Canada will not send any official representatives to the Beijing Winter Olympics in February as part of a growing diplomatic boycott by allies over China’s record of human rights abuses.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made the announcement on Wednesday after facing several days of questions over whether Canada would stand with allies that have already announced similar plans.
The China Class wants the public fooled into believing Canada has taken a hard line against their paymasters.
Dec 8 (Reuters) – A white Minnesota police officer who fatally shot an unarmed Black motorist in April, triggering protests against police brutality, will go on trial on Wednesday as opening statements to the jury get underway.
Kimberly Potter, a former police officer in a city north of Minneapolis, has said she mistakenly used her handgun instead of her Taser when firing at Daunte Wright, 20, as he attempted to flee in his car following a traffic stop.
” … Both Democrats and Republicans are raising alarms about McKinsey’s lucrative and highly sensitive contracts with the Pentagon during the Barton years while the company simultaneously provided blue-chip services to shadowy Chinese state corporations, including the blacklisted China Communications Construction Company (CCCC), which has been building heavily-militarized artificial islands in the South China Sea. It was only a few months before Barton’s appointment that Ottawa blocked the CCCC from acquiring Aecon, one of Canada’s biggest construction companies, on national security grounds.
NEW YORK (AP) — The Rev. Craig Duke has been a Methodist minister for three decades, building a reputation as a staunch advocate of LGBTQ inclusion. His pastoral duties have now been terminated — the result of a bitter rift surfacing in his Indiana church after he sought to demonstrate solidarity by appearing in drag alongside prominent drag queens in the HBO reality series “We’re Here.”
China’s ambassador to Canada said Tuesday that denying Huawei Technologies access to Canada’s next-generation 5G wireless network would send a “very wrong signal” — raising the diplomatic stakes for the Trudeau government as it prepares to issue a decision on the file.
While some of Canada’s Five Eyes intelligence-sharing allies have made aggressive moves against Huawei — citing concerns that it is an arm of Chinese military intelligence — Canada has stalled on publicly declaring which companies will be permitted to supply equipment to providers of 5G networks.
Beijing’s top diplomat in Ottawa, Ambassador Cong Peiwu, suggested today a decision by Ottawa denying the media giant access would be received poorly by the Chinese business community.
Warns? More like dictates to the LPC’s China suck ups.
Ont. reports 1,009 new COVID-19 infections; highest 7-day rolling average of new cases in 6 months
Ontario reported more than 1,000 new COVID-19 cases and eight more virus-related deaths on Wednesday as the seven-day rolling average of new infections hit a high not seen for the past six months.
Provincial health officials logged 1,009 new coronavirus infections today, up from 928 yesterday and from 780 a week ago.
Sure looks like the emergency is forever temporary
Omicron COVID-19 variant reported in 57 countries, hospitalizations likely to rise as it spreads: WHO
The Omicron variant has been reported in 57 nations and the number of patients needing hospitalization is likely to rise as it spreads, the World Health Organization said on Wednesday.
The WHO, in its weekly epidemiological report, said more data was needed to assess the severity of disease caused by the Omicron variant and whether its mutations might reduce protection from vaccine-derived immunity.
Booster dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine neutralizes Omicron variant, company says
BioNTech and Pfizer said on Wednesday a three-shot course of their COVID-19 vaccine was able to neutralize the new Omicron variant in a laboratory test and they could deliver an Omicron-based vaccine in March 2022 if needed.
In the first official statement from vaccine manufacturers on the likely efficacy of their shot against Omicron, BioNTech and Pfizer said that two vaccine doses resulted in significantly lower neutralizing antibodies but that a third dose of their vaccine increased the neutralizing antibodies by a factor of 25.
Will COVID-19 boosters be required to be considered ‘fully vaccinated’? Expert weighs in
… Researchers have found that the immunity from two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine wanes over time, meaning Canadians will require another dose to “boost” their immunity to the virus.
Asked whether the public will need booster shots every six months for the foreseeable future, Muhajarine said “I would think so.”
Ontario extends pause on reopening plan indefinitely as COVID-19 situation worsens
When drug dealers complain about the lack of law enforcement protection, the boomerang has come full circle and hit us in the back of the head.
Gangs of smash-and-grab thieves have targeted cannabis shops in the San Francisco Bay Area while firing 175 shots and stealing about $5 million’s worth of products. Alphonso “Tucky” Blunt, owner of a legal cannabis shop, criticized poor police protection and the bureaucratic details of business in Oakland: “I was safer, and had more money, [selling] on the street, illegally.” Such is the economic reality of the Bay area.
She thought she was a queen, but she was only a pawn.
