From the Daily Wire to the Rubin Report and many news and commentary outlets in between, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau’s comments about the Canadian trucker’s convoy are making their way around the web. For those of you who may have missed it, here are Trudeau’s remarks from a Wednesday presser as quoted by CTV…
Germany’s refusal to send weapons to Ukraine has puzzled and angered some allies. But the reasons why Europe’s most powerful country is standing back are historical and complex.
There’s a great grassy plain to the east of Berlin where the soil tells terrible stories.
As farmers plough, their blades disturb human bones, weapons; the fragments of one of the most brutal battles of World War II.
It was spring 1945. Hitler was hiding in a bunker in Berlin, his troops in retreat. Soviet forces advanced from the east across the plain but, above them on a hill called the Seelow Heights, the Nazis had taken up a defensive position.
As hundreds of protest truckers converge on Ottawa with a demand to immediately lift all COVID restrictions, it’s caught the attention of foreign anti-mandate sympathizers who are framing Freedom Convoy 2022 as a popular uprising against the pandemic strictures of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
China’s ambassador to the US has said the two countries could face a “military conflict” over the future of Taiwan, in an unusually explicit reference to the prospect of war.
“The Taiwan issue is the biggest tinderbox between China and the United States,” Qin Gang told the US public broadcaster National Public Radio (NPR), on Friday. “If the Taiwanese authorities, emboldened by the United States, keep going down the road for independence, it most likely will involve China and the United States, the two big countries, in the military conflict.”
Tensions over the island’s place in the world continue to grow. Beijing considers Taiwan to be a breakaway province of China. In November the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, told Joe Biden that any support for Taiwanese independence from the US would be “like playing with fire” and that “those who play with fire will get burned”.
Canadian Black Lives Matter activists are furious over the group’s recent $8.1 million cash purchase of a mansion in downtown Toronto that once served as the headquarters of the Communist Party of Canada.
The U.S. charity that serves as the face of the BLM movement provided the bulk of the funding for the purchase of the 10,000-square-foot property in July. The purchase flew largely under the radar at the time, but anger has now reached a boiling point amid other revelations about BLM’s management and its finances.
Legendary singer-songwriter Neil Young has turned to criticizing Spotify’s sound quality after the streaming service chose to remove his songs rather than meet his demand to cancel podcaster Joe Rogan for allegedly spreading “disinformation” about Covid-19 vaccines.
Joni Mitchell wants songs off Spotify in Covid row
The protest convoy that has been gaining steam and headlines over the last week reached Canada’s capital Friday, with a multi-day demonstration expected to grind official Ottawa’s business to a halt.
Big rigs lined Wellington Street Friday evening – a portend of protesters to come, united by a vague message of ending COVID-19 vaccine mandates and other public health measures after almost two full years of pandemic precautions.
Truckers’ ‘freedom convoy’ set to rally at Parliament Hill
The remaining truckers and other activists opposed to cross-border vaccine mandates and other public health restrictions are set to roll into Ottawa on Saturday in time for a rally on Parliament Hill.
For the past week, several teams of truckers and supporters across the country have been making their way to the nation’s capital as part of the “freedom convoy,” raising more than $7.8 million from more than 99,000 donations on GoFundMe along the way, as of Saturday morning. Some convoy participants have already been in the city since Friday, lining the streets and waving flags in front of the Hill.
The protest convoy carries a combustible load. Politicians can exploit it — or confront it
With a convoy of protesters gathering in the nation’s capital, Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole addressed reporters Thursday evening and called on everyone — protesters and others — to “take the temperature down.”
That’s not a bad notion. A calm discussion about the vaccine mandate for cross-border truck drivers — its purpose, its consequences and the merits of the alternatives — might be useful right now, especially after a long and painful two pandemic years.
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Ontario reports 58 more COVID-19 deaths; hospitalizations continue to drop
Ontario reported another 58 COVID-19 deaths on Saturday as patients hospitalized with the virus continue to drop.
