 |
| Let this new year begin cutely for you. |
An inquiry judge has found Manitoba child welfare fundamentally misunderstood its mandate to protect children and left a little girl who was murdered "defenceless against her mother's cruelty" and against the "sadistic violence" of the woman's boyfriend.
Five-year-old Phoenix Sinclair was killed by the couple in 2005 after prolonged and horrific abuse.
In his final report into her death, Commissioner Ted Hughes recommended Manitoba should take the lead to address the disproportionate number of aboriginal children in care across Canada.
"At least 13 times throughout her life, Winnipeg Child and Family Services received notice of concerns for Phoenix's safety and well-being from various sources, the last one coming three months before her death," Hughes wrote in his three-volume report released Friday. "Throughout, files were opened and closed, often without a social worker ever laying eyes on Phoenix.
"Unfortunately, the system failed to act on what it knew, with tragic results."
Phoenix was apprehended at birth and during her life 27 agency workers were involved in her file. She was repeatedly returned to her mother, Samantha Kematch, despite concerns about what the judge called the woman's indifference toward her daughter.
Kematch and Karl McKay neglected, confined, tortured and beat Phoenix. She ultimately died of extensive injuries on the cold basement floor of the couple's home on the Fisher River reserve. She was buried in a shallow grave by the community dump and Kematch continued to collect child subsidy cheques.
Both adults were convicted of first-degree murder in 2008.
Hughes said the little girl's fate was sealed once Kematch began her relationship with McKay and took custody of Phoenix in 2004. He was "a dangerous man, from whom the agency could have, and should have, saved Phoenix," the judge wrote. ...
Manitoba must also push aboriginal children in care onto the national agenda, Hughes suggested. More aboriginal children are taken from their homes not because they are aboriginal, but because they are living in poverty and their parents often suffer from addictions. ...
Grand Chief Derek Nepinak of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs said aboriginal people don't want greater centralization of a system that takes children away from their culture.
He said he would rather see more focus on the expertise of elders and support for a generation of parents still suffering from the legacy of residential schools.
"There is a genocide that's continuing to happen. The precedent for apprehension of children against the will of families started in the residential school era," he said. "It's still happening today.
"We have to work on creating a healing mechanism for families and that is not enough of a focus right now."
The most studied pipeline in U.S. history passed a key test Friday after the U.S. State Department gave its blessing after years of delays, triggering a 90-day review of Keystone XL.
The final word now rests with President Barack Obama.
Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver has been selling the importance of Keystone for years and, with other cabinet ministers, has been pressing U.S. legislators and the White House to quit dithering.
"The choice for the United States is clear: oil supply from a reliable, environmentally responsible friend and neighbour or from unstable sources with similar or higher greenhouse gas emissions and lesser environmental standards," he said.
The State Department's environmental impact study concluded the TransCanada Corp. pipeline would not significantly increase oilsands production on its own because crude would find its way to market through other means, including rail.
It also said the rail alternative is far more dangerous than the pipeline in terms of fatalities and injuries.
"Approval or denial of any one crude oil transport project, including the proposed Project, remains unlikely to significantly impact the rate of extraction in the oilsands, or the continued demand for heavy crude oil at refineries in the United States," the study said.
 |
| Obama doesn't like Canadian exceptionalism, either. |
MSNBC stepped in it big time with their bigoted tweet claiming “right wingers” would “hate” a Cheerios ad featuring a bi-racial family. MSNBC deleted the tweet and apologized, but only after being called on it.
After MSNBC’s ridiculous but not surprising tweet, Twitchy founder, syndicated columnist and “just a blogger” Michelle Malkin started the hashtag #MyRightWingBiracialFamily ...
Here are 75 tweets from biracial families telling MSNBC their pandering to left-wing stereotypes of people who disagree with them will not be tolerated...
 |
| Stay warm, Earth. |
A disgraced state department official who oversaw security decisions at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi at the time of a deadly terrorist attack may be posted to Canada, according to a report.
Charlene Lamb was among four state department security officials disciplined following a scathing review into the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the embassy in Benghazi, Libya.
Four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, were killed in the attack.
Lamb was placed on administrative leave from her position as deputy assistant secretary for international programs in December 2012 after a sharply critical independent inquiry into the attacks.
The inquiry cited several problems, noting "systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels within two bureaus of the state department resulted in a special mission security posture that was inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place."
A House committee probe also cited her for failing to bolster safeguards at the Benghazi mission and rebuffing calls from subordinates to improve security staffing in the run-up to the deadly attack.
