IN THE Middle Ages there were no nation states. Instead, there were competing and interlocked feudal power blocs ruled by upper classes identifying with each other. The elite spoke the same language, had the same interests, shared the same culture. The peasants and serfs they ruled were of no account.
At his upmarket Bali spas, Roger Paulus Silalahi has been overseeing renovations, ready to pamper tourists with herbal massages and milk baths as they return to the Indonesian holiday island after a crippling pandemic lockdown.
But last week the entrepreneur’s optimism was jolted after parliament approved a sweeping new criminal code featuring tough curbs on personal freedoms — including a ban on sex outside marriage, with a punishment of up to one year in jail.
The laws will apply to everyone — Indonesian citizens, foreign residents and tourists — in the world’s third-largest democracy and most populous Muslim nation.
The head of a conservative Christian group in Virginia is speaking out after members of her organization were turned away from a restaurant based solely on their religious views.
Victoria Cobb, president of the non-profit Christian lobbying organization Family Foundation of Virginia, told Fox News Digital that several members of her group were scheduled to hold a private event at a side room at Metzger Bar and Butchery in Richmond, Virginia when they received a call an hour and a half before the reservation saying their reservation had been canceled.
What is the consequence of taking a bunch of high school dropouts, paying them millions of dollars for performing tasks that most civilizations delegated to the lowest dregs, and surrounding them 24/7 with a lapdog press and fan base?
Celebrity activists.
In 1936, King George V lay on his deathbed. As his final hours drew near, the royal physician administered two injections of morphine and cocaine to hasten his passing, ensuring that his death would be announced in the morning papers, and not the ‘less appropriate evening journals’.
The King’s death was quick, painless, and utterly illegal; British law continues to view assisting suicide in almost any form as a criminal act. With the news this week that the House of Commons is launching an inquiry into assisted dying, this may soon change. For now, what was fit for the King remains, in the eye of the law, unfit for the common man. And thank God for that. Because before any change is made, lawmakers should seriously consider the catastrophe unfolding in Canada.
Arizona’s outgoing Republican governor erected a three-mile barrier of shipping containers on the Mexico-US border in his final days in office before handing power to a Democrat.
Topped with barbed wire, the edifice is intended to fill gaps in Donald Trump’s much-vaunted but never completed border wall.
Doug Ducey, who is due to be replaced as governor by Democrat Katie Hobbs, has announced plans to spend $95 million (£78 million) on a 10-mile barrier before he leaves office.
The Jewish presence in the civil right movements has been erased from black history. The Jews have erased their own history.
Black Hebrew Israelites are getting the attention that they didn’t when they spent decades screaming antisemitic and racist slurs in urban centers, killed four people in two separate attacks in New York and New Jersey (one that took place on Chanukah) and provoked the Covington Catholic incident.
That last one led to the New York Times defending the racist hate group as “sidewalk ministers” who practice “tough love” in “blunt and sometimes offensive language.” Examples of that include, “The Holocaust is a damn joke! Heil Hitler!” and “The messiah, who is a black man, is going to kill you”.
A German eco-activist who glued himself to a road in Mainz had to have the tarmac around his hand removed after emergency workers were unable to free him.
A member of Letzte Generation, Germany’s version of Just Stop Oil, reportedly stuck his hand to the road using superglue mixed with sand, meaning the authorities could not dissolve the glue.
Zero Covid experiment has ended in catastrophic failure.
In 2020, China was where the world’s Covid lockdowns began – today, they are finally ending there, too. Until recently, China had seemed committed to its draconian Zero Covid approach. In October, President Xi Jinping assured the Chinese Communist Party Congress: ‘We have adhered to the supremacy of the people and the supremacy of life, adhered to dynamic Zero Covid, and achieved major positive results in the overall prevention and control of the epidemic, and economic and social development.’
Ottawa preparing to go toe-to-toe with U.S. to subsidize EV battery production in Canada
The federal government is preparing to transform its industrial policy in a bid to shelter Canadian production of electric vehicle batteries from the threat posed by the United States’ offer of billions of dollars in new subsidies, sources say.
For the first time, Ottawa is set to subsidize the production costs of large electric vehicle battery producers. It hopes to convince them to set up their plants in Canada, or to maintain their presence here.
The new measures would be a game-changer for Canada’s industrial policy. For decades, government programs have been based on funding “non-recurring” capital expenditures, such as the construction or modernization of factories.
Nobody thought it was going to be a humble shuffling off into anonymity.
And I suppose we cannot begrudge the most celebrated bureaucrat in the U.S. government a final retracing of his much-trodden path through the green rooms of New York and Washington, D.C.
Four friends were knifed in their beds in a remote college town in Idaho. Police have found no motives or suspects
Becca Whitmer used to love a party, but now she tries to be in her room at the University of Idaho by five o’clock each evening with the door bolted. She will not step back out into the snow-blanketed streets until the morning. You can see why.
Almost a month ago in the small, remote college town of Moscow four of her fellow students were stabbed to death in their beds. No motive has emerged for the crimes, which were not discovered until the morning after, and although tips and theories have poured in from across the country, police have released few details as to how the murders were carried out. The killer is still at large.
“Give me liberty or give me death!” So said American revolutionary Patrick Henry back in 1775. It was a poetic way of expressing his desire for American independence.
Patrick Henry wanted freedom so badly that he was willing to die for his cause. While our Canadian Confederation of 1867 was a quieter affair then the American Revolution, there is little doubt that our founding fathers also wanted Canada to be a free country.
Unfortunately, the legalization of MAID (medical aid in dying) has led to a much different rallying cry in modern-day Canada. Our new mantra appears to be “Give me medically assisted death when I become a burden on society!” Not only does it lack Patrick Henry’s poetic cadence, but it also conveys a very different message.
Ukrainian forces have struck a headquarters of Russia’s Wagner mercenary group in eastern Ukraine, Luhansk’s Ukrainian governor has said.
Serhiy Haidai said a hotel where the group was based in Kadiivka, Luhansk region, was hit. He added there were major Russian losses.
The BBC was unable to independently verify Wagner’s presence at the hotel.
Wagner are state-sponsored mercenaries who act in the Kremlin’s interests, according to Western experts.
May 11, 2022. Jenin. West Bank. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) launch an operation against a cell of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a terrorist organization funded by the regime in Iran, which, since it came to power in 1979, has continuously threatened to obliterate the Jewish state. As exchanges of fire took place, Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, embedded with the terrorists, was killed by a bullet, not clear from where.
Immediately after the battle, when Israeli soldiers withdrew, the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Palestinian Islamic Jihad scrubbed the battle scene to erase all traces of what just happened. The PA refused to let Israeli forensic doctors examine the body of the journalist or hand over to Israeli authorities the bullet that killed her – at least, until much, much later.
