Legal challenges to the federal quarantine hotel policy continue to work their way through the courts, with another decision that was released on April 23. This decision was a minor procedural setback that will not have a bearing on the challenge to the policy. But the decision has attracted significant attention and is worth understanding.
Seven Italian far-left guerrilla fighters, who hid in France for decades after escaping terrorism convictions that left “an open wound” in Italy, have been arrested.
French authorities are also searching for three other Italians convicted on terrorism charges linked to bombings and assassinations between the late 1960s and early 1980s.
The Italian government has been urging France for years to arrest and extradite the fugitives, who were identified in the Italian media as Marina Petrella, Giovanni Alimonti, Enzo Calvitti, Roberta Cappelli, Sergio Tornaghi, Giorgio Pietrostefani and Narciso Manenti.
Pressure continues to mount for the deputy leader of Slough Borough Council to resign after protesters flocked to the council building for the third time, demanding her to step down over controversial Facebook posts.
On Friday, April 23, campaigners gathered at the Observatory House on Windsor Road with placards of ‘stop Islamophobia’ and of the deputy leader’s face, councillor Sabia Akram, crossed out with the words ‘shame on you’ attached.
…Cllr Akram (Lab,Elliman), who is Muslim, sparked controversy after she posted on Facebook, welcoming the Batley Grammar School teacher to the town if he needed to leave the area.
The Yorkshire teacher and his family are in hiding after he showed a cartoon drawing of the Prophet from the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo to pupils during a religious education class on blasphemy.
… “In light of how quickly COVID-19 spread in long-term-care homes, every day that implementing mandatory requirements was delayed made a difference in the effort to control its spread,” Lysyk said in her report.
Lysyk said in her report that the province was aware in March, 2020 that 98 per cent of the COVID-19 deaths in Italy had involved elderly people with pre-existing conditions and should have recognized the risk the virus posed to long-term care homes.
It was neglect and incompetence that killed them.
More… Ontario long-term care homes were poorly prepared for COVID-19 pandemic, auditor-general report says
The report also noted that 13 of the 15 homes with the highest numbers of COVID-19 deaths were operated by for-profit entities. The 15 homes had only 4.4 per cent of all long-term-care home beds but accounted for 28 per cent of all resident deaths.
Lysyk’s report makes 16 recommendations to address the findings.
Those include requiring operators to renovate and upgrade homes more quickly, and coming up with a provincial strategy to address “root causes” of staffing shortages. It also urges development of a pandemic plan for the sector.
And then there’s this.
Last week I received this letter from Runnymede the hospital where my Mother contracted Covid. It’s a request that she fill out a patient experience survey. When her condition worsened she was transferred to a Covid ward at a nearby hospital where she died. They know or should know she passed away. I arranged to pick up her belongings at Runnymede and informed staff of her passing. They were so kind that along with her personal items they included a bag of her soiled bed linens which I tossed back into the lobby along with a few choice remarks.
Investigative journalism mostly reconstructs events and exchanges from hidden scraps, obscure records, and third-party documents. Often the best we can do is to show that something bad must have happened based on the coincidences we find in these records. Because reporters are not prosecutors, they cannot issue subpoenas or compel testimony. It is exceedingly rare for a reporter to obtain that “smoking gun.”
That is why the case of Hunter Biden’s missing laptop, combined with original text messages and emails obtained through direct access to a recipient’s Gmail account, is so notable. It is primary, original source. At long last, even Hunter Biden himself has finally acknowledged it.
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan has boasted that his plan for Muslim-majority countries to unite and force Western governments to criminalise insulting the Prophet Mohammed will work.
The 68-year-old leader said lobbying Western nations, the EU and UN to adopt blasphemy laws with a warning of a trade boycott if they do not do so will be ‘effective’ in achieving their goal.
LOS ANGELES, California — Homeless encampments lined the sidewalks and parks near Union Station, the venue for Sunday evening’s Oscars, on Tuesday — 48 hours after the red carpet had been rolled up and the stars and media had gone home.
Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas was recently caught badmouthing several countries, including the United States and his Arab neighbors, during a profanity-laced rant that raises new concerns about the 85-year-old leader’s deteriorating health.
The Arabic language rant is renewing speculation that Abbas—who is overweight and a heavy cigarette smoker—is in poor mental and physical health as he carries out his 16th year in office. His government is under great strain amid monumental regional shifts that have seen Israel make peace with its traditional Arab foes.