Rumours of Lamb's possible new position as a regional security officer to Canada come from Special Operations Forces Report, an online news source for military and former special operative soldiers.
A woman who tossed three of her newborns into the garbage has been given 18 more months in jail and faces three years of probation.
Meredith Borowiec gave birth in 2008 and 2009, but the babies' bodies have never been found. A third infant born in 2010 survived when the baby's father, not knowing it was his child, helped pull the newborn out of a neighbourhood trash bin after a passerby heard cries.
Borowiec, 32, was convicted on two counts of infanticide and one count of aggravated assault.
Tuesday morning, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed promised the hub of the South that City Hall was “ready for the snow.”That turned out to have been serious hubris, as the city whose phoenix symbol rises from the fire saw two inches of snow and ice turn into a nightmare gridlock that stranded motorists in sub-zero weather for more than 18 hours and left school children having to spend nights in school buses alongside interstate highways.
Ontario's Liberal government will move quickly to retroactively raise the $10.25 an hour minimum wage, which has been frozen for four years, sources said Monday.
Government sources told The Canadian Press there would be an announcement later this week to hike the minimum wage retroactively to 2010, based on the rate of inflation since then — which ranged from 0.91 to 2.9 per cent.
Premier Kathleen Wynne joked with reporters at an Ottawa news conference Monday when they tried repeatedly to find out what the new minimum wage would be.
"What you're trying to do is come at the number from any angle, but I'm not going to take the bait," Wynne said with a chuckle.
"Really, you're not going to have to wait a long time because we have a pretty good idea of where we want to go, so very soon you will get that number."
The Ontario Convenience Stores Association said Monday it likes seeing future increases in the minimum wage tied to the inflation rate, and wasn't concerned by a retroactive hike back to 2010, saying "it looks very minimal and will protect jobs."
The Ontario Chamber of Commerce had recommended future changes in the minimum wage to be tied to the rate of inflation, but the Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses was not happy with the prospect of a retroactive increase.
"Businesses can't go back to their customers and retroactively charge more fees for their products and services, so really why should government be able to do this," asked CFIB policy analyst Nicole Troster?
"I think any kind of increase, be it an increase in the hourly rate or retroactive increases, it's going to make it difficult for businesses to cope, period."
Billionaire Obama donor Tom Steyer, who is funding and leading the environmentalist campaign against the Keystone XL pipeline, will air an anti-Keystone ad on MSNBC before and after President Barack Obama's State of the Union address on Tuesday evening. The minute-long ad, entitled "Sucker Punch," claims that Canada may not send its tar sand oil through the pipeline to the U.S., and implies it will send the oil to China instead. ...
Steyer has also been criticized for having made much of his fortune through investments in the oil and gas industry. Ezra Levant of Sun News wrote last year: "Steyer hasn't campaigned against OPEC oil. It's Canadian oil he's against. The same Canadian oil that helped make him rich." Steyer is also investing in a rival pipeline that would carry the oil to the Canadian province of British Columbia. He promises to donate the profits.
It is thought that Steyer's donations, and his ability to organize other donors in the San Francisco area, play a key role in the Obama administration's repeated decisions to delay the Keystone XL project. Steyer hosted fundraisers for Obama last year on Billionaires' Row in San Francisco at which the president famously predicted that Nancy Pelosi would recover the Speaker's gavel in the House of Representatives.
All relatives of the executed uncle of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, including children and the country's ambassadors to Cuba and Malaysia, have also been put to death at the leader's instruction, multiple sources said Sunday.
Jang Song-thaek, the once-powerful uncle, was executed last month on charges of attempting to overthrow the communist regime, including contemplating a military-backed coup. All direct relatives of Jang have also been executed, the sources said.
"Extensive executions have been carried out for relatives of Jang Song-thaek," one source said on condition of anonymity. "All relatives of Jang have been put to death, including even children."
The executed relatives include Jang's sister Jang Kye-sun, her husband and Ambassador to Cuba Jon Yong-jin, and Ambassador to Malaysia Jang Yong-chol, who is a nephew of Jang, as well as his two sons, the sources said.
All of them were recalled to Pyongyang in early December and executed, they said. The sons, daughters and even grandchildren of Jang's two brothers were all executed, they said.
It was unclear exactly when they were killed, but they are believed to have been put to death after Jang's death on Dec. 12.
Central African Republic's Muslim minority faces a rising wave of reprisal attacks and foreign governments must do more to prevent the country being torn apart, the top U.N. human rights official said on Monday.
