Hans Christian Andersen’s celebrated folk tale The Emperor’s New Clothes serves as a parable for our ideological age and in particular for the current political environment in the U.S. in which a presidential election has been stolen from the people by massive and undoubted electoral fraud.
Zhang Zhan, a 37-year-old former lawyer and citizen journalist who was arrested in May while reporting from Wuhan, has been sentenced to four years in jail.
Zhang was arrested for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” – an accusation commonly used against dissidents, activists and journalists – with her video and blog reports from the Wuhan lockdown. Last month she was charged with disseminating false information.
On Monday afternoon, just hours after the trial began, Zhang’s lawyer said she had been sentenced to four years in jail.
England’s “very high” Covid infection level is a “growing concern” as the NHS struggles to cope with rising patient numbers, a health official has said.
On Monday, a record 41,385 Covid cases and 357 deaths were reported in the UK.
NHS England said the number of people being treated for the virus in hospital is now 20,426, which is higher than the previous peak of about 19,000 in April.
Health officials in Wales and Scotland have also said they are at risk of becoming overwhelmed.
President Trump pardoned two former U.S. Border Patrol agents involved in the chase and shooting of a Mexican drug cartel drug mule who brought more than half a million dollars in marijuana across the border in 2005.
The United Arab Emirates and Israel are reportedly formulating a plan to phase out the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), the UN organization dedicated to dealing with, and some say perpetuating, the Palestinian refugee problem.
According to leading French daily Le Monde, both the UAE and Israel would like to eventually see the controversial agency shuttered.
And you thought it couldn’t get any worse?
World-ending asteroids, zombies and ruinous famine are on deck for 2021, according to French philosopher Michel de Nostradamus, whose track record for predicting the future has been freakishly accurate.
New York Times podcast host Michael Barbaro reportedly pressured several journalists to tone down their criticism of the paper after it retracted the core of its award-winning podcast series “Caliphate” due to false reporting.
According to NPR’s David Folkenflik, Mr. Barbaro “repeatedly pressed at least four journalists Friday to temper their critiques of The Times and how they framed what happened. I know, because I was one of them.”
It took less than a month for students attending virtual school to devise new ways to cheat.
From texting friends on the sly to downloading apps that spit out answers, educators say the pandemic-induced move to an online classroom has offered up a wealth of tech-driven workarounds to actually doing the work.
Olivia Meleta, a high school math teacher in Thornhill, Ont., said she realized something was amiss in late September when several students learning virtually submitted tests with matching solutions – using a method she and her colleagues don’t teach.
The United States is ratcheting up the threat of sanctions against European companies in an effort to deal a death blow to the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline between Russia and Germany. The pipeline would double shipments of Russian natural gas to Germany by transporting the gas under the Baltic Sea. U.S. President Donald Trump, like his predecessor Barack Obama, has criticized the project because it would make Germany “captive” to Russia for its energy supplies.
Trump has been especially critical of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who, in opposition to the United States and many Eastern European countries, has doggedly pursued the pipeline project, which would funnel billions of dollars to Russia at a time that Germany is free-riding on the U.S. defense umbrella that protects Germany from that same Russia.
That would be the same Teutonic Tart noted here, she luvs her China too – Angela Merkel faces European revolt over China trade policy
President Donald Trump on Sunday urged supporters to join the planned protests in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021.
“See you in Washington, DC, on January 6th. Don’t miss it,” Trump wrote in a tweet, promising more information later.
A number of groups are planning to gather in the nation’s capital next month as members of Congress convene in a joint session to count electoral votes.
TORONTO — For many small businesses in Ontario, the province-wide lockdown that began on Boxing Day is the last straw.
One business that couldn’t survive another lockdown is the Pickering Flea Market in the Greater Toronto Area. After almost half a century, the large indoor market with hundreds of vendors is closing its doors.
“The COVID outbreak has made it very, very hard to operate,” Erik Tamm, general manager of the Pickering Markets, told CTV News.
UN eyes bicycles as driver of post-COVID-19 ‘green recovery’
….Public transport usage has fallen significantly as an increasing number of people choose to walk or ride bicycles to avoid crowded mass transits and follow health authorities’ advice for physical distancing. To respond to these trends, Milan, Geneva, Brussels and London have decided to invest in flexible bike lanes.
At the same time, more people are using their private cars to escape crowds. A return to the mass use of private vehicles will not allow Governments to meet their sustainable development objectives and the Paris Agreement targets, the Commission pointed out.
The new taskforce, launched under the Transport, Health and Environment Pan-European Programme (THE PEP) jointly led by UNECE and the World Health Organization (WHO) Europe, aims to resolve these concerns and develop a set of principles for green and healthy sustainable mobility.
You just know PM Asshat is on board with this.
In the absence of anything more original to write at year-end, the politics of this country are discouraging; I lamented as recently as last week the failure of any visible and audible political leader in the country to offer even a slightly uplifting version of what the late president George Bush Sr. used to call ”the vision thing.” Political discourse in this country appears to be confined entirely to climate change, gender issues, native concerns, and the apparently invincible, bone-crushing advance of the juggernaut of political correctness. The entire citizenry seems to have been mobilized to hunt down, root out, pulverize, and incinerate any trace of the ghastly and abominable, ubiquitous bugbear, “systemic racism.” It is an “existential” threat. The phrase means that the social and political system in this case of Canada is rotten throughout, because of its inherent racist prejudices. In practice, many people who bandy this conceptually and acoustically irritating phrase about have no idea what they mean and if asked to think about it, most would say that they believe there has been a good deal of official racism and racially discriminating attitudes and practices in Canadian history, and that to a substantial extent, it lingers yet. This is utter nonsense.
The fading celebrity trophy life ranks as one of the easiest jobs of modern life.
Refresh your fillers enough that the Daily Mail can never describe you as “tired-looking” in a supposedly candid shot staged outside, pop out just enough children that your trainer and your plastic surgeon can nip you back into a size two, and develop just enough of a rapport with your mindless friends that they’ll buy whatever FitTea or slave-labor made swimsuit you’re paid to tag in your inexplicably popular Instagram posts.
Oh, and perhaps don’t pretend to be a borderline-racist caricature of a barely literate Latina woman when you’re actually whiter than Wonder Bread.
A high school senior of mixed race is suing a taxpayer-funded charter school in Nevada over the “coercive, ideological indoctrination” that is central to its Critical Race Theory-based curriculum that forces students to associate aspects of their identity with oppression.
