Friday Post

Just in time for the week-end...


Al-Shabab has claimed responsibility for killing nine people at a hotel in Mogadishu and murdering people on a beach:

Al-Shabab militants blasted their way into a Mogadishu hotel on Friday and took up positions inside, killing at least nine people and exchanging fire with security forces seeking to recapture the facility, a Somali police official said.

One survivor who made it safely outside the Maka Al-Mukarramah hotel in the Somali capital said the militants were killing anyone they could find inside. He did not give his name.

The attack started when a suicide bomber detonated his explosives-laden car at the gate of the hotel. Gunmen then quickly moved in, Capt. Mohamed Hussein told The Associated Press from the scene of the attack.

Hours later, the militants were still holed up in the hotel's dark alleys and rooms. Sporadic gunfire could be heard, but it appeared that the security forces would wait until daybreak before trying again to dislodge the militants.

(Sidebar: by "militants", the "reporter" means terrorists.)

 

The Somali extremist group Al Shabaab have released a new video, showing civilians being forced into the sea and murdered in a hail of gunfire. 

Entitled 'In Remembrance 2',the video show Al-Shabaab coldly executing civilians with machine guns before leaving the bodies to rot on the beach.

The chilling video is the second part of a two episode series by Al-Shabaab's main media branch, al-Kataib Foundation.

The horrific scenes show half a dozen fully clothed civilians being forced into the sea, somewhere on the Somali coast.

Al-Shabaab gunmen, armed with machine guns proceed to callously gun down the prisoners in the sea. 

Videoed from the beach, sporadic gunshot is shown hitting the exposed heads of the struggling victims. The water is shown splashing as the hail of gunfire continues from the beach.

Graphic closeup footage of the dead bodies are shown, floating fully clothed in the water. The lifeless bodies appear to be left unburied, with footage later showing one of the corpses rotting on the sand.

The Tories are amending the proposed Bill C-51:

The government will propose a handful of amendments to the proposed anti-terror bill when it goes to clause-by-clause review on Tuesday, CBC News has learned, including a proposal that would protect protests from being captured by the new measures.

"Many witnesses were concerned that by saying "lawful" protests would not be considered terrorist acts, it meant that protests which were not necessarily terrorist, but not necessarily legal, could be," CBC News correspondent Chris Hall explained in an interview on CBC News Network on Friday afternoon.

"For example, incidents of chaining yourself to a fence to protest, a logging decision or mine development."

That section will be changed to narrow the scope of what might be captured as a terrorist-related activity, he said.

Well, I would consider bursting into the House of Commons with a gun to be an act of terrorism and chaining one's self to fence an act paid for by a special-interest group.

The Ontario Sunshine List for 2015 has been released:

A total of 111,438 public sector workers in Ontario were paid more than $100,000 in 2014, according to details included in the so-called Sunshine List released this morning.  

 The annual sunshine list, which includes nurses, teachers, police and firefighters, in addition to provincial civil servants, grew by more than 13,600 workers over 2013. 

 Reporters are still poring through the six-volume report of big earners, but it appears Ontario Power Generation CEO Tom Mitchell topped the list again with $1.55 million in salary and benefits.

There are about 12,500 employees from OPG, Hydro One and their subsidiaries on the 2014 list, up by nearly 1,000 over 2013, when the auditor general warned those salaries were driving up electricity rates.

Premier Kathleen Wynne was paid just over $209,00 last year, up about $10,000 from 2013.

The Public Salary Disclosure Act requires organizations that receive public funding from the Province of Ontario to disclose annually the names, positions, salaries and total taxable benefits of employees paid $100,000 or more in a calendar year.

The act was brought in under the Mike Harris-led Progressive Conservative government in 1996. At the time, Harris said it served as an important check on the public payroll. If the list was adjusted for inflation since 1996, the real benchmark salary would now be around $145,000.

