Residential school reconciliation walk ends week-long of Truth and Reconciliation Commission event


Thousands of people braved a pouring rain in Vancouver Sunday to take part in a reconciliation walk marking the sad history of residential schools in Canada, erupting in a raucous cheer as the daughter of American civil rights hero Martin Luther King Jr. urged all Canadians to move forward and heal.

Bernice King told the crowd not to give up on the process of progress.

A young First Nations boy beats a drum as he walks with thousands of people during the Walk for Reconciliation in Vancouver, B.C., on Sunday September 22, 2013.

"My father said something very powerful about progress. He said, human progress is neither automatic, nor inevitable," she said from a stage set up at the start of the march, which drew a huge crowd that some estimates put more than 10,000.

"Even a superficial look at history reveals that no social advance rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. Every step towards the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering and struggle."

Pope Francis has called for a global economic system that puts people and not "an idol called money" at its heart, drawing on the hardship of his immigrant family as he sympathised with unemployed workers in a part of Italy that has suffered greatly from the recession.

Addressing about 20,000 people in the Sardinian capital of Cagliari, the Argentinian pontiff said that his parents had "lost everything" after they emigrated from Italy and that he understood the suffering that came from joblessness.

"Where there is no work, there is no dignity," he said, in ad-libbed remarks after listening to three locals, including an unemployed worker who spoke of how joblessness "weakens the spirit". But the problem went far beyond the Italian island, said Francis, who has called for wholesale reform of the financial system.

"This is not just a problem of Sardinia; it is not just a problem of Italy or of some countries in Europe," he said. "It is the consequence of a global choice, an economic system which leads to this tragedy; an economic system which has at its centre an idol called money."

The 76-year-old said that God had wanted men and women to be at the heart of the world. "But now, in this ethics-less system, there is an idol at the centre and the world has become the idolater of this 'money-god'," he added.

A man strangled his wife to death because he felt divorce would be too costly, a court heard yesterday.

AQ, 23, from India, murdered Bushra Atif with the help of his friend RA, 28, from Pakistan, then wrapped her body in a bin bag and dumped it in the desert, prosecutors told the Criminal Court. The bag was discovered on the Dubai to Al Ain Road by a municipality cleaner who spotted the woman's head protruding and called police.

When officers tried to contact the woman's husband they discovered he had left the country on the same day as her death - March 11.

The court heard that the man had brought his wife to the UAE about three years ago but that he had moved out of their home and moved in with his friend, whom the wife believed to be a bad influence.

"She told me that she often warned him about his friend and asked him to stay away from him but he wouldn't listen," testified the dead woman's father-in-law, QA, 55.

The couple's problems grew after the man quit his job. Once he came home drunk and assaulted his wife because she asked him to look for work, said the father-in-law.

A bill to hand over control of research institutions in Russia from the country's Academy of Sciences to the federal government was approved on Wednesday in the federal parliament despite vehement objections from the scientific community.

The landmark bill, which has yet to be approved by the upper house of parliament and signed by the president, was hurriedly passed by the lower house of parliament, the State Duma, on Wednesday in the second and third readings while hundreds of scientists were rallying outside the legislature's building.

Despite decades of decline since the end of the Soviet Union, the Academy of Sciences is still the country's leading scientific research establishment comprising about 50,000 researchers across its 434 scholarly institutions.

New York, NY - Six students were arrested Tuesday evening in an unprovoked police attack against a peaceful protest lead by City University of New York (CUNY) students and faculty decrying the University's appointment of former CIA chief and ex-General, David Petraeus as an adjunct professor to the Honors College. Students were punched, pushed against parked vehicles and thrown to the pavement by police captains and officers after the NYPD forced them off the sidewalk and into the street. Tuesday's demonstration was called for by the Ad Hoc Committee Against the Militarization of CUNY.

The arrested students were arraigned Wednesday evening, September 18, at the Manhattan Criminal Court located at 100 Centre Street. The courtroom was flooded with supporters ranging from activists, to fellow students, to CUNY faculty outraged at the NYPD's response to their student's attempts to peaceably assemble.

