Mohamed Ibrahim can barely bring himself to recall his run-in with so-called Islamic State fighters.
With tears in his eyes, the husband and father-of-three spoke about the eight militants who stopped his bus in Syria in late 2017 after living under IS rule for years, pressing a rifle to his cheek.
“I started to sweat. My heart was pounding,” Mr Ibrahim said.
Dumping milk onto floors. Hurling food onto walls. Refusing to eat. Gluing body parts. Throwing paint. Refusing to leave. Threatening to pee and poop in your pants. Screaming accusations. Are those the behaviors of a toddler’s temper tantrum? Yes. But they’re also the dominant tactics of today’s climate activists.
Consider the case of Gianluca Grimalda. On October 19, Grimalda, along with 15 other members of a climate activist group called Scientist Rebellion, glued himself to the floor of the visitors center next to a Volkswagon factory in Germany. The VW security guards brought pizza to Grimalda and the other activist scientists, but Grimalda felt disrespected and so he declared a hunger strike in retaliation.
Today in the West, no issue matters more than immigration policy, especially at a time when much of the world, from Mexicans to Nigerians to Pakistanis, wants to move to North America and Western Europe.
Controlling immigration has proven difficult because the political establishments in destination countries tend to view mass, unfettered, and unvetted immigration as a benign phenomenon. Two examples capture this outlook. In 2014, Sweden’s establishment parties, making up 86 percent of the parliament, joined forces to marginalize the civilizationist party (that is, the party focused on controlling immigration and demanding the integration of immigrants) with 14 percent. Angela Merkel, the establishment German chancellor, waved in over 1 million unvetted migrants, leading to a pan-European crisis in 2015-16.
We’re losing touch with its lessons just as they struggled to commemorate the Civil War
With worries about inflation, the war in Ukraine, and tension over Taiwan, it’s easy for Americans to forget that we are now deep into the four-year period marking the eightieth anniversary of World War II. Last December marked eighty years since the day of infamy at Pearl Harbor, while this June passed the date of the critical victory at Midway. In a little less than two years, it will be eight decades since the greatest invasion in history, on D-Day. Soon after will follow commemorations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and both V-E and V-J Days. Each year, living memory of that global struggle continues to fade, with the passage of both time and the Greatest Generation.
A Vermont school allowed a transgender pupil to make ‘death threats’ against another student who complained about them using female changing rooms, a lawsuit claims.
Blake Allen, 14, was suspended from Randolph Union High School after she called a biologically male student, who identifies as a female, a ‘dude’.
Her father Travis was fired from his job as the girls’ soccer coach for also calling the student in question a ‘male’.
Why even the hint of more liberty sends the woke set into meltdown.
So he’s done it. The richest man in the world and self-styled ‘free-speech absolutist’ has taken over Twitter. The bête noire of illiberal liberals has got his hands on social media. Cue meltdown. Listening to the woke set you’d be forgiven for thinking that the gates of hell had been flung open and every manner of evil and blasphemy will now pour forth. Twitter could become a ‘soap box for hate speech’, fretted one media outlet yesterday. It really is extraordinary how much some people fear freedom.
America’s heartlands are still haunted by despair
In 1982, Bruce Springsteen was at the height of his powers. Seven years earlier, his third album, Born to Run, had brought him global fame. “Springsteen is everything that has been claimed for him,” declared Rolling Stone. Critic Dave Marsh said he was “comparable to all the greats”. John Rockwell called him “the next Mick Jagger”. His next two albums, Darkness at the Edge of Town and The River, did nothing to dim his blazing star.
Today ProPublica and Vanity Fair report on Toy Reid, a China specialist for the RAND Corporation and a political officer in East Asia for the U.S. State Department, who reviewed hundreds of dispatches archived on the website of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Reid worked as part of a team assembled by the minority oversight staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.
Toronto police never checked Toronto Pearson International Airport cameras to see if any potential suspects — including the mysterious “Walking Man” caught on neighbourhood surveillance cameras — left the country immediately after killing Barry and Honey Sherman, a Toronto court has heard.
“Why would we do that,” Det. Const. Dennis Yim said during cross examination by a Toronto Star reporter last week. “The person could have changed their appearance.”
Yet, as Yim testified, police showed photos of the “Walking Man” around the Sherman neighbourhood to see if anyone could identify him. Nobody could. Police believe he is the killer or one of the killers, according to police documents.
As the second full week of hearings by the Public Order Emergency Commission winds down, it’s becoming increasingly clear just how weak the government’s rationale appears to be for invoking the Emergencies Act. As I wrote last week, key witnesses, including the OPP’s intelligence chief Supt. Pat Morris, shredded the federal narrative that the protesters were a violent and dangerous fringe who posed an imminent threat to the nation’s capital. Morris’s point of view was reconfirmed by OPP Commissioner Thomas Carrique, who asserted categorically that there was no “credible threat” to national security posed by the Freedom Convoy.
OK THIS IS JUST GETTING WEIRD
Hostile countries, a group that includes China and Russia, are targeting foreign nationals and diaspora populations in Canada, as well as activists and journalists, according to the Communications Security Establishment.
“State-sponsored cyberthreat actors almost certainly” target those groups in order “to monitor and control these individuals,” Canada’s cyber defense agency said in a new report. The tools they use include “content monitoring on foreign-based applications, social media-enabled activity and espionage against individuals using spyware.”
We have Bigger Fish to worry about than Russia or China … The enemy within aka the Liberal Party.
We have a serious mental health crisis in this country. pic.twitter.com/CTwl1FsYbi
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) October 28, 2022
It’s official, Elon Musk is now the owner of Twitter. This is good news. Musk has promised to make Twitter a truly open platform that supports free speech—something it most certainly has not been for some time. We’ve all heard the stories of conservative voices on Twitter being silenced for no good reason or under false pretenses.
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier is warning of “tougher, rough years ahead,” for his country and Europe. In his address Friday dubbed a “state of the nation” speech, the German president said the war in Ukraine has led to “the deepest crisis” in a reunified Germany, citing an energy crunch, the soaring cost of living, and increasing poverty rates.
“This crisis demands that we learn to be modest again,” Steinmeier said during the speech at his official residence, Bellevue Palace, in Berlin. He pledged Germany’s commitment to support Ukraine and its partnership with NATO and EU allies.
