… The number of Canadians who say their finances are worse today than a year earlier has reached 41%, according to weekly telephone polling by Nanos Research for Bloomberg News. That’s the second highest reading for this question in surveys going back to 2008. A separate poll released by Angus Reid on Tuesday found 28% of Canadians believe their finances will continue worsening over the next year – also a record high for this question.
When Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, it had hoped to overtake the country in a blitz lasting only days or a few weeks. Many Western analysts thought so, too.
As the conflict marked its third month Tuesday, however, Moscow appears to be bogged down in what increasingly looks like a war of attrition, with no end in sight and few successes on the battlefield.
There was no quick victory for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s powerful forces, no rout that would allow the Kremlin to control most of Ukraine and establish a puppet government.
#Ukraine: Ukrainian SSO (SOF) published rare footage of a kamikaze drone in action, which we identied as a US-supplied Switchblade 300 – hitting a Russian T-72B3 tank with its crew on top.
The tank is unlikely to receive any serious damage, which cannot be said about the crew. pic.twitter.com/sRm5GQNRyL— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) May 24, 2022
#Ukraine: Canadian Roshel Senator armored personnel carriers are already in Ukraine – 8 of these APCs were supplied by Canada recently. The hull of this vehicle can protect occupants from explosion and bullets up to .30-60 AP. pic.twitter.com/YNh2el1J1b
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) May 23, 2022
WHO expert warns amid claim cluster of cases may trace back to just ONE super-spreader event
Sexual transmission at two festivals in Europe may have sparked the world’s escalating monkeypox outbreak, a World Health Organization expert has claimed.
Dr David Heymann, who used to head the WHO’s emergencies department, revealed it was the leading theory behind the origins of the current cluster of cases.
He said: ‘We know monkeypox can spread when there is close contact with the lesions of someone who is infected, and it looks like sexual contact has now amplified that transmission.
Just nine days remain in the Ontario election campaign, not a lot of time for the race to shift dramatically, but Liberal and NDP strategists claim it’s enough time.
Both those parties hoped that they would have definitively left the other in the dust by this point in the campaign, and sitting within clear striking distance of Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives.
It hasn’t worked out that way. The story of the race so far is how little has changed since the campaign period officially began nearly three weeks ago.
It’s easy to forget there is an election.
Trudeau faces chants, pounding drums as he walks through crowd at Kamloops memorial
Trudeau was followed by a large group of memorial attendees who chanted and pounded drums as he stopped in the stands, talking face-to-face with people and often exchanging hugs with others.
“We have so much more to do,” Trudeau was overheard saying to an elderly woman who he spoke with and hugged.
Others did not appear as friendly, chanting, “Canada is all Indian land,” and “We don’t need your Constitution.”
And..
PM @JustinTrudeau was just met by Indigenous protestors in Kamloops, BC.
"Take your disrespect out of our tribe."pic.twitter.com/ctEEFkUteC
— Cosmin Dzsurdzsa 🇷🇴 (@cosminDZS) May 24, 2022
h/t Mauser
ISIS has put a bounty on the life of a Calgary woman the Crown fears could be re-radicalized after joining the terrorism organization eight years ago, her lawyer said Friday.
Defence counsel Yoav Niv, in successfully seeking a publication ban on the woman’s identity, said she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and fears for her safety.
Niv told provincial court Judge Lloyd Robertson his client has become an ISIS target after co-operating with western intelligence groups.
A recent controversy at Western University in London, Ontario, has shown that the Leftist/Islamic alliance, though for the most part firm and untroubled on both sides, has cracks that could easily widen into a chasm.
Early demands from the National School Boards Association to the White House included calling for the deployment of the Army National Guard and the military police to monitor school board meetings, according to an early draft letter the organization’s independent review released Friday.
Russian President Vladimir Putin survived an assassination attempt two months ago, a top Ukrainian military official said Monday.
Maj. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, chief of the Defense Intelligence of Ukraine, said an “unsuccessful attempt” on the Russian strongman’s life occurred in Caucasus shortly after Russia invaded the nation on Feb. 24, Ukrainska Pravda reported.
“There was an attempt to assassinate Putin,” Budanov told the outlet. “He was even attacked, it is said, by representatives of the Caucasus, not so long ago.”
Transgender woman is accused of ‘abuse’ after revealing she’s breastfeeding her wife’s newborn – having taken hormones to stimulate milk production – as critics slam her for doing ‘sick experiment’ on an infant
A transgender woman is being blasted online after she revealed that she is breastfeeding her wife’s newborn daughter, having taken a regimen of hormones to try and stimulate her milk production ahead of the baby’s birth.
After opening up about her experience on Reddit, the unnamed woman – who is understood to be based in the U.S. – was met with bitter backlash from social media users who branded it ‘unnatural’ and ‘sick’ for her to breastfeed the baby, both because she was born a male and because she needed to take hormones in order to begin lactating in the first place.
The woman, whose username is AdmiralFisticuffs, explained that she worked with a lactation consultant and took a series of hormones and drugs to grow her breasts and stimulate lactation.
Celebrities unhinged.
On March 27, 2022, during a live television broadcast of the 94th Academy Awards, popular actor Will Smith hijacked the ceremony by storming onstage to slap comedian Chris Rock for a tame joke about Smith’s actress wife, Jada Pinkett. Then Smith returned to his seat and, in an epic explosion of Hollywood narcissism, spewed profane threats at Rock, which were broadcast around the world, sucking all the air out of an event designed to showcase the achievements of his fellow artists. Some speculated that Smith’s meltdown stemmed not from a chivalrous defense of his wife’s honor, but from the pent-up humiliation of being wedded to a woman who publicly insisted on having an “open marriage.”
HSBC has suspended its most senior risk manager for criticising eco-alarmism.
HSBC has suspended one of its most senior global risk managers. At an industry event last week, Stuart Kirk – global head of responsible investments at HSBC Asset Management – took aim at how risk managers and central banks have exaggerated the risks posed by climate change. Within hours, he was hung out to dry.
A Russian diplomat has quit his job in protest at the “bloody, witless” war “unleashed by Putin against Ukraine”.
Boris Bondarev, whose LinkedIn says he worked at the Russian mission to the UN in Geneva, told the BBC he knew his decision to speak out may mean the Kremlin now considers him a traitor.
But he stood by his statement which described the war as “a crime against the Ukrainian people” and “the people of Russia”.
Moscow has not yet commented.
President Joe Biden said the US military would intervene to defend Taiwan in any attack from China, comments that appeared to break from the longstanding US policy of “strategic ambiguity” before they were walked back by White House officials.
Asked during a press briefing on Monday in Tokyo whether the US would be willing to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan after not doing so in Ukraine, Biden said “yes — it’s a commitment we made.”
“We agree with the One China policy, we signed onto it and all the attendant agreements made from there,” Biden added. “But the idea that — that it can be taken by force, just taken by force, is just not — it’s just not appropriate. It will dislocate the entire region and be another action similar to what happened in Ukraine.”
Any public protest against the war in Russia is fraught with criminal charges
Thousands of people chanted anti-war slogans at a rock concert in Russia last weekend in a growing sign of public discontent with the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Concert-goers at a popular girl band show in St Petersburg at the weekend were chanting “F–ck the war!” in unison in a video that was widely circulated online.
h/t RM
