For A Monday

On this, the last day of July ...

Australian authorities stop a plot of bring down an airplane:

Police have disrupted a terror plot to bring down a plane and arrested four men after raiding several properties in Sydney , Australia's prime minister has said.

Malcolm Turnbull told a news conference said the plot appeared to be "elaborate" rather than designed by a lone wolf.

He said: "I can report last night that there has been a major joint counter-terrorism operation to disrupt a terrorist plot to bring down an airplane.

"The threat of terrorism is very real. The efforts overnight have been very effective but there's more work to do."

He said security had been increased at all major international and domestic airports around Australia.

Officials did not specify if the plot targeted a domestic or international flight, but Sydney's Daily Telegraph reported that "a local route" had been the objective.

The four men held after a series of raids across Sydney on Saturday were allegedly linked to an "Islamic-inspired" plot, Australian Federal Police Commissioner Andrew Colvin said.

(Sidebar: oh, is that what the kids are calling it these days?) 

Also - he's trying for an insanity defense. Don't believe him:

Esseghaier, a Tunisian-born, Montreal-based PhD student, was convicted in 2015 of planning to blow a hole in an Ontario railway bridge. He also mused on tape about poisoning the food on a military base and setting off a volcano.

His arrest and conviction were hailed as landmarks in the Canadian battle against terrorism. But his case has since morphed into something much stranger and less morally clear.

According to multiple doctors, Esseghaier is severely mentally ill and almost certainly schizophrenic. 

He had long rejected that diagnosis. But in court documents filed this week, he revealed that he now agrees.

Then again, one would have to be insane to believe a war-mongering pedophile in the first place.




Saudi Arabia regards internationalisation of holy sites as "an act of war":

Saudi Arabia's foreign minister called what he said was Qatar's demand for an internationalization of the Muslim hajj pilgrimage a declaration of war against the kingdom, Saudi-owned Al Arabiya television said on Sunday, but Qatar said it never made such a call. 

"Qatar's demands to internationalize the holy sites is aggressive and a declaration of war against the kingdom," Adel al-Jubeir was quoted saying on Al Arabiya's website. 

"We reserve the right to respond to anyone who is working on the internationalization of the holy sites," he said. 

Qatar denies that it ever made such a claim.

Also:

The federal government says it's trying to find out more about reports that Saudi Arabia is using Canadian made military vehicles in clashes with militants.

 
Canada is back - as an arms dealer!


And:

Thousands of people rallied in Turkey's largest city on Sunday against security measures Israel has imposed at the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, shortly after Israel removed other measures that led to two weeks of violent Palestinian protests. 

I'm sure the goings-on of Israel are widely felt in Turkey.




This is the same country that backs an ever-belligerent North Korea:

President Xi Jinping said China needs to speed up the modernization of its military to fend off threats in increasingly dangerous times.

“The world isn’t safe at this moment” Xi, wearing a camouflauge military uniform, said on Sunday after riding in an open jeep at an army parade in Inner Mongolia. “A strong army is needed now more than ever.”

The speech came just hours after U.S. President Donald Trump lambasted China for failing to do more to stop North Korea’s nuclear program, saying “we will no longer allow this to continue.” North Korea, which relies on ally China for food and fuel, test-fired a second intercontinental ballistic missile late on Friday night.

Trump was wrong to believe that China wants a reunited or stable Korea. It should be clear to him now.


Also:

China hit back on Monday after U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted he was “very disappointed” in China following Pyongyang’s latest missile test, saying the problem did not arise in China and that all sides need to work for a solution.

China has become increasingly frustrated with American and Japanese criticism that it should do more to rein in Pyongyang. China is North Korea’s closest ally, but Beijing is angry with its continued nuclear and missile tests.

I'm not frustrated because I know China is a war-monger.




Oh, I'm sure that Glen Murray truly felt that it was time to go:

Glen Murray, Ontario’s minister of environment and climate change, is quitting to head an environmental think tank based in Alberta.

Murray is a longtime ally of Premier Kathleen Wynne’s, a former leadership rival who dropped out and endorsed her in 2013 and the minister trusted with the delicate and complicated job of devising the Liberals’ signature plan to cut the province’s greenhouse-gas emissions.

He’s proud to have had that responsibility, he said in a statement announcing his departure.

Again, he is totally sincere about this. There is no reason to think that he is fleeing while the fleeing is good.




Speaking of slime:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau encouraged people over the weekend to donate to the Canadian Red Cross to help British Columbians affected by raging wildfires and he made a similar appeal for Ontario and Quebec flood victims earlier this year.

