Socialist Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) called her father “an educator.” According to the man’s obituary, he was a distinguished colonel in the army of communist Somalia, whom the United Nations described as having “one of the worst human rights records in Africa.”
There is no evidence of her father’s direct complicity in any atrocities, but Omar has not confronted the legacy of the regime to which her father was loyal.
“A nightmare of murder and crime,” Donald Trump called Washington DC during the 2024 election campaign, adding that the US national capital was “a dirty, crime-ridden death trap, that must be taken over and properly run”.
The president’s animus against Washington continued after he returned to office, when he charged that Washington’s elected local officials were “not doing the job – too much crime, too much graffiti”. On Feb 19, while returning to Washington from Mar-a-Lago, Trump suggested a federal takeover of the capital city’s municipal governance to address its many woes.
The Trump administration is evaluating plans that would establish a “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force” composed of hundreds of National Guard troops tasked with rapidly deploying into American cities facing protests or other unrest, according to internal Pentagon documents reviewed by The Washington Post.
The plan calls for 600 troops to be on standby at all times so they can deploy in as little as one hour, the documents say. They would be split into two groups of 300 and stationed at military bases in Alabama and Arizona, with purview of regions east and west of the Mississippi River, respectively.
The U.S. military and Coast Guard are monitoring the simultaneous appearance of five Chinese icebreaking vessels in the Arctic region near Alaska. That unprecedented presence represents two and a half times the number of icebreakers currently capable of being operated in the entire Arctic region by the U.S. Coast Guard. Another is scheduled to be commissioned on Sunday and plans are underway to build dozens more.
h/t DS
President Donald Trump has just made clear that there will be consequences for those countries that now propose to recognize a “Palestinian” state. He has said that it will be difficult to make a deal on reducing tariffs on Canadian goods after Prime Minister Mark Carney said that Canada would at the UN General Assembly meeting in September announce its support for a “Palestinian” state.
Do you think Liz Truss is right about Carney? pic.twitter.com/3qVjKW7WtO
— Canada Proud (@WeAreCanProud) August 11, 2025
There’s been very little publicly shared about the progress of Ottawa-Washington trade talks, but what little has been revealed in recent weeks hasn’t been very positive.
Publicly, the cabinet has said the trade talks with the Trump administration are moving along positively, while at the same time stressing that they need to keep the discussions to the negotiating table and that they can’t disclose much more.
But from what can be gathered from public records, whether it’s the state of communication between the two leaders or messaging around the need to accelerate internal efforts to build resilience, it appears Canada isn’t on the verge of a breakthrough.
Road trips to the US decreased for a seventh straight month as Canadians ramped up their American boycott.
Canadian-resident return trips by automobile from the neighboring US slumped 36.9% in July from a year ago, Statistics Canada data showed Monday.
Return trips by air from the US also slid 25.8%, while those from other countries grew 5.9% as Canadians traveled elsewhere.
“Nice city you have here — it would be a shame if something were to happen to it.”
Something bad is about to happen to New York City.
Maybe I’m wrong. I hope I’m wrong. The greatest city in the world deserves something better than a commie-racist/nepo-red-diaper-baby like Zohran Mamdani as its mayor.
UPDATE: Trump says he’s placing DC police under federal control and deploying National Guard
BREAKING: President Trump has officially announced a HISTORIC ACTION to rescue Washington DC!
“This is LIBERATION DAY IN DC and we are going to take our Capitol BACK!”
“I’m officially invoking section seven forty of the District Of Columbia Home Rule Act.”
“In addition, I am… pic.twitter.com/PFtbqhAqWm
— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) August 11, 2025
Trump demands homeless people ‘immediately’ move out of Washington DC
US President Donald Trump has said homeless people must “move out” of Washington DC as he vowed to tackle crime in the city, but the mayor pushed back against the White House likening the American capital to Baghdad in Iraq.
The Republican president has also trailed a news conference for Monday about his plan to make the city “safer and more beautiful than it ever was before”.
Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, said: “We are not experiencing a crime spike.”
Trump signed an order last month making it easier to arrest homeless people, and he last week ordered federal law enforcement into the streets of Washington DC.
h/t patthedog
Canada, a country with a smaller population than California, features the second-largest land mass in the world, thousands of kilometres of coastal shoreline, water, and natural resources in abundance, and a huge arctic geography where, for over a century, there was minimal predatory interest from other countries. But most Canadians live and earn a living within a few hundred kilometres of the U.S. border. We’ve enjoyed easy prosperity doing business directly or indirectly with Americans, to whom we’ve defaulted to do the heavy lifting on defence and security.
On Tuesday, the FBI released its annual update on American crime trends, estimated from police department reports covering 2024. The big headline: America’s murder rate stood at five per 100,000 last year. This was well below its 2020–21 surge of around 6.5, a 15 percent decrease from 2023, and even a touch below the 2019 rate.
The murder spike that began in 2020 is officially over.
Washington is “done with the funding” of Ukraine’s war against Russia, JD Vance, the US vice-president, has said, as Europe scrambles to build a united defence before in-person negotiations between Presidents Trump and Putin.
Speaking in an interview after an emergency summit with European and Ukrainian officials, co-hosted by David Lammy at Chevening, the foreign secretary’s mansion in Kent, Vance said Americans were fed up with paying towards the cost of the war.
“What we said to the Europeans is simply, first of all, this is in your neck of the woods. This is in your back door,” he told Fox News. “You guys have got to step up and take a bigger role in this thing. And if you care so much about this conflict, you should be willing to play a more direct and a more substantial way in funding this war yourself, I think the president and I certainly think that America, we’re done with the funding of the Ukraine war business.
JD VANCE ON UKRAINE: “Americans, I think, are SICK of continuing to send their money, their tax dollars”
DARN RIGHT!
“If the Europeans want to step up and actually buy the weapons from American producers, we're OK with that—but we're NOT going to fund it ourselves anymore” pic.twitter.com/xugcIUfoAt
— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) August 10, 2025
It’s become a common refrain when Canadian politicians are asked about retaliatory measures or negotiations in the ongoing trade war: 85 per cent of Canada’s trade with the U.S. is “tariff-free.”
Prime Minister Mark Carney said as much on Tuesday and again on Friday, when pressed for information about his next salvo in the dispute with the U.S. after President Donald Trump imposed 35 per cent tariffs on Canadian goods that aren’t compliant with the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA).
“We’re in a situation right now where 85 per cent of our trade with the United States is tariff-free,” Carney told reporters at a news conference in Trenton, Ont., on Friday.
So no “Elbows” required?
I’ve commended leftist comedian Bill Maher plenty of times in the past for his willingness to call out the radical, woke left, and without a doubt, he deserves that praise because there are very few people on the left willing to say such things. That said, Maher is still a leftist and is wrong on many things. And on the latest episode of his HBO show, “Real Time with Bill Maher,” Dr. Phil called him out to his face, and it was pretty epic.
NEW: Bill Maher confronts Dr. Phil over joining ICE raids — and Dr. Phil fires back, calling bullsh*t right to his face.
Dr. Phil doesn’t just curse for anything.
MAHER: “Why are you going on these ICE raids? I don’t understand that. You’re a guy who we know for so many years… pic.twitter.com/QAxAZ9waAt
— The Vigilant Fox (@VigilantFox) August 9, 2025
WINDSOR, ONT. — From boom town to gloom town.
After four years of population growth, as new arrivals to Windsor chased jobs in a manufacturing revival fuelled by the promise of electric vehicles, the influx stalled when U.S. tariffs hit.
The unemployment rate soared to the highest in Canada. Five thousand manufacturing positions were cut in the last five months, according to the local Chamber of Commerce. Roughly 16 per cent of jobs in the area are dependent on Canada-U.S. trade — double the national average. Home sales are down 6.3 per cent this year.
