Canada to pay Indigenous abuse survivors more than $2bn

Yahoo – AFP, 22 January 2023 

Canada will pay hundreds of Indigenous communities more than $2 billion in compensation for nearly a century of abuse suffered by children in residential schools, its government has announced. 

The Can$2.8 billion (US$2.1 billion) settlement, the result of a class action lawsuit by 325 Indigenous groups, will be placed in a not-for-profit trust independent of the government. 

It will be used to "revitalize Indigenous education, culture, and language -– to support survivors in healing and reconnecting with their heritage," according to a press release. 

"It has taken Canada far too long to own up to its history, own up to the genocide it committed and recognize the collective harm caused to our nations by residential schools," said Garry Feschuk, an Indigenous leader who is one of the plaintiffs in the suit. 

"It is time that Canada not only recognize this harm, but help undo it by walking with us. This settlement is a good first step," he said in the statement released Saturday. 

From the late 1800s to the 1990s, Canada's government sent about 150,000 children into 139 residential schools mostly run by the Catholic church, where they were cut off from their families, language and culture. 

Many were physically and sexually abused, and thousands are believed to have died of disease, malnutrition or neglect. 

The discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves at the sites of the former schools over the past two years has dragged the legacy of those institutions back into the spotlight as Canada reckons with its dark colonial past. 

More than 1,300 graves have been identified, the most recent earlier this month. 

In Lebret, Saskatchewan, ground-penetrating radar has uncovered nearly "2,000 areas of interest" that need to be thoroughly investigated, the Star Blanket Cree community said. 

A fragment of a child's jawbone dating to some 125 years ago has already been identified on the grounds of a former residential school in the western Canadian community. 

The search areas were selected near the Catholic-run residential school -- which was open until 1998 -- on the advice of former students. 

"The residential school system decimated our languages, profoundly damaged our cultures, and left a legacy of social harms. The effects go beyond my generation. It will take many generations for us to heal," said Shane Gottfriedson, another Indigenous leader and plaintiff. 

"We believe that all survivors deserve justice and the compensation to which they are owed," said Marc Miller, federal minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations in the press release. 

The precise terms for disbursing the $2.8 billion will be determined by the federal court on February 27. 

A national commission of inquiry in 2015 called the residential school system a "cultural genocide." 

Last year, Pope Francis visited Canada on a penitential trip to apologize for the "evil" perpetrated in the schools -- a gesture seen by many survivors as overwhelming, but only the beginning of a process of healing and reconciliation.

US designates Russia's Wagner military group an intl 'criminal organization'

Yahoo - AFP, January 20, 2023 

The United States on Friday designated Russia's Wagner group as a "transnational criminal organization," raising pressure on the private Russian army fighting in Ukraine. 

White House national security spokesman John Kirby said Wagner, controlled by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a businessman close to President Vladimir Putin, has about 50,000 fighters in Ukraine, 80 percent of them drawn from prisons. 

Kirby showed US intelligence photographs of North Korea supplying arms to Wagner for its Ukraine operations, and said the private army has become a rival to the formal Russian military. 

The photographs, from November 18-19, show Russian rail cars entering North Korea, picking up a load of infantry rockets and missiles, and returning to Russia, he said. 

He said the US Treasury was formally designating Wagner as a transnational criminal organization, putting it in league with Italian mafia groups and Japanese and Russian organized crime. 

The designation will allow the wider application of sanctions on the group’s sprawling global network, which includes mercenary operations as well as businesses in Africa and elsewhere. 

Wagner "is a criminal organization that is committing widespread atrocities and human rights abuses," Kirby said. 

"We will work relentlessly to identify, disrupt, expose and target those who are assisting Wagner," he said. 

Kirby also said the United States had presented its intelligence on Wagner's North Korean purchase to the UN Security Council's unit on North Korea sanctions. 

The arms transfers from North Korea are in direct violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions, Kirby said. 

Kirby said there is evidence that Prigozhin's confidence in Wagner fighters' relative success in Ukraine has generated tensions in the Kremlin. 

"Wagner is becoming a rival power center to the Russian military and other Russian ministries," Kirby said. 

"Prigozhin is trying to advance his own interest in Ukraine and Wagner is making military decisions based largely on what they will generate for Prigozhin, in terms of positive publicity."

US government examining over 500 'UFO' reports

Rfi – AFP, 12 Jan 2023 

An image from of US military pilot's sighting of an "unidentified
anomalous phenomena" that some think is evidence of UFOs © Handout / DoD/AFP

Washington (AFP) – The US government is examining 510 UFO reports, over triple the number in its 2021 file, and while many were caused by drones or balloons, hundreds remain unexplained, according to a report released Thursday. 

The 2022 report by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) said that 247 "unidentified anomalous phenomena" or UAP reports have been filed with it since June 2021, when it revealed that it had records of 144 sightings of suspicious aerial objects under examination. 

In addition, the report said, another 119 reports that had been buried in old records from the past 17 years had been unearthed, leaving it with 510 in total. 

Most of the new reports come from US Navy and Air Force pilots, it said. 

Of those, close to 200 had "unremarkable" explanations: they were balloons, drones or so-called aerial clutter, which covers birds, weather events and airborne plastic bags. 

But others haven't been explained according to the DNI document, an unclassified version of a report delivered to Congress. 

Those are the focus of examinations by the Pentagon, US intelligence agencies, and NASA over concerns not that they are alien spacecraft but unknown spying capabilities of rival countries. 

"UAP continue to represent a hazard to flight safety and pose a possible adversary collection threat," the report said, referring to intelligence gathering. 

"Some of these uncharacterized UAP appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities, and require further analysis," it said. 

The report said many of those still unexplained reports could stem from weather phenomena, faulty sensors, or erroneous analysis by humans. 

"Many reports lack enough detailed data to enable attribution of UAP with high certainty," it said. 

The report came after years of pressure from Congress for the military and intelligence community to take seriously what were formerly called UFOs, or unidentified flying objects. 

The US military is worried some of the UAPs spotted by military pilots in the past may represent technologies of strategic rivals unknown to US scientists. 

The Pentagon previously called them unidentified aerial phenomena, but has now changed it to unidentified anomalous phenomena to include air, space, and maritime domains. 

In 2020, the Pentagon released a still inexplicable video taken by navy pilots of objects moving at incredible speeds, spinning and mysteriously disappearing. 

"We take reports of incursions into our designated space, land, sea, or airspaces seriously and examine each one," said Pentagon Spokesman Pat Ryder in a statement.