In the last few days, seeking release from the high anxieties of living for six weeks during the most pivotal moment since 1945, I drove around the splendid rural Ontario countryside. It is a great thing about this Canada of ours that I can say that all Canadian provinces are beautiful, but every province is beautiful in its own way.
Restaurant patrons who’ve grown accustomed during the pandemic to whipping out their phones to access menus using QR codes should understand the implications for their personal data, say privacy and cyber-security experts.
That’s especially important given some restaurant owners are finding electronic menus efficient and cost effective, and that they may hold onto the practice even after COVID-19 is more contained.
While reading a New York Times story about the Justice Department plan to drop serious charges against a Chinese tech executive, I looked for the Hunter Biden angle. It wasn’t a long search.
After noting the 2018 arrest in Canada of Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei Technologies, at the request of the Trump administration, the Times called the case a “symbol of the tumultuous relationship” between America and China.
Then came this: “The deal to release Ms. Meng could signal a more conciliatory approach in Washington’s stance toward Beijing under the Biden administration.”
It seems the Tories would rather chew up their leaders after one failure than give them the chance to grow into their skin.
Erin O’Toole is now being vetted more than he was when he was running for the leadership of the Conservatives, and he is now being accused of “betraying” the pack by becoming more centrist and giving short shrift to the core Conservatives whose right-wing ideals made him a little too uncomfortable.
I think they are better off keeping O’Toole. The shift to the left he initiated for the party is likely here to stay. That’s good news for the PPC.
We should all be very happy that the 1,019-day prison ordeal endured by Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor in China has finally ended. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is quite right that we should be happy for them, and for their families, if only because everything else about this whole squalid business has given Canadians every reason to feel disgusted, embarrassed, ashamed and angry.
Keir Starmer, the leader of the opposition Labour Party, claimed on Sunday that people should not say only women have a cervix, calling it “not right,” after one of his MPs received threats online for making the statement.
When asked by BBC presenter Andrew Marr whether it was “transphobic to say only women have a cervix,” Starmer replied, “It’s something that shouldn’t be said. It’s not right.”
After years of denying the imprisonment of the two Michaels for espionage had anything to do with the arrest of Meng for fraud, China seemed to have dropped the charade. This was hostage diplomacy, and it looked to have paid off.
“I am shocked at what happened yesterday, genuinely shocked,” said Stephanie Carvin, associate professor of international relations at Carlton University. “China has been doing everything it can to try and make the case that the two incidents are completely separate. By letting the two Michaels go, even before Michael Kovrig had his sentence handed down, it just shows exactly what this is about.”
Only an academic “expert” could be “genuinely shocked” about China’s machinations.
Ontario reports 653 new COVID-19 cases, 6 more virus-related deaths
Ontario is reporting another week-over-week decline in its daily COVID-19 case count with fewer than 700 new infections confirmed over the past 24 hours.
Provincial health officials logged 653 new COVID-19 cases today, up slightly from 640 on Saturday but down from 715 one week ago.
When will the pandemic be over in Ontario? Here’s what scientists say
More than 80 per cent of eligible Ontarians have now been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 and, with the possibility that vaccines will be offered to young children in the coming months, the pandemic’s familiar wave-after-wave pattern of new infections could soon calm.
Scientists believe that as more people increase their immunity to the virus either through vaccination or infection, cases in Ontario are on track to drop to endemic levels as early as spring, provided of course that a more transmissible and vaccine-evasive variant doesn’t rear its head in the meantime.
Hillary Clinton has finally been inaugurated… as the first female chancellor of Queen’s University in Belfast, Ireland – but not before she was loudly heckled on the way to her coronation.
The crew of a U.S. Coast Guard cutter was surprised this summer to find the Chinese and Russian navies conducting a joint exercise in open water in the Arctic Ocean.
Details about what was apparently a serendipitous discovery of the Chinese and Russian vessels by the U.S. Coast Guard were sparse.
Until this chance encounter near the top of the world, Western countries with an interest in the Far North, such as Canada, Denmark (Greenland), Norway, the United Kingdom, France and the United States, were unaware of what was going on, a former commandant of the coast guard told a recent virtual conference hosted by the Defense News.
Border Patrol agents are reportedly furious with President Joe Biden’s comments on a debunked claim that some agents were whipping migrants at the border.
Biden on Friday addressed claims that Border Patrol agents on horseback were “whipping” and “running … over” migrants attempting to enter the U.S. illegally. Though no evidence has been given to support the claims, Biden pledged that the agents allegedly responsible “will pay.”
“To see people treated like they did? Horses running them over? People being strapped? It’s outrageous,” Biden said. “I promise you those people will pay. There will be consequences.”
Immigration is Canada’s most under-analyzed social policy. It’s justification being reduced by government and media to the most simplistic of rationalizations:
Immigration policy exists in response to an aging population. Add to this an aging workforce. Stop the press. An exaggeration this may be, but not one without a point. This specious approach has for decades served to cover-up a plethora of related implications.
At least three people died and several passengers were injured after an Amtrak train derailed in north-central Montana. The National Transportation Safety Board said it would investigate https://t.co/1mQpVoOKVX pic.twitter.com/boxAVE1cA2
— Reuters (@Reuters) September 26, 2021
The incident on Monday, which is now under internal investigation, began after the 21-year-old refused to produce her identification when police approached her for not wearing a mask.
An emergency room physician from Alberta has claimed that the hospital capacity crisis in his province was “created,” is nothing new, and is not from COVID-19 patients.
“We have a crisis, and we have a crisis because we have no staff, because our staff quit, because they’re burned out, they’re not burnt out from COVID,” said Dr. Gary Davidson who works as an emergency doctor in Red Deer.
“So, it has nothing to do with COVID, it’s been going on for six years, and it was created.”
