Foreign News
New Zealand PM says sorry for ‘horrific’ care home abuse
New Zealand’s Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has formally apologised to victims of abuse in care homes, following an inquiry into one of the country’s biggest abuse scandals.
The historic apology, delivered in parliament, comes after a report found that 200,000 children and vulnerable adults had suffered abuse while in state and faith-based care between 1950 and 2019.
Many of them included people from the Māori and Pacific communities and those with mental or physical disabilities.
The government has since promised to reform the care system.
“I make this apology to all survivors on behalf of my own and previous governments,” said Luxon on Tuesday. “It was horrific. It was heartbreaking. It was wrong. And it should never have happened,” he added. “For many of you it changed the course of your life, and for that, the government must take responsibility.”
The inquiry, which Luxon described as the largest and most complex public inquiry ever held in New Zealand, took six years to complete and included interviews with more than 2,300 survivors of abuse in state and faith-based care institutions.
The ensuing report documented a wide range of abuses including rape, sterilisation, and forced labour.
It found that faith-based institutions often had higher rates of sexual abuse than state care; and civil and faith leaders fought to cover up abuse by moving abusers to other locations and denying culpability, with many victims dying before seeing justice.
The findings were seen as vindication for those who found themselves facing down powerful officialdom, the state, and religious institutions – and often struggling to be believed.
Some survivors and advocates arrived in parliament Tuesday to hear the prime minister’s apology, while hundreds of others tuned in through livestreams across the country. Luxon had earlier faced criticism for delivering the apology in parliament, as that meant many survivors could not hear from the prime minister directly.
Survivors have argued that Luxon’s apology rings hollow unless it is accompanied with proper plans for restitution.
“The effects of that trauma came through later on in life,” Tupua Urlich, a Māori survivor who had given his testimony of abuse to the inquiry, told the BBC’s Newsday programme. “It’s not just the physical abuse, it was the disconnection from my family, from my culture.”
“Justice? No, not yet… These words are nothing unless they’re followed by action, and the right kind of action that is informed by survivors.
“The government have proven that alone they’re not trusted, nor capable, of providing the sort of change and service that we need.”
Details on a restitution scheme are not expected until early next year.
Luxon said Tuesday that while the government works on a new financial redress mechanism for survivors, it would pump an additional NZ$32m ($19m, £15m) into its current system.
The inquiry had made over 100 recommendations, including public apologies from New Zealand authorities and religious leaders, as well as legislation mandating suspected abuse to be reported.
Luxon said the government has either completed or is in the process of working on 28 of these recommendations, but did not give specific detail.
A bill aimed at better protecting children in care had its first reading in parliament on Tuesday, after Luxon delivered the apology. The bill proposes, among other things, a ban on strip searches and greater restrictions on people working with young children.
Luxon also announced a National Remembrance Day to be held on 12 November next year to mark the anniversary of Tuesday’s apology.
“It is on all of us to do all we can to ensure that abuse that should never have been accepted, no longer occurs,” he said.
[BBC]
Australian teen Bianca Jones has become the fourth tourist to have died in a suspected mass poisoning in Laos.
The 19-year-old’s family confirmed her death to the media on Thursday. Hours earlier, the US State Department told the media that an American man died in the tourist town of Vang Vieng.
Two Danish women, aged 19 and 20, also died last week in Laos, Danish authorities confirmed, declining to share more due to confidentiality concerns.
The deaths remain under police investigation, but news reports and testimonies online from other tourists suggest they may have consumed drinks laced with methanol, a deadly substance often found in bootleg alcohol.
Jones’s friend Holly Bowles is in hospital on life support, while a British woman is also reportedly in hospital.
New Zealand’s foreign ministry told local media on Thursday that one of its citizens was also unwell from suspected methanol poisoning. It is unclear how many more people have fallen ill.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the department of foreign affairs had confirmed Jones’s death.
“Our first thoughts in this moment are with her family and friends who are grieving a terrible and cruel loss,” Albanese said on Thursday afternoon.
“This is every parent’s very worst fear and a nightmare that no one should have to endure.”
He said he hoped Ms Bowles, who is currently at Bangkok Hospital, would recover well.
The US State Department said it was “closely monitoring” the situation with regards to the American victim, adding that it was up to local authorities to determine the cause of death.
Australian, New Zealand and UK authorities have each warned their citizens to be careful of methanol poisoning when consuming alcohol in Laos.
Nana Backpacker Hostel, where the two Australian women stayed in Vang Vieng, told the BBC that it was closed for police investigation.
The hostel’s manager told the Associated Press that the two women were among more than 100 guests who received free shots of Lao vodka from the hostel. The pair then headed out for the night, he said, adding that no other guests reported health issues.
The manager said he hoped the investigation would clear the hostel’s name, but said they have stopped giving free shots for now.
In a statement to Australian newspaper the Herald Sun, Jones’s family expressed their “deepest gratitude for the overwhelming support, love, and prayers we’ve received from across Australia”.
“We kindly ask for privacy as we navigate through our grief and begin to heal,” the statement said.
