Grim anniversary for couple separated by Iran

Antonella Mega and Hamid Ghassemi-Shall before his arrest in May 2008.  (Photo courtesy of Antonella Mega.)

This is an anniversary Antonella Mega never wanted to see.

Instead of a party, there will be an Amnesty International vigil in the Beaches on Monday. It’s to commemorate the fifth year of imprisonment for Mega’s husband Hamid Ghassemi-Shall, an Iranian-born Canadian who was seized in Tehran on May 24, 2008, while on a family visit, tried on widely-decried charges of espionage and put on death row in Evin Prison.

Ghassemi-Shall was not a political refugee, but someone who believed that his life would be better in free and prosperous Canada. He emigrated, got a job as a salesman in a fashionable shoe store and fell in love with Mega, whose background is Italian. For a few years it was the perfect Toronto success story: a multicultural couple working hard and enjoying their lives in their home in the Beaches, out fishing, entertaining friends or walking their beloved German shepherd. They were planning to adopt a child.

That all ended when Ghassemi-Shall answered a plea to fly to his sick mother’s bedside. As a devoted son and Canadian with no Iranian political baggage, he didn’t hesitate. He had made previous family trips and anticipated no problems.

But this time his reception was catastrophic. His brother, a former naval officer, was arrested and later died in suspicious circumstances in Evin Prison (the authorities insist it was from cancer.) Ghassemi-Shall was detained shortly after his brother and accused of joining him in a treasonous plot against the clerical regime. A death sentence followed a sham trial in which he had no chance to defend himself.

Ottawa has protested. People from around the world have signed petitions and sent letters of support. On Monday from 6.30 to 9.30 pm Mega, Amnesty members and well-wishers will gather for a vigil in St. John Anglican Church on Woodbine Ave. at Kingston Rd.

They’ll hear a talk on the brutality of life in Evin by award-winning author and former prisoner Marina Nemat, and watch a video about Ghassemi-Shall’s incarceration by 14-year-old Beatrice Perusse, who was deeply moved by his story. They can also sign a giant banner urging his release, and bound for Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s office.

On Monday Parliament will also launch an Iranian political prisoner advocacy project in which prisoners, including Ghassemi-Shall, will be “adopted” by MPs.

Mega’s message is simple: free Hamid. And now. Five years is five too many.

Olivia Ward has covered conflicts, politics and human rights from the former Soviet Union to South Asia and the Middle East, winning national and international awards.

 

  

PHOTO: Carrying the wounded

A wounded Afghan police officer is carried away from the site of an explosion in Kabul on Friday. Several large explosions rocked a busy area in the centre of Kabul on Friday with Reuters witnesses describing shootings in the area. (REUTERS/Omar Sobhani)

Did King Richard III get a quick burial?

The remains of England's King Richard III, which were missing for 500 years. (AP Photo/University of Leicester)

 

Medieval chroniclers wrote that King Richard III had been buried "without any pompe or solemne funeral."

Now, archaeologists say that's true. 

The University of Leicester team that co-discovered the 15th century British monarch's skeleton last September --- and confirmed this February that the remains were in fact Richard III -- have announced new details about the burial.

The grave was too short for the body, the archeologists say, and was dug in an "untidy lozenge" shape.  That's inconsistent with other burials of the era in the same town, which were neatly dug with square sides and are of proper length for the bodies they contain.

Furthermore, there is no evidence of a coffin or shroud, and the king's head was propped against one side of the grave, suggesting the gravediggers didn't try to lay the body out properly after it was lowered into the ground.

"This may show that the gravediggers were in a hurry to put the body in the ground – or had little respect for the deceased," the University announced in a press release.

King Richard III died in battle in 1485 and was buried at what was then Grey Friars church -- now a parking lot. When archeologists began to dig beneath the lot in August 2012, they found bones of a man who seemed to have fatal battle wounds and a curved spine -- King Richard III was described as having the symptoms of scoliosis.

