… The incident raises troubling questions about the due diligence conducted by the military and defence officials when they went shopping for a new handgun, in light of the fact that misfires involving the weapon have been the subject of multiple lawsuits in the United States over several years, including at least one class action case that was settled last summer.
I bet it’s a glitter problem. This is what happens when you buy armaments to match your “combat boots.”
Early in January, the Guardian Australia published alarming reports of a bushfire ravaging vast areas of the southern continent.
Three fires moving rapidly across New South Wales and Victoria had merged to create one gigantic “megablaze,” the news outlet reported, forcing midnight evacuations and the deployment of thousands of firefighters across the region.
Some Australians who rely on Google’s search engine for news might have missed this.
At the time of the bushfires, the multinational technology company was “running a few experiments” that removed some media sites from its search results, it told the Guardian a few days later.
You watch, despite Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s total train wreck on acquiring COVID vaccines, Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal voters will ensure his Liberals win re-election — perhaps even this spring.
Until this week, Trudeau had been claiming Canada’s current two-week pause on vaccine shipments is immaterial.
OTTAWA – Despite the nearly 800-day arbitrary detention of two Canadians and a “genocide” of Uyghur Muslims in China, the Trudeau government is allowing the Canadian Olympic Committee to make the decision alone on participation in the 2022 Beijing Olympics.
Gutless suck ups.
An attempt by a controversial Dutch Muslim party to sweeten its image backfired when a Jewish baker who was set to stand for the group refused to stop selling X-rated cakes and was forced to withdraw.
Jolisa Brouwer, a baker from the town of Waalre in the southern Netherlands, was expected to take the number-three slot on the Party of Unity’s ticket for the national election in March. The party has been accused of radicalism and anti-Semitism in the past.
Ontario is reporting 1,563 cases of #COVID19 and nearly 64,500 tests completed. Locally, there are 584 new cases in Toronto, 265 in Peel and 132 in York Region.
As of 8:00 p.m. yesterday, 355,055 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been administered.
— Christine Elliott (@celliottability) February 4, 2021
Wanna a good laugh?
WHO team in Wuhan says discussions open, meetings frank
WUHAN, CHINA — One of the World Health Organization investigators looking for clues into the origin of the coronavirus in the central Chinese city of Wuhan said that the Chinese side has provided a high level of co-operation.
In a tweet, zoologist and team member Peter Daszak praised Wednesday’s meetings with staff at the key Wuhan Institute of Virology, including with Deputy Director is Shi Zhengli, a virologist who worked with Daszak to track down the origins of SARS that originated in China and led to the 2003 outbreak.
Canada has defended its decision to draw on a supply of coronavirus vaccines from a global inoculation-sharing initiative known as Covax.
Covax pools funds from wealthier countries to help buy vaccines for themselves and low-income nations.
The scheme has announced a plan to deliver more than 330 million vaccine doses in the first half of 2021.
Canada is the only member of the G7 group of rich countries listed as a Covax beneficiary at this stage.
In this period of COVID-19, one in which new fast-spreading strains of the coronavirus are developing and vaccination has reached only a small part of the world’s population, travel, especially international travel, has been limited or must be approached carefully or banned to certain places. Instead, the reality is largely immobility, the result of a complex mix of factors: lockdown, masking, social distancing, quarantine, and international travel bans. Already, before the appearance of the pandemic, there was action or calls for action to limit travel to certain destinations because of tourism overload and backlash.
“I was inspired by the Palestinian intifada,” Hady Amr wrote a year after September 11, discussing his work as the national coordinator of the anti-Israel Middle East Justice Network.
Biden has now chosen Amr as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Israel-Palestine.
“I have news for every Israeli,” Amr ranted in one column written after Sheikh Salah Shahada, the head of Hamas’ Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, was taken out by an Israeli air strike.
At the moment, we are getting an astonishing insight into the action of evolution by natural selection. It is operating in just the way that Charles Darwin would recognise, especially if he was given a copy of Mendel’s paper about the peas; but it is happening at a speed which means we can see it happening. Instead of species changing over decades or centuries or millennia, it’s happening in viruses in days and weeks.
New data show that poor white teens are the least likely group to attend university.
The Office for Students (OfS) claims that ‘poor white teens’ are being ‘left behind’ by not going to university.
Chris Millward, the director for fair access and participation at the OfS, looked at a ‘combination of factors such as race, poverty and place’ and identified 90 per cent of those young people in the lowest higher-education-participation quintile as white British. These young people also either received free school meals or grew up in neighbourhoods with low HE-participation rates.
Debates on the controversial new “anti-separatism” bill, aimed to combat religious extremism, have kicked off at the French lower house National Assembly, the Daily Mail newspaper reported, adding that heated discussions are expected to last for the next two weeks.
According to the newspaper, the French left-wing fears the proposed legislation, dubbed the anti-separatism bill, will harm Muslims in France, while right-wing politicians, on the contrary, argue that it fails to cover major issues.
Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, one of the strongest supporters of the bill, touted it as legislation that fights against what he called “the Islamist takeover bid”.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made headlines earlier this week for her dramatic narrative about the riot at the Capitol. But her story may not be all that it seems.
…Scary stuff, right? Well, according to Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), Ocasio-Cortez is full of it. Mace says that her office is two doors down from AOC’s and that “insurrectionists never stormed our hallway.”
“Over at The Debrief, Mike Damante has a report on a new study from the Max-Planck Institute for Humans and Machines dealing with advanced Artificial Intelligence and some of the challenges we face as this technology continues to expand into new territory on a continuing basis. (You can read the results of their study here.) The upshot of the study is a conclusion that the actions of increasingly smart AI systems may be hard to predict, leading them to be “uncontrollable.” But as Mike points out, we’re not talking about an I Robot situation here, or at least not yet.”
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) challenged President Joe Biden’s Education Secretary nominee on his statement it is “appropriate” to allow boys to compete in girls’ sports by asking, “What planet are you from?”
During a confirmation hearing Wednesday of the Senate committee that oversees education, the Kentucky senator asked Miguel Cardona if he thinks it is “fair” to allow boys claiming to be transgender to participate in girls’ sports, and about how it affects girls competing in these athletic events.