 
Because Ontario Liberal voters don't have a problem with bloated, useless public sector workers, it is unlikely that this will change any time soon.


No, I would argue that millennial progressive leftist would-be voters know very little about politics because they believe government intervention and higher taxes magically fix everything and the only irreconcilable cultural differences out there are ones that involve food in some way:

The abysmal turnout among Millennials in the last two federal elections has been singled out to Elections Canada as one of the main culprits in the overall demise in voting numbers.

But the problem is not that young voters are any less civically engaged or politically aware than their older compatriots.

There is a generational divide between Canadians under age 35 and those over, says the study released Friday by the Broadbent Institute.

“When we ask why they don’t vote, a lot of them say the biggest reason is not because they don’t know about politics,” David McGrane, a professor of political science at the University of Saskatchewan and author of the report, tells Yahoo Canada News.

“They know every bit as much as older Canadians. They know where to vote; they know how to vote.”

But young voters across the country tend to lean to the left of the political spectrum, says McGrane, who was among a team that surveyed more than 8,100 voters across the country over the past four years.

They are more socially progressive and they’re looking for an activist government, says his report. 

They support social spending and they’re in favour of higher taxes if it means better public services.

Compared to older Canadians, they are less likely to favour economic growth over the environment. Health and education are priorities for them, not crime and justice, McGrane says.

“So, they’re really describing a policy agenda and a set of political priorities that I think are quite different from Stephen Harper,” he says.

(Sidebar: oh, surprise, surprise.)

This is something Obama might do:





It's no wonder why lawyers are hated:




On March 26th, 2010, the ROKS Cheonan was sunk by the North Koreans killing forty-six sailors.

South Korea responded by ... doing nothing of any consequence, really, unless one calls already frosty relations action. So unless President Park is ready to lay some serious hurt onto North Korea, forty-six men died for nothing:

President Park Geun-hye paid tribute Thursday to the dozens of fallen soldiers who died in a North Korean torpedo attack five years ago, saying she will build a strong defense posture to prevent similar tragedies.

On March 26, 2010, the 1,200-ton warship Cheonan sank near the western maritime border with North Korea, killing 46 of the 104 sailors on board. A South Korean-led investigation, including experts from the U.S., Australia, Britain and Sweden, concluded that the corvette was downed by a North Korean torpedo, but Pyongyang has denied any responsibility.

Speaking at a memorial ceremony in Daejeon National Cemetery, 164 kilometers south of Seoul, Park vowed to push for reunification of the two Koreas to honor the fallen soldiers.

"The government will expand our national defense capabilities and establish a firm war deterrent based on our solid alliance with the United States, and ensure that incidents similar to the attack on the Cheonan never happen again," Park said in her address to the more than 5,000 people gathered, including the bereaved families, survivors, top government officials and citizens.

She also ordered the military to be on the alert against unexpected provocations and block all such possibilities.

"I hope North Korea also abandons its reckless provocations and belief that nuclear weapons can protect it," Park said. "Only when North Korea abandons its isolation and stagnation for the road to true change will we be able to build a new Korean Peninsula."

This year marks the 70th year since Korea gained independence from Japanese colonial rule and came under U.S. military occupation in the South and Soviet occupation in the North.

"Realizing a unified homeland where people of both the South and North are happy is sure to be an earnest wish of our patriotic martyrs and a way to ensure that the sacrifices of the Cheonan soldiers were not in vain," Park said.

Adding insult to injury:

North Korea on Wednesday again denied responsibility for sinking the South Korean navy corvette Cheonan in 2010 and blamed the U.S. for "fabricating" the incident. 

North Koreans escape their homeland moreso for freedom than food, have a harder time acclimatising to the south,  suffer from depression, North Korean soldiers are defecting like crazy, defectors seek refuge in the south in great numbers and - for some reason- Kim Jong-Un is still alive. 


And now, spring in South Korea:

(photo credit here)

Screw you, "global warming".