Mid-Week Post

Your middle-of-the-week fun!



Liberals are patting themselves on the back for bringing in more of their voters block (some of whom weren't sponsored by the Liberal government but privately):

Over 10,000 Syrian refugees are expected to arrive in Canada by the end of today, marking a milestone for the Liberals who had promised to resettle that many by the end of 2015.

The Liberals originally committed to resettling 25,000 government-assisted refugees by Dec. 31 but lowered the target to 10,000 in November, announcing they would be a mix of government-assisted and privately sponsored refugees.

 
Did we forget Paris and Cologne already?




PM Trulander was so busy squeezing in more selfies that he neglected to clarify whether the government would be funding ethical and proven adult stem-cell research or embryonic stem-cell research which amounts to junk science (something the popular press never distinguish):

The first official visit of a sitting prime minister to Toronto's city hall in almost 20 years was marked by a cheering mob of onlookers and staffers, not-so-subtle digs at Justin Trudeau's predecessor and, of course, selfies.

Trudeau made a $20-million funding announcement Wednesday to help establish a stem-cell therapy development facility in the city, but the biggest hoopla was reserved for his subsequent city hall visit.

He also managed to squeeze in the same old, tired "politics of division" crap because he's not an orator who can think on his feet but some puppet-guy with a hand up his @$$.



Remember -  all cultures have something positive to add to the greater one:

A mom is now in Winnipeg after fleeing Nigeria to prevent her daughters from undergoing female genital mutilation.

FGM, sometimes known as female circumcision, involves removing all or part of the clitoris as well as, often, the labia to make young girls appear "more virginal."

The woman's father-in-law insisted her first daughter have FGM when she was just a few months old.

"She was forced to get in the vehicle and driven to a rural area and … she couldn't bear to stay there while this was being forcibly done to her daughter," said lawyer Bashir Khan, who helped the woman get refugee status in Canada.

He said the procedure was botched.

"They cut off too much of [the daughter's] clitoris, and she nearly died from the infection," said Khan.

Then, when she became pregnant with triplets – all female – the woman was told she could have the procedure done on the babies when they were born or abort them, Khan said.

Instead, she fled Nigeria, and arrived in Canada in November 2015 when she was 29 weeks pregnant.

By the way, Trudeau refused to call this mutilation barbaric.

Carry on.



Belgian police have uncovered safe houses of terrorists who carried last year's attacks in Paris:

Belgian police have identified three safe houses used by key suspects including presumed ringleader Abdelhamid Abaaoud as they plotted the deadly Paris attacks, prosecutors said Wednesday.

The premises include a flat in Charleroi -- a town south of the capital Brussels where a major airport is located, as well as a house in the rural village of Auvelais near the French border and a flat in Brussels.

"The investigators were able to identify three premises that have been used by the conspiring perpetrators of the attacks of 13th November 2015," Eric Van Der Sypt, a spokesman for the federal prosecutor, said in a statement.

French President Francois Hollande has previously said that the Paris attacks in which 130 people were killed were planned in Syria but prepared and organised in Belgium.

The Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for the attacks.

South Korea fires upon a North Korean drone:

South Korea on Wednesday fired 20 machine-gun warning shots after a North Korean drone briefly crossed the rivals' border, officials said, the first shots fired in a Cold War-style standoff between the Koreas in the wake of the North's nuclear test last week.

The North Korean drone was flying dozens of meters (yards) south of the border and turned back to the North after the South fired the shots, South Korean defence and military officials said, requesting anonymity because of office rules. The shots did not hit the drone.

 


Getting adulation for something one is supposed to do still doesn't count as earth-shattering:

Mark Zuckerberg sparked a social media debate over child vaccines after posting a photo of himself with his newborn daughter at the doctor’s office.

The image shows his daughter, Max, sitting on his lap while sporting a cute winter onesie, alongside a caption: “Doctor’s visit – time for the vaccines!”

It quickly generated more than three million likes and a long thread of comments with many weighing in on the vaccine debate.

“Vaccine is poison for human kind,” commented one Facebook user Elza Sakz. “It kills more people than it helps. I wish people don’t take this as an example here.”

 
One group of people wants a sticker just for breathing and another doesn't trust its own eyes when it sees people unaffected by polio.




Paleontologists discover a saltwater crocodile that may have been the largest crocodile on Earth:

Scientists have discovered what may be the largest marine crocodile that ever lived, a monstrous predator as long as a bus that crunched up and ate sea turtles with blunt, bullet-shaped teeth.

The new species, named Machimosaurus rex, grew to be about 10 metres long and hunted in the shallow seas of what is now Tunisia around 130 million years ago, during the age of dinosaurs, report scientists in a new paper published in the journal Cretaceous Research.

Its powerful jaws were equipped with teeth shaped like "armour-piercing bullets," said Tetsuto Miyashita, a PhD candidate in paleontology at the University of Alberta who co-authored the study. "Those are built for crushing the bones rather than [to] slice through or pierce through flesh."

Those teeth were likely the perfect tool for crunching through the shells of turtles that were common in the tropical waters where it lived.

Chris Pratt should totally be in a movie about this. 

 And now, a lone train station stays open so that a little trooper of a student can board a train each day until she graduates:

A desolate Japanese train station will remain open until after the sole high school student who regularly uses it graduates later this year.

Every weekday, Kana Harada boards the train at Kyu-Shirataki Station, which is an hour ride to her school in the main city of Asahikawa. Her parents drive her to the station every morning, which take about five minutes, and Harada boards the 7:16 a.m. train. She’s usually the only passenger waiting on the platform.

About 10 other students are onboard the train once Harada gets on and she uses the hour-long ride to read, do homework or listen to music.

With only three services stopping at Kyu-Shirataki Station in the afternoon, Harada usually has to rush straight from school to catch the last train home.

After reviewing passenger numbers, Japan Rail Hokkaido had planned to close a number of lesser-used stations along their line, but decided to postpone the closure of Kyu-Shirataki after learning about Harada’s story.

The station is scheduled to close in March of this year, once she’s graduated.