Speaking from the Vatican for BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day, the Pope talked of crises including the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change and economic difficulties, and urged the world to respond to them with vision and radical decisions, so as not to “waste opportunities” that the current challenges present.
“We can confront these crises by retreating into isolationism, protectionism and exploitation,” the pontiff said, “or we can see in them a real chance for change.”
Disinformation, extremism threatening democracies, global economies: Trudeau
… “We cannot pretend that China isn’t there, just cross our arms and ignore it,” he said. “It is too important a player in our economies right now.”
Trudeau added that countries like Canada and the Netherlands have to engage China constructively on trade, on climate change, while challenging it on human rights, the situation in Hong Kong, the Uyghurs, Taiwan and the South China Sea.
Don’t worry slaves, Justin is thinking of you.
MONTREAL — In a 5-4 split decision Friday morning, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled Quebec comedian Mike Ward had the right to make fun of Jeremy Gabriel.
The case pitted the comedian against the Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse, which had succeeded in obtaining $35,000 in damages for Gabriel from the Quebec Court of Appeal.
Ontario reports 419 new COVID-19 cases, no new deaths
Ontario reported more than 400 new COVID-19 cases and no additional deaths today as the seven-day rolling average continued to drop.
Provincial health officials logged 419 new infections on Friday, up from 409 yesterday but down from 492 a week ago.
Fully vaccinated Ontario man dies after COVID-19 sweeps through his hockey league
A fully vaccinated Ontario man has died after a COVID-19 outbreak swept through his adult hockey league.
… There were 15 COVID-19 cases linked to the hockey league and all were breakthrough infections in fully vaccinated people, officials in York Region said.
The rookie armorer in charge of weapons when Alec Baldwin accidentally shot dead his cinematographer has insisted she has “no idea” where the live ammunition came from — and is blaming the tragedy on her cost-cutting bosses.
Lawyers for Hannah Gutierrez-Reed told NBC late Thursday that the 24-year-old former model “is devastated and completely beside herself over the events that have transpired” on the set of Baldwin’s “Rust.”
“Safety is Hannah’s number one priority on set. Ultimately this set would never have been compromised if live ammo were not introduced,” her attorneys, Jason Bowles and Robert Gorence, said in a statement.
From 1945 to the present day, the United States has been the world’s dominant power, militarily, economically, and culturally. But a lot of people realize that this is changing, and soon, China will probably be the dominant power.
Perhaps you saw the news a few days ago about how Boston Celtics games have been removed from Chinese media after Celtics forward Enes Kantor made a video about the oppression of Tibet? As China is the NBA’s biggest emerging market, it would be naïve to think that Kantor isn’t in for an unpleasant word from the Celtics’ owner and/or manager.
Totalitarian tenderfoots.
You don’t hear a heck of a lot about Oberlin College, the liberal arts college in Ohio, but on Wednesday Hugh Fitzgerald wrote here about an esteemed member of its faculty, Mohammad Jafar Mahallati who, despite revelations about his past involvement with the diabolical regime in Tehran, has enjoyed the unanimous support of Oberlin’s top administrators. Mahallati, reported Fitzgerald, served as Iran’s ambassador to the UN in the late 1980s, where, among other things, he promoted “genocidal antisemitism,” denounced the Baha’i people (hundreds of whom “have been executed or murdered” in Iran), and helped cover up the mass execution of political prisoners. At Oberlin, he teaches Religion, Islamic Studies, and Middle East and North African Studies.
Lesbians are being pressured into having sex with people with penises.
This week the BBC published a story about the wrong type of victims.
Journalist Caroline Lowbridge wrote an article headlined ‘We’re being pressured into sex by some trans women’. The piece gives a voice to lesbians who say they have been subjected to sexual pressure, and in some cases sexual violence, from men who identify as transgender women. Astonishingly, rather than praise the BBC for giving column inches to lesbians to talk about the abuse they have faced, the loudest voices in the LGBT-plc world have not only condemned the BBC for the article, but they have also dismissed the testimonies of the women interviewed.
While governments from Washington westward to California are forcing vaccinations on Americans whether they want the shots or not, don’t forget that policymakers want to do much the same with renewable energy. But renewables aren’t the unalloyed good we’re told they are. They have nasty downsides.
The forms of energy accepted by activists and politicians as “renewable” or “green” are restricted to wind and solar. While both are renewable (and are intermittent and therefore unreliable), neither is truly green. In this editorial, we will focus on solar, just to keep things short.
Solar power depends on photovoltaic panels, which convert sunlight to electricity. Those panels, indispensable to the process, are where solar power’s green reputation breaks down.
The city’s richest and whitest district wants to secede
More and more Americans are desperate to redraw their country. In California and Texas, campaigners want their states to secede. In the Pacific Northwest, farming communities in Oregon’s rural, red counties want to split and form part of a reconfigured state called “Greater Idaho”. One recent poll found that 40% of Biden voters and 50% of Trump voters would rather blue and red states break apart and go it alone.
And nowhere does this sort of reconfiguration stand a better chance of success than in Atlanta, where an organised and well-funded group of residents is pushing for Buckhead, the city’s wealthiest neighbourhood, to break away from the de facto capital of the South and form a municipality of its own. But while ‘Buckxit’ may be a local campaign to create a city of just 80,000 residents, it also goes to the heart of the challenges facing cities — and the Democrats who run them — across America.
A long-awaited announcement from U.S. President Joe Biden is going to make some Canadians unhappy.
Biden released updated highlights of his key budget plan Thursday and it includes language Ottawa has been urging against: a Buy American-type provision for the auto sector.
It involves a tax credit for U.S.-made cars that the Canadian government describes as potentially damaging, and also illegal under international trade law.
HISTORY IS MADE: First MALE wins homecoming QUEEN at Rock Bridge High School, Missouri pic.twitter.com/W9o5F7ihwN
— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) October 28, 2021
I hope you’re sitting down, because otherwise the following news might send you to the fainting couch quicker than a Victorian lady who has just overheard someone say the word “knickers.” A new study says that putting a high-paid diversity bureaucrat on the school payroll may actually make things worse for black and Latino students.
No, that sound you’re hearing is not a nationwide cicada infestation: That’s just 10,000 heads being scratched in school administrators’ offices. You mean, all those diversity hucksters who said we could close racial gaps by hiring lavishly paid diversity hucksters were just in it for themselves?
Rachel Diamond looks like most of the moms at the Park Slope café where we meet. She’s wearing a green T-shirt under a black corduroy jumper, sensible shoes and carries a smart, leather bag. She sips a four dollar iced chai. Except the 31-year-old isn’t a mom. And she never will be.
“You know,” Diamond says cheerily, “I never expected to be the poster child of sterilization.”
President Joe Biden’s top homeland security official on Wednesday ordered immigration officers not to arrest illegal immigrants at a number of places, including food banks and shelters.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas detailed the safe spaces for illegal aliens in a memorandum to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers.
“Sensitive locations” where officers were barred from detaining people in the country illegally previously constituted of a small number of settings, including churches, hospitals, and schools.
