The Chinese Foreign Ministry confirmed on Monday that an unconfirmed number of American officials have requested Chinese visas to travel to the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics despite President Joe Biden announcing a “diplomatic boycott” of the event this month.
Chilling moment masked man with crossbow threatens to kill Queen in vid sent to pals minutes before cops arrest man, 19
“This is revenge for those who have died in the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre.
“It is also revenge for those who have been killed, humiliated and discriminated on because of their race.
“I’m an Indian Sikh, a Sith. My name was Jaswant Singh Chail, my name is Darth Jones.”
Suspect Jaswant Singh Chail was sectioned under the Mental Health Act.
🚨🚨🚨 | BREAKING: Chilling footage of the alleged Crosbow man who broke into Windsor threatening to kill the Queen
Via @TheSun pic.twitter.com/d655TIzqPo
— News For All (@NewsForAllUK) December 26, 2021
Canada makes major guarantees, including tax exemptions to host FIFA 2026 games
OTTAWA — The Canadian government has signed onto tax breaks, security costs and eased travel rules in order to have the FIFA World Cup come to Canada in 2026.
Canada won a joint bid with the U.S. and Mexico for the 2026 event, which will see the majority of games played in the U.S., but 10 games will be played in Canada with Toronto and Edmonton the potential host cities. Montreal was a candidate city, but pulled out earlier this year over cost concerns.
All the usual palms will be greased.
Ontario reported more than 9,400 new COVID-19 cases on Monday, as demand for diagnostic testing continues to outstrip available supply.
The seven-day rolling average of new cases now stands at 7,550, up from 2,863 one week ago.
Experts concerned about hospital capacity as Omicron spread continues
OTTAWA — A rise in COVID-19 cases driven by the highly infectious Omicron variant of the virus has renewed concerns among experts about the capacity of Canada’s hospitals and health-care workers to handle another wave of the pandemic.
Paul-Emile Cloutier, president of HealthCareCAN, said the latest wave could make the existing health-care worker shortage worse. HealthCareCAN represents research hospitals and regional health authorities.
Interesting observations by this ER doc
So what are the take-home points?
1. The Omicron wave will not come anywhere near the initially modeled worst case scenario in terms of hospitalization and ICU utilization.
— David Jacobs (@DrJacobsRad) December 26, 2021
If Madonna penned a new pop song for teens growing up in the Zettabyte Era, she could do worse on the lyric front than: “We are living in a data-rich world, and I am a data-rich girl.” What is a zettabyte? It equals 1,024 exabytes, which is a billion terabytes, or a trillion gigabytes. Expressed with all the zeros, a zettabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes — phew.
Last Thursday at 5:45 p.m., two gunmen opened fire on each other inside the Oak Brook Terrace Mall in Oakbrook, Ill. Oak Brook is a quiet suburb of Chicago in DuPage County, and any kind of violence involving guns used to be extremely rare.
Football, cricket, Olympic gymnastics… no sport is now safe from woke politics.
In 2021, the culture wars thoroughly colonised all of our favourite sports.
Nowhere was this clearer than in football. The people’s game was rife with woke politics this year, as it was last year. Players are still ‘taking the knee’ before each game, more than 18 months after the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests, which first inspired all the knee-taking. The kneeling still frequently features as a highlight alongside shots and saves on Match of the Day, in case we hadn’t got the message yet.
Conservatism may have won the Cold War, but conservatives lost the peace in the West
Thirty years ago this December 26, the impossible happened. One of the bloodiest states of the twentieth century (a horrific and highly competitive category) dissolved without violence. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had all but ended months earlier, when Russians took to the streets to defy the communist hardliners who had seized the government from an impotent Mikhail Gorbachev. That popular countercoup was itself largely bloodless: the soldiers called upon to enforce the hardliners’ rule refused to shoot their own countrymen.
The Biden argument has been that we can and should dispatch over a hundred million dollars of humanitarian aid and that we can safely fund and stock aid efforts in Afghanistan because somehow the Taliban won’t get their hands on it.
Defense attorneys want dismissed the indictment against five men accused of plotting to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, because of what they call “egregious overreaching” by federal agents and informants.
The government alleges that the men were upset over coronavirus restrictions last year when they conspired to kidnap Whitmer, a Democrat then spoken about as a possible vice-president, even scouting her second home in northern Michigan.
Five people are charged with kidnapping conspiracy and face trial on 8 March in Grand Rapids. They have pleaded not guilty and claim to be victims of entrapment. Federal prosecutors have argued the men were not entrapped.
As a Christmas present to statistics lovers, the Census Bureau has released its estimates of the population of the nation and the 50 states as of July 1, 2021. The Bureau admits up front that, due to COVID, its numbers are subject to more than usual uncertainty. But overall, they provide important clues as to how the public has coped with the pandemic and how COVID may have changed the trajectory of national growth — and contraction.
He’s prepared to make war at a time of his choosing.
Russian President Vladimir Putin scored major propaganda points in his over four-hour annual press conference this week. He turned attention away from Russia’s invasion of Crimea, support of Russian separatists in the Donbas region (Donbas), and troop buildup on Ukraine’s borders. Instead, Putin guides the untrained eye through the conflict in terms of Russian grievances. In Putin-speak, the Ukrainian conflict is a product of Ukrainian persecution of Russians and separatists, and NATO’s expansion eastward. Putin also used the news conference to showcase the growing Russia-China strategic partnership.
G. Tod Slone has written that “as a political ideology, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), has proven time and again to be against freedom, reason, and truth. Proponents of the ideology tend to be hypocrites and anti-white racists [.]”
In fact, DEI is also a pathway to anti-Semitism.
Idaho sheriff attempts to justify pulling a gun on church youth group who had dropped a Thanksgiving card at his home by saying he feared they were ‘drunk Indians’ from nearby reservation
… This year, the German cities of Berlin, Frankfurt, and Munich canceled their fireworks celebrations and prohibited large gatherings due to Omicron. Celebrations have been canceled in Paris, France; Rome, Italy; Edinburgh, Scotland; London, England; and New Delhi, India.
“Due to the surge in Covid cases, we’ve taken the difficult decision to cancel our NYE event in Trafalgar Square,” Mayor of London Sadiq Khan wrote on his Twitter account. “The safety of all Londoners must come first.”
