Whenever a person is “cancelled” or “no-platformed”, a public battle is inevitably waged. On one side, there are those who uphold the value of free speech; on the other, those who insist free speech depends on what is being said, or believe the whole debate is some kind of smokescreen for smuggling extremist ideas into society. What goes unnoticed, however, is that there is a pattern to these eruptions.
French-Canadians owe their cultural survival to the Roman Catholic Church; they owe their achievement of approximate economic equality with English-Canadians to Duplessis
San Francisco Mayor London Breed released a plan Thursday to redistribute $120 million from the city’s law enforcement budget to projects aimed at helping the city’s black minority.
New joint report with terror tsar calls for tighter rules to stop spread of hate online
Extremists who turn young people to terrorism are operating with impunity in the UK because of a “gaping chasm” in the law, the UK’s former counter-terror chief has said.
In a report to be presented to ministers, Sir Mark Rowley said the UK’s laws were so ill-defined that hate preachers such as Anjem Choudary had been able to get away with recruiting hundreds of young people to terrorism without being prosecuted and were still able to do so.
He cited cases of how extremists could use social media to glorify terrorism by Islamic State (IS) murderers and evade prosecution as long as they avoided “encouraging the commission, preparation, or instigation of acts of terrorism”.
Twitter’s plan to let people charge money for access to additional or exclusive content was criticized by some users on Friday.
The hashtag #RIPTwitter became a top-five trending topic as it was used thousands of times to reject the new feature, which is known as Super Follows. Memes were widely shared to illustrate the stance, some attracting thousands of shares.
Things are going well for the blog on GAB, Twitter is dying.
More than 300 schoolgirls have been kidnapped by unidentified gunmen from a school in Nigeria’s north-western Zamfara state, police say.
Security officers have been dispatched to the town of Jangebe where the girls were seized early on Friday morning.
Local officials have confirmed the attack but have not given more details.
This is the latest mass abduction targeting schools in recent weeks. Armed gangs often seize schoolchildren for ransom.
British parliamentarians have challenged Facebook tsar Mark Zuckerberg over the tech giant’s abortive efforts to censor a history group for discussing the traditional Black Country dish faggots and peas.
Al-Hawl camp, where Shamima Begum surfaced, is focal point of humanitarian crisis starring unsympathetic protagonists
When 20-year-old Shamima Begum, heavily pregnant and alone, managed to escape the US-led coalition bombing of Islamic State’s last stronghold two years ago, she left behind a scene resembling hell and entered limbo instead.
Begum was among an astonishing 64,000 women and children who poured out of Baghuz, a tiny oasis town on the Euphrates river, deep in the Syrian desert. Many of their husbands and fathers died defending the last sliver of the so-called caliphate.
Whether by accident or design, there was no plan in place for what to do with these families. Al-Hawl camp, where Begum surfaced, quickly became the focal point of a new humanitarian crisis starring unsympathetic protagonists. Set up in 2016 to house around 10,000 ordinary Syrians and Iraqis who had fled the group, suddenly it had a huge influx of new, and in some cases dangerous, arrivals.
A US intelligence report has found that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved the murder of exiled journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.
The declassified report released by the Biden administration says the prince approved a plan to either “capture or kill” the US-based Saudi exile.
It is the first time America has publicly named the crown prince, who denies ordering the murder.
Khashoggi was killed while visiting the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.
The Jewish community in Sweden’s third-largest city has dwidled to only 387 members from about 2,500 during its heday in the 1970s amid reports of attacks, hate crimes and everyday anti-Semitism. By contrast, the Middle-Eastern community has grown due to mass immigration.
A recent report has documented a rise of anti-Semitism in the schools of Malmö, Sweden’s third-largest city. What it considers remarkable is that the hatred of Jewish students mainly comes from their peers from the Middle East.
MONTREAL — The idea of giving citizens “passports” proving they’ve been vaccinated is controversial around the world, and in Ottawa—but less so in Quebec, whose health minister said Thursday that the province is going full steam ahead on the idea.
“The goal is easy,” said Quebec Health Minister Christian Dubé when asked about passports at a press conference.
h/t Mauser
President Ronald Reagan knew the weaknesses of the Soviet Union. Unlike his predecessors, he did not focus on countering their strengths, but by exploiting those problems of life under a Marxist-Leninist regime that were impossible for them to fix. Reagan’s policies targeted many weaknesses – religious, political, military, and cultural among them – but his focus on Russia’s economic problems exposed those other weaknesses by choking the regime’s ability even to throw money at other problems.
Today, the most pressing threats do not come from Russia. They come from the growing power exerted by China. So, the question becomes: Can we apply these today lessons to China? With the massive, worldwide reach of China, its economic power and military build-up combine to pose strategic threats to the U.S. and the free world. Reagan’s strategy, however, can counter these threats and reduce others posed by the Chinese dragon.
Tristin Hopper’s weekend article in the National Post asked why Canada can’t get things done anymore, from procuring vaccines to renovating 24 Sussex Drive. Malaise about Canada’s performance is entirely justified as our pampered public sector fails to deliver and few Canadian brands dominate in the global marketplace.
Canada’s image was not always so dim.
Joe Biden and his press chief have been accused of hypocrisy after old tweets slamming the Trump administration’s Middle East air strikes resurfaced following last night’s bombing raid on Syria.
The US dropped seven 500-pound precision-guided bombs in a Biden-directed bombardment that reportedly killed 22 Iran-backed militants smuggling weapons at a border crossing with Iraq.
That ferocity of the attack has drawn accusations of double standards because Biden previously referred to Donald Trump as ‘erratic’ and ‘impulsive’ for threatening to bomb Iran, while press secretary Jen Psaki questioned the legality of attacking Syria.
A group of Russian diplomats and their families made an unusual exit out of North Korea on a hand-pushed rail trolley due to strict Covid measures.
The eight people travelled by train and bus before pushing themselves across the Russian border for about 1km (0.6miles) over train tracks.
North Korea has blocked most passenger transport to limit the virus’s spread.
The country maintains it has not had any confirmed cases, but observers dispute this claim.
h/t DM