Almost one million people, or a quarter of the population, have been displaced by fighting since the mainly Muslim Seleka rebel movement seized power in the majority Christian country last March, unleashing a wave of killing and looting.
Christian self-defense groups, known as "anti-balaka" or anti-machete, have taken up arms against them and the United Nations estimates that more than 2,000 people have been killed in the resulting bloodshed over the past 10 months.
Thieves broke into a small church in the mountains east of Rome over the weekend and stole a reliquary with the blood of the late Pope John Paul II, a custodian said on Monday.
American detainee Kenneth Bae, held captive in North Korea for over a year for "hostile acts," spoke at a North Korean press conference on Monday addressing the charges levied against him and pleading for American government intervention.
Speaking in front of video cameras and multiple news outlets in Pyongyang, Bae's comments were sanctioned by the North Korean government and some possibly coerced. Bae admitted he had committed a "serious crime" and asked the North Korean government to pardon him. ...
Pope Francis is considering a trip to South Korea in August to meet with young Catholics, a Vatican spokesman said on Wednesday, in what would be his first visit to Asia where membership of the Church is increasing.
Father Federico Lombardi said the pontiff was also weighing visits to the Philippines and Sri Lanka, though these would not take place this year.
Catholics make up roughly 10 percent of the population of South Korea, which was visited twice by Pope John Paul II, and where the number of Catholics has grown by around 3 percent per annum for the past 11 years, according to Church figures.
Newly disclosed emails suggest senior policy officials at the Environmental Protection Agency and environmental groups are working closely to kill the Keystone XL pipeline, critics say.
"These damning emails make it clear that the Obama administration has been actively trying to stop this important project for years," Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., who has long advocated for the Canada-to-Texas pipeline's construction, said in a statement to Fox News.
The emails were obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request by the Energy and Environment Legal Institute. In one communication, Lena Moffit of the Sierra Club wrote to three senior policy staffers at the EPA, including Michael Goo, who was then the associate administrator for policy.
"Thanks so much for taking the time to meet with us on Keystone XL yesterday," she wrote. "Let me know if I can be helpful in any way -- particularly in further identifying those opportunities for EPA to engage that don't involve 'throwing your body across the tracks,' as Michael put it."
As the Dallas paper discovered, Davis' claim that she was a "single teen mom" is so much hokum. It turns out Davis was divorced at 21, not 19, and her time in a trailer park lasted only a few months. According to an interactive timeline, Davis did not file for divorce until December 1983, well after her 20th birthday.**
According to Jeffrey Davis, Wendy Davis left him the day after he finished paying for her education. “I made the last payment, and it was the next day she left,” Jeffry Davis said. Wendy Davis didn't deny the timing, although she suggested the break was long-coming. “The idea that suddenly there was this instantaneous departure after Jeff had partnered so beautifully with me in putting me through school is just absurd,” she said.
Harper isn't the only one to hold this sort of ethnic media event.
Toronto Mayor Rob Ford held court with ethnic media outlets on Monday.
In British Columbia, Premier Christy Clark was scheduled to do one on Thursday afternoon.
That didn't sit well with journalist Bob Mackin.
"These discriminatory sessions are not new, but they appear to be more common," he wrote on his website.
"Here we are, in 21st century, multicultural Canada, and political leaders are picking and choosing which types of media they want to accept questions from, based on ethnicity and language."
Much of Atlantic Canada is closing up and hunkering down as a major blizzard that already delivered a wallop of snow and wind to the U.S. Northeast sweeps through today.
Angry protesters took over a planned talk by First Nations leader Phil Fontaine in Winnipeg on Wednesday, resulting in the rescheduling of the event.Fontaine was scheduled to speak at the University of Winnipeg in the early afternoon on First Nations issues in the past, present and future.
But loud protesters crowded the area almost immediately after he began speaking, some armed with anti-oil sands signs, others with drums and some with their faces painted red and black.
Fontaine, a former Assembly of First Nations chief, accepted a job with TransCanada Pipeline, a natural gas and oil pipeline developer in December.
Protesters were angry he took the job, saying he isn't representing their interests and isn't thinking of the environment.
Relatives of China's president and other business and political leaders are linked to offshore tax havens that help "shroud the communist elite's wealth," a U.S.-based journalism group said Wednesday.
The report by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists might fuel politically awkward attention on President Xi Jinping's family and its wealth at a time when Xi has made fighting corruption a theme of his leadership.
