Doctors Without Borders says it is under “the clear presumption that a war crime has been committed” after a U.S.-led NATO coalition bombed its hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan.
The aid organization, referred to internationally in French as Medecins Sans Frontières (MSF), asserted that it “condemn[s] this attack, which constitutes a grave violation of International Humanitarian Law.”
The U.S. military’s version of the story behind the bombing is full of holes, and constantly changing. After launching airstrikes on Kunduz, which has recently seen an insurgency by the Taliban, on Saturday morning, NATO said its bombing “may have resulted in collateral damage to a nearby medical facility.”
At least 23 people people were killed in the airstrikes, including 13 staff members and 10 patients, three of whom were children. A minimum of 37 more were wounded. A hospital nurse said there “are no words for how terrible it was,” noting “patients were burning in their beds.”
Uncertainty dominated Washington’s earliest account of the attack. The media echoed this ambiguity, but MSF insisted all “indications currently point to the bombing being carried out by international Coalition forces” led by the U.S. The humanitarian organization stressed that it had “communicated the precise locations of its facilities to all parties on multiple occasions over the past months” and yet, despite this, the NATO bombing of the hospital continued for over 30 minutes, even after MSF “frantically phoned” Washington.
Subsequently, the U.S. and Afghan governments moved away from describing the attack as an accident, a tragic instance of “collateral damage,” and proceeded to imply the bombing was intentional. Afghan officials claimed the hospital was being used as a “base” for the Taliban. “The hospital has a vast garden, and the Taliban were there,” insisted Kunduz acting Governor Hamdullah Danishi.
MSF was not buying it. The aid organization called the “Taliban base” claims “spurious” and said it is “disgusted by the recent statements coming from some Afghanistan government authorities justifying the attack.”
The organization flatly denied that the Taliban was ever fighting from its hospital. “Not a single member of our staff reported any fighting inside the MSF hospital compound prior to the U.S. airstrike,” MSF recalled.
“These statements imply that Afghan and US forces working together decided to raze to the ground a fully functioning hospital with more than 180 staff and patients inside because they claim that members of the Taliban were present,” MSF stated. “This amounts to an admission of a war crime. This utterly contradicts the initial attempts of the US government to minimize the attack as ‘collateral damage.‘” …
the “you live with your parents” insult is really flaccid because a metric shitton of cultures don’t see “leave the house forever” as some grandiose moment of liberation that’s so important to the development of a person that it has to happen as fast as possible. until i came to the USA i didn’t know a single person who was pressured by their parents to leave the house because they’re “too old to stay there” or whatever. in puerto rico it is really common to stay with your parents until they and you are both stable enough that you can leave. whaddaya know, there are cultures that don’t place a stigma on being poor or wanting to care for your family or needing your family to care for you for some other reason.
so many people are so fucking salty already about pokemon go and i don’t give a single fuck
this could be a badly designed, ugly, battery sapping nightmare cashgrab from the pits of microtransaction hell that sucks all of pokemon’s dev time out of the next main game and i will still give zero fucks as i run down the street to find a snorlax
European accents (and in general white people accents) are commonly perceived as attractive and endearing, while accents from basically any other part of the world are considered to be signs of laziness and disrespect and get routinely made fun of.
My whole family is Korean. My sister and I have grown up in the US so we can pretty much speak English. However, our parents speak very broken English. It makes me mad though because my mother has taken ESL classes at our local university and my father graduated from the University of Washington with a PhD in mechanical engineering, yet I constantly see them being made fun of by their coworkers or other people in general because “they’re too lazy to try to understand English.” My mom has spent countless nights crying whilst taking her classes because of the stress wishing she could speak half as fluently as I can. If you don’t know what it’s like trying to learn English as a second language, then you have no room to talk.
As someone who’s been trained to teach English to non-English speakers, allow me to inform you that English is an eldritch Frankenstein-esque abomination of borrowed words and mismatched grammatical rules.
Structurally, English is as convoluted and obtuse as any aspect of governmental bureaucracy, and it’s similarly societally entrenched in a way that makes people believe, and even insist, that’s just “the way of things.”
Here’s the facts: English is fucking hard. English doesn’t make logical sense. English is weird and horrible and inconsistent and makes common use of unusual phonemes that most adult speakers of other languages have to be mechanically taught to differentiate from similar sounds that are distinct in the English language. Without mechanical introduction and proper instruction, a lot of people cannot actually hear the difference in sounds you are mocking them for.
In some languages, [p] and [b] are indistinguishable. This is why you heard that gentleman say he would like a “can of Coke or Bebsi” with his order. It has nothing to do with laziness.
In some languages, [l] and [r] are indistinguishable. This is why you’re an asshole for going “me rikey” like the substitution is somehow comical. You’re a dick, and also most likely racist.
In the vast majority of languages, [θ] and [ð], known to English speakers as the voiceless (thing) and voiced (there) versions of the th sound, respectively, straight up does not even exist. This is why she says “teef” or “toofbrush,” why he keeps saying “ze” or “de” in place of “the,” and why they said “sank you very much” when you held open the door for them.
There are sounds in English that a hell of a lot of speakers of other languages cannot teach themselves to recognize and recreate without assistance.
And, y’know, even if you get the screwy grammar and troublesome pronounciation down, English is a language in which very slight changes in intonation and word stress can completely change the meaning of a sentence.
Like so:
But how are you doing? (Flamboyant pleasure to see someone, eagerness to catch up.)
But how are you doing? (Deflection from inquiries about self, moving conversation in a new direction.)
But how are you doing? (Concern, request for further or more accurate information.)
These are all totally different statements.
It’s incredibly easy to come across in a way you did not want or intend to when you’re not familiar with the particular ways in which saying something can change what it means to other people.
Don’t you ever give people shit for not achieving or approaching fluency in English.
Repeat after me: English is a terrible fucking language and speaking it does not make me tangibly superior to anyone else in literally any way.