However unlike many international disasters like the earthquakes in Nepal two years ago or in Haiti in 2010, Canada's appeal for domestic donations isn't shored up by a pledge that the government will pony up an equal amount of cash to match the individual donors.

Fires in northern New Brunswick force residents to flee:

About 25 people in northern New Brunswick have been forced to leave their homes because of a forest fire.

New Brunswick’s fire prevention officer says the fire on Miscou Island is out of control and appears to have grown to 90 hectares as of late Sunday afternoon.

Roger Collet says water bombers and dozens of fire crew are fighting the blaze on the island.

Collet says the fire has been burning since 4 p.m. Saturday and the rate of growth appears to have slowed.

Also - people who are generally unco-operative should know what it's like to get the short shrift:

First Nations in the path of British Columbia’s forests fires say to protect their communities they need equal funding and recognition of their expertise that is granted to other emergency response organizations.

A "world-class" Arctic station is near completion:

A decade after it was first promised, Canada’s new High Arctic Research Station is nearly complete and already giving scientists access to a vast new section of ice and tundra.

“We’re trying to come up with a long-term, systematic, multi-disciplinary view of this part of the world, which is really understudied,” said David Scott, president of Polar Knowledge Canada, which operates the new station in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut.

A line item in the 2007 federal budget, the station was a centrepiece of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Arctic strategy. Located in the centre of the High Arctic right along the Northwest Passage, the station was to give researchers a home base in a part of the North lacking in scientific infrastructure.

Although work will continue on the main building for a few months, the centre is “largely operational,” said Scott.

Researchers are already living and working on the site.

The parents of the late Charlie Gard are considering starting a charity for children with rare illnesses:

The parents of Charlie Gard are considering launching a charitable foundation to help other families with children suffering rare and complex genetic disorders.

An appeal launched by Connie Yates and Chris Gard received $2.23 million to help fund their legal battle to take their son to the U.S. for experimental treatment for the mitochondrial depletion syndrome he was suffering.

But, after losing that fight, and following Charlie’s death on Friday, the parents are said to be planning to use that money to set up an organization helping sick children.

Friday Post

For the week-end ...



The hospital that held Charlie Gard hostage before and after his parents' legal challenge to seek treatment elsewhere now reports his death:

Charlie Gard, a British baby who became the subject of a bitter dispute between his parents and doctors over whether he should be taken to the United States for experimental treatment, has died, local media said on Friday.

The 11-month-old baby suffered from an extremely rare genetic condition causing progressive brain damage and muscle weakness, and his parents' long struggle to save him drew an international outpouring of sympathy, including from U.S. President Donald Trump and Pope Francis.

"Our beautiful little boy has gone, we are so proud of you Charlie," Connie Yates, the baby's mother, was quoted as saying by the Daily Mail.

Local media said a family spokesman had confirmed the death.

"Everyone at Great Ormond Street Hospital sends their heartfelt condolences to Charlie’s parents and loved-ones at this very sad time," said a spokeswoman for the hospital where Charlie had been receiving treatment.

Oh, that's just rich. 

The hospital should have pointed out that if people did things its way, nobody would get hurt.

North Korea has launched is second ICBM towards Japan:

North Korea on Friday test-fired its second intercontinental ballistic missile, which flew longer and higher than the first according to its wary neighbours , leading analysts to conclude that a wide swath of the U.S. including Los Angeles and Chicago is now within range of Pyongyang's weapons.

Japanese government spokesman Yoshihide Suga said the missile, launched late Friday night, flew for about 45 minutes — about five minutes longer than the ICBM North Korea test-fired on July 4. 

The missile was launched on very high trajectory, which limited the distance it travelled , and landed west of Japan's island of Hokkaido.

North Korea would not be able to do this is its chief back, China, was sanctioned.

Also:

Malaysia will begin on October 2 the trial of two women accused of the dramatic killing of the estranged half brother of North Korea's leader, the High Court said on Friday.

Indonesian Siti Aisyah, 25, and Doan Thi Huong, 28, from Vietnam, are charged with murdering Kim Jong Nam at Kuala Lumpur airport on Feb. 13 by smearing his face with VX, a chemical the United Nations describes as a weapon of mass destruction.

A stabbing in Hamburg clearly has nothing to do with Islamism:

One man was killed and six people were injured in a stabbing attack in a supermarket in Hamburg on Friday, police said.

A 52-year-old German man was stabbed to death in an Edeka Supermarket. A 50-year-old woman and four men aged 64, 57, 56 and 19 suffered stabbing injuries. A 35-year-old man was injured while tackling the attacker, police said.

Police spokesperson Timo Zill said a kitchen knife was used in the stabbing, which he described as "indiscriminate" and "totally unexpected."

