Strikes strafe Syria rebel region as crisis talks fail
BEIRUT — Syrian and Russian warplanes launched dozens of airstrikes on Syria’s northern province of Idlib on Saturday, a monitoring group said, intensifying pressure on the country’s last rebel stronghold after crisis talks yielded no progress.
At least seven civilians were dead after some 80 airstrikes around the province’s southern edge, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. It said the violence was the “most intense” in weeks, with helicopters also dropping barrel bombs packed with shrapnel.
Pro-government forces have massed on the edges of Idlib, wedged into Syria’s northwest along the Turkish border. Syrian and Russian officials — key allies in Syria’s long conflict — appear to be preparing for an all-out assault to retake the area.
But there are deep fears that an attempt to reclaim Idlib could touch off major bloodshed and a humanitarian crisis among the area’s 3 million civilians, half of them displaced from elsewhere in Syria.
At a meeting in Tehran on Friday, the presidents of Russia, Iran and Turkey failed to agree on a ceasefire to halt the violence.
Although on different sides of the war, Turkey and Russia share an interest in preventing the situation from unraveling.
Turkey worries the violence could send hundreds of thousands of fleeing civilians to its border. Russia is wary of being drawn deeper into a bloody battle as it tells international partners that Syria is stabilizing and open for reconstruction.
The Observatory said Saturday that some 2,000 people were already on the move from areas being bombed, heading deeper into Idlib province.
Al-Qaida-linked rebels control more than half of Idlib, and much of the Russian and Syrian government rhetoric has focused on defeating the group.
The state-run AlIkhbariya TV said Saturday that the Syrian government was retaliating against rebel shelling on a government-held area south of Idlib. The barrage late Friday in Mhradah killed at least nine civilians, according to state media. The reports could not be independently verified.
Separately, clashes broke out in eastern Syria in Qamishli, a town close to the border with Turkey, between government and Kurdish security members. The Observatory said the clashes left 10 government security personnel and seven Kurdish fighters dead.
The town is run by Kurdish-led administrators and forces, but Syrian government troops hold pockets of territory there, including the airport. Occasional clashes erupt there over turf control and authority, reflecting deepening political tension between the uneasy partners.
The U.S.-backed Kurdish administration has been talking with the Syrian government, seeking government recognition of its selfrule areas. But in recent days, Damascus announced that it will be holding local elections, including in Kurdish-ruled areas, undermining the negotiations with the Kurds.
TORONTO — In elementary schools across Ontario this month, the first day of school was filled with the usual mix of nervousness and excitement for young students.
But many teachers had back-to-school jitters themselves thanks to a recent announcement from the new provincial government.
In July, the center-right government of Premier Doug Ford said it was scrapping the sex-education curriculum updated in 2015 and replacing it with a version from 1998, when same-sex marriage was not yet legal in Canada and social media and cyberbullying were unknown to most parents.
It also set up what critics are calling a “snitch line” that allows parents to anonymously report teachers for not teaching the old version.
The decision, which fulfilled one of Ford’s campaign promises, was the latest in a series of changes made since he was sworn in as premier in late June.
He has quashed the province’s carbon-pricing policy, clashed with the federal government over asylum seekers, halved the number of city councilors in Toronto and scrapped a basic-income pilot project.
Like many of those decisions, the sex-education switch has left officials scrambling, spawned a barrage of legal challenges and provoked public backlash.
“If you take the 1998 curriculum at face value, it’s outrageously out of date,” said Lauren Bialystok, a professor in social justice education at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.
The rollback, she said, would put the health and safety of children at risk and lead them to adopt “dangerous conceptions of sexuality, consent and body image.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, comprehensive sex-education programs “have been shown to reduce high risk behavior, a clear factor for sexual violence victimization and perpetration.”
The 2015 curriculum, welcomed by educators as a long-overdue update, included new topics such as same-sex relationships, masturbation, gender identity, consent and the dangers of sexting.
It was also controversial at the time among some religious groups and socially conservative organizations, which felt that some of its topics were age-inappropriate and best left to parents to address.
Thousands of students were kept home from school as a show of opposition.
Bialystok said the tempest mostly subsided as parents spoke with teachers who debunked many of the myths propagated at the time about the 2015 curriculum, such as that it taught students how to perform various sex acts.
In an academic survey she did of teachers last year, the overwhelming majority said they supported the update.
“Now they’re in effect being muzzled,” she said, noting that while some school boards have said they will support teachers who wish to teach topics from the newer curriculum, others have not, leaving teachers in a difficult position.
Ford has not elaborated on what it is about the 2015 curriculum that he opposes, saying only that he thinks it was not subjected to enough consultation.
Anna, an eighth-grade teacher in Toronto, said she will embed material from the 2015 curriculum into lesson plans for subjects other than health.
She plans to show students clips of HBO’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and have them read Judy Blume’s “Deenie.” She spoke on the condition that only her first name be used because of concerns that she could lose her job.
Education Minister Lisa Thompson said her ministry would launch consultations for a new curriculum that might be introduced in 2019.
The Ford government will fight legal battles over the curriculum rollback.
Both the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the province’s largest teachers union have filed injunctions in a bid to stop the government from replacing the 2015 curriculum and to cancel the “snitch line.”