In February, with the help of DNA from Canadian relatives, the skeleton was positively identified as Richard. 

Kate Allen is the Star's science and technology reporter. Find her on Twitter at @katecallen.

Morrissey attacks Kate Middleton

The pregnant Duchess of Cambridge at the Queen's garden party on May 22. (AP Toby Melville)

What’s with Morrissey and his weird fixation with the Duchess of Cambridge and her body?  The vocalist for rock bank The Smiths hit out in his fanzine at Kate Middleton and her apparent taste for foie gras.

But what is odd is the disgust he seems to have for her pregnancy, which overshadows fair comment over foie gras which animal rights activist say is cruel food because ducks or geese are forcefed until their livers are fattened.

He criticizes department store Fortnum & Mason for selling the French delicacy and congratulates Prince Charles for banning it from functions. 

He writes: “However, unsurprisingly, this most savage and cruel commodity continues to be the favorite "dish" of smiling mother-to-be Kate Muddleton (from whom, in fact, we expect no less.)”  

He goes on to say that Fortnum is stocking the stuff, “possibly with the hope that smiling Kate will wobble in and place an order for her unborn child.”


Wobble in? Her unborn child? What’s that got to do with cruelty to animals? 

Can the Duchess of Cambridge’s supposed taste for foie gras possibly be the only reason why Fortnum's is selling it? The basis of the attack is a gossip item in a tabloid a few months back where a waiter at a restaurant told a journalist the duchess ordered foie gras as a starter.

Last year Morrissey blamed Kate Middleton for the death of a hospital nurse who committed suicide after she was duped by a hoax call from Australian DJs posing as the Queen and calling Kate Middleton’s hospital room. She was recovering from acute morning sickness, a potentially dangerous condition.

Morrissey, who does not have a medical degree, however, determined that she was in hospital “as far as I could see for absolutely no reason” and called the arrogance of royals "staggering."   

Kate Middleton is not exactly an inspiring role model in the mold of Hillary Clinton or Serena Williams – she met a prince, waited for his proposal, got married and is now pregnant. Very retro.  But why use her body as a way to take potshots against the monarchy or support animal rights? 

Hamida Ghafour is a foreign affairs reporter at the Star. She has lived and worked in the Middle East and Asia for more than 10 years and is the author of a book on Afghanistan. Follow her on Twitter @HamidaGhafour 

Learn from traditional culture to save food: UN

A chef hands a plate of sushi to a customer at a sushi bar in the Ximending shopping district of Taipei on Friday. (REUTERS/Pichi Chuang)

It’s true: traditional cultures can teach the “wasteful” developed world how to preserve and conserve one of our most-precious resources: food.

So says a United Nations Environment Programme report.

From condensing the meat of an entire cow into the size of a human fist to preserving seabirds in sealskins, there are a lot of ways in which traditional cultures save and conserve food, says the report.

UNEP asked people to submit examples of traditional ways in which food is preserved. Sure, the report notes that some of the delicacies may not tickle taste buds but they demonstrate how people once valued food far more than they do now.

Here are some examples:

• Genghis Khan, the Mongolian general, and his troops used a traditional food called borts to gallop across Asia. Borts is concentrated beef equal to the protein of an entire cow condensed and ground down to the size of a human fist. This remarkable method of food preservation, without refrigeration, produced a meal equivalent to several steaks.

• Greenland Inuits, dine on a dish called Kiviak — a wintertime food made from Auks, a small bird. Hundreds of whole birds are wrapped in a seal skin, which then has the air removed before being sewn up. The skin is placed in the permafrost under a stone. The birds then ferment for around seven months before they are dug up and eaten. 

• The Turkish horsemen of Central Asia preserved meat by placing it in pockets on their saddles to be compressed by their legs as they rode. This meat was a direct ancestor of pastirma, a term which means ‘being pressed’ in Turkish.

Of course, it is ironic that in an era where technology makes it so easy to store food for longer, most of us make less effort to conserve food.

