Monday Post

Starting the week off right...


Malaysia Airlines flight 370 has at last been located in the Indian Ocean:

Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak announced overnight that new satellite data from UK company Inmarsat showed the Malaysia Airlines plane flew along the southern search corridor.

"Using a type of analysis never before used in an investigation of this sort, they have been able to shed more light on MH370's flight path," he said.

The analysis concluded that the plane's last position was in the middle of the Indian Ocean, west of Perth.

"It is therefore with deep sadness and regret that I must inform you that in light of this new data, MH370 flight ended in the southern Indian Ocean," Mr Najib said.

Weeks of meandering, obfuscating and sheer cluelessness can be blamed for this.


The last Ukrainian troops withdraw from Crimea:

Ukraine's fledgling government ordered troops to retreat from Crimea on Monday, ending days of wavering as Western leaders tried to present a unified response to Russia's increasingly firm control of the peninsula. 

Russian forces have been systematically seizing Ukrainian ships and military installations in Crimea, including a naval base near the eastern Crimean port of Feodosia, where two injured servicemen were taken captive on Monday and as many as 80 were detained on-site, Ukrainian officials said. 

With the storming of at least three military facilities over the past three days alone -- and the decision by some to switch to the Russian side -- it wasn't clear how many Ukrainian troops remained on the peninsula. 

The former chief of Ukraine's navy, who was charged with treason after he swore allegiance to the Crimean authorities and urged others to defect, was named a deputy chief of Russia's Black Sea Fleet. 

Ukraine's acting president, Oleksandr Turchnynov, whose new government has struggled to maintain control and cohesion, said the Defense Ministry was ordered to withdraw all servicemen in Crimea to Ukraine's mainland. 

(Sidebar: that is where they will be needed because Putin is not done yet.)


Oh, we're scared:

Russia announced on Monday that it was barring 13 Canadian officials, lawmakers and public figures from the country in retaliation for sanctions imposed by Canada over Russia's annexation of Crimea.

The Canadians prohibited from entering Russia include aides to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and members of parliament and the head of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, Paul Grod, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

It was only a matter of time before Russia did anything to directly impede Canada as a business partner. If it can annex part of Ukraine, don't think for one minute that it will play nicely when divvying up the Arctic.


So the reason why now former Alberta Premier Alison Redford was made to resign was because of chauvinism, not her waste of taxpayers dollars?

Resigning Alberta Premier Alison Redford is an insightful and smart woman and it wouldn't be a shock if gender bias played a role in her departure, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne says.

"I hope that it's not the case that there was a gender issue in terms of the decision that she made," Wynne said Saturday.

"Would it be a shock to me if there were some part of the decision that had to do with her being a woman? It wouldn't be a shock to me."

Nice deflection, there, O Friend of Dalton and Benjamin. You don't think voters might remember this sort of vain trickery during election time, do you?


Oh crap:

A traveller returning to Canada from west Africa has been hospitalized after displaying symptoms consistent with those of the Ebola virus that has killed dozens in Guinea, a health official said Monday.

"All we know at this point is that we have a person who is critically ill who travelled from a country where these diseases occur," Denise Werker, joint director of health in Saskatchewan province in western Canada, told reporters.

She said the casualty had been in Liberia and had developed the symptoms after landing in Canada. He or she would not have been contagious when travelling and was now in isolation and while the has been placed in quarantine, pending test results.

Aid workers and health officials in Guinea are battling to contain west Africa's first outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus as neighboring Liberia reported its first suspected victims.

At least 59 people are known to have died in Guinea's southern forests but the Liberian cases, if confirmed, would mark the first spread of the highly contagious pathogen into another country.

 
Not good.


Never underestimate the human ability for complete and utter depravity:

One of the country’s leading hospitals, Addenbrooke’s in Cambridge, incinerated 797 babies below 13 weeks gestation at their own ‘waste to energy’ plant. The mothers were told the remains had been ‘cremated.’ Another ‘waste to energy’ facility at Ipswich Hospital, operated by a private contractor, incinerated 1,101 fetal remains between 2011 and 2013.

I'm sure there are apologists of all sorts for this sick thing.


But wait! There's more evil!

Arab residents of Abu Dis Arab threw four puppies at a border police patrol, causing them deaths. A heartbreaking action near the separation barrier in Abu Dis, East of Jerusalem. Arabs threw four bags with live puppies from behind the high walls at a border police patrol while on activity. The stunned police were still able hear the puppies whimpering. They opened the bags and found three puppies had died on the spot, and another puppy dying. The cub was transferred immediately to a vet, but died a short time later. The policemen were horrified by the brutality against the pups, and the talk of the day amongst their company dealt with the incident.

We've seen this Malthusian apocalyptic nonsense before:

A new infographic that recently hit the web, called the World Food Clock, is showing us exactly how much food the world consumes, even timed down to the second, and coupled with the draft version of a new climate report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it's really showing us how we're going to be vulnerable in a warmer world.

Does this infographic talk about how much food is wasted each year (Canada wastes about forty percent each year)? Does it explain why countries like North Korea have starving populations? Could it be that food distribution, not growth or even personal consumption, could be a much bigger and actual problem than projected fantasies related to the "green" cash cow of "global warming"?