Complaints that relatives of China's leaders abuse their positions to profit from real estate and other deals are widespread. But details on their activities, especially those at the highest party levels, are often hidden.
The ICIJ, based in Washington, said it obtained documents showing the identities of nearly 22,000 owners of companies and trusts in the British Virgin Islands, Samoa and other offshore centres. It said they include Xi's brother-in-law, former Premier Wen Jiabao's son and son-in-law and relatives of other ruling party figures.
"Close relatives of China's top leaders have held secretive offshore companies in tax havens that helped shroud the communist elite's wealth," the group said.
Chinese authorities moved quickly to block the country's public from seeing Wednesday's report. Access to the ICIJ website was blocked, as were foreign news reports about it. A reporter posted an Internet link to the report on the popular Sina Weibo microblog service but received a message from the company saying other users were blocked from seeing it.
South Korea recorded its fastest growth since the first quarter of 2011, its central bank said Thursday, showing a recovery in Asia's fourth-largest economy is on track.
As the debate over the federal wage floor heats up in Washington, experts are making the point that the minimum wage does not equal a living wage.
Amy Glasmeier, a professor of economic geography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has created a living wage calculator based on government data, which bears out this argument.
She breaks down the total cost of living, including food, housing, transportation, child and health care, based on the county in which people live.
Glasmeier said the cost of living rises with the size of the city.
For instance, in places with fewer than 250,000 people, Glasmeier found that the living wage would be between $12 and $15 per hour. In cities with 250,000 to 1 million residents, its $17, and in cities with more than one million residents, it's $20 per hour.
"The living wage calculator shows what you really need to make it, to survive," Glasmeier siad. "The minimum wage was never meant to be something for people to live on."
Using Glasmeier's calculator, Burgos would need to make about $15 per hour. But because he has three kids, his living wage would need to be slightly higher.
Any increase in his wage would make a huge difference to his life, Burgos said. That's why he's participated in several union-backed fast food strikes that have been building momentum across the country in the last couple of years. He hopes lawmakers will try to bridge the gap.
"[Politicians] don't really know how it feels to live in poverty, so they say let's raise the minimum wage to $10.10 and maybe they'll shut up," he said. "But $10.10 means we'll still have to struggle. It's really not a living wage."
The March for Life 2014 drew thousands, who braved the freezing temperatures to express their opposition to abortion on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade.The 41st March for Life, held on each year since the momentous decision by the Supreme Court to legalize abortion, was once again attended by thousands, but this time they had one of the biggest winter storms to contend with, however, this didn’t stop any of the many young people attending the event.
Pro-life activists spotted giving boxes of pizza to the homeless
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo may not have room in his state for “extremist conservatives” who believe in the right to life, but Sen. Ted Cruz would be more than happy to welcome them to his neck of the woods...
There’s a post at Buzzfeed’s community-contributed section titled, get this, “29 Astounding Soviet Propaganda Images Promoting Racial Equality.” The subtitle is “Whoa. The Soviet Union got racial equality right before America?”
Here’s first paragraph:
Under its policy of internationalism, the Soviet Union tried to eliminate racism right from the beginning — aggressively instituting domestic and international policies of equality, humanism, and anti-colonialism.What a great guy that Stalin was!
As Christians of every stripe in Jesus' hometown of Nazareth begin to again take a real stand for their faith, local Muslims are warning them not to overstep the boundaries of their traditional place in the Middle East (hint: they must remain dhimmis, or second-class).
A large billboard hanging at a central point in Nazareth features a picture of an Israeli stop sign, along with the English translation of a verse from the Koran cautioning Christians (and Jews) to speak only the "truth" regarding Allah.
President Obama will meet with Pope Francis on March 27, capping a European trip that will take him to the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy.
Adam Kredo of the Washington Free Beacon, citing congressional and other sources, reports: "Executive orders grant the president significant leverage in the how sanctions are implemented, meaning that Obama could choose to stop enforcing many of the laws on the books, according to government insiders."
The expectation is that the Obama administration will not only resist new sanctions, but will push back against congressional oversight of the Iran deal, which took effect Jan. 20 and trades some sanctions relief for temporary stalling of high-level uranium enrichment, among other minor and reversible concessions.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry says he still doesn't have an answer on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline extension, and suggests it won't be coming any time soon.
Turns out Trudeau did bill taxpayers three times for the sum of $840.05 he said Thursday he returned to the Receiver General in early December after the House of Commons caught him billing $672.00 in transportation costs to Kingston, Ont., on April 25, 2012, for work unrelated to his MP responsibilities.