The end of the Obama era renewed the civil war between the Democrat establishment and the Socialist insurgents. Hillary Clinton, the establishment woman whose loss to Obama had inaugurated 8 years of insurgent rule, faced down a new challenge from the Sanders insurgency.
Already arrayed against one another on any number of fronts, Americans are massing for a new battle along an old fault line.
On one level it’s about abortion, an old and intractable debate. But with a new ruling in the works that could produce a fundamental shift in U.S. laws, a second argument is underway: does the Supreme Court have the right to change its mind?
President Joe Biden held a virtual summit meeting that lasted two hours with Russian president Vladimir Putin on Tuesday amid mounting military tensions over Ukraine. Though the Biden administration has been eager to focus on China rather than Russia, Putin is adroitly ensuring that Moscow remains a central player in world politics. The summit itself was a potent sign of the Kremlin’s influence.
“Greetings, Mr. President!” Putin reportedly said at the start of the call. “Good to see you again,” Biden responded. “Unfortunately last time we didn’t get to see one another at the G20. I am hoping next time we meet we do it in person.”
Experts are blinded by the threat of the far-Right
… What is even more curious is the incuriosity of the elite media and extremism experts about the Brooks case. Had he been a white male who had expressed misogynistic views about women it is certain that they would have staged a giant moral panic about the global menace of incels and the far-Right.
But Brooks, who is a registered sex offender and trader in online hate, has attracted little sustained discussion or concern. To be clear: I’m not saying that the Brooks case should occasion a moral panic, or that he be given a terrorism charge. There’s still much that we don’t know about him, his state of mind, motives and indeed mental health. But I do think we should ask questions about the selection bias of the credentialed commentators and experts who command so much of our attention.
A 13-year-old boy was bribed with pizza from his school to get a COVID-19 vaccine without parental consent, reports NBC Los Angeles. According to the report, the school not only gave the minor child the vaccine without parental consent but instructed the boy not to tell his parents.
That’s cruel.
Google has sued hackers believed to be part of a cybercrime gang that has stolen user information from around the world.
A complaint names two Russians and 15 unknown individuals said to be behind Glupteba, a malicious “botnet” that has infected over a million computers.
Criminals use these systems of compromised devices to hack private data.
It is the first case Google has launched against a botnet.
According to a lawsuit filed in New York and unsealed on Tuesday, the botnet built by Dmitry Starovikov, Alexander Filippov and their associates has become a “modern technological and borderless incarnation of organised crime”.
Kinda hard to pick out the bad guys here.
Just when it seemed President Joe Biden could get no lower in the public’s political esteem, a new I&I/TIPP Poll of Americans’ preference for the 2024 Democratic presidential ballot is a shocker: Just over one out of five want Joe Biden back at the top of the Democrats’ ticket in three years.
A number of recent I&I/TIPP Polls (here and here) have documented Biden’s sharp decline in favorability with the public due to a number of issues, ranging from his leadership of the military, the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, the recent inflation surge and supply-chain crisis, the border crisis, and a number of other vexing White House issues.
Small wonder, Biden is a sad joke – Biden-Putin summit opens with mic problems amid Russia-Ukraine tensions
December 7 will mark the 80th anniversary of the Japanese surprise attack that killed 2,403 American service members, dealt a grievous blow to our fleet, and forced the United States into World War II. As we mark this anniversary, our inadequate response to China’s military build-up shows that we are not taking the lessons of that infamous day seriously.
Nine years ago, while stationed at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, I put on my whites and took part in the annual Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day commemoration. Watching the ceremony, I must admit that the horrors of that attack seemed quite distant. More than the beautiful tropical setting, I knew that I was a part of the most dominant naval force in human history. With the Cold War long past, no other country could threaten America’s fleet.
The forgotten history of Pearl Harbor – Why Japan’s attack on the US 80 years ago was not a surprise.
In a straight line between the US and Japan, Hawaii is the first piece of land due west of San Francisco. In 1941 its shallow-water port, Pearl Harbor, provided the best place to anchor in the whole Pacific. There, at 7.49am (local time) on 7 December of that year, a first wave of torpedo bombers began to destroy the US Pacific Fleet.
The Second World War revolved around not just Europe and the Atlantic, nor even the Pacific, but the whole of Asia, too. Japan occupied Korea from 1905 to 1945, and in 1931 it used Korean troops when invading Manchuria, a vast territory of China north-east of Beijing. By 1937, in the then capital of China, Nanjing, Japan had killed 300,000 inhabitants in six weeks. By 1939, it had taken over the large island of Hainan, off China. By the next year, it had invaded French Indochina (now Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia).