For once I agree with Abbas.
When the former head of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Dr. Robert Redfield, recently said Covid-19 likely leaked from a Chinese research lab, news headlines called it “shocking.”
Dr. Robert Redfield on CNN: “I still think the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory— you know, escaped.”
That was followed by a flurry of media reports ridiculing the notion; insisting that Covid-19 probably jumped from bats to people through an unexplained, natural route. But there’s new information that hasn’t been widely reported. A sizable segment of the research community has formed the same opinion as Dr. Redfield: that Covid-19 leaked from experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
A knifeman went on a stabbing rampage in a kindergarten in the southern Chinese city of Beiliu on Wednesday, injuring 18 people, including young children. The suspect was detained by police.
The attacker broke into a private kindergarten at around 2pm local time, injuring 16 children, two of them seriously, and two teachers, Chinese media reported, citing officials.
突发：今日广西玉林北流新丰幼儿园！暴徒砍伤10余个小朋友！🙏🙏🙏 pic.twitter.com/H9hdMX4vxB
— 沉默的力量The power of reticence (@2mmbPkM00IJwIUV) April 28, 2021
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau vigorously defended his top aide on Tuesday, saying that while his office knew there was a complaint against then-defence chief general Jonathan Vance three years ago, no one knew it was about sexual misconduct.
The comments came in response to fresh questions about what the prime minister and his chief of staff, Katie Telford, knew about the allegation against Vance in March 2018 following testimony last week from one of Trudeau’s former advisers.
Responding to a question during one of his regular COVID-19 briefings, Trudeau described his chief of staff as “an extraordinarily strong leader” who has been instrumental in pushing the federal government to become more feminist.
Ontario is reporting 3,480 cases of #COVID19 and nearly 50,200 tests completed. Locally, there are 961 new cases in Toronto, 589 in Peel, 341 in Niagara and 290 in York Region.
As of 8:00 p.m. yesterday, 4,907,203 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been administered.
— Christine Elliott (@celliottability) April 28, 2021
Ontario largely ignored long-term care as COVID-19 crisis began, internal documents reveal
Internal government documents obtained by CBC News show few signs that Ontario prepared the long-term care sector for the risks from COVID-19 before the virus began its deadly spread through the province’s nursing homes.
CBC News asked the Ministry of Health and Ministry of Long-Term Care for all reports, memos and briefing notes concerning the novel coronavirus/COVID-19 and long-term care homes in February, March and April of 2020.
Only a handful of documents from the ministries mention protecting long-term care residents in February, even as cases were steadily arriving in Ontario and the devastation from the infections in Italy became apparent.
I still don’t understand how my late Mother was never offered the vaccine while confined to a physio-rehab hospital. A hospital where the majority of patients were elderly and which had previous outbreaks. She passed away March 5th from Covid she contracted in that hospital. Why was she and so many others left unprotected?
When John McWhorter, professor of Linguistics and American Studies at Columbia, described ‘antiracism’ as America’s ‘new flawed religion’ in 2015, few could have imagined just how prescient that description would prove to be. Just last week, the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi thanked George Floyd for “sacrificing his life for justice” while CEOs, celebrities, and other politicians all made versions of the same promise: the work was not done.
If you thought last year was bad, wait until these proposed policies tear through the economy.
At the “virtual world summit” President Biden announced that he’s committing this country to cut CO2 emissions to half of 2005 levels by 2030. Just trying to reach this ambitious goal will require severely damaging the economy in order to achieve something that won’t stop the alleged catastrophic effects of a rise in temperature that may or may not happen.
A hotels-for-homeless program does nothing to address the real problem: addiction.
The most important walk you can take in San Francisco is not to the grand Golden Gate bridge, down crooked Lombard Street, or to the brightly painted Victorians in Alamo Square. It’s to the city’s large and gritty sixth district, which contains the Tenderloin, Civic Center, and South of Market neighborhoods. What you’ll find there will shatter any preconceived notions about homelessness you might have heard from activists, city departments, and elected officials. You’ll realize that San Francisco doesn’t have a homeless problem—it has a substance-abuse crisis. And Project Roomkey, California governor Gavin Newsom’s hotels-for-homeless plan that he’s touting as a model for the rest of the country, won’t help any more than a band-aid will cure a cancer patient.