There are currently 3,439 people hospitalized with the virus across Ontario, down from 3,535 yesterday and from 4,026 a week ago.
597 people are in ICU with #COVID19. 82% of patients admitted to the ICU were admitted for COVID-19 and 18% were admitted for other reasons but have tested positive for COVID-19.
There are 4,855 new cases of COVID-19.
— Christine Elliott (@celliottability) January 29, 2022
Canadians eager for post-COVID-19 ‘normal’, but mixed on how to get there: poll
Canadians are eager to return to some version of “normal” after two years of living through the COVID-19 pandemic, but a new poll finds mixed opinions on how to achieve that.
The Ipsos poll conducted exclusively for Global News did find some consensus, with two-thirds of Canadians saying governments aren’t doing enough to get the country back to normal — even if they can’t agree what politicians should be doing.
The American Federation of Teachers is buying 1.7 million Newsguard licenses for teachers nationwide. They will then share them with millions of students. Since students turn to the internet in increasing numbers annually, they will be highly susceptible to stinted propaganda coming from a source that touts itself as a “fact-checker.” In short, Newsguard is cloaking cleverly concealed inaccuracies and, in some instances, flagrant conflicts of interests as facts. This is eerily reminiscent of the methodology employed by Joseph Goebbels in NAZI Germany.
Speaking at a press conference on Friday, People’s Party of Canada (PPC) leader Maxime Bernier made three demands to the federal government – chiefly to repeal the vaccine mandate on civil servants and to rehire all public employees fired because of them.
“The government should reinstate all civil servants, military personnel and other government employees who unjustly lost their jobs,” said Bernier.
The PPC leader also called on federally regulated companies in the transportation and telecom industries to rehire affected employees. Bernier added that if those workers didn’t want to return to their jobs, “they should get severance packages and unemployment benefits that terminated employees normally receive.”
When 15-year-old Ellah Nahum and a few other unvaccinated students showed up at Los Angeles’ New West Charter School on Tuesday, January 18, after winter break, they brought lunches, backpacks, and negative COVID-19 tests, hoping to be allowed in. They’d been negotiating with school administrators since early October, when the school had announced that a vaccine mandate would go into effect in January. Prior to returning to school from winter break, they’d requested a hearing, attempting to find alternative options to getting vaccinated.
When they showed up at school around 7:30 a.m., they sailed through the first checkpoint, run by two newly hired security guards who were satisfied with the girls’ proof of negative test conducted in the last 24 hours. It was the second checkpoint, run by school administrators demanding proof of vaccination, that created trouble for the teens. Several hours later, after tense negotiations between administrators, teens, and their parents, the school called Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) to the scene, and cordoned the teens off, denying them chairs and bathroom breaks, according to the girls.
In a statement late Friday afternoon, the Emergency Management Office issued an order that prohibits protesters from blockading the Trans-Canada Highway at the border.
The order also applies to people stopping or gathering along the side of the highway, both at the border and at the toll plaza for the Cobequid Pass, the highway that runs through northern Nova Scotia to the New Brunswick border.
After considering it for the past year, the unicameral body approved the measure in a 32-11 vote, with six senators abstaining or absent. According to the resolution, the Nebraska legislature seeks to call a convention “limited to proposing amendments to the Constitution of the United States that impose fiscal restraints on the federal government, limit the power and jurisdiction of the federal government, and limit the terms of office for its officials and for members of Congress.”
I have never been more proud of my Canadian roots than during the last few days as I have tracked the “Anti-Vaccine-Mandate” trucker convoy making its way across Canada to its final destination of the national capital of Ottawa to scream out as one against the dictatorial edicts of the entrenched-establishment elites who “lead” the country.
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) Director alongside two other agency officials, David Morens and Jeffrey Taubenberger, called for the development of new vaccines in a letter published by the New England Journal of Medicine.