Police identified the attacker as a 26-year-old man born in the United Arab Emirates, but his citizenship was unclear.

The Americans drop a potential border tax:

Canadian officials are praising a U.S. decision to drop a contentious border tax proposal, suggesting its death signals an open-mindedness in the Trump administration on open borders and free trade.

Canada was thrown a bone. The Trudeau government will be brought to heel as it has been with the Chinese.





But ... but ... "green" energy!

We have a question for Premier Kathleen Wynne.

Would Ontario be back in the coal business if she hadn’t sold off majority control of Hydro One in a fire sale, to shore up her cash-starved government?

We think the answer from a Liberal government that has railed against the environmental evils of coal since it was elected in 2003 under premier Dalton McGuinty, is obvious.

That answer is no.

For heaven’s sake, Wynne passed a law making it illegal to generate electricity from coal in Ontario in 2015, after closing down the province’s last coal-fired power plant the year before.

A decade earlier, McGuinty spearheaded a Liberal government campaign against America’s use of coal to generate electricity, arguing it was responsible for most of Ontario’s air pollution.

And yet now, Ontario taxpayers, through their minority stake in Hydro One (the Wynne government is still the largest single shareholder), will soon be part owners of Montana’s mammoth Colstrip coal-fired electricity plant.

That’s because Hydro One is buying U.S. energy company Avista Corp. for $6.7 billion.

Avista is a co-owner of Colstrip, the largest facility of its kind west of the Mississippi and one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.

Some chick wants everyone else to play make-believe:

A Newfoundland and Labrador court will hear the case of a transgender activist vying for a non-binary birth certificate this fall.

Gemma Hickey appeared in the province’s Supreme Court in St. John’s Friday to set a Nov. 22 date for arguments in a challenge of the Vital Statistics Act’s change-of-sex designation provision.

Hickey is taking legal action against the Newfoundland and Labrador government to have a gender other than male and female formally recognized on such documents.

“I wanted to send a message out to people that are different, who don’t fit into an either-or category,” Hickey said in a phone interview after the hearing. “It’s important that people have the space to be who they are, and express that through gender. We deserve to be recognized.”

Hickey applied for a non-binary birth certificate in April and is believed to be the first in Canada to do so.

Hickey, who runs a foundation for survivors of sexual abuse, has taken testosterone and is transmasculine, but identifies as non-binary.

Note that no one is going to address the former complain but will play long with the latter.


Also playing make-believe - people who think that a former snowboard instructor is not an idiot other people are actually ashamed of:

Whatever his talents as clickbait, a strong case can be made that Trudeau is not very good at the governing side of his job. And I'm not talking about the mildly contrarian he's-not-progressive-enough critiques you sometimes read from left-wing Canadians in the foreign press; I'm talking basic competence. The aftermath of Khadr-gate should hopefully serve as a wake-up call for international media to balance Trudeau's antics as a charming figurehead with his unglamorous reality as a politician.

Trudeau was never terribly qualified to be prime minister. Before his quick political rise, he was known simply as the wealthy, dilettantish son of a popular ex-prime minister who had trouble choosing a career. First elected to Parliament in 2008, he was abruptly made Liberal boss in 2013 in what was dubbed a "personality cult" gimmick by a party whose popularity had slumped to record lows.

Trudeau's initial steps on the national stage were defined by George W. Bush-style gaffes, such as expressing envy for the efficiency of China's "basic dictatorship." During his inauguration, it was revealed he didn't know how to pronounce the word "heir." To this day, he still stumbles when forced to express opinions outside his talking-point comfort zone (watch, for example, his painful attempt to articulate thoughts on North Korea). Carefully staged photo ops, such as Trudeau's supposed "off-the-cuff" description of quantum computing, can be seen as a deliberate effort to reassure voters that their leader actually has something under that carefully coiffed hair.

Were the Canaanites really wiped out?

Now a study of Canaanite DNA, published Thursday in the American Journal of Human Genetics, rules out the biblical idea that an ancient war wiped out the group. The DNA, when compared to that of modern-day people, shows that the Canaanites managed to leave a long line of descendants. Even if they suffered some defeats, “enough people survived that they contributed to the present-day population,” Tyler-Smith said.

And now, a cat within a cat ... or something:

Mid-Week Post

The pinpoint of the work-week ...



When one thinks that one's government works for one, one is terribly mistaken:

According to a report by the Financial Tribune, the federal government“will provide $100 million in finance for a deal between Montreal-based multinational aerospace and transportation company, Bombardier Inc., and Iran’s Qeshm Free Zone Organization for purchasing 10 passenger planes, the FTZ’s chief executive, Hamidreza Momeni, has said.”