The UNEP report says that every year about one third of all food produced —  .3 billion tonnes, worth around $1 trillion (U.S.)— ends up in garbage bins due to poor transportation and harvesting practises.

In a world where almost 900 million people go hungry every day, that's criminal.

Raveena Aulakh is the Star's environment reporter. She is intrigued by climate change and its impact, now and long-term, and wildlife. Follow her on Twitter @raveenaaulakh

What scientists say about global warming, and what people think

A vast majority of climate change scientists say global warming is mainly man-made but a widespread public belief that experts are divided is making it harder to gain support for policies to curb climate change, a new international study shows.

The new survey of nearly 12,000 scientific papers on climate change show that 97 per cent of scientists agree that climate change is happening because of human activities. Experts studied 4,000 summaries of peer-reviewed papers in journals giving a view about climate change since the early 1990s and found that the majority said it was mainly caused by humans.

In the U.S., opinion polls have indicated that as many as 60 per cent of people believe there is a significant disagreement among scientists about whether global warming was happening or not.

Similarly, 57 per cent of the Americans either disagreed or were unaware that scientists agree that the Earth is very likely warming due to human activity.

The study was published in the journal Environmental Research Letters. It was led by John Cook of the University of Queensland in Australia.

“There is a gaping chasm between the actual consensus and the public perception,” Cook said in a statement. “When people understand that scientists agree on global warming, they're more likely to support policies that take action on it.”

The peer-reviewed scientific literature provides a ground level assessment of the degree of consensus among publishing scientists, the authors wrote.

Raveena Aulakh is the Star's environment reporter. She is intrigued by climate change and its impact, now and long-term, and wildlife. Follow her on Twitter @raveenaaulakh

Without immigrants, North Carolina’s farm sector would collapse: study

The loamy soil of North Carolina is being used to address a key political debate: Does immigration create jobs or take them away?

As U.S. politicians debate a watershed immigration bill,  which removes the threat of deportation for 11 million illegal immigrants and offers a path toward U.S. citizenship, The Centre for Global Development, an influential think tank that focuses on international aid and development issues, has released a study examining the impact of immigration on farming, one of the oldest, and most important North American industries.

Every year, after proving that U.S. workers won’t fill their employment needs, North Carolina farmers, through a joint collective called the North Carolina Growers Association, spend about $100,000 to advertise farm jobs. At the same time, the farmers also file requests with the federal government for permission to hire foreign seasonal farm workers.

In 2011, there were 489,000 unemployed people in the state and 6,500 available farm jobs. Yet even with 10 per cent unemployment in the U.S., just 268 of those nearly 500,000 unemployed North Carolinans bothered to apply for jobs.

Of the 245 resident Americans who were hired for farm work, just 163 showed up for their first day of work. Four weeks in, more than half of those had quit.

Just seven native workers completed the entire growing season.

The 7,000 seasonal workers, meanwhile, who received H-2A visas, added at least $248 million to the state’s economy, creating one U.S. worker job for each 3 to 4.6 foreign farmer workers who worked in North Carolina.

"About two-thirds of hired farm workers in America today are foreigners, and America’s farms are depending steadily more on hired help and less on family members,” the CGD study, called International Harvest, says.

The analysis also suggests that most farmers cannot pay higher wages to find more native workers. If wages were raised for collecting cucumbers from $9.70 an hour to $19.40, the study says, it would be impossible for farmers to grow the vegetable profitably.

“North Carolina’s experience shows that few Americans look for these jobs, fewer show up for day one, and even fewer stay through to the end,” the report says. “At a basic level, the farms of North Carolina depend on foreign labour to even exist.”

The CGD’s findings echo the results of a 2011 study conducted on behalf of the Partnership for a New American Economy, which lobbies the U.S. government for more liberal immigration laws.

That study, reported in The Economist, concluded immigration bolsters employment. It reported that employment among native-born Americans increased by 262 jobs for every 100 foreign-born workers admitted with advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering or mathematics from U.S. universities.

