The Southport attack would not have happened if the killer’s parents had done “what they morally ought to have done”, an inquiry has found.
Axel Rudakubana, then 17, killed three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class on July 29 2024 and attempted to murder 10 others.
An inquiry into the incident heard that the teenager’s parents, Alphonse Rudakubana and Laetitia Muzayire, knew their son was hoarding knives, was accessing violent content online and had been making poison in his room.
The gap between Canada’s richest and poorest grew last year as financial markets gained, interest payouts declined and the job market softened, said Statistics Canada on Monday.
The agency says the income gap — measuring the difference in the share of disposable income between households in the top 40 per cent and those in the bottom 40 per cent — reached 46.7 percentage points in 2025.
There’s no doubt the US military has the capability to mount a blockade of vessels moving in and out of the Gulf. The question is: to what end?
“I do think it’s doable,” retired US Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery told the BBC this morning. “And it’s certainly less risky than the alternative, which would have been to forcibly push back the Iranians and create the conditions for a convoy.”
Some of the options floated by President Trump in recent weeks – the seizure of Kharg Island or militarily escorting convoys through the Strait of Hormuz – would have proved hazardous and potentially costly.
U.S. to Blockade Ships Entering or Exiting Iranian Ports
Anyone who is wondering why the Doug Ford government expects to have political cover for making sweeping changes to Ontario’s school boards, effectively neutering the authority of elected trustees in the process, need only look to one of the pages in the background document that was released on Monday.
On it, under the heading “Holding School Board Trustees Accountable,” the government says that many trustees have run huge deficits and “wasted public funds” that were intended for the classroom.
King’s College London has instructed lecturers to overlook poor grammar in an effort to “embrace linguistic diversity.” The university plans to reduce traditional exams and offer a “choice in assessment formats” to be more inclusive. Additionally, essay word limits will be shortened to prevent students from being “overburdened.”
On March 22, a second letter was sent to Ontario’s Chief Firearms Officer.
It asked one question. A simple one.
“Will the Chief Firearms Officer revoke the firearms licences of those who do not turn in their newly prohibited firearms?”
And then, for clarity: “Yes, or no. Please choose one.”
If the purpose of trolling — the posting of offensive or inflammatory messages about an individual on social media — is to produce an overreaction, Donald Trump is a grandmaster of the genre.
He lashed out at Pope Leo XIV for opposing the Iran war. “I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon,” he wrote on Truth Social. “Leo should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician.”
OTTAWA — Mark Carney’s minority government transformed into a slim but workable majority in Parliament courtesy of two Monday night byelection victories in Toronto, meaning the prime minister can now more easily advance his high-spending economic and defence agenda over any opposition objections.
The majority gives Carney greater control over parliamentary committee membership and votes in the House of Commons. More importantly, it gives him the luxury of time to govern as he sees fit amid global turmoil.
With 173 of 343 seats in the House of Commons, Carney has up to three more years before he will need to call a federal election.
A key government adviser will accuse the UK’s leaders of “corrosive complacency” towards defence and warn the country’s security is “in peril”.
Lord George Robertson, the former Nato secretary general who wrote the government’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR), will use a speech later on Tuesday to accuse “non-military experts in the Treasury” of “vandalism”.
The government has promised to publish a 10-year defence investment plan to fund the SDR’s vision but it has been repeatedly delayed.
When officials from the United States and Iran walked away from negotiations in Pakistan this weekend with no deal on the Strait of Hormuz, markets didn’t wait for clarity. They reacted. The subsequent announcement by United States Central Command of a naval blockade targeting Iranian ports was meant to reassure. Instead, it raised more questions than answers.
Markets, as they often do, may be reading this correctly.
h/t handy n handsome
On March 6, the body of Masood Majoody, a mathematics professor at Simon Fraser University and a vocal critic of the theocratic Iranian regime, was found in Mission, B.C. He went missing on Feb. 2, a victim of suspected foul play.
Police have now arrested and charged two individuals, Mehdi Razavi and Arezou Soltani, alleged to have ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a branch of Iran’s military responsible for internal repression and overseas operations, with his murder.
Canada’s dominant Liberal Party has introduced legislation that may soon make Christian speech illegal.
In March, the Canadian House of Commons passed Bill C-9, also known as the “Combatting Hate Act.” The bill was introduced under the guise of mitigating antisemitic attacks in the wake of Hamas’ violent attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Liberals claimed it was developed to protect religious communities, but C-9 eagerly expanded to prohibit public displays of “hate,” including “Islamophobia, homophobia, and transphobia.” The Canadian Liberals have used so-called hate speech as a Trojan horse to enact censorship laws — the same thing American Democrats are trying to do here.
Four provinces and the federal government are dialling back their freedom-of-information (FOI) laws, moves that ominously mirror one another.
British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, Nova Scotia and Ottawa are tightening transparency legislation, or proposing to do so, to make internal government documents harder for citizens, journalists and others to obtain.
Timelines for governments to provide responses to such requests are being extended, for example, and more records are being declared off-limits.
Environmentalists used to warn that there are ‘too many people on the planet’. In The Population Bomb (1968), the late Paul Ehrlich warned that ‘overpopulation’ would lead to mass starvation by the 1970s, to US life expectancy plummeting to just 42 by the 1980s, and by the year 2000, England would cease to exist. We now know that the world faces the precise opposite challenge – of unprecedented demographic collapse in the face of falling birth rates.
The struggle over Panama is not a trade dispute. It is a pre-kinetic tug-of-war between Beijing and Washington — and Canada should be watching.
OTTAWA — The Panama Canal is one of the great arteries of the world economy, a narrow thread of water through which roughly five percent of global maritime trade passes each year. For three decades, the ports at each end of it — Balboa on the Pacific, Cristobal on the Atlantic — were operated by a subsidiary of CK Hutchison, the Hong Kong conglomerate controlled by the family of billionaire Li Ka-shing. That arrangement ended this year when Panama’s Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional, the government physically seized the terminals, and Beijing erupted in fury, threatening that Panama would “pay a heavy price.”
