China’s New World Order: Michael Kovrig on how Beijing is trying to undermine the West

Kovrig is a senior advisor at the International Crisis Group and a former Canadian diplomat, but he is best known to Canadians as one of the “two Michaels” who were detained by Chinese authorities in 2018, in response to the arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou at the Vancouver airport on a U.S. extradition request.

“I was detained by state security officers when I was coming back from dinner and they abducted me and held me hostage for 1,019 days,” said Kovrig. “I spent about nearly six months in solitary confinement, being relentlessly interrogated, and then another two years in a detention centre, confined to a single cell.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Canada's China Class", "China - Communist Slave State", Canada's Corrupt Liberal Government

Why the real target of Trump’s campaign in Venezuela is Cuba

When the attorney general of the United States took personal charge of Operation Mongoose, he declared it America’s “top priority”, saying “no time, money, effort or manpower” was to be spared.

The official in question was Robert Kennedy and the supreme objective that mattered more than anything else was toppling Fidel Castro and “liberating” Cuba from Communist rule.

Operation Mongoose and its famously futile campaign of subversion began in November 1961, inspiring plenty of Hollywood movies but not the dawn of freedom in Cuba.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCuba, USA, Venezuela

All the non-economic ways Canada is declining

In just the last few years, Canada has dropped to the rear of the pack on any number of economic indicators in which it used to do quite well.

Canada now has the slowest per capita GDP growth of any other large OECD country. It continues to post the world’s most unaffordable housing. Canada isn’t even one of the richest countries on earth anymore. Whereas Canada used to make the top five as recently as the 1980s, it’s now behind 14 countries that are officially wealthier.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCanada, Decline & Fall

Australian prisoner sues for right to eat Vegemite in jail

A convicted murderer is challenging the southern Australian state of Victoria’s ban on prisoners eating the Vegemite yeast-based spread, arguing that the restriction breaches his human right to “enjoy his culture as an Australian.”

Andre McKechnie is suing Victoria’s Department of Justice and Community Safety and the agency that manages the prisons, Corrections Victoria, in a case currently scheduled to be heard in 2026.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inWTF?

F-35 defenders launch counterattack against Swedish fighter jet proposal

Ottawa’s bureaucrat reserve airmen designed the F-69! Home grown aviation technology only slightly more expensive per plane than the F-35

Former high-ranking officers of the Canadian Armed Forces are mounting a defence of the planned acquisition of 88 American F-35 fighter jets, hoping to put an end to the ongoing courtship between the Canadian government and the Swedish firm Saab.

According to information obtained by Radio-Canada, a dozen former high-ranking officers of the Royal Canadian Air Force sent a letter to the federal government to reiterate the benefits of acquiring a full fleet of F-35s to meet Canada’s military needs.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"CAF - Canadian Armed Forces"

Federal agents arrest 130 people in Charlotte immigration crackdown

Federal agents have arrested 130 people in two days in Charlotte, North Carolina, the latest city to face President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigration, according to a US official.

Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), told the BBC that a number of the people arrested are criminals and gang members. But local leaders say the operation is doing more harm than good.

DHS said a US citizen allegedly injured an officer by ramming a law enforcement vehicle with their car.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Deep State", Camp Of The Saints, USA

The Islamic world is astonishingly silent on its gruesome history of slavery

Suleyman the Magnificent enslaved millions

In his new book, The Big Payback, the British comedian Sir Lenny Henry has called on the UK Government to pay £18tn in reparations for slavery to black British people.

Having spent the past five years researching a history of slavery and the slave trade in the Islamic world, what struck me especially about Sir Lenny’s intervention (apart from the figure of £18tn, which is equivalent to between six and seven times the size of the UK’s economy), was the continued dominance of the transatlantic trade in public discourse about slavery.

While the West has engaged in critical discussions over this egregious phenomenon for many years, the same cannot be said for swathes of the Middle East: a region in which slavery and the accompanying trade endured without pause from the seventh to the 20th centuries.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Islamophobia", Islam, Islam and slavery, Islam and violence

The idea of a mixed fleet of Canadian fighter jets should not take flight

Canada is apparently considering acquiring a mixed fleet of fighter jets. But this decision is being considered without any real strategic thinking.

Economic considerations seem to be taking precedence over military imperatives, even though several experts and military leaders strongly recommend a single fleet of F-35s, which is considered more consistent with continental defence needs.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"CAF - Canadian Armed Forces", "RCAF", Canada's Corrupt Liberal Government

Crumbling Johannesburg gets a rushed makeover as G20 looms

Vhutshilo, an Uber driver, gestures with annoyance at workers busily planting flowers along the verge of a major road into Sandton, a glitzy Johannesburg suburb known as Africa’s richest square mile. “You see this,” he says, “it shows they do have resources.”

His gripe is that the government is only spending money and getting things done to impress foreign visitors before the G20 summit next weekend, while the city’s steady decay has been ignored for years and millions of its residents suffer frequent electricity and water cuts, even in the wealthy suburbs.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inWTF?

Liberals survive crucial confidence vote on budget in win for Carney

The House of Commons narrowly voted to approve the federal budget Monday, ensuring Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal government survives into the new year.

The confidence vote was a crucial test for Carney’s ability to hold onto power, as all opposition parties had expressed at least some displeasure with the spending plan.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCanada's Corrupt Liberal Government