1/12/20: Protests in Iran grow, as news that Iranian forces shot down a Ukrainian jetliner by mistake spreads. Many passengers among the 176 dead were Iranian students heading to Canada to pursue advanced degrees.
This gives President Trump a chance to tweet in Farsi, his
sudden support for the Iranian people.
When translated, we get: “The Iranian government should allow human rights groups to monitor and report on the current reality of protests in the Iranian people. We should not see the peaceful killing of protesters again or the Internet shut down. The world is watching.”
The actor Mark Hamill beats me to the punch when he responds, in Farsi: “Please ignore the fact that I created a travel ban for you and threatened to bomb your cultural sites.”
I
might add that Trump is no fan of protesters in this country. Remember
the good old days, he likes to say, when you could beat them up if they showed up at your rallies and they’d be “carried out
on a stretcher?”
*
MEANWHILE, FIRES in Australia continue to spread with no end in sight. Two big fires merge to create a “megafire” engulfing 1.5 million acres, or 2,300 square miles. More than 3,000 homes have gone up in flames. At least 26 people have perished. With winds shifting suddenly on Friday, authorities called on a quarter million people to evacuate their homes. With 15 million acres, overall, reduced to ash, we can compare it to burning down the state of West Virginia.
Massive protests force Prime Minister Scott Morrison, until
now pretty much a climate-change denier, to admit that the link between climate
change and the crisis has “been acknowledged.”
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