For every 100 H-1B work visas, 183 Americans found jobs. Foreigners on average paid about 10 times more in taxes than they received in government benefits, the study found.

Rick Westhead is a foreign affairs writer at the Star. He was based in India as the Star’s South Asia bureau chief from 2008 until 2011 and reports on international aid and development. Follow him on Twitter @rwesthead

Lights, camera, action: stars buff up Chechnya's on-screen image

 Elizabeth Hurley attends a news conference in Chechnya's capital Grozny, earlier this week. Hurley will star alongside with French actor Gerard Depardieu in the drama, titled "Turquoise, " that will be directed by French filmmaker Philippe Martinez. (AP Photo/Musa Sadulayev)

“A tale of tragedy, betrayal, lots and lots of mayhem and finally, sweet bloody revenge.”

The modern history of Chechnya? No, a media description of the French-Russian thriller, Turquoise, starring curvaceous British actress Elizabeth Hurley, and lumpy formerly-French actor Gerard Depardieu, now on a permanent tax holiday from Paris in his adopted homeland, Russia.

The film’s biggest casting coup is Chechnya itself.

Russia’s southern banana republic is soon to be a glitzy backdrop to a thriller that aims to eradicate those grittier Hiroshima-like bombing images, massacres, firefights and filtration camps that did so much to undermine its star quality during two brutal wars. Not to mention more recent attention as the place of origin of the alleged Boston Marathon bombers.

 “I followed everything that happened here and saw a city totally rebuilt and very sympathetic people,” Depardieu told reporters from the Chechen capital Grozny, where he is a “very close friend” of warlord leader Ramzan Kadyrov. He is also making a Russian-produced film on Chechnya's post war reconstruction.

Kadyrov’s own hard man image got the soft-lens treatment when Hurley was photographed next to him, cuddling his white kitten, nostalgically named Chanel. And he has taken to posting “almost adorably kooky” pix on Instagram, recently posing benignly alongside another apparent close friend, martial arts film actor Steven Seagal, who gave an impromptu folk dance performance in Grozny.

It won’t be the first time Kadyrov has tried to punch up Chechnya’s image.

He’s imported top-flight footballers for exhibition matchers. And most notoriously, invited action star Jean-Claude Van Damme and Oscar-winning actor Hilary Swank for lavish  national celebrations in Grozny two years ago that coincided with his birthday. (Kadyrov formally opposes public birthdays to avoid accusations of a Stalin-like cult of personality.) After viral, and virulent, media reports, Swank apologized, insisted she knew nothing of her host’s allegedly dubious human rights record, and reportedly fired her manager on return.

This time, Hurley and Depardieu are making no excuses. If they had earlier doubts they could have consulted any number of human rights groups -- like Memorial, whose Chechnya monitor, Natalya Estemirova, was kidnapped and murdered in 2009. Kadyrov’s regime has been accused of pursuing its enemies to foreign countries, killing six of them in Turkey alone. Allegations of human rights abuses fill the files of advocates who can only do their dangerous work outside of Chechnya.

Depardieu, at least, won’t be apologizing any time soon. His new BFF, President Vladimir Putin, personally handed him a Russian passport after he quit France in a dudgeon over a 75 per cent tax on millionaires. He now has registration papers for a new flat in the Soviet-style city of Saransk, capital of the Russian republic of Mordovia, where he plans to open a restaurant.

The region, he rhapsodized, has no oil or gas, but “rich people who make their wishes come true in life.”  Except for Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, who was denied parole last month from a Mordovian penal colony where she’s serving a two-year sentence for a brief protest in a Moscow cathedral. None of the punk group has been invited to perform in Grozny.

Olivia Ward covered the former Soviet Union from 1992-2002, including Russia’s two wars with Chechnya. She collaborated on Shelley Saywell’s film A Child’s Century of War, which was based on her reports, and listed for an Academy Award.

