“The potatoes still live in spite of the black flea beetles, and the Raspberry bush is producing but not enough for jam, just snacks. The last of the peas were harvested yesterday along with the onions. Now we wait for more beans so we can start canning those & more zucchini.
Please join me in the garden.”
The Gathering Storm: Where Organized Crime Meets Espionage
From my earliest days in the RCMP through years embedded with global financial intelligence units, one reality has remained consistent—and it’s now accelerating: Canada is a soft target.
In Undercover in the Shady World of Organized Crime, I chronicled how criminal empires—from Italian syndicates to Asian Triads—operated in the shadows, laundering vast fortunes through our banks, casinos, and real estate. Back then, the fight was tactical. Today, it’s existential.
A transgender doctor complained that she felt threatened by a ‘much smaller’ nurse in the female-only changing rooms at Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy, Fife, a tribunal has heard.
A senior medic in the ongoing legal action between transgender medic Dr Beth Upton and nurse Sandie Peggie, said that it was ‘plausible’ that Dr Upton could have felt threatened.
Dr Elspeth Pitt, a consultant in emergency medicine at NHS Fife, told the tribunal that Dr Upton was ‘sobbing’ following a confrontation with Ms Peggie.
Spain has overtaken Germany as the main destination for asylum seekers in the European Union, following the sudden collapse of Syria’s Assad regime and a steep decline in Syrian migration to Europe, according to an unpublished report by the EU Agency for Asylum (EUAA).
The report, seen by the Financial Times, says the agency recorded 64,000 asylum applications across the EU in May 2025—a 24% decrease compared to the same month last year. The sharpest fall came from Syrians, whose claims plummeted from around 16,000 in October 2024 to just 3,100 in May. For the first time in over a decade, Germany no longer tops the list, with its monthly claims halving to 9,900. Spain now leads with 12,800 applications, fuelled in part by rising numbers from Venezuela amid that country’s economic collapse.
Infamous environmental activist David Suzuki has issued a stark warning to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government, calling for the complete dismantling of Canada’s fossil fuel pipeline system to avert catastrophic climate change.
Speaking on theThursday, episode of CBC’s Front Burner podcast with host Jayme Poisson, Suzuki described the continued expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure as “moral and economic madness.”
Rideshare Driver Arrested in Sexual Assault Investigation, Weston Road and Eglinton Avenue West area
The Star didn’t mention his name …
H/T JB & Patti Jo
‘We are facing a long, hot summer’, warned a report social cohesion on Tuesday, ‘with a powder keg of tensions left largely unaddressed from last year that could easily ignite once again’. It only took two days for the first sign of this grim prediction coming true.
This time, though, the expression of public fury at migration failures was not in ‘left-behind’ northern towns like Hull or Hartlepool – or even like last month in Ballymena, where tight-knit loyalist communities have a history of kicking off to defend their interests. Thursday’s protests – and later clashes – at an asylum hotel were in the quiet Essex market town of Epping, population 12,000, mentioned in the Domesday Book and a well-heeled part of the London commuter belt at the terminus of the Central Line.
Essex police clearly saw this protestor in Epping & deliberately ran him over.
The gloves are firmly on when it's Palestine protestors & Just Stop Oil protesters. Why are they off when it's the white working class?pic.twitter.com/w6wQAMtY7p
— Major Gowen (@MajorGowen_) July 18, 2025
Don’t know about anyone else, but I’m DEEPLY uncomfortable with the footage from the Epping Hotel protest that appears to show @EssexPoliceUK bussing in counter protestors.
This looks REALLY bad.
We need to demand answers. pic.twitter.com/5jKhdo98A8— Lee Harris (@addicted2newz) July 18, 2025
I’ve a suspicion the Epping violence was manufactured, like in Southport. The govt knows how angry we are trying to discredit protestors.
Look no further as @MartinGauci‘s video as the Antifa types are “bussed” to the station.
Are you going to come clean @EssexPoliceUK? pic.twitter.com/h5N1WB8WzW
— David Atherton (@DaveAtherton20) July 19, 2025
ALERT: Officers get tough with anti-ICE agitators on a bridge between Ohio and Kentucky.pic.twitter.com/O4eFKSEgpL
— E X X ➠A L E R T S (@ExxAlerts) July 19, 2025
CAMROSE, ALTA. — The balloons have long since deflated and drifted back to earth, the lawn signs and ballot boxes packed away. In most of the country, anyway.
But for Pierre Poilievre, the election campaign never really ended. After the Conservative leader lost the Ottawa-area riding of Carleton, which he’d held for 21 years, to a Liberal newcomer, he was cast out into the proverbial wilderness. Specifically, to a sprawling rural Alberta riding where the freshly re-elected Tory MP stepped down, allowing Poilievre a chance to win the seat in a byelection and rejoin the party he leads in the House of Commons.
Warning Star article … I only found out I was blocked by accident.
Does this guy know he’s white? pic.twitter.com/Mlli9UzTms
— Dr. Jebra Faushay (@JebraFaushay) July 18, 2025
Clutching a teddy bear and trembling through her story in the witness box, a female former Afghan interpreter who worked for Canada in Afghanistan detailed the harrowing sexual abuse she allegedly suffered at the hands of a Canadian government employee.
For four days this week, the woman, whose identity is protected by a publication ban, recounted to an Ottawa courtroom how the alleged abuse started when she was 17, shortly after moving to Canada in October 2011, and went on until 2013.
“He called me his sex toy, a whore and a bitch,” the woman said of her alleged attacker, whose family she was living with during some of the alleged abuse.
My estimates put the number of Afghan Interpreters employed by CAF at approximately 3 to 4 million.
I fully support and appreciate the inclusion of this new crop of superheroes. pic.twitter.com/vrD5XEk4bP
— Dr. Jebra Faushay (@JebraFaushay) July 19, 2025
NEW YORK — The upcoming trial of Linda Sun — also known as Wen Sun — may prove to be the most sophisticated and high-level political infiltration operation in the United States publicly tied to Beijing’s United Front system. A youthful, naturalized immigrant from China, Sun rose through New York State’s bureaucracy to become a senior diversity official. Now, she stands accused of secretly manipulating two Democratic governors — effectively scripting Andrew Cuomo’s praise of Chinese pandemic mask shipments, while blocking Governor Kathy Hochul from meeting Taiwanese officials and ensuring her silence on the Chinese Communist Party’s mass detention of Uyghurs.
I was heading home on the 4 train with my son after a Yankees game. It had been a picture-perfect New York day—sunshine, baseball, hot dogs, and family. During the seventh-inning stretch, the crowd stood and sang “God Bless America.” My son, who has become increasingly interested in what it means to be American—especially after recent visits to the Liberty Bell and the Statue of Liberty—sang it with pride.
On the train home, still riding the high from the game, he broke into the song again. It wasn’t loud or disruptive. It was joyful, spontaneous, and sincere—a child expressing genuine love for his country.
Threats of political violence rose rapidly through the Trudeau years, new data shows
Catherine McKenna noticed the first serious wave of threats aimed at her in 2018, on the same day the Trudeau government’s carbon-tax-and-rebate policy went into effect.
She was then the environment minister in former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet and became the lightning rod for opponents of the policy.
“Pretty quickly, things got really weird,” McKenna, who left politics after the 2019 election, said in a recent interview.
