America’s heartlands are still haunted by despair
In 1982, Bruce Springsteen was at the height of his powers. Seven years earlier, his third album, Born to Run, had brought him global fame. “Springsteen is everything that has been claimed for him,” declared Rolling Stone. Critic Dave Marsh said he was “comparable to all the greats”. John Rockwell called him “the next Mick Jagger”. His next two albums, Darkness at the Edge of Town and The River, did nothing to dim his blazing star.
Today ProPublica and Vanity Fair report on Toy Reid, a China specialist for the RAND Corporation and a political officer in East Asia for the U.S. State Department, who reviewed hundreds of dispatches archived on the website of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Reid worked as part of a team assembled by the minority oversight staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.
Toronto police never checked Toronto Pearson International Airport cameras to see if any potential suspects — including the mysterious “Walking Man” caught on neighbourhood surveillance cameras — left the country immediately after killing Barry and Honey Sherman, a Toronto court has heard.
“Why would we do that,” Det. Const. Dennis Yim said during cross examination by a Toronto Star reporter last week. “The person could have changed their appearance.”
Yet, as Yim testified, police showed photos of the “Walking Man” around the Sherman neighbourhood to see if anyone could identify him. Nobody could. Police believe he is the killer or one of the killers, according to police documents.
As the second full week of hearings by the Public Order Emergency Commission winds down, it’s becoming increasingly clear just how weak the government’s rationale appears to be for invoking the Emergencies Act. As I wrote last week, key witnesses, including the OPP’s intelligence chief Supt. Pat Morris, shredded the federal narrative that the protesters were a violent and dangerous fringe who posed an imminent threat to the nation’s capital. Morris’s point of view was reconfirmed by OPP Commissioner Thomas Carrique, who asserted categorically that there was no “credible threat” to national security posed by the Freedom Convoy.
OK THIS IS JUST GETTING WEIRD
Hostile countries, a group that includes China and Russia, are targeting foreign nationals and diaspora populations in Canada, as well as activists and journalists, according to the Communications Security Establishment.
“State-sponsored cyberthreat actors almost certainly” target those groups in order “to monitor and control these individuals,” Canada’s cyber defense agency said in a new report. The tools they use include “content monitoring on foreign-based applications, social media-enabled activity and espionage against individuals using spyware.”
We have Bigger Fish to worry about than Russia or China … The enemy within aka the Liberal Party.
We have a serious mental health crisis in this country. pic.twitter.com/CTwl1FsYbi
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) October 28, 2022
It’s official, Elon Musk is now the owner of Twitter. This is good news. Musk has promised to make Twitter a truly open platform that supports free speech—something it most certainly has not been for some time. We’ve all heard the stories of conservative voices on Twitter being silenced for no good reason or under false pretenses.
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier is warning of “tougher, rough years ahead,” for his country and Europe. In his address Friday dubbed a “state of the nation” speech, the German president said the war in Ukraine has led to “the deepest crisis” in a reunified Germany, citing an energy crunch, the soaring cost of living, and increasing poverty rates.
“This crisis demands that we learn to be modest again,” Steinmeier said during the speech at his official residence, Bellevue Palace, in Berlin. He pledged Germany’s commitment to support Ukraine and its partnership with NATO and EU allies.
A bizarre UFO case dubbed “Brazil’s Roswell” has set the internet abuzz amid rumors that video of a captured “creature” may exist — and could soon be released.
The so-called Varginha incident — an alleged UFO crash, extraterrestrial encounter, and subsequent military cover-up — made global headlines in 1996 and sparked a media frenzy in Brazil, despite official government denials that anything unusual had occurred.
It’s like Fatima but with UFO’s!
An artwork by the abstract Dutch painter Piet Mondrian has been hanging upside down in various galleries for 75 years, an art historian has said.
Despite the recent discovery, the work, entitled New York City I, will continue to be displayed the wrong way up to avoid it being damaged.
The 1941 picture was first put on display at New York’s MoMA in 1945.
It has hung at the art collection of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia in Düsseldorf since 1980.
The Shanghai Five group, which later became the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), was created on April 26, 1996 with the signing of the Treaty on Deepening Military Trust in Border Regions, in Shanghai by the heads of states of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan.
Full members of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s de facto answer to NATO, in addition to the Shanghai Five group, are Uzbekistan, Iran, India and Pakistan, with Belarus going through the accession process. Afghanistan and Mongolia are observer states. Sri Lanka, Turkey, Cambodia, Azerbaijan, Nepal, Armenia, Egypt, Qatar and Saudi Arabia are dialogue partners.
What do members, future members, dialogue partners and future dialogue partners of this exotic blend of nations have in common?
Russia could start conscripting women to join the war against Ukraine as part of ongoing mobilization efforts, according to a former commander-in-chief of the Russian Ground Forces.
Army General Vladimir Boldyrev, who led the Russian ground forces from 2008 to 2010, made the remarks on October 21 in response to a politician’s calls for military service to be extended to women.
#Ukraine: Two Russian 2S19M2 Msta-SM2 152mm self-propelled howitzers were destroyed and another one was captured in damaged condition by the Ukrainian army in #Kharkiv Oblast. pic.twitter.com/h8Vrt5v5fn
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) October 28, 2022
Another assortment of groups funded with millions of dollars from liberal billionaire George Soros are adding to the number of groups demanding that Big Tech unleash a censorship Armageddon against so-called election “disinformation.”
Facebook (now known as Meta) reported a second straight quarterly revenue decline, with its stock plummeting an astonishing 22 percent in morning trading after already losing two-thirds of its value this year so far.
