In Tehran Much Talk of Talks

“Return to the nuclear talks!” This is the advice that China, France and Russia have been publicly giving to Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi’s new team in Tehran since they assumed power last month. Other powers, notably Germany, have echoed that advice in private. There are signs that the new Raisi team may be listening to that advice or, at least, trying to prepare public opinion for a return to Vienna with its flag in its pocket.

Raisi, who had once dismissed any negotiations with big powers as “out of the question,” now says he always regarded negotiations as “one instrument of policy.”

Several developments have contributed to what seems a less belligerent stance by Tehran.

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Ayman al Zawahiri: Taliban’s return fuels questions about al Qaeda leader’s health and whereabouts

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba — The whereabouts of Ayman al Zawahiri, who succeeded Osama bin Laden after U.S. special forces killed the al Qaeda leader in a 2011 raid in Pakistan, remain a mystery even as the terror group could be poised to rise again.

The shadowy Zawahiri, a 70-year-old native of Egypt, is believed to be hiding out in Afghanistan or Pakistan. But he may not even be alive.

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University student senator busted ‘trashing’ American flag display honoring 9/11 victims

A student senator at Washington University in St. Louis was caught on camera as he allegedly defaced a memorial of 2,977 flags commemorating the victims of the 9/11 attacks on the 20 year anniversary, throwing them in the trash.

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Green Party – “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever”

Annamie Paul says some of her candidates don’t want her to visit their ridings

TORONTO — Green Party Leader Annamie Paul said on Friday that she’s staying out of other ridings in part to avoid being a distraction and to honour her candidates’ wishes.

At a press conference on Friday, Paul addressed why she hasn’t been travelling to various ridings around the country, acknowledging that some candidates might not want her to visit.

“I still want to make sure that if I travel somewhere first, that I’m wanted, and that’s not a given, and then secondly, that it is going to help our local candidates and that’s also unfortunately, not a given,” she said a press conference on Friday.

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Medical Mandates: A Hideous Strength

One recalls C.S. Lewis’ dystopian novel That Hideous Strength, a longtime favorite of mine, where he speaks of “false writings” and “men maddened with false promises and soured with true miseries.” Lewis held to an apocalyptic vision of moral and intellectual surrender to the idols of mere self-sufficiency and hedonistic indulgence, of a time characterized by the death of meaning and the weakening of belief in a just and merciful God. “The shadow of one dark wing is over all Tellus,” the human spirit is being progressively “enclosed,” as he describes it. There is not much of the Rapture here, little indication of the new Jerusalem prophesied in Revelation. 

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John Ivison: Trudeau is struggling to save his campaign from collapse

MISSISSAUGA, ONT. — On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, Justin Trudeau reflected on the enormity of the events that changed modern history.

“Canadians of a certain age remember that extraordinary day clearly. I was teaching in Vancouver and remember talking to my Grade Nine students all that day, and in subsequent days, about what it meant for the future,” he said at media availability on Saturday morning.

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Ousted Conservative candidate Lisa Robinson denies writing racist posts, says party is ‘throwing me under the bus’

Lisa Robinson, who was dropped by the Conservative Party as a Toronto-area candidate over the weekend, says she never wrote the online posts that led to her dismissal and that she’s gone to the police because fake posts continue to appear under her name online.

… Ms. Robinson said those Twitter posts, which appear to be from 2017, first circulated when she was running for city council in Ajax, Ont., in 2018. She said she filed a police report about it at the time and had informed the Conservative Party about the issue as part of her screening process as a candidate.

WTF? Go incognito

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Why Did the USA Hand Afghanistan to China? – Ask The China Class

“… I have believed for some time—and our extraordinarily rapid and ill-conceived evacuation of Afghanistan, leaving behind not only Bagram but enough U.S. weaponry to make the Taliban’s army nearly equivalent to the Italian’s, not to mention putting our advanced military technology in the hands of the Chinese and the Russians, only underscores this—that a large percentage of our Democratic Party leadership as well as a tragically significant percentage of the Republican have long believed the Chinese regime are winning the battle between China and America for global hegemony. They are therefore, overtly or covertly, consciously or subconsciously, throwing in with the Chinese side for their own economic—and to a lesser extent survival, though the two interact—advantage.”

Yup. Same, Same Canada.

 

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FBI releases declassified records on its investigation into possible Saudi-9/11 links

The FBI released declassified records from its secretive investigation that explored potential links between the Saudi government and 9/11, with some of the long-anticipated documents released on the 20th anniversary of the al Qaeda terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.

Families of the 9/11 victims have sought a host of details tied to possible Saudi government involvement in the attacks. Last week, President Joe Biden issued an executive order directing the Justice Department to declassify information stemming from an FBI inquiry into possible Saudi-9/11 links.

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5 in Italy slashed with knife; Somali asylum seeker arrested … today is Sunday so police are running with the “he was on drugs” excuse

ROME (AP) — Italian police on Sunday were investigating a Somali asylum-seeker for attempted murder after he allegedly slashed two ticket controllers aboard a bus in the beach resort town of Rimini, then wounded three other people, including a boy, as he fled.

Investigators are ruling out terrorism as a motive and hypothesize that the 26-year-old man was under the influence of drugs during the knife attack Saturday night, according to reports on Italy’s state broadcaster RAI.

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Chinese Dissidents Worry About Communist China’s Access to Canadian Student Data Through Confucius Institutes

The access that communist China’s Confucius Institutes (CIs) have to Canadian student data, as recently highlighted in New Brunswick, has several members of the Chinese dissident community expressing worry over the institutes operating in their own school district and on Canadian soil in general.

Sheng Xue, a Chinese-Canadian democracy activist in Toronto, said she is very concerned because access to CI student data can potentially threaten the safety of Chinese dissidents targeted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) who have any connection with the CI.

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Inside the election showdown in the Toronto suburbs that could make Erin O’Toole prime minister

About an hour before Erin O’Toole, the man many believe will be Canada’s next prime minister, appeared in the ballroom, a blue van sat blocking the exit lane outside the Crystal Fountain Event Venue in Markham, Ontario. Inside, visible behind a propped up trunk door, lay a stack of blue campaign signs, all bearing the name Melissa Felian. Nearby, two Felian volunteers, blue masks around their chins, struggled to sink another sign into the hard ground beneath the late summer grass.

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