David Attenborough should stick to educating us about animals rather than bashing human beings.
It’s that high-pitched, cranky and creaky voice again. It’s the most fabulous footage of wildlife, taken by intrepid photographers on very cold ships. We see emperor penguins waddling, sliding on their bellies, tobogganing and mountaineering through acres of Antarctic snow. A young male hooded seal, out to mate in the spring, sees off an older and bigger rival. Then he tries to pull a female – first with an inflatable black nose, then with an inflatable, balloon-like red sack in his left nostril.
Officials in Germany have announced plans to rebuild a bridge over the Rhine that collapsed days after its capture by US soldiers in the final weeks of the second world war.
The bridge at Remagen, which featured in a 1969 film of the same name starring George Segal, Ben Gazzara and Robert Vaughn, focusing on the heroism of the allies’ final advance into Germany, could be standing again within a decade, town planners have said.
Kurdish forces in northeast Syria on Saturday announced the end of a three-week operation against ISIS supporters inside the overcrowded and increasingly lawless camp of al-Hol.
They arrested more than 200 people, including dozens of women, discovered tunnels used by extremists and seized an arsenal of weapons.
We are now a revolutionary society in decline using the courts, prosecutors, the administrative state, and the law itself to punish enemies, help friends, and declare such asymmetry “social justice.”
What once distinguished the United States from illiberal regimes following the Orwellian mantra “some are more equal than others” was the hallowed American idea of “equal justice under the law.”
The phrase is engraved above the entrance to the United States Supreme Court—an ideal that took centuries to achieve. Yet it is an ancient concept—what the Greeks called isonomia that distinguished classical democratic Athens from its anti-democratic rivals. Isonomia later became enshrined as the central criterion of all Western consensual governments.
Now that even the Biden administration has been forced to admit defeat in its ill-considered attempts to revive the Iran nuclear deal, it is vital that the West does not let its guard slip on Iran’s malign activities across the globe.
Throughout the year-long negotiating process in Vienna over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, which the Biden administration now concedes have ended in stalemate, Tehran has sought to give the impression that it is interested in negotiating a deal, while at the same time ramping up its aggressive military activities in the Middle East and beyond.
“History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme rather nicely.”
That quip has often been attributed to Mark Twain. I’ve never been able to verify the attribution, but it does sound like him. I’m inclined to pair it with Santayana’s observation: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” A gloss on that observation: “Those who know the past are condemned to watch others unwittingly repeat the avoidable errors of the past.”
Had Amtrak come to a screeching halt this week, as it was on the verge of doing, most Americans would not have noticed. Of those workers who still commute to in-person jobs, 76 percent drive their own cars, 10 percent ride a bike, and only 11 percent use public transportation.
Other countries tend to give us a bad rap for our car-loving ways. Most of us — nine in 10 Americans over the age of 16 — drive. And we drive a lot: 59 minutes and 30 miles a day, on average. We’re on the road twice as much as our friends in France, Germany, and Great Britain. So when non-American critics blame climate change on our driving habits, I can’t help but think they’re just plain jealous.
It’s been a “Twilight Zone” of a political week, from James Taylor singing “Fire and Rain” to cheer the Inflation Reduction Act to our Beto O’Rourke in New York looking for money to the Democrats in full “Daydream Believer” mode to pursue their climate change agenda.
Nearly 30 arrests have been made over the past few weeks
Once regarded as the model example of a cohesive hyper-diverse locality in modern-day Britain, the city of Leicester is in danger of collapsing into a Hindutva-Islamist battleground in the East Midlands.
It has been reported by the Leicester Mercury that the recent escalation in community tensions started after the Asia Cup cricket match between India and Pakistan in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on August 28. Before the weekend, it was reported that a total of twenty-seven people had been arrested. Another fifteen arrests have recently been made after further public disturbances in the Asian-dominant areas of East Leicester such as Belgrave.
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi spoke out during his first interview with a Western reporter Sunday, telling 60 Minutes that Israel is a ‘malignant cancerous tumor’ and claiming the ‘Holocaust probably happened’ but it needs to ‘be investigated and researched.’
President Ebrahim Raisi, whose full name is Ebrahīm Raʾīs al-Sādātī, 60, was elected to the presidency in August 2021 and became the country’s eighth president.
When asked if he believed the Holocaust happened, Iranian President Raisi told Lesley Stahl, “There are some signs that it happened. If so, they should allow it to be investigated and researched.” https://t.co/CChTRxBFcrpic.twitter.com/7ZSBEknrh1
The UK still leads the world in magnificent final farewells to its leaders
State funerals say a lot about the country in which they take place — and one of the things in which Britain still indisputably leads the world are the magnificent final farewells that it arranges for its leaders.
How very different are some of the send-offs seen in less fortunate lands. When Stalin died in 1953, hundreds, possibly thousands, were added to the toll of his victims when they were fatally crushed lining up in Moscow to view the dead Soviet dictator. In 1989, after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in revolutionary Iran, the chaotic funeral culminated in the dead Supreme Leader’s body actually falling out of its coffin, while Revolutionary Guards fired into the crowd of more than a million mourners, killing at least eight. In Britain, in stark contrast, the funerary rituals are so meticulously planned and rehearsed that it seems shocking and makes headlines if a lone anti-monarchist shouts a disobliging comment or holds up a blank placard.
I don’t consider myself a Monarchist but as with so many I did admire the steadfast Queen Elizabeth.
Regardless of our personal opinions of the institution there is no question that Elizabeth served her nation and the commonwealth in exemplary fashion.
I am saddened at her passing but history will remember her well.
The world’s most vulnerable countries are preparing to take on the richest economies with a demand for urgent finance – potentially including new taxes on fossil fuels or flying – for the irrecoverable losses they are suffering from the climate crisis, leaked documents show.
Extreme weather is already hitting many developing countries hard and forecast to wreak further catastrophe. Loss and damage – the issue of how to help poor nations suffering from the most extreme impacts of climate breakdown, which countries cannot be protected against – is one of the most contentious problems in climate negotiations.
If politicians and police forces don’t want to see a repeat of this winter’s protest in Ottawa, they would be well-served to take a step back and try to understand why the protests happened rather than obsessively trying to chase down and punish citizens who were found to be supportive of them.
The witch hunt being carried out against Const. Kristina Neilson of the Ottawa Police Service (OPS) who allegedly donated to the Freedom Convoy is only entrenching division and mistrust among Canadians.
Related – Hospital executive fired after convoy donation data breach files $650Gs lawsuit
A London long-term care boss fired after a freedom convoy donation data breach has launched a $650,000 wrongful dismissal lawsuit against his former employer, St. Joseph’s Health Care London, an action the hospital is fighting.
With Pierre Poilievre’s landslide leadership win, all the moth-eaten political tropes have been dusted off and the dead horses dragged out to be flogged. Prominent among these is angst around the prospective demise of “progressive,” or moderate, conservatism.
Trans tiktoker admits that doctors will easily agree to do hysterectomies in the name of “gender affirming care” but “cis” women have a much harder time getting approved for it.
