Inside the lab at Olive Fertility Centre in Vancouver, hundreds of unfertilized human eggs are nesting in round tanks full of cold liquid nitrogen.
For some, the frozen eggs could fulfil dreams of parenthood in years to come.
“Honestly, I’m so grateful for science,” said Natalie Grunberg-Ferreira, 47, who conceived two sons from the eggs she froze at the fertility clinic.
Since Oct. 7, the public has been inundated with allegations of Israeli atrocities and human rights abuses. Israel, we’re told, is committing a “genocide” in Gaza, and, in fact, has been through all the years in which the Gazan population has grown steadily. The strange story of one young woman, or really, one photograph, is an object lesson in why such claims of Israeli evils should be taken with a large grain of salt.
It was another bad year for The Walt Disney Company.
Disney planned to spend 2023 celebrating its 100th anniversary, mounting a number of festivities to commemorate the company’s historic 1923 founding by brothers Walt and Roy O. Disney. Instead, the once invincible studio spent the year battling one bad news cycle after another.
Nearly 20 years ago, Hank Idsinga was part of a downtown detective division. The Toronto police officer had considered himself a hotshot investigator – but then he was promoted into the homicide squad.
He soon found that, compared with his previous work probing crimes, proving suspects culpable in court for fatal shootings and stabbings to the satisfaction of senior detectives, and then lawyers, and then judges and juries, was like a different world.
Berlin police said on Monday that they detained around 390 people overnight on New Year’s Eve in the German capital and have so far tallied just over 700 potential criminal investigations.
Police spokeswoman Anja Dierschke said that 54 officers were injured, 30 of them by fireworks, after 4,500 police from the capital and other states deployed in a major operation launched because of more widespread unrest than usual last year. Only eight of them were unable to finish their shifts though, she said.
Gangs attack bus drivers in Berlin on New Year’s Eve pic.twitter.com/FahQh2uDVk
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) January 1, 2024
Berlin is like London a white minority city. On New Years Eve in the Mitte district mainly Turkish & Arab men assemble.
No women or native Germans can be seen. pic.twitter.com/e9bSgKhhqr
— David Atherton (@DaveAtherton20) January 1, 2024
Loss of cooking skills has hurt our ability to adapt to rising food prices, experts say
Skyrocketing prices have taken a big bite out of what Canadians are able to serve up for dinner but food economists say our ability to cope has been worsened by our collective decline in cooking skills.
“We are less able to cook than we were 30 or 40 years ago, and so it’s much more difficult for us to adapt our diet,” said Mike von Massow, an associate professor at the University of Guelph’s Food, Agricultural & Resource Economics department.
Of course no amount of cooking prowess will help if you can’t afford a basket of groceries. Nearly two million Canadians used a food bank in March, according to an annual report by Food Banks Canada.
I took Home Ec in Grade 9, so did a lot of guys, it was fun, except for the sewing part. I feel sorry for our teacher to this day.
Historians of the future, flash-frying peccary testicles and mesquite pods over their campfires, will wonder at how the archetypal Shining City on a Hill of America’s storied yesteryear got transformed into the roach motel that our country has become on the threshold of 2024 CE. Will they be as stupidly bewildered as, in our time, the faculty at Harvard, the editors of The New York Times, or the directorate of the CDC? Or will they figure out the score by then?
Which is: the nauseating state-of-the-nation is being driven by a cohort of our own fellow citizens lost in an evil crypto-religious salvation rapture that veils their own self-disgust, moral failure, peevish discontents, petty hatreds, willful profanations, compulsive lying, sexual depravity, fraudulence, venality, cupidity, and all-around want of boundaries. They are wrecking the country on-purpose, led by their chosen figurehead avatar, “Joe Biden,” and the horses of many different colors he rode in on.
… The Canadian government has often intervened at the same court in support of human-rights cases against the governments of Myanmar, Syria, Iran and Russia over the past two years. As a supporter of Israel, it is likely to oppose the South African application, but will struggle to explain the apparent inconsistency, legal analysts say.
In a submission to the court in the Myanmar case last month, for example, Canada and five other Western governments argued that the evidence of genocide can include “a violent military operation triggering the forced displacement of members of a targeted group” and can also include “subjecting a group of people to a subsistence diet, systematic expulsion from homes and the induction of essential medical services below minimum requirement.”
The detention in France of a charter plane bound for Nicaragua has renewed attention on the Central American nation’s role as a springboard for migrants from across the world seeking to make their way to the United States.
The flight, which left the United Arab Emirates on 21 December with 303 passengers of Indian nationality, was grounded during a refueling stop after an anonymous tip-off alleging human trafficking.
The passengers, however, were not being trafficked against their will, but rather attempting to migrate.
Nicaragua is the closest country connected by land to the United States that does not impose strict entry requirements upon citizens of many nations who are barred from flying to other destinations without a visa.
REGINA – The Saskatchewan government says its natural gas utility is to stop collecting the carbon levy as of Monday from residential customers.
The move comes after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau exempted those who use home heating oil from paying the levy, mostly benefiting residents in Atlantic Canada.
Saskatchewan asked for the exemption to cover all other forms of heating, but Ottawa denied the request. In response, the province said it would stop collecting the charge at the start of 2024.
Cats Filled the Prison. Then the Inmates Fell in Love.
Some say they were first brought in to take out the rats. Others contend they wandered in on their own.
What everyone can agree on — including those who have lived or worked at Chile’s largest prison the longest — is that the cats were here first.
For decades, they have walked along the prison’s high walls, sunbathed on the metal roof and skittered between cells crowded with 10 men each. To prison officials, they were a peculiarity of sorts, and mostly ignored. The cats kept multiplying into the hundreds.
Canadians are right to be concerned about a rising tide of antisemitism at home and an increasingly assertive political Islam abroad. Both are being promoted aggressively by the Islamic Republic of Iran as it pulls the strings on its proxies Hamas and Hezbollah.
But if Iranian policy can produce chaos, tension and hatred, it can also do the opposite. Unlike the clerics who now run Iran, most Iranians including expatriate and young Iranians would prefer things to be different.
Crazy subway fire. Instead of governments changing names of parks/colleges or cancelling past leaders, maybe in 2024 instead of woke feel-good projects, they can address e-bikes and scooter safety around batteries and how these wheels can terrorize the roads, paths and sidewalks pic.twitter.com/yDNRJmdgov
— Joe Warmington (@joe_warmington) January 1, 2024
2023 has left the arrogance of Charles and the ridiculousness of the Sussexes brutally exposed.
2023 – the year of King Charles’s coronation and Prince Harry’s Spare – was a weird year for a republican like me. Though I nurse a profound and lifelong loathing for Charles, I found myself repeatedly taking his side against Harry and Meghan of Montecito. Add to this my weakness for Diana-faced Prince William (even when he is manhandling man-necklaces) and his well-groomed, well-meaning wife (great-great-granddaughter of a miner, daughter of a trolly dolly), and my attitude towards the British monarchy became something of a hot mess.
