Friday Post

Let's relax into the week-end....


Despite a truce, there is still violence in Ukraine:

Despite a truce called by Ukraine's protest leaders and the president they aim to oust, street fighting between protesters and police in the center of Kiev continued on Thursday morning, as the number of people reported dead in the conflict rose to 28.

Well, English is the language of commerce:

The Alberta Court of Appeal sided with the provincial government Friday, ruling that its laws do not need to be printed and published in both English and French.

Really? That's not what I heard:

In a speech full of irony and sly asides, retired lieutenant-general Andrew Leslie said he talked with "other political parties" when he left the Canadian Army, and in the end chose to become a Liberal.

**

Retired lieutenant-general Andrew Leslie engaged in lively discussions with Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s office about senior positions with the RCMP and a national museum before becoming an adviser to Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, according to emails.

The emails were provided to the Toronto Star by the Liberal party Friday after Leslie suggested recent Conservative attacks against him over $72,000 in relocation expenses were retaliation for his having chosen the Liberals over the Tories.

They were intended to prove the Conservatives were interested in the retired general, and that the Tories had no questions about the retired general’s judgment and character before he decided to enlist with Trudeau and company.

Yet the emails leave many questions unanswered, including how serious the retired general, whom the Liberals are touting as one of their star candidates going into next year’s federal election, was about working with the Conservatives, and vice versa.

"Chose"? Rather, he ran with the party that would have him.


Guess who wins this little contest?

Trudeau said he had "no interest in joining Mulcair and Harper in a competition seeing who can make Canadians angrier."

Who blames the leading party for everything, Obama Trudeau? Who believes the Canadian middle-class is suffering the way the American middle-class is? Who gleefully told a crowd of adoring old broads that the one-party dictatorship of China, which forcibly returns North Korean defectors and is complicit in the sexual exploitation of North Korean women, that he has an "admiration" for it? Who was that?


So this is what China is planning on doing with its surplus men:

China has long trained for an amphibious invasion of Taiwan during military exercises, but has now expanded its training to include a similar attack on the Senkaku Islands and other Japanese holdings in the East China Sea. All branches of China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) participated in a massive exercise last year for taking these islands.

According to James Fanell, Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence and Information Operations, U.S. Pacific Fleet:

We witnessed the massive amphibious and cross military region enterprise – Mission Action 2013. [We] concluded that the PLA has been given the new task to be able to conduct a short sharp war to destroy Japanese forces in the East China Sea following with what can only be expected a seizure of the Senkakus or even a southern Ryukyu [islands] – as some of their academics say. 
...
Tensions in the South and East China Seas have deteriorated with the Chinese Coast Guard playing the role of antagonist, harassing China’s neighbors while PLA Navy ships, their protectors, (make) port calls throughout the region promising friendship and cooperation.

This concept of a "short, sharp attack" is quite credible, as the Chinese people widely believe that America has become weak because of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and that, particularly under President Barack Obama, Americans have little will to oppose China. Thus, they could quickly overwhelm Japan's forces, America would do nothing, and Chinese ownership of the Japanese islands would be part of the new status quo.

And now, Olympians who refused their medals.