At least 40 people – most believed to be female students – have been killed after multiple blasts targeted a school in west Kabul, according to Afghan government officials.
At least 50 are also reported to have been injured by the blast, which happened in the Shia-majority neighbourhood of Dasht-e-Barchi.
Former Olympic weightlifter Tracey Lambrechs says females are being told to “be quiet” when they complain about the fairness of transgender New Zealand athlete Laurel Hubbard competing in women’s competitions.
Hubbard is on track to become the first transgender athlete to compete at an Olympics after the International Weightlifting Federation (IWF) modified qualifying requirements for the Tokyo Games on Wednesday.
The 43-year-old still has to satisfy the New Zealand Olympic Committee (NZOC) of her fitness and performance standards before selection for the team but the prospect she will compete in Tokyo has already raised hackles.
At least 163 Palestinians and six Israeli police officers have been hurt in clashes in Jerusalem, Palestinian medics and Israeli police say.
Most were injured at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, where Israeli police fired rubber bullets and stun grenades as Palestinians threw stones and bottles.
Tensions have been rising over the potential eviction of Palestinians from land claimed by Jewish settlers.
The Red Crescent has opened a field hospital to treat the wounded.
The Al-Aqsa mosque complex in Jerusalem’s Old City is one of Islam’s most revered locations, but its location is also the holiest site in Judaism, known as the Temple Mount.
Ontario is reporting 2,864 cases of #COVID19 and over 47,800 tests completed. Locally, there are 803 new cases in Peel, 684 in Toronto, 285 in York Region, 133 in Hamilton and 125 in Durham.
— Christine Elliott (@celliottability) May 8, 2021
Pandemic errors made Canadian COVID-19 outbreak far worse than it needed to be, committee told
Poor intelligence gathering on COVID-19, faulty risk assessments on the spread of the virus, and a Public Health Agency that lacked enough scientific expertise all helped make the pandemic worse in Canada than it should have been, a parliamentary committee heard Friday.
During several hours of testimony that was critical of the federal government’s response to the outbreak, experts in national security, public health and medicine said many of the problems with Canada’s pandemic response were avoidable. And those lessons can’t be ignored as the government tries to distil the lessons from COVID-19 in hopes of preparing the country for a future health threat.
Wesley Wark, an adjunct professor at the University of Ottawa who is an expert in intelligence gathering and security, said the government failed to conduct proper risk assessments of the virus, and did not heed early evidence in 2020 that the pandemic was a serious threat.
(Go incognito)
Ontario government must ‘immediately’ reopen outdoor spaces: Canadian Paediatric Society
The Canadian Paediatric Society is calling on the Ontario provincial government to “immediately” reopen outdoor recreation spaces, saying the closure is having “devastating effects” on children and youth amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
In an open letter posted to Twitter on Friday, the society said it “cannot overstate the extent of the mental health crisis facing our children and youth.”
Ashley Rindsberg, author of The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times’ Misreporting, Fabrications and Distortions Radically Alter History, spoke to an April 19 Middle East Forum webinar (video) about “how the New York Times gets the Mideast wrong, and why it matters.”
Rindsberg wrote his new book to explain “how false media narratives are created and how they shape the world around us … generally, not for the better.” By “false media narratives,” a term that he prefers to the “highly politicized” phrase “fake news,” Rindsberg is referring to the “promulgation of facts, storylines, and ideas that are designed to suit an ideological or interest-driven agenda of some kind.”
During recent court hearings in the UK, a pair of Islamic terrorists threw temper tantrums and resorted to asinine name-calling. They are Hashem Abedi, who was found guilty of “22 counts of murder, attempted murder and plotting to cause an explosion likely to endanger life over the terror attack at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester in 2017”; and Ahmed Hassan, “who planted the Parsons Green Tube bomb in September 2017 that injured 51 passengers.”
Back in February, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was stripped of her committee roles, despite her expression of “regret” for some of her more extreme views. One of the charges against Rep. Greene is that she has supported QAnon, whose central claim is that there exists an elite whose members exercise political power and who indulge in promiscuity and other corrupt forms of behavior.
There is an interesting site which breaks down American voting trends by occupation. Some of it is mysterious — why should pediatricians swing so overwhelmingly to the Democrats? Why should urology be so dominated by Republicans? Readers may insert their own jokes here.
But some of the voting patterns are far from surprising. No one would expect yoga teaching to be a hotbed of radical right-wing activity, for instance, and yogis do indeed push heavily to the left.
Critical race theory is fast becoming America’s new institutional orthodoxy. Yet most Americans have never heard of it — and of those who have, many don’t understand it. This must change. We need to know what it is so we can know how to fight it.
To explain critical race theory, it helps to begin with a brief history of Marxism.
Originally, the Marxist left built its political program on the theory of class conflict. Karl Marx believed that the primary characteristic of industrial societies was the imbalance of power between capitalists and workers. The solution to that imbalance, according to Marx, was revolution: The workers would eventually gain consciousness of their plight, seize the means of production, overthrow the capitalist class and usher in a new socialist society.
After Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleoptra, and Pepé Le Pew and Penelope, there were Bill and Melinda. The Microsoft technocrat and his spouse were a love story for the ages.
In 1993, Bill proposed to Melinda: an executive at his company. In 1994, they were married. In 1995, Melinda debuted Microsoft Bob. Microsoft Bob treated computer users like idiots who were too stupid to be allowed to use their computers without a lot of handholding.
Leading Jewish groups and Israeli officials were outraged on Friday at the The Guardian listing its past editorial support for the 1917 Balfour declaration — which announced the British government’s support for the establishment of a Jewish state — as one of the paper’s “worst errors in judgement over 200 years” in a bicentennial feature article.
The ugly truth about the Guardian
This liberal paper, celebrating its 200th birthday today, is a bastion of misanthropy, anti-democracy and imperialism.
Guardian editor Katharine Viner celebrates the bicentennial of her paper today with claims that it is the newspaper of Britain’s liberal conscience. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Canadians are getting it wrong on oil and gas production in one self-defeating way — we’re disturbingly myopic.
We see clearly our own failings but we overlook far greater failings of many of our oil and gas competitors. We’re like the handsome teenager who feels like crap and refuses to go to the school dance just because of one pimple on their chin.
Karolinska University Hospital listed a plethora of side effects, including infertility, cancer and thrombosis, and emphasised the low evidence of the hormone treatment achieving the desired effect amid doubts about long-term safety.
Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, one of Sweden’s largest medical institutions, is now terminating its controversial irreversible hormone treatments for minors suffering from ‘gender dysphoria’, that is, being born into the ‘wrong sex’, national broadcaster SVT reported.
In its updated guidelines that came into force at the start of May, the acclaimed hospital called these treatments controversial and suggested that they involve risks.
Former first lady Michelle Obama said on Friday’s broadcast of “CBS This Morning” that people take to the street in Black Lives Matter protests because they had to.
When former Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of the murder of George Floyd, former President Barack and Michelle Obama said in a joint statement, “true justice is about much more than a single verdict in a single trial.”
Will the Liberal government’s costly blunders and moral lapses never end? In the past few weeks Canadians have been subjected to assaults on their health, economic wellbeing and fundamental values. Yet by skillfully and cynically exploiting the pandemic, shifting blame to the provinces, claiming undeserved credit, never admitting fault and — especially — doling out hundreds of billions of dollars to those in need but also to many who were not, the Liberals have managed, so far, to avoid harsh condemnation from the public or from a largely forgiving media. It is all very remarkable.