Unlike ethanol, the key component of alcoholic beverages, methanol is toxic to humans. Bootleg liquor producers sometimes add it to their drinks, however, as a cheap way to increase alcohol content.
Earlier this year, at least 57 people in India died after consuming methanol-laced liquor. Similar cases of mass poisoning have also been reported across the world, from the Philippines to Peru.
Vang Vieng is a small riverside town in central Laos, and a hub for backpackers in Southeast Asia.
[BBC]
The humanitarian medical organisation Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has suspended its operations in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, following a violent attack on its staff and the alleged killing of two patients they were treating by Haitian police officers.
The incident took place last week as violence continued to worsen in the country.
An estimated 25 people were killed in Port-au-Prince on Tuesday alone in what police say was a foiled attempt at a gang invasion of a wealthy neighbourhood.
Politically, the situation also remains critical with interim Prime Minister Garry Conille fired this month by the country’s ruling council – less than six months after he took office.
MSF says that on 11 November one of its ambulances carrying three young men with gunshot wounds was stopped by Haitian law enforcement officers.
Apparently supported by a paramilitary self-defence group, the men attacked the vehicle, removed two of the patients, took them outside hospital grounds and executed them.
The humanitarian group denounced the violence in a strongly worded statement last week, saying their personnel had been tear-gassed and held against their will for several hours.
While that incident appears to have been the final straw for MSF in Port-au-Prince, at least for the time being, it was not the only recent example of extreme aggression against their staff.
The announcement comes amid a worsening climate of violence in Haiti with some 25 suspected gang members killed in the capital on Tuesday.
The police say that residents helped officers to fight off an attempted attack on the upscale suburb of Pétion-Ville.
The neighbourhood was cordoned off after residents barricaded streets, some armed with machetes and makeshift weapons, in an apparent effort to prevent a gang invasion.
[BBC]
Winter has come to Delhi and with it, a familiar sense of gloom. The sky here is grey and there is a thick, visible blanket of smog.
If you stay outdoors for more than a few minutes, you can almost taste ash. You will feel breathless within minutes if you try to run or even walk at a brisk pace in the smog.
Newspapers are back to using words like toxic, deadly and poisonous in their main headlines.
Most schools have been shut and people have been advised to stay indoors – though those whose livelihoods depend on working outdoors can’t afford to do so.
Delhi’s air quality score was somewhere between 1,200 and 1,500 on Monday and Tuesday, according to different monitoring agencies. The acceptable limit is less than 100.
These scores measure the levels of particulate matter – called PM 2.5 and PM10 – in the air. These tiny particles can enter the lungs and cause a host of diseases.
On social media, people have been expressing shock, disappointment and anguish that it’s all happening again.
Along with the gloom, there is a strong sense of déjà vu – like we have seen this all many times before in the past 15 years.
Covering this story feels like watching (and being in) the same dystopian film every year – following the same characters, plot and script. The outcome is always the same – nothing changes.
The parks are empty again – people, particularly children and the elderly, have been told to stay indoors.
Those who must work – daily-wage labourers, rickshaw pullers, delivery riders – are coughing but still going out.
Hospitals are seeing an increasing number of people coming in with respiratory problems.
And amid all this, we are back to the same question again – why does nothing change?
The simple answer is that solving Delhi’s air problem requires monumental efforts and coordination.
The sources of the problem are many. One of them is the practice of farmers burning crop remains to clear their fields quickly to sow seeds for the next yield.
This mostly happens in the neighbouring states of Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. The smoke from the farm fires engulfs Delhi every winter and hangs low in the atmosphere as wind speeds reduce during winter months.
But farmers can’t be entirely blamed for this because this is the cheapest way of clearing fields.
Different governments have talked about providing machines and financial incentives to stop crop burning, but very little has happened on the ground.
Delhi itself produces a huge chunk of the pollution – emission from vehicles, construction and factories.
Every year, in the winter months, people get angry, journalists write and produce reports, politicians blame each other and courts fume – until we do it all over again the next year.
A public health emergency like this would spark mass protests in most democracies. But the anger in Delhi is mostly limited to social media.
Activists say the reason is that pollution doesn’t cause immediate problems for most people. Ingesting high levels of PM2.5 deteriorates health slowly. A Lancet study found that pollution led to more than 2.3 million premature deaths in India in 2019.
And then there is the class divide. People who can afford to temporarily leave the city do that, those who can buy air purifiers do that, and those who can vent on social media do that.
The rest, who don’t have these options, just go about their lives.
The collective angst has so far not resulted in a massive protest and, as the Supreme Court once observed, politicians just “pass the buck” and wait for the season to get over.
Experts say governments at the federal level and in different states need to leave their party politics behind and work together to solve this problem. They need to focus on long-term solutions.
And citizens need to hold politicians accountable and courts have to pass decisive orders months before the pollution worsens.
This year, we are again in the thick of the season and temporary measures have been announced, like banning construction work.
But can these bring Delhi’s elusive blue skies back? The evidence from the past few years doesn’t give much hope.
[BBC]
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