Leave it to Canada to try to reconcile accounts of Hamas gang rape with the modern morals of the West. Take the Canadian embassy to Israel, for example.
“Sexual & gender-based violence impact both Israeli & Palestinian women and girls, and also men and boys, in distinct ways,” it wrote in a post this week. “Canada condemns all use of sexual and gender-based violence as a tactic of war.”
The United States’ top diplomat has told the Israeli government that he expects it to end the war in Gaza within the next month.
At meetings in Israel last week, Antony Blinken, the American secretary of state, made it clear that Israel would have until early January to wrap up its ground operation against Hamas.
Following the federal government’s announcement of a regulatory framework to cap oil and gas emissions by 35 to 38 percent below 2019 levels, the premiers of Alberta and Saskatchewan have indicated they will fight back against the policy and protect their “constitutional right” to develop their own energy sectors.
“The recent announcement on what they are calling an emissions cap, but today’s announced de facto production cap on Alberta’s oil and gas sector amounts to an intentional attack by the federal government on the economy of Alberta and the financial well-being of millions of Albertans and Canadians,” Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said during a press conference shortly after the Dec. 7 announcement.
Today marks both the two month anniversary of the war in Gaza and the start of the Hanukkah festival period. For Jews worldwide, it is a sombre occasion as this is the first Jewish festival since the Oct 7 attacks that saw gunmen storm communities near the border with the Gaza Strip, killing hundreds of Israelis and taking hostages.
As the war has unfolded, both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia have skyrocketed. In the 61 days inclusive between the Hamas terror attack on Israel and Dec 6, Community Security Trust (CST) recorded at least 1,890 anti-Semitic incidents across the UK.
More and bigger homeless encampments have been set up across Canada recently and, with the help of advocacy groups, they’re taking on a more permanent feel.
Hunkering down for the winter, some have generators, heating stoves, winterized tents, and more. Advocacy groups have helped them obtain these supplies, along with legal help to stop attempts at moving them.
Will Justin Trudeau step down in the new year, will he follow in his father’s footsteps and take the proverbial walk in the snow?
That’s the question on the minds of federal political watchers as they look at the polling numbers coming in that show the Liberals falling further and further behind.
Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an influential Muslim-American lobbying group, is standing by remarks he made during a conference in late November justifying the atrocities committed by Palestinian terror groups after they invaded southern Israel.
Last September, the rapper Killer Mike was DJing hip-hop classics like Snoop Dogg’s Ain’t No Fun at a music festival afterparty in Louisville, Kentucky. “The inspiration for the night’s set is freedom of speech, so say what the fuck you want!” he told a crowd of hundreds. Killer Mike, half of the duo Run the Jewels, is known for speaking out against police brutality and racial injustice, as well as campaigning for Bernie Sanders.
But this night’s set was co-sponsored by Stand Together Music, an organization backed by the libertarian billionaire Charles Koch, who made his fortune in fossil fuels. Other sponsors of the party included the free-speech group Fire (which has received millions of dollars in contributions from the Charles G Koch charitable foundation), as well as the music outlet Spin, an official partner of Stand Together Music.
I have zero respect for a billionaire who advocates for open borders.
Something is rotten in the imperial court of Chairman Xi Jinping.
While the world is distracted by war in the Middle East and Ukraine, a Stalin-like purge is sweeping through China’s ultra-secretive political system, with profound implications for the global economy and even the prospects for peace in the region.
The signals emanating from Beijing are unmistakable, even as China’s security services have ramped up repression to totalitarian levels, making it almost impossible to know what is really happening inside the country.
h/t Mauser
Every day, people across the world wake up to news about climate change affecting their lives. With the seeming randomness of a roulette wheel, the doomsday clique of the climate world daily selects a fresh topic to sow seeds of anxiety among the populace.
Popular things easily recognized — even cherished — by people are continually identified as being at risk of being damaged or destroyed by climate change. Coffee, for example, is a commodity experiencing a surge in popularity, and there are no prizes for guessing what climate doomsayers are saying now.
Politics is not so much about getting things done, as it is about whom to blame when those things go wrong.
The Biden administration chose to tether a limited Israel military resupply package to a huge one for Ukraine. The goal here was to put Republicans on the wrong side of the Israel debate and then, in the wake of the bad news from Ukraine’s offensive, to blame them for the loss of the war.
What can we Jews not accomplish? There were three years between the ovens of Auschwitz and the foundation of the Jewish State. And then the Israelis transformed the wasteland between the River and the Sea into an agricultural phenomenon, supplying much of Europe’s produce. Jews even wrote the world’s greatest Christmas songs: “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” by Mendelssohn, a converted Jew (a “Jew”), and “White Christmas” by Irving Berlin.
They call it ‘The Poopie Dance’ and San Franciscans are having to learn it – and quickly.
It involves constantly looking straight ahead to find a clean line between where you are on the street and where you want to go.
Sadly, it’s the reality in parts of the Bay City as the growing homeless population have taken to using the famed streets of San Francisco as one giant open-air toilet.
UK Sentencing Council urges lenience for certain demographic groups, not others.
Even if (like me) you know precious little about the law, the chances are you know one thing: Lady Justice is supposed to be blind. Equality before the law is a cornerstone of any functioning democracy, and is vital for social cohesion. Despite what we may have witnessed playing out on the streets of London recently (alongside the reasonable accusations of two-tier policing), it is vital that no group is privileged in the eyes of the law. That, however, could all be about to change.
There was a notable event this week in the American mainstream-media landscape. Rachel Maddow, the grande dame of the vote-blue-no-matter-who crowd, said something insightful for once. She tweeted out a clip of herself speaking to fellow MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes on his podcast a few weeks ago. In it, she cogently described why definitions matter and what happens when words lose their meaning. She noted how, in the run-up to the 2016 election, Trump turned the tables on his journalist opponents by appropriating the phrase ‘fake news’ to describe their reporting. As Maddow explained…
