The way British Columbia ended their mask mandate was the best. It was a Thursday morning a couple of weeks ago and they announced that the mandate would end the very next day – in fact, a minute beyond midnight that very evening.
It didn’t give people a lot of time to react and certainly no time to lobby for its reversal. The band-aid was ripped off real quick.
How liberal democracies acquired the power to end your participation in society with the push of a button
Before beating a hasty retreat, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau went where no world leader has gone before. Last month, he became the first Western leader to wield the financial system as a push-button weapon of government enforcement against opinions and behaviors that he found politically distasteful or inconvenient. This is an entirely new form of power, which much of the world has not even begun to reckon with—but which may well define our politics in the years to come.
A Russian soldier has handed himself and his tank over to Ukrainian troops for a reward of $10,000 (£7,500) and a chance at Ukrainian citizenship.
Misha, one of alleged war criminal Vladimir Putin’s invading soldiers, surrendered in a T-72B3 main battle tank after his two other crewmates escaped home and his commanding officer threatened to shoot him.
Ukrainian Minister of Internal Affairs Victor Andrusiv said Misha had contacted Ukraine’s national police by phone and arranged a place to meet.
h/t RM
Today’s dull filmstar scolds have turned a must-watch event into a hypocritical bore-fest.
The Oscars used to be massive, didn’t it? A few decades ago, it was a proper big deal in the TV calendar, a seismic cultural event.
You’d read the newspaper previews and predictions for weeks ahead of the air date. You’d have your favourite films and actors, rooting for them with a fan’s fervour as if this was the Premier League (of course, it was the Canon League Division One back then, but I digress).
The morning after the prizes were handed out, you’d try to avoid all mention of who won – mam, turn off the radio! – so you could enjoy that evening’s highlights on terrestrial telly. In the pre-internet days, that was relatively easy. But regardless of knowing the results, you’d tune in later anyway and enjoy every minute.
Spring break in Florida: a group of about 40 kids mobbed a Walmart and trashed the entire store. Just for fun. pic.twitter.com/W63Y6hyizY
— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) March 27, 2022
Over the past week, US President Joe Biden has made a series of unscripted remarks that have upped the temperature of US-Russia relations to near boiling point.
However, his ad-libbed line at the end of what was billed as a “major speech” in Poland on Saturday – seemingly calling for President Vladimir Putin to be removed from power – may have landed the hardest.
In his speech to a crowd of assembled Polish government officials and dignitaries at the Royal Castle in Warsaw, the US president once again warned that the world was in the midst of an era-defining conflict between democracies and autocracies.
As much of North America was locked down during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Matty Clarke was in a boat full of supplies, motoring up the Yukon River. He was searching for wild lands where he could strike it rich.
“Getting myself a goldmine,” he told viewers on his YouTube channel. “Everyone’s heard about all this gold up there. You must be curious yourself – what’s actually going on up there? Can I just show up with all this stuff and end up having a goldmine? I think so.”
VANCOUVER — Some experts say violent online rhetoric among so-called involuntary celibates is a concern as pandemic rules lift, but others say the threat of violence is overstated among a group of men who need mental health support.
Involuntary celibates or incels are made up predominantly of young heterosexual men who feel they are unable to attract romantic partners because of their looks or social status, says the think-tank Moonshot CVE. They often blame women, sexually active men and “oppressive societal structures” for their feelings of rejection and isolation, it says.
As attacks linked to the so-called movement mounted in recent years, authorities around the world began treating it as a terrorism threat.
Incels? Seriously? This was only ever a ludicrously overblown “threat” designed to smear the “right.”
Whatever the outcome of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the crisis it triggered may have one lasting effect: the return of war as a routine instrument of politics on a global scale.
Before the invasion, there was an implicit consensus that war was something that happened in the so-called “developing world,” where Arabs fought Israelis, Africans slaughtered Africans, and Indian and Pakistanis were at each other’s throats.
Europe, however, was believed to have closed its book of wars for good. The Balkan wars of the 1990s were regarded as a multi-layered civil war involving component parts of the failed Yugoslav state.
Despite reaching one of the darkest moments in more than 40 years as a dissident and human rights activist, Oleg Orlov says that he has no plans to flee Russia. “I made a decision a long time ago that I want to live and die in Russia, it’s my country,” Orlov told the Observer. “Even though it’s never been so bad.”
That’s saying something for Orlov, who can recall printing homemade anti-war posters in the late 1970s to protest against the Russian invasion of Afghanistan or in support of Poland’s Solidarnost movement, and was an observer and negotiator during the bloody war in Chechnya in the 1990s.
Jurors on Friday found police used excessive force against protesters, violating their constitutional rights, during demonstrations over the killing of George Floyd in 2020 – and ordered the city to pay a total of $14 million in damages to 12 who sued.
The jury of two men and six women, largely white and drawn from around Colorado, returned its verdict after about four hours of deliberations.
The verdict followed three weeks of testimony and evidence that included police and protester video of incidents.
Ukraine is prepared to discuss adopting a neutral status as part of a peace deal with Russia but it would have to be guaranteed by third parties and put to a referendum, President Volodymyr Zelensky said in remarks broadcast on Sunday.
Zelensky was speaking to Russian journalists in a 90-minute video call, an interview that the Russian authorities had pre-emptively warned Russian media to refrain from reporting. Zelensky spoke in Russian throughout.
Zelensky said Russia’s invasion had caused the destruction of Russian-speaking cities in Ukraine, and said the damage was worse than the Russian wars in Chechnya.
#Ukraine: In the same location in #Donetsk Oblast, other Russian vehicles also ran into mines or Ukrainian fire, and were totally destroyed. This includes two more BMP-2, and three T-72 tanks. https://t.co/OkQaJ1hYoc pic.twitter.com/b01rhZZoDP
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) March 27, 2022
A shooting was reported in the northern Israeli city of Hadera on Sunday, and several people were wounded – including a number of police officers.
At least six people were wounded in the attack – including three police officers – and two Israelis were killed.
MES AYNAK, Afghanistan (AP) — The ancient Buddha statues sit in serene meditation in the caves carved into the russet cliffs of rural Afghanistan. Hundreds of meters below lies what is believed to be the world’s largest deposit of copper.
Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers are pinning their hopes on Beijing to turn that rich vein into revenue to salvage the cash-starved country amid crippling international sanctions.
The fighters standing guard by the rocky hillside may once have considered destroying the terracotta Buddhas. Two decades ago when the Islamic hard-line Taliban were first in power, they sparked world outrage by blowing up gigantic Buddha statues in another part of the country, calling them pagan symbols that must be purged.
Say what? China plans to destroy an ancient Buddhist city to get the copper buried there
What isn’t a sign of white supremacy to the left? Apparently “fascist fitness” is all the rage, if you believe the wackjobs at the Pravda-esque MSNBC.
