At a former paintball park in west Ukraine, Canadian, British and American military instructors were putting two dozen recruits through a warm-up drill.
“Breathe!” a U.S. army veteran told the trainees, who lay prone in the ankle-high grass, aiming their AK-47 rifles at the treeline.
“Keep your fingers on those triggers!”
The instructors were members of the Wolverines, a group started by international veterans who have been quietly operating in Ukraine.
After initial hesitation about the seriousness of Turkey’s objections, its president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has doubled down on his threat to veto Finland’s and Sweden’s applications for membership of Nato, saying there is no point in either country sending delegations to Ankara to persuade him otherwise.
On Wednesday, he also extended his demands from the two he outlined on Monday to 10, leading to claims that he is using blackmail.
It’s one of the (dis)advantages of being an antique that you can recall a time when Canada had a $2 bill. There was a time when we had $1 bills, too, but that was even a longer time ago — co-incident I believe with the fall of the Ming dynasty in China — and not even I go back that far.
Measures akin to a COVID lockdown are needed in order to curb the EU’s reliance on Russian oil, one member state has said.
Lockdown-like measures should be implemented across the European Union to curb the bloc’s reliance on Russian oil, Luxembourg’s energy minister has said.
The demand comes as the transnational bloc prepares to publish a plan aimed at weaning the EU off of fossil fuels supplied from Russia, with some nation-states such as Germany being badly addicted to the likes of natural gas provided by the state.
Luxembourg? Isn’t that next to the Grand Duchy of Fenwick? I bet it’s a wet dream to Justin though.
TORONTO – Experts and advocates anticipate that more Canadians could be at risk of going hungry as inflation continues to outpace many consumers’ grocery budgets.
Valerie Tarasuk, a professor of nutritional sciences at University of Toronto, says steepening inflation rates are likely to increase the prevalence and severity of food insecurity in Canada.
Statistics Canada says consumers paid 9.7 per cent more for food at stores in April compared with a year ago, the largest increase since September 1981.
I’m waiting for Justin’s swim in the Rideau.
Some are calling attention to a comment Conservative leadership candidate Pierre Poilievre made while appearing as a guest on controversial psychologist Jordan Peterson’s podcast in an episode posted on Tuesday.
“I’m a believer in using simple Anglo-Saxon words that strike right at the the meaning that I’m trying to convey,” Poilievre said in the interview. “And so I say things that people say, ‘Yeah, that actually makes sense.’”
Some have pointed out that the term has been used by those on the far-right to differentiate white people from immigrants and people of colour.
OMG! He said Anglo-Saxon! The best thing he can do is laugh in response and never apologize.
Jason Kenney quit as leader of his party, and premier of Alberta, Wednesday night after receiving a slight majority of support in his United Conservative Party leadership review.
“While 51 per cent of the vote passes the constitutional threshold of a majority, it clearly is not adequate support to continue on as leader,” Kenney told a crowd gathered at Spruce Meadows in Calgary.
Farmers are being killed and their barns looted
Lviv, Ukraine
“In the old days, we had horses and cows and pigs and chickens. Now we are dying of hunger. In the old days, we fed the world. Now they have taken all we had away from us and we have nothing. In the old days, I should have bade you welcome, and given you as my guest chickens and eggs and milk and fine, white bread. Now we have no bread in the house. They are killing us.”
I’m so old I can remember Bill Clinton blaming the 1995 Oklahoma bombing on Rush Limbaugh. Heck, I’m so old I can recall MSNBC and the rest of the leftist hive mind blaming the 2011 shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords on Sarah Palin, when 30 seconds of observation showed clearly the shooter was severely mentally ill. Oh, wait—you don’t need to be old for that: the New York Times repeated that outrageous slur in an editorial just four years ago—now the subject of a much-deserved libel suit from Palin.
A peculiar moment occurred during the congressional hearings on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs, AKA UFOs) Tuesday (May 17). Congressman Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) asked a question about the 1967 Malmstrom Air Force Base incident and got a rather astonishing, shall we call it, non-reply. Scott Bray, the deputy director of naval intelligence, responded that he knew nothing of the event, other than that it has received some publicity outside official channels.
Branding the Azov Battalion as ‘neo-Nazi’ long after it shed its far-right origins is part of a deafening corruption of public discourse
The Ukrainian port town of Mariupol is the hometown of the Azov Battalion, a special operations detachment of the Ukrainian National Guard with a past neo-Nazi association—which is one self-evident reason the Russian high command chose the city to serve as an example for Vladimir Putin’s “denazification” campaign. In the last few months, the siege of Mariupol has witnessed the most thorough destruction of a European city since the bombing of Dresden. In the process of committing numerous war crimes (and likely crimes against humanity), the Russian army leveled the city’s housing stock to the ground. The fighting reportedly killed tens of thousands of civilians, and most of the city’s nearly half million residents have fled, even as tens of thousands more remain trapped in basements and bunkers under ruins without access to medicine, water, electricity, or basic health care. These include the parents of several of my friends and acquaintances—incidentally ethnic Jewish and Armenian citizens of Ukraine. One, the Lithuanian filmmaker Mantas Kvedaravičius, was killed in Mariupol as he was filming the war.
The omertà on criticising Islam has, predictably, produced a new extremist
Koran-burning agitator Rasmus Paludan is an odd fish. No matter what you think of his political views, what he has done is uncommon — no matter where you look in the world, few dare to challenge the religion of Islam. His antics are gaining more and more attention.
I’m thrilled that Tucker Carlson isn’t doing the usual right-wing thing and crumpling in the face of bad-faith attacks from the media and Democrats. Watch this 15-minute monologue from him last night, throwing the “Great Replacement” smears back in their faces.
Early in the monologue, Carlson points out that last year, a Syrian immigrant shooter went into a Boulder, Colo., supermarket and allegedly (he has not yet been tried and found guilty) murdered ten people — same number of dead as in Buffalo. Unlike this week in Buffalo, Joe Biden didn’t fly to that crime scene, Tucker said. Why not? Because that mass shooting didn’t fit the Narrative. He was a Person of Color, not a white supremacist. Colorado Public Radio even did a story at the time about how worried Colorado Muslims were of “backlash” because the shooter was Muslim. The Washington Post ran an analysis that pointed out that the Syrian shooter was, in fact, legally white, and an example of “whiteness”. So the Narrative Managers were able to call this an example of white male violence after all!
Reports that president is interfering in tactical decisions show a lack of trust in the Russian military and a chain of command in disarray
When it comes to military operations, political leaders should be looking outwards: explaining the action to maintain support from domestic society and international allies.
But on Monday we were told that Vladimir Putin is personally intervening in the tactical direction of the Kremlin’s stuttering war in Ukraine.
“We think Putin and Gerasimov are involved in tactical decision-making at a level we would normally expect to be taken by a colonel or a brigadier,” a military source told The Telegraph.
General Valery Gerasimov is the head of the Russian armed forces, but he too should be primarily focused on the politicians: garnering resources and top cover in case things go wrong.
At a press conference on Oct. 6, 2021, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland announced mandatory vaccination in federally regulated workplaces and sectors, including for passengers boarding a plane or a train. Trudeau said his government’s two-dose vaccine mandates for travellers and for federal government employees, who continued to work from home, were amongst the “strongest in the world.”
