It’s almost as if lockdowns do nothing to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
California has some of the nation’s strictest restrictions when it comes to COVID-19, yet it is one of America’s epicenters for the virus, Politico reported. The state has at times instituted “a complete ban on restaurant dining to travel quarantines and indoor gym closures.”
TORONTO — A new variant of the virus that causes COVID-19 that first surfaced in the U.K. and has since been found in several other countries is likely already in Canada, a health expert says.
“I’d be surprised if it’s not, actually,” Ronald St. John, the former director-general of the Centre for Emergency Preparedness and Response at the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), told CTV News Channel Saturday.
“Suddenly, it all turned to ‘What these people are doing is noble,’” he said. “And not only do you no longer have the obligation to stay at home, you now have the obligation to go and march against racism on the grounds that racism is the worst public [threat] than the coronavirus pandemic.”
When a call came to respond to a “shots fired” in downtown Nashville on Christmas morning, it wasn’t antifa or Black Lives Matter who responded, it was six Nashville cops, some reportedly new to the job, who found themselves “standing between good and evil” in a potential mass casualty situation.
China will overtake the US to become the world’s largest economy by 2028, five years earlier than previously forecast, a report says.
The UK-based Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) said China’s “skilful” management of Covid-19 would boost its relative growth compared to the US and Europe in coming years.
Meanwhile India is tipped to become the third largest economy by 2030.
Police have reportedly identified a person of interest in Nashville’s Christmas Day bombing that injured three people and caused massive damage to the city’s downtown.
On Saturday morning, CBS journalist Jeff Pegues tweeted out the news, but did not say whether anybody was yet in custody.
The blast emanated from a white RV parked on 2nd Avenue at 6.40 am Friday, and the FBI is now probing whether the explosion was deliberately designed to target law enforcement officers.
WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge said the Justice Department unlawfully rescheduled the execution of the only woman on federal death row, potentially setting up the Trump administration to schedule the execution after President-elect Joe Biden takes office.
U.S. District Court Judge Randolph Moss also vacated an order from the director of the Bureau of Prisons that had set Lisa Montgomery’s execution date for Jan. 12. Montgomery had previously been scheduled to be put to death at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana, this month, but Moss delayed the execution after her attorneys contracted coronavirus visiting their client and asked him to extend the amount of time to file a clemency petition.
It was unseasonably cold as my wife, daughter, and I emerged from a downtown Nasvhille restaurant where we had been enjoying a Christmas Eve dinner.
All was quiet. That rarity in the South, a gentle snow, was drifting down, reflected in the Christmas lights of the neighboring buildings. It was almost magical.
You could forget for the moment the unremitting misery that was annus horribilis 2020, particularly bad in my adopted Music City home that suffered not just the pandemic but a destructive tornado in March.
A dark web hacking outfit claims to have purloined some 900 gigabytes of “before and after” photos from a UK cosmetic surgery chain with a litany of celebrity endorsements, vowing to release the images unless a ransom is paid.
The hack on the surgery chain, the Hospital Group, was reported by the BBC on Thursday, noting that the company had informed both its customers as well as the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office of the data theft.
Scientists in Los Angeles County have begun examining samples of COVID-19 found in patients to determine if a new, more infectious strain of the virus from Britain has made its way to the West Coast of the U.S.
The new strain is of particular concern given the ease with which it spreads from person to person, though it is unclear if it is more lethal than the strand that have been spreading for months.
Ontario reported more than 2,100 COVID-19 cases on both Friday and Saturday, with 81 new deaths over that 48-hour period, as the number of patients in intensive care surpassed 300 for the first time.
The province detected 2,159 new cases of COVID-19 on Friday and 2,142 new cases on Saturday.
“Today, there are 541 new cases in Toronto, 344 in Peel, 262 in York Region, 136 in Hamilton and 131 in Windsor-Essex,” Health Minister Christine Elliott wrote on Twitter.
WARMINGTON: Christmas lights show turned off while Pearson runway lights stay lit
Turns out there’s no light at the end of the tunnel after all — or in the middle of it either.
The popular drive-thru Polar Drive light festival in the parking garage of Pearson International Airport has been ordered shut down.
Amarnath Amarasingam and Mubin Shaikh are both regarded as experts in radicalization.
Both say they have spent extensive amounts of time counselling Shehroze Chaudhry, a 26-year-old Burlington, Ont. man now facing a rare terrorism-hoax charge and recently labelled a “fabulist” by The New York Times over his claims that he committed atrocities on behalf of the Islamic State in Syria.
For his part, Shaikh, a Seneca College professor and former counterterrorism operative for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and Royal Canadian Mounted Police, says he now believes Chaudhry never stepped foot in Syria and got caught up in his own “fantasy.”
Yet Amarasingam, a Queen’s University professor, isn’t so quick to dismiss Chaudhry’s claims, noting he’s seen signs of “remorse” and “survivor’s guilt” in the young man.
This sick joke is what passes for expertise in “Canadian” counter-jihad. Good Lord.
When bullets fly in the city — often piercing kitchen windows, shattering TVs or sailing over children’s beds — all we can do is shake our heads and be thankful innocent victims weren’t injured or killed.
Sadly, there are times when that luck runs out — like Boxing Day 2005 when a gunfight broke out on a bustling Yonge St., just north of Dundas St., killing Jane Creba and wounding six others.
The former British spy and Soviet Union double agent George Blake has died at the age of 98.
The RIA news agency reported that Blake died in Russia, citing the country’s SVR foreign intelligence agency. “We received some bitter news – the legendary George Blake passed away,” it said.
Blake was the last in a line of British spies to operate secretly for the Soviet Union, exposing the identities of hundreds of western agents across eastern Europe in the 1950s and humiliating the intelligence establishment when his work was discovered at the height of the cold war.
This explanation sounds plausible … see this thread
The most mundane possibility: a dramatic suicide.
2020 has been a dark year, and it’s possible that someone planned to kill themselves (but not others) on Christmas in the most dramatic way possible.
24/x
— Alex Little (@AlexLittleTN) December 25, 2020
This one is more fun, I believe it entirely possible Taylor Swift is behind the bombing.
nashville , cctv of the RT playing the recorded message pic.twitter.com/ACPMn1xxLc
— basedengland8 (@basedengland8) December 26, 2020
