Foreign interference protocol worked well in 2021 election, says Justin’s buddy formerly in charge of ChiCom cash donations at the Trudeau slush fund … er, Foundation

OTTAWA – A newly released independent report on the protocol designed to inform Canadians in the event of threats to the 2021 federal election concludes it worked well overall, but the public should be told more about what it would consider cause for concern.

Former civil servant Morris Rosenberg, who was tasked with writing the report assessing the Critical Election Incident Public Protocol, also made several recommendations for its future in a report released Tuesday.

The protocol was created in 2019 to monitor threats to federal elections. If a threat meets its threshold, the panel created by the protocol can make an announcement to Canadians.

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Scrounging for Tanks for Ukraine, Europe’s Armies Come Up Short

The struggle to deliver on promises to provide Leopard 2 tanks for use against Russian forces has exposed just how unprepared European militaries are.

BERLIN — Nearly a month after Berlin gave European allies permission to send German-made tanks to Ukraine, the flow of tanks so many leaders vowed would follow seems more like a trickle.

Some nations have discovered that the tanks in their armory don’t actually work or lack spare parts. Political leaders have encountered unanticipated resistance within their own coalitions, and even from their defense ministries. And some armies had to pull trainers out of retirement to teach Ukrainian soldiers how to use old-model tanks.

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WARMINGTON: Time for investigation into China’s alleged election interference

Forget about a partisan public inquiry into alleged Chinese interference in Canadian elections. Investigate immediately.

This is what Democracy Watch is strongly urging following the leak of Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) documents containing allegations that China violated rules and used influence and money to help Liberals win elections.

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Ireland backtracks on gender identity curriculum in schools

Guess his pronouns and you get a pot of shit.

Ireland is routinely cited as a beacon of best practice on all matters transgender. Over the water, self-identification of legal gender was introduced in 2015. The Scottish Government — when pursuing their own ill-fated Gender Recognition Reform Bill — described it as a “well established system”. Now it seems the Irish are having second thoughts.

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Violent British Criminals Let off the Hook With Apology

A record number of criminals, including robbers and sex offenders, are being let off with an apology, government figures show. This offers a stark contrast to the tough rhetoric espoused every election time by the governing Conservative Party.

Ahead of his election as prime minister, Rishi Sunak promised a “major crime crackdown” to tackle rising fears of criminality among the British public. Two years before this, Boris Johnson, like other Tory and Labour leaders who preceded him, also vowed to “come down hard on crime” by “coming down hard on criminals.” But data from the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has revealed that more criminals than ever are avoiding punishment—even so much as a criminal record—simply by apologising for their wrongdoing.

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‘Far from justice’: why are nearly half of US murders going unsolved?

Every night since May, two-year-old Nylah Cheese has slept with a crocheted doll wearing a white tee, black pants and a silver chain. The toddler’s aunt, Silvia Lopez, had the figurine made in the likeness of Nylah’s father, Brandon Cheese, who was shot and killed at a park in San Francisco the month before.

“She instantly knew it was him and screamed, ‘It’s Dada!’” Lopez, Brandon Cheese’s older sister, said. The toddler has since named it “Dada doll”.

Since Cheese’s killing, Lopez and her family have been working to ensure Nylah knows who her father was and how much he loved her. But for the past 10 months they’ve also been searching for answers about who killed Cheese and why.

San Francisco police have yet to make any arrests.

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Is America Ready for the Next War?

History teaches us that no peace is ever permanent.

What are we watching in Ukraine? Is the Russian invasion a blundering failure by a desperate tyrant? Or is it possible that Vladimir Putin was correct in his estimate that Western democracies have become weak, decadent, and cowardly, so that his ultimate victory in Ukraine is assured? This is not a matter of moot speculation, to be volleyed back and forth in a game of intellectual badminton, but rather an issue of utmost urgency, which serious people must address if we are to avert destruction.

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Harry, Meghan and the rise and fall of the folie à deux

They don’t make them like they used to

I was interested to read that the next Joker film has the subtitle ‘Folie à Deux’ – a lovely phrase not used enough these days. When shrinks talk about folie à deux (also known as Lasègue-Falret Syndrome, after the 19th-century French psychiatrists who discovered it) they mean a ‘shared delusional disorder’ in which symptoms of an irrational belief are transmitted from one individual to another – including folie en famille or folie à plusieurs (‘madness of several’), sometimes leading to violence and even murder. But in popular culture, we generally mean a pair of lovers who act in such a way that anyone outside their set-up sees them as insane (‘folly of two’ or ‘madness shared by two’) and who provide a great deal of entertainment – and reassurance – for those who have chosen a tamer path.

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Eyes Wide Shut: The Covid-Origins Story

Was the U.S. furtively funding the lab research that unleashed Covid-19?

Slowly but surely, new cracks are appearing in the wall of silence denying Chinese culpability in causing the nearly 7 million deaths attributed to Covid. In a classified intelligence report on the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic, the U.S. Department of Energy concluded, based on new but still secret intelligence, that the Covid-19 virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China. The DOE — which runs biosecurity labs at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a biological-safety program, and the Biological and Environmental Research (BER) program to fund research into organisms’ genetic codes and how to “reengineer” them — now agrees with the 2021 assessment by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that the pandemic was likely the result of a lab leak.

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How sad, this new Europe!

Europe is falling apart and is on a slope, absorbing blow by blow without being able to respond.

Midday on a mild, almost hot Monday in mid-December, and the muezzins of West London were chanting the glory of Allah and how there was no other God…”. Thus opens “1985”, the prophetic novel by Anthony Burgess, the author of “A Clockwork Orange”. He wrote it in 1978 and it looks like the portrait of Europe in 2023…

The Islamic call to prayer (Adhan) is now resounding in Stockholm, reports Samnytt news. The Adhan was recorded in the capital. In Sweden, three mosques have received permission from the authorities to use loudspeakers to broadcast prayers in Botkyrka, Karlskrona and Växjö. But no permits for Muslim prayer calls have been issued in Stockholm. Despite this, Swedes in the capital have repeatedly witnessed the Adhan being imposed on non-Muslims.

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University Rewrites Shakespeare for “Diverse” Audience, Wonders Why English Majors Vanished

The English major of a decade or two ago or today is very different. Within a fairly short span of time the traditional way of studying and analyzing texts has mostly been sidelined at universities in favor of identity politics readings. Look at the UCLA English courses and you’ll see a once respected department where half the courses are about race, sexuality, and assorted wokeness ‘lenses’ filtering out the actual books.

This bastardization is a form of cultural appropriation.

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CSIS is worried about China interfering in our elections, even if the government isn’t

By now it will have dawned on many people that we have a full-blown, five-alarm national security crisis on our hands.

Two possibilities are open to us; each would be a crisis of a different kind. Either 1: rogue officers within the Canadian Security Intelligence Service have been making a series of sensational and wholly false accusations against the government of Justin Trudeau and certain prominent members of the Liberal Party, in an apparent bid to destabilize the government.

Or 2: the substance of the charges is true. That this is easily the more plausible of the scenarios underlines the gravity of the situation.

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How Olivia Dunne turned the male gaze into a gymnastics empire

… She attends Louisiana State University on a full athletic scholarship. A leg injury kept her from competing with the Tigers in 2023 until her return this past weekend. But Dunne’s erratic competition schedule has not interfered with her being the highest-paid female college athlete in the US: she is worth an estimated $2.3m and has said that she pulls in seven figures in endorsement deals a year. No wonder: according to industry analyst On3, a single social media post by Dunne is worth $31,000.

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