Anthony Weiner admits there may be more photos out there

New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner speaks with reporters at campaign event in New York on Thursday. (Brendan McDermid/Reuters)

So, Anthony Weiner, the former and disgraced U.S. Congressman, is running for mayor of New York City.

You remember him, he was the rising Democratic star who literally got caught with his pants down in a variety of lewd tweets with various women. He is also married to the well-respected Huma Abedin, a former top aide to Hillary Clinton.

The Weiner scandal broke open in May 2011, when a photo of a man's torso with boxers on, was tweeted to 45,000 of Weiner's Twitter followers instead of to a 21-year-old college student in Seattle, reported the New York Times Magazine in a far reaching interview with the couple in April. Yes, they are still together.

After much soul-searching, apologizing to Abedin, concentrating on his family and some serious polling data, Weiner relaunched his political career recently in his bid to become mayor of New York.

In a radio interview Thursday with WNYC-FM, Weiner told the host he knows he has "made very big mistakes and I compounded it immeasurably by being dishonest about it."

Weiner told the station that several times a day he gets questions from the public, asking him: "What were you thinking?"

He admits, "I don't know if I was." He chalks up the lewd tweets to various women as a "blindspot" and a "thoughtlessness."

"It is what it is," he told the station. "I did these inappropriate things over an extended period of time with more than one person."

He also left the door open to the possibility that more pictures may surface. But Weiner said he isn't going to dwell on it. Instead, he is going to concentrate on his political campaign.

The question now is, will New Yorkers forgive and forget?

Tanya Talaga is the Star's global economics reporter. Follow her on Twitter @tanyatalaga

Scaling mountains and crossing deserts to break tradition

Raha Moharrak became the first Saudi woman to scale Mount Everest. (Courtesy: Arabs on Top of The World)

 

 

 

 

Women from the Gulf states are increasingly making their mark on the world stage in small, but significant ways.

Last Saturday, Raha Moharrak, 27, became the first Saudi woman to climb Mount Everest.

Moharrak made it clear she did not intend to make a political statement – she told AP afterwards: “I didn’t do it to cause a movement, did not do it because of anything, but if I can change people’s opinion or the world’s opinion on Saudi women and if I can change Saudi women’s opinion about themselves I would be really happy.”

Coming from a country where she is forbidden to drive, scaling one of the most difficult mountains in the world is a political statement, whether she chooses to recognize it or not.

Women from the Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, hampered by social and family pressure, rarely seek public roles. 

On the expedition’s website Moharrak, who is from Jeddah, says it was difficult to convince her conservative family to allow her to climb but in the end they supported her.

Other women have also been chipping away at tradition.

In 2010, Elham Al Qasimi of the United Arab Emirates became the first Arab woman to reach the North Pole. She was 27 at the time. She cross-country skied for 11 days, battling temperatures of minus 40 C. 

Touchingly, when she arrived at her destination she poured a bag of sand from her desert homeland.  "It was such a huge journey, and it would have brought me to my knees if I hadn't come from the place that I came from, so I wanted to leave it there to recognize that," she said at the time.

These girls are smart and courageous but they also have the family and contacts behind them to succeed. Al Qasimi, a graduate of the London School of Economics, was sponsored by a major Dubai-based company and her PR looked after by powerhouse Bell Pottinger.

Moharrak’s expedition to Mount Everest was for a charity founded by the wife of the ruling emir of Qatar and one of her teammates was a royal sheikh. That may sound like a tenuous link but Gulf Arab society is tiny, and anyone who does anything of import, regardless of gender, needs powerful backers.  

 

Elham Al Qasimi pours sand upon reaching the North Pole in 2010. (Copyright: Elham Al Qasimi)

 

Hamida Ghafour is a foreign affairs reporter at The Star. She has lived and worked in the Middle East and Asia for more than 10 years and is the author of a book on Afghanistan. Follow her on Twitter @HamidaGhafour