More Americans support sending further military aid to Ukraine than to Israel, according to a Quinnipiac poll published on Wednesday.
Net support for increased funding for Israel has dipped underwater, with 45% backing and 46% opposing the measure. A month earlier, the same pollster found that 54% of Americans supported further aid, with 39% opposing. Meanwhile, the corresponding figures for sending further military aid to Ukraine are currently 55% and 38%.
Sarah Brown and her husband decided to have a date night last Friday. Their three-year-old was at the grandparent’s for the night, so the couple planned to go out for dinner and take their 8-week-old to the Yorkdale Shopping Centre in Toronto for a photo with Santa.
The police did nothing.
Update: Sweetpea advises Miller is likely referring to St. Nick.
That is all that I will be saying on this matter other than Merry Christmas!
— Marc Miller ᐅᑭᒫᐃᐧᐅᓃᐸᐄᐧᐤᐃᔨᐣ (@MarcMillerVM) December 23, 2023
H/T Mauser
A British man has been accused by the German authorities of being Hamas’s key liaison in Europe with numerous alleged links to the terrorist organisation.
Majed Al-Zeer, 61, a prominent Palestinian activist who has appeared in parliament at events with Jeremy Corbyn and several other British MPs, is alleged to have contacts at the highest levels of the Hamas leadership.
A file from the German interior ministry, first reported by Der Spiegel, a German news magazine, names Al-Zeer as the “person responsible for Hamas” in Germany and across Europe.
The “war on Christmas” debate is an oldie but a goodie. It’s become something of an annual tradition to ask whether such a war is in fact going on or not. It’s usually reignited by a news story about a school replacing their Christmas concert with a “holiday concert” or a town that decides to stop putting up a Christmas tree.
This year though, the Israel-Gaza war has brought a troubling twist to the war on Christmas. Pro-Palestine protesters have decided to target malls in Canada during this busiest shopping season of the year.
A plane carrying Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner mercenary boss, was brought down by a bomb planted under its wing in a plot orchestrated by Vladimir Putin’s oldest ally, according to a new report.
Nikolai Patrushev, a former KGB officer, the powerful head of Russia’s security council, personally oversaw the planning of the operation, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing Western intelligence sources and a former Russian intelligence officer.
Prigozhin died when his private jet crashed over Russia’s Tver region on Aug 23, around two months after he led an armed rebellion against Moscow’s military leadership in June, in the biggest threat to Putin’s two-decade rule.
After considerable flack Anita Anand deleted her tone deaf post featuring the Minister smugly standing beside a food bank sign. I get it, when you're a Liberal the impoverishment of your constituents is considered an accomplishment. #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/LfyAdANVnW
— Fancypants Maloney (@fancypants_s) December 23, 2023
Toronto may have a new deal with the province for financial relief, but Mayor Olivia Chow says city residents will also need to do their part to battle the $1.5-billion shortfall — and that will mean property tax increases and new fees in 2024.
Chow made the comments to CBC Toronto in a wide-ranging year end interview.
The new mayor and Premier Doug Ford announced an agreement last month that will see the province provide billions of dollars in aid and upload the Gardiner Expressway and Don Valley Parkway. But Chow says the city has to be willing to show it will make sacrifices as well to fix the city’s structural deficit.
The Brothers of Italy (FdI), the party led by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, has introduced a bill that would ban any school from cancelling Christian celebrations at Christmas or Easter, infuriating the Italian Left.
The bill was presented to the Italian Senate this week just days before Christmas and declares that “it will no longer be possible to cancel the nativity scene, Christmas, and Easter within Italian schools of all levels,” the newspaper Il Giornale reports.
The federal government has announced that all new vehicles sold in Canada must be electric by 2035, but new data shows that interest in EVs actually declined in 2023.
AutoTrader, Canada’s largest automotive marketplace, released a search data report that shows only 56 per cent of car shoppers who do not own an EV are open to purchasing one for their next vehicle, down from 68 per cent in 2022.
Pierre Poilievre, “Newsmaker of the Year,” is crushing it in polls. The Liberals call him our Trump. So this may surprise you:
Someone I know in the U.K. says traditional Conservatives there who fear going the MAGA way, see Poilievre as a role model. The surprise isn’t that they watch Canadian politics; it’s that they admire Poilievre’s moderation and centrism. He takes them back to the era of Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan, before Thatcher went all Reagan and radical, leading them to botch Brexit and fall into their current bottomless leadership catastrophe.
The Census Bureau has announced its year-end estimates of state population changes, which are dated as of July 1, 2023. They once again show the continuing trend of America’s population shifting out of its bluest states and into red states, mainly in the Sun Belt. While the trend is not entirely uniform, it is a powerful one cutting across regions. The shifts in the past year have been less dramatic than they were during the Covid pandemic, when the differing approaches to emergency governance among American states presented obvious distinctions in employment, education, worship, and entertainment.
It’s taking no time at all for the Biden administration Red Sea plan to fall apart. In point of fact, it started to crumble almost as soon as our lumbering, blundering SecDef Lloyd Austin announced the inspirational program.
The new multi-national taskforce with the thrillingly inspirational name – “Prosperity Guardian” – was a call-to-arms of sorts for nations whose vessels transit the Red Sea/Suez Canal routes, and who were being threatened by repeated Houthi attacks, both drones and swift boat piracy, in what’s known as the Bab el-Mandeb (BAM) Strait. That’s the southern chokepoint where the Red Sea squeezes between Yemen and Djibouti as it makes a left turn before reopening into the Gulf of Aden, Arabian Sea, and the open waters of the Indian Ocean beyond.
The standard TV image of a district attorney — or, prosecuting attorney — in the US is of a tough government lawyer passionate about putting bad guys behind bars. Or maybe the “DA” is a cynical, striving politician willing to bend or break the law to get a high-profile conviction on a guy who isn’t bad at all. Either way, DAs on TV like to finish the process that begins with the police arresting someone by getting a conviction, setting bars between society and a guy, usually but not always bad. The reality is very different in the smaller details, but fairly similar in the larger ones. Reality has far fewer dramatic trials than TV, for example, and much more plea-bargaining, but on the main thing — prosecutors tending to prosecute people — TV and reality are in rough agreement.
As the Ivy League anti-Semitism scandal shows, an elite education offers no immunity to bigotry.
‘Anti-Semitism is a symptom of ignorance, and the cure for ignorance is knowledge.’ These words were spoken by Harvard University president Claudine Gay during her congressional testimony about anti-Semitism earlier this month. This may seem like a simple, comforting homily, but parse that sentence and you will find a thin layer of self-serving hubris. Implicit is the message that because we are Harvard, we cannot be ignorant. So we can’t be anti-Semitic.
