Mid-Week Post

The intermission of the work-week....



How embarrassing:

CBC News has "ended its relationship" with Power & Politics host Evan Solomon, CBC editor in chief Jennifer McGuire said in a note to staff.

The note came after the Toronto Star published a report claiming that Solomon had brokered art deals involving people whom he also dealt with as a journalist.

 Once again, the Toronto Star knocks down the pegs that the government will not. How sad is it that the Red Toronto Star is dismantling the CBC?



Two Russian ships track Prime Minister Stephen Harper:

Two Russian frigates shadowed HMCS Fredericton and tracked its course while Prime Minister Stephen Harper was on board today.

The vessels were spotted mid-morning, after Harper and his wife, Laureen, spent the night on board the Canadian frigate in the Baltic Sea.

 
Should one be looking out for polonium pellets?



The Senate should have been reformed in 1867:

The Auditor-General of Canada used a very large hammer to strike some flies in his investigation of senators’ expenses.

Five lead auditors plus “many other staff within the Office of the Auditor-General of Canada” examined more than 80,000 expense items for 116 past and current senators over a two-year period, from 2011 to 2013.

Headline-grabbing indiscretions and mistakes notwithstanding, the haul of the allegedly guilty in the A-G’s report is rather small. This conforms to a long pattern of A-G reports going back many years on various issues: They are astringent with praise and long with condemnation.

Thirty of the 116 senators were found to have done something possibly wrong or something that might warrant further inquiry.

Nine of the 30, Auditor-General Michael Ferguson recommended, should have files referred to the police. Upon examination of the incomplete information made public by the A-G and the senators’ responses, the sums at issue were not large and the senators’ prima facie explanations not implausible.

Here are the nine potentially guilty parties.

How embarrassing.

In case one forgot:

The scandal-plagued Senate has a cheerleader in Justin Trudeau after the Liberal leader said he wouldn't abolish the chamber because it's to Quebec's gain over other provinces to keep the lights on.

"We have 24 senators from Quebec and there are just six from Alberta and British Columbia. It's to our advantage," he told a French newspaper.

White people in the First World have too little to do:




Look- real rape cultures no one wants to talk about:

Gloria Steinem must have had her first reservations about “Women Cross DMZ” when the march’s organizer was outed as a North Korean apologist, and reporters began to ask her uncomfortable questions about North Korea’s war on women. Since then, Steinem has had to duck questions about the regime’s rape and murder of female prisoners, the endemic and unpunished rapes of North Korean women by its soldiers, and the infanticides and forced abortions this regime inflicts on North Korean refugee women and their babies. Steinem dismissed calls to speak up for North Korea’s millions of vulnerable women as “a bananas question.”

**

The upcoming annual conference of the National Organization for Women does not list ISIS or Boko Haram on its agenda. While the most recent Women’s Studies annual conference did focus on foreign policy, they were only interested in Palestine, a country which has never existed, and support for which is often synonymous with an anti-Israel position. Privately, feminists favor non-intervention, non-violence and the need for multilateral action, and they blame America for practically everything wrong in the world.

(Kamsahamnida)

 

A bombing at the temple at Karnak was thwarted:

Militants tried to attack the ancient temple of Karnak in southern Egypt on Wednesday, with a suicide bomber blowing himself up and two gunmen battling police. No sightseers were hurt in the thwarted assault, but it suggested that Islamic extremists are shifting targets from security forces to the country's vital tourism industry.

Culture matters:

A High Court judge has enraged child protection experts after saying that “cultural context” should be taken into account when investigating allegations of parental child abuse. ...

The father denied ever striking his son “with a belt or otherwise” but said he would give him a “slap or a tap”. He claimed: “this was not to slap [him] badly but to keep him disciplined.”

The man’s wife said she had seen him slap their son twice - as well as seeing him push and shout at their son.

But Mrs Justice Pauffley said: “I do not believe there was punitively harsh treatment of (the boy) of the kind that would merit the term physical abuse. Proper allowance must be made for what is, almost certainly, a different cultural context.

“Within many communities newly arrived in this country, children are slapped and hit for misbehaviour in a way which at first excites the interest of child protection professionals.”

(Sidebar: how much do you want to bet she wouldn't be lenient had the couple been anything but "ethnic"?)

People thought Randal Dooley's abuse was "cultural", too.

 

And who could forget Phoenix Sinclair.

And now, this is a real thing:

Here are 7 confiscated weapons that I know every one of y’all knew you couldn’t take on a plane. ...

3. A friggin’ Kinglon Batleth

Just... wow...

(From here)