Reportedly, the $100 million will finance 80% of the deal.

**

Under the iron fist of Xi Jinping, the Chinese people have been force-marched back into the darkest moments before Tiananmen. The regime in Beijing has gone into hyperdrive in its efforts to persuade the rest of the world that this is how things must be. Beijing is now spending at least $7 billion a year, by the estimates of Christopher Walker, a vice-president of the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington D.C., on outward propaganda, to “make friends” in the democracies. To encourage cultural exchanges. To engage the news media, to further these ends. 

“Taken together,” Walker reckons, ” the forces working against democracy are more powerful than at any time since the end of the Cold War.” And a significant body of opinion around Ottawa appears to contend that we can’t beat them, after all, so we might as well join them.

**
 

British Columbia’s new NDP/Green coalition government was in damage control mode after the most ambitious of the province’s proposed liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects, the $36-billion Pacific NorthWest LNG, was cancelled Tuesday.

It's like a fan club for terrorists:

You can’t make this stuff up, folks. A registered third-party group previously committed to defeating former prime minister Stephen Harper has now turned its attention to getting Canadians to show some love for Omar Khadr.

“I stand with Omar Khadr” is the latest campaign from activist group Leadnow. They’re calling on Canadians to sign a petition to show their solidarity with the former al-Qaida enthusiast.

Yep.


Also - he may also get $10.5 million:

A Tunisian man convicted in a botched Canadian terror plot is being treated in prison with anti-psychotic drugs and now plans to appeal both his conviction and his sentence, a lawyer appointed on his behalf said Wednesday.

Chiheb Esseghaier “now understands the severity” of his life sentence, said Erin Dann, a court-appointed amicus curaie (friend of the court) and wants a chance to fight it.

Esseghaier was convicted in 2015, along with an accomplice, of planning to kill Canadians in a terrorist attack. An undercover FBI agent recorded him discussing plans to cut a hole in a railway bridge — possibly with a laser — poison the food on a military base, or trigger the eruption of a long-dormant volcano.

His accomplice, Raed Jaser, spoke on tape about murdering prominent Toronto Jews with a sniper rifle. Both men were sentenced to life in prison in September 2015.

The Supreme Court has disallowed seismic testing in Nunavut:

The Supreme Court of Canada has quashed plans for seismic testing in Nunavut, delivering a major victory to Inuit who argued they were inadequately consulted before the National Energy Board gave oil companies the green light to conduct this disruptive activity.

In a unanimous decision handed down Wednesday, written by Justices Karakatsanis and Brown, the top court ruled the NEB's consultation process in Clyde River was "significantly flawed," and gave little, if any, consideration to the treaty rights of Inuit and their reliance on marine mammals for subsistence.

A man who stabbed his pregnant wife could be charged with the murder of his infant:

(Sidebar: son or daughter? The CBC will not identify. That he or she was legally a bowl of jelly when his or her father attempted to kill him or her is too much to bear.)

A Montreal man accused of stabbing his pregnant wife, who remains in hospital, and prompting the baby's death has been charged with attempted murder and first-degree murder.  

The baby was born by emergency C-section following the stabbing of Raja Ghazi, 33, early Monday morning. The infant was in critical condition for several hours before dying in hospital. The woman was about eight months pregnant at the time of the attack. 

Sofiane Ghazi, 37, appeared at the Montreal courthouse via video conference on Tuesday. Along with being accused of murder and attempted murder, Ghazi was charged with:

- uttering threats

- car theft

- armed robbery

- failure to comply with conditions from previous arrests. 

The case has caught the attention of legal experts because the baby was in utero when the stabbing occurred and therefore not legally considered a human being.

But a representative from Quebec's director of criminal and penal prosecutions told reporters there are grounds for the murder charge because the baby was born.

Anne Aubé cited a section of Canada's Criminal Code, which says that "a child becomes a human being … when it has completely proceeded, in a living state, from the body of its mother."

Aubé acknowledged the case is "very rare." 

We don't have a justice system. We have a legal one.


Also:

"The clock ticks [so] that you have a few minutes and you start having brain damage and other organ damage," says Dr. Edgar Jaeggi, head of the fetal cardiac program at SickKids.

So on May 18, Ryan, Chaturvedi and Jaeggi, along with dozens of clinicians from both Mount Sinai Hospital and SickKids performed a risky and remarkable procedure: a balloon atrial septoplasty while the baby is still in the uterus.  

  

With neonatal and cardiac surgeons on standby in case an emergency cesarean section became necessary, the doctors used a needle to insert a balloon through Barry's uterus and into Sebastian's heart, making a small hