Drivers in #Brampton are a special breed. pic.twitter.com/ya8Vrq9xYQ
— Curious George (@01CuriousGeorge) December 30, 2024
Why Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are disliked by Americans: ‘Most unpopular kids in school’
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have lost favorability in the United States — and one royal expert believes she knows why.
“I give a lot of talks to Americans and they all dislike Harry and Meghan,” Ingrid Seward, editor-in-chief of Majesty magazine and author of the royal biography “My Mother & I,” recently told The Standard.
“They hate that they let the Queen down,” Seward added.
WTF?
A devastating fire in Spencer, Massachusetts, obliterated two homes on Sunday, leading to explosive fireworks stored in one of the residences. Firefighters faced treacherous icy conditions as they fought the blaze, but remarkably, no injuries were reported. pic.twitter.com/gzsniDc0GQ
— Dee (@deemarwar78) December 28, 2024
Atlantic Liberal caucus calls for Trudeau to step down as leader
The Atlantic Liberal caucus is calling on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to step down as party leader.
Following an Atlantic Liberal caucus meeting the morning of December 23, caucus chair Kody Blois wrote a letter to Trudeau, shared Sunday on social media by New Brunswick Liberal MP Wayne Long.
“The discussion this morning centred around the need for you to resign as the Leader of the Liberal Party and to urgently allow for a process to determine a new leader to replace you,” wrote Blois to Trudeau.
The Progressive Moment in Global Politics Is Over
The progressive moment is over—at least for now.
This past year showed that the progressive politics that dominated most industrialized countries over the past two decades or more is shifting to the right, fueled by working-class anxieties over the economy and immigration, and growing fatigue with issues from climate change to identity politics.
h/t DS
‘Pretty limited’ options for Liberal MPs calling for leadership change
As calls mount within the federal Liberal Party for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to step down as leader, one political analyst says there’s little his detractors can do to force his hand.
In a Sunday interview with CTV News Channel, Lori Turnbull of Dalhousie University and the Institute on Governance said the decision remains Trudeau’s at this time, as the party previously removed the option to initiate a leadership change through a majority vote.
Proposal to strip religious groups of charitable tax status would eviscerate Canada’s charities
On that fateful Friday when Ottawa was gearing up for the following Monday’s fall economic statement, all attention was on the finance minister, who, we discovered later, had been fired that very day by the prime minister via Zoom. Justin Trudeau had set something of a time-delayed explosive, not to take effect until after Chrystia Freeland delivered Monday’s statement. But instead she blew up the government. Understandably so.
What a Difference Eight Years Make: How Trump’s Second Inaugural Will Surpass His First
In the weeks before the 2016 Trump Electoral College victory, Candidate Trump was polling between 35 percent and 40 percent.
He would average only about 41 percent approval over his tumultuous four-year tenure.
Israel built an ‘AI factory’ for war. It unleashed it in Gaza.
After the brutal Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas, the Israel Defense Forces deluged Gaza with bombs, drawing on a database painstakingly compiled through the years that detailed home addresses, tunnels and other infrastructure critical to the militant group.
But then the target bank ran low. To maintain the war’s breakneck pace, the IDF turned to an elaborate artificial intelligence tool called Habsora — or “the Gospel” — which could quickly generate hundreds of additional targets.
The use of AI to rapidly refill IDF’s target bank allowed the military to continue its campaign uninterrupted, according to two people familiar with the operation. It is an example of how the decade-long program to place advanced AI tools at the center of IDF’s intelligence operations has contributed to the violence of Israel’s 14-month war in Gaza.
The revenge of the real economy
Europe’s governing classes have long been estranged from the real economy – from the world of production, industry and agriculture. To these green-hued technocrats, the economy appears as little more than a set of figures on a spreadsheet, to be regulated and managed towards a ‘better’, ‘greener’ future. To be redesigned according to a schedule of abstract, arbitrary Net Zero targets. All the while, the actual activity of making the stuff we need and use everyday – from energy to food – has remained out of sight and, above all, out of mind.
h/t DS
Europe’s blindspot over antisemitism
The politicians say ‘It must never happen again’, and then it happens again the following week
You would think that we Europeans might have learned a thing or two about antisemitism over the past century or so — and perhaps come to understand pragmatically, if nothing else, that what begins with the vicious persecution of Jews usually moves on to murdering lots of other people, too. But no. Or if we did, then it has conveniently slipped our minds, as things tend to do in these complicated times. Or perhaps we think that the persecution of the Jews we are seeing right now in Europe is of a different marque to that which began in the early 1930s in Germany. Yes, it’s sort of antisemitism — but it’s of a nicer kind than that instigated by that psychotic little Austrian with the performative mustache. A little more excusable.
Why Was the Head of the World Health Organization in a Terror State?
The media is hyping up outrage over the fact that UN’s World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was at a Houthi airport in Yemen during Israel’s retaliation against the Islamic terrorist group over its attacks on Israel.
Why liberals keep losing
They ignore America’s real majority
At home: disorder in the streets and a rising tide of drugs. Abroad: a shameful, humiliating withdrawal from an Asian outpost of empire. In politics: a conservative demagogue, backed by the silent majority, sweeps aside an ineffectual liberal stooge. In culture: fights over abortion, and women, and music, all conjuring a feeling that the republic is doomed. Am I talking about pot and Saigon and the sweep of Richard Nixon, or fentanyl and Kabul and the return of Donald Trump? I could be describing either, for both 1968 and 2024 feel like chaotically epochal years in the American story. Nor are these the only similarities between past and present. Just as in the Sixties, liberals today are faced with an urgent question: what now?
The answer, I think, is epitomised in a single book. Written by Ben Wattenberg and Richard M. Scammon in 1970, The Real Majority: An Extraordinary Examination of the American Electorate charted the political centre in the new Nixonian age. Over half a century on, it still offers deep insights for navigating a society in flux, even as it shrewdly leavens its electoral insights with clear and evocative language. Especially with Donald Trump the new American leviathan, moreover, The Real Majority offers another enduring truth — if liberals fail to occupy the heartland of American politics, wily conservatives will rush to get there first.
Trump lobs threats at Greenland, Panama and Canada – should we take him seriously?
Merry Christmas,” Donald Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Christmas Day with a photo of himself and his wife, Melania. So far, so traditional. But the US president-elect was just getting started.
In another post, Trump wished merry Christmas to all “including to the wonderful soldiers of China, who are lovingly, but illegally, operating the Panama canal”. He poked fun at the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, and claimed the US could annex Canada as its 51st state. For good measure, he addressed “the people of Greenland, which is needed by the United States for National Security purposes and, who want the US to be there, and we will!”
It was the type of diatribe that, if delivered by a drunk uncle at the Christmas dinner table, might be laughed off or undercut by “Anyone for dessert?” But Trump, 78, is less than a month away from accessing the nuclear codes and commanding the strongest military in the world. No one is quite sure whether to take him literally or seriously – or both.
The Guardian lies ahead.
Behind the Dismantling of Hezbollah: Decades of Israeli Intelligence
Right up until he was assassinated, Hassan Nasrallah did not believe that Israel would kill him.
As he hunkered inside a Hezbollah fortress 40 feet underground on Sept. 27, his aides urged him to go to a safer location. Mr. Nasrallah brushed it off, according to intelligence collected by
Israel and shared later with Western allies. In his view, Israel had no interest in a full-scale war.
What he did not realize was that Israeli spy agencies were tracking his every movement — and had been doing so for years.