Convicted terrorist Omar Khadr is being transferred from his maximum-security cell to a medium-security penitentiary in central Alberta
North Korea proposed on Thursday that the rival Koreas halt hostile military actions and mutual vilification to build better relations. But it said it would maintain its nuclear weapons program, while urging South Korea to cancel upcoming military drills with the United States.
Paignton Zoo in Devon is grabbing bananas out of its monkeys' hands, giving them leafy veggies and sprouts instead.This is no monkey-business diet fad, though.The zoo says the high calorie and sugar content of bananas grown for human consumption -- which are sweeter than those found in the wild -- are bad for the monkeys' health and can rot their teeth.
On Wednesday, the pollster released the results of their popular quarterly premier survey which suggests both of the premiers' approval ratings are on the decline.
Premier Wynne now has a rating of 34 per cent. That's down four percentage points from September 2013, the last time Angus Reid conducted this survey.
Marois' popularity has dropped a whopping seven points to 32 percent.
Mustafa al-Gharib, a 22-year-old Canadian-born Muslim convert who left Calgary for Syria in November 2012, has been killed by Free Syrian Army (FSA) forces during rebel infighting, CBC News has confirmed.According to sources in Syria and Canada, al-Gharib was injured in battle, and subsequently captured and killed by an unknown faction of the FSA in the city of Aleppo.
Born in Nova Scotia as Damian Clairmont, al-Gharib was reportedly fighting with Jabhat al-Nusra, an al-Qaeda-affiliated rebel group consisting of largely foreign extremists.
Jabhat al-Nusra was designated a terrorist group by the Canadian government in November 2013.
Minutes after the American consulate in Benghazi came under assault on Sept. 11, 2012, the nation's top civilian and uniformed defense officials -- headed for a previously scheduled Oval Office session with President Obama -- were informed that the event was a "terrorist attack," declassified documents show. The new evidence raises the question of why the top military men, one of whom was a member of the president's Cabinet, allowed him and other senior Obama administration officials to press a false narrative of the Benghazi attacks for two weeks afterward.
Gates also confirms that Lee Myung Bak had intended to carry out a “disproportional” response using “both aircraft and artillery” after North Korea’s attacks of 2010, but that the Obama Administration forced Lee to call off the strikes.
So how close are the Irish to winning the ethnic-cleansing sweepstakes? They got their official apology from Tony Blair in 1997—always the key first step, but we’re well into a new century and those checks aren’t even in the mail. What gives?
Substitute Communist China for imperial Japan and the same thing is now occurring in the Pacific. China believes it is finally time to make its military reflect its enormous economic power.
Chinese armed forces are growing while America’s are shrinking. China does not like visiting American blowhards — most recently, Vice President Joe Biden — lecturing them on human rights, especially when American power, both military and economic, appears to be waning.
If the Japanese of the 1930s once talked of Western decadence and American frivolity, so too the Chinese now sense that American global influence is not being earned by the current generation of Americans, who enjoy the high life on $17 trillion in borrowed money, much of it from China.
China likewise senses growing American isolationism, hears parlor talk about the U.S. reducing its nuclear arsenal, and notices America’s new habit of distancing itself from allies.
Americans once talked tough about Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria. But China tuned out that empty rhetoric and instead noted that we abandoned Iraq after the successful surge, are exhausted by Afghanistan, were humiliated by Bashar Assad in Syria, and were seemingly paid back with Benghazi after removing Moammar Qaddafi in Libya. China is reassured that what America says and what America does are not quite the same thing.
More important, the Chinese also appear to hate the Japanese in the same way the latter despised the former in the 1930s. China resents Japan’s undeniable lack of contrition over the approximately 15 million Chinese killed by Japanese aggression in World War II. The Chinese also sense that Japan may be a has-been power, with an aging, shrinking population; energy woes; a sluggish, deflationary economy; and increasingly without its once-ubiquitous American patron at its side.
China accepts that the U.N., like the old League of Nations, is useless in solving global tensions, and prefers that it be so.
Add everything up and China seems about as confident of the future as Japan once was in the 1930s. It is as eager to teach Japan a lesson as Japan once did China.
Meryl Streep calls out Walt Disney as an anti-Semite (based purely on anecdotal evidence) all the while praising a real anti-Semite such as Emma Thompson who tried to get an Israel acting group is-invited from performing in Hebrew Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice” at the Globe Theatre in London.