"As students were chanting 'War Criminal Petraeus Out of CUNY Now,' I was shocked to see several police officers grab and brutalize one of the demonstrators," said City College student Yexenia Vanegas. "This was completely unprovoked, as demonstrators made [it] clear that they were there to defend our university in a peaceful protest."

The attack occurred in front of CUNY's Macaulay Honors College, where Petraeus has been appointed to teach a class on public policy. "Protestors were marching in a circle on the sidewalk and chanting, but the police forced them into the street and then charged. One of the most brutal things I saw was that five police officers slammed a Queens College student face down to the pavement across the street from Macaulay, put their knees on his back and he was then repeatedly kneed in the back," said Hunter student Michael Brian. "The student was one of those pointed out by 'white shirt' officers, then seized and brutalized. A Latina student was heaved through the air and slammed to the ground."

If you were to ask any random aam aadmi anywhere in India what is the single biggest failing of the UPA, the answer would be - price rise. This is so because the most important items of family spending - food items - have relentlessly risen for the past several years despite repeated promises to bring them down by the economic mandarins and policy wonks that run the country's economy. Poorer families have had to stop eating various foods in order to save crumbling family budgets.

Click! Another notch on the ratchet turning the UK from civilization to fascism this week as Britain's Justice minister, Chris Grayling, announced ten year jail sentences for those who claim too much state benefit.

The latest statistics from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) show that £1.3bn was fraudulently claimed in 2012/13. Tax Justice Network figures estimating tax fraud by the super-rich at £60bn, which is around 50 times greater, seem to have 'evaded' Grayling; as has the estimated five times greater figure of £10bn in unclaimed benefits.

The sad fact is simply that tyrants are running the show and rather than pay their fair share they intend to squeeze the poor until the pips squeak.

Clashes between far-right Golden Dawn and anti-fascists raise fears that crisis has reached new stage

It was not the scene that Greece's international stewards envisaged when they last visited the country at the epicentre of Europe's financial mess. When representatives of the "troika" of creditors arrived in June, book-keeping in Athens had been problem-free and monitors described their inspection tour as "almost boring". The great Greek debt crisis, it seemed, had finally gone quiet.

But when mission heads representing the European Union, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank fly into Athens on Sunday - for the start of a review upon which the future of Greece will hang - what they will find is a country teetering on the edge: its people divided as never before, its mood brittle, its streets the setting for running battles between anti-fascists and neo-Nazis. And unions girding for battle.

After six years of recession, four years of austerity and the biggest financial rescue programme in global history, it is clear that Greeks have moved into another phase, beyond the fear, fatigue and fury engendered by record levels of poverty and unemployment.

Along with the teargas - fired on Monday for the first time in more than a year outside the administrative reform ministry - there is a new sense of foreboding: a belief that they might never be "saved" and, worse still, could turn against each other.

An animal control officer on disability kept 850 snakes, including two 6-foot Burmese pythons, while running an illegal snake business out of his suburban New York home, according to authorities who made the discovery on Thursday.

Richard Parrinello, of Brookhaven, New York, kept the snakes in his detached garage, all neatly stacked in containers and at the right temperature, according to Roy Gross, chief of the Suffolk County SPCA.

Burmese pythons are illegal in New York, and Parrinello's were taken from the house to a reptile sanctuary in Massachusetts while the rest of the snakes are still in his garage, according to Jack Krieger, communications director for the Town of Brookhaven on Long Island.

Gross said all the snakes appeared to be in good health and there was no animal abuse or neglect.

"It was a well-maintained facility, it was very clean and organized, it was a business," Krieger said.

Two Michigan drivers shot and killed each other Wednesday night after a road rage incident took a fatal turn in a drive-in car wash parking lot, police said.


Robert Taylor, 56, and James Pullum, 43, were driving on a highway in Ionia, Mich., when Taylor began to closely follow Pullum, according to the Ionia Public Safety Department, based on witness reports.

The two drivers eventually pulled into the parking lot of Wonder Wand Car Wash, at the intersection of M-66 highway and Steele Street. where they got out of their vehicles and fired shots at each other, police said. The two men exchanged a total of eight to nine shots, police said.