OTTAWA – The RCMP is falling well short of staffing levels in multiple jurisdictions across Canada where it has provincial policing contracts, with as many as one in six positions unfilled, leaving communities with fewer officers and detachments short-staffed.
And not just in areas where crime is commonplace.
Much of the criticism of the changes in the criminal-justice system has been focused on the decriminalizing of errant behaviors and the lack of serious responses to the gun violence that plagues many urban black neighborhoods. What is largely ignored is the breakdown in lawful behavior in other less life-threatening areas: car and traffic violations, fare-beaters on public transportation, and car and store thefts.
The effort to reduce carbon emissions by transitioning to electric vehicles isn’t going as well as it might seem.
On the bright side, the adoption of electric cars is happening faster than some experts predicted, with sales in the U.S. soaring 65% to 800,000 last year. But the move to electric power for big commercial trucks is stuck in first gear, with only a few thousand on American roads.
Experts say it’s vital to replace millions of diesel-engine tractor-trailers and other big rigs with green alternatives to tackle climate change. Medium- and heavy-duty trucks make up only about 5% of U.S. vehicles but spew about 23% of all greenhouse gases from transportation sources, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
… Beyond the steep price of battery trucks, fleet operators face high expenses and other challenges in constructing charging stations at their depots. Among the hurdles: delays in government approvals, lead times of up to two years in procuring the electrical gear, and trouble getting the local utility to provide the vast amount of power needed.
The queue for the bar has long been a bugbear for the thirsty sports fan, a gamble that all too often results in a rushed pint, downed just before the whistle for the start of the second-half.
After missing a key try at an international rugby match while waiting for a beer a few years ago, Sam Pettipher decided to do something about it. Studying for an MBA at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen at the time, he dedicated his final project on “technology commercialisation” to finding a better way of lubricating crowds at mass events.
… In eight months, Putin faces re-election with his popularity ratings having dropped by 20 percent and his myth punctured by the Wagner rebellion. Four months after that, Biden, if he manages to get his party’s nomination, will also face re-election. Both men need to show something for the immense resources they have used, or wasted, on a needless war.
… A number of events, under-reported by global media, point in that direction. First, there were leaked reports about the opening of a track-2 diplomatic channel by the US to Russia. Track-2 designates “probing talks” with an adversary conducted through unofficial or semi-official figures. In World War II, US President Franklin Roosevelt used the method through his dentist who held talks with a representative of the SS chief Heinrich Himmler in neutral Stockholm.
This seems a probable route to a politically necessary “peace.”
A French teenager was hospitalized after an attack by a group of youths who had taken issue with her choice of clothing on a night out left her face disfigured.
The attack occurred in the early hours of Wednesday morning when the 19-year-old victim, named as Nissan, was on a date with her boyfriend in the southern French city of Toulouse.
“Children in their games are wont to submit to rules which they have themselves established, and to punish misdemeanours which they have themselves defined.” Thus did Tocqueville marvel at Americans’ habit of self-government, and the temperament it both required and encouraged from a young age. “The same spirit,” he said, “pervades every act of social life.” The unsupervised games and rituals of children in the 19th century were nicely depicted (with comic exaggeration) in Mark Twain’s novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.
Protests involving the desecration, vandalism, or burning of the Islamic holy book, the Quran, have been going on for years in Scandinavia, with Danish anti-Islam activist Rasmus Paludan and his group Stram Kurs (Hard Line) being behind many of the demonstrations in Denmark, Sweden, and elsewhere.
Earlier this year, Paludan burned a copy of the Quran in front of the Turkish embassy in Stockholm, provoking fierce condemnation from the Turkish government and from Islamist president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
One of the first studies into the side effects of transgender surgeries has revealed alarmingly high rates of post-op pain, aching during intercourse, and bladder problems, raising troubling questions for this new frontier of medicine.
A huge majority – 81 percent – of those who had surgery on their genitals in the past five years said they endured pain simply from moving around in the weeks and months after going under the knife.
Researchers from the University of Florida and Brooks Rehabilitation, a health non-profit, showed that more than half of trans surgery patients endured pain during sex, and nearly a third could not control their bladders.
An alien spaceship crash landing cannot be ruled out as the cause of the strange pointy protrusions found on Mars, scientists have said.
In April, Nasa’s Curiosity Rover photographed what appear to be rows of spikes, plates and wedges protruding from rocks on the floor of the 96-mile (154 km) Gale Crater.
UFOs are a ‘matter of national security’: Ryan Graves
Amid the recent rise in fear-mongering reports from the corporate media driven by the globalist green agenda, many rarely look at the legitimacy of the data that these doom allegations of a so-called “climate crisis” are actually based on.
Much of the panic-inducing claims of a “climate emergency” we hear from in the media, often supported with scary red and fire orange-colored weather maps, are mostly based on corrupted data.
Andrew Truelove needs a belt and a pair of socks.
He takes his time getting up from the mattress he slept on the night before in the parking lot behind a Torrance shopping center. He smokes his first Lucky Strike of the day, then takes a Lyft to San Pedro, where he’s heard he may be able to get into a tiny house community.
It’s May 17, Truelove’s 32nd day in California. Shortly after he arrived at LAX from his native Virginia, he hitched a ride to Slab City, an eccentric off-grid community in the Sonoran desert. Then he spent a few weeks in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley, pursuing his dream of starting a new social media platform.
Slab City
The disgraced cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried, who founded the FTX exchange, had planned to purchase the small Pacific island nation of Nauru in case the world came to an end, according to a new lawsuit.
The lawsuit, filed on Thursday by FTX against its 31-year-old founder and three other former executives, and seeking $1bn, included a memo created by Bankman-Fried’s younger brother Gabriel and an FTX Foundation executive. The memo detailed plans to buy Nauru.
The plan was to “purchase the sovereign nation of Nauru in order to construct a ‘bunker/shelter’ that would be used for ‘some event where 50-99.99% of people die [to] ensure that most EAs survive’” the memo said, referring to “effective altruism”, a philosophical and social movement championed by Bankman-Fried that tries to maximize the impact of charitable giving.
During one of my trips to the Congo, I met Jolie in her small home of cracked brick walls and rusted roofing in the cobalt-mining town of Kolwezi. Although Jolie had invited me to her home that day to discuss her story, the moment I arrived it felt as if she regretted my presence. She did not wish to speak at length.
To prevent Jolie and everyone else I’ve interviewed from being identified and targeted for reprisal, I have used pseudonyms for them and am withholding the dates on which we met. This is also to protect my continuing research, which delves into the often unseen, yet heavy cost that the Global South pays for the First World’s ideals and conveniences.
I wonder if Justin ever gives a thought to this?
