Sunday Post

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Oh, dear:

The roof of a church has collapsed during a packed service in Nigeria, killing at least 160 worshippers, a hospital director has said.

Morgues are overflowing and the number of dead is expected to rise much further, Etete Peters of the University of Uyo Teaching Hospital told the Associated Press.

Dozens of people were also injured in the collapse in the southern city of Uyo in Akwa Ibom state.

The Reigners Bible Church International was reportedly still under construction when it was being used for a ceremony to ordain church founder Akan Weeks as a bishop.

Witnesses said hundreds of people were inside when metal girders crashed and the corrugated iron roof caved in.

A Kurdish extremist group to credit for a bomb that killed thirty-eight people in Turkey:

Turkey declared a national day of mourning, launched a full investigation and paid tribute to the dead Sunday after two bombings in Istanbul killed 38 people and wounded 155 others near a soccer stadium. The attack was claimed by a Turkey-based Kurdish militant group.

In a statement posted on its website , the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons, or TAK, said two of its members had sacrificed their lives in the Saturday night attack that targeted security forces outside a stadium shortly after the conclusion of a soccer match.

"Two of our comrades were heroically martyred in the attack," the statement read. It said the attack was reprisal for state violence in the southeast and the ongoing imprisonment of Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK. TAK is considered by authorities as a PKK offshoot.

Sit back and watch both the Kurdish extremists and Erdogan finish each other off.





ISIS recaptures a city it has already destroyed:

Islamic State has regained control of Syria's ancient city of Palmyra, activists and a news agency affiliated with the militant group have said.

What further damage could it do? ISIS has already destroyed artefacts that existed even before Christ walked the earth. What else is it going to do?

How does one expect a civilisation to grow in only rubble, not out of it? What is left to admire or ponder? What art or architecture remains to remind generations to come of what ingenuity or admiration meant to people who laboured to produce what now is a pile of rocks?





Twenty-five were killed during Sunday Mass in Egypt:

A bombing at a chapel adjacent to Egypt’s main Coptic Christian cathedral killed 25 people and wounded another 49 during Sunday Mass, in one of the deadliest attacks carried out against the religious minority in recent memory.

The attack came two days after a bomb elsewhere in Cairo killed six policemen, an assault claimed by a shadowy group that authorities say is linked to the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood and which claimed responsibility for a pair of assassination attempts earlier this year in Cairo that targeted Egypt’s former mufti, or chief Muslim theologian, and an aide to the country’s top prosecutor.

Nothing to do with Islam ever.





Oh, this can't be good:

The West is turning inward and going home, leaving the field to the rising authoritarians — Russia, China and Iran.

People will rue the day that the West finally packed up its toys and headed home.





Ladies and gentlemen, a train wreck is imminent:

Canada needs to change the Constitution to ensure indigenous leaders can be in the room when the prime minister sits down to do serious business with the provinces and territories, the head of the Assembly of First Nations said Friday.

“Until that Constitution is fixed, we will continue to be excluded,” said National Chief Perry Bellegarde.

Indigenous leaders were frustrated at being invited to Friday’s meeting with the premiers, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden, but excluded from the afternoon session on climate change.

(Sidebar: big clue, Chief, the government you helped put in place will punish the poor with a tax on an element that isn't melting ice caps. The Australians are still hopping mad about carbon taxes.)

They argue that Aboriginal Peoples and their traditional way of life suffer some of the worst effects of climate change, despite having next to nothing to do with the cause, and they should be fully involved in decisions on a solution.

The challenge right now is that the Constitution does not recognize First Nations, Metis and Inuit leaders as representatives from an order of government, said Bellegarde, who acknowledged aboriginal priorities were discussed during the morning meeting.

(Sidebar: or you could integrate and not live in northern ghettos were the opportunities are few.)


Hair-Boy can override his dad's precious Charter (and in the process, God willing, destroy it) or he can ignore this valuable whining voters block at his own political peril.

Any takers?





A bill has passed to ostensibly make things easier at the border:

A bill with potentially sweeping consequences for the Canada-U.S. border has just been adopted by the American Congress, allowing new projects aimed at speeding up travel through the international boundary.

The so-called preclearance bill has now been adopted by both U.S. legislative chambers after being passed by the Senate early Saturday. It's now expected to become law with President Barack Obama's signature.

Officials in both countries celebrated the news. The project has involved both U.S. political parties and the Harper and Trudeau governments, yet some participants had begun worrying it might stall from inertia.

It was finally taken up in the last moments of the current Congress, passed first by the House of Representatives and then the Senate this week as lawmakers prepared to dissolve and reconvene a new post-election legislature after the holidays.

I'll believe it when I see it.





An election? It will end the same way the others did - the Liberals will get in or their clone Tories (but not likely) and the NDP will hang on like a gangrenous limb.


(Paws up)





And now, a post-birthday fact about Emily Dickinson:

Dickinson’s approach to poetry was unconventional. As her original manuscripts reveal, she interspersed her writing with many dashes of varying lengths and orientations (horizontal and vertical). Early editors cleaned up her unconventional markings, publishing her poems without her original notations. Scholars still debate how Dickinson’s unusual punctuation affected the rhythm and deeper meaning of her poems.

But, Miss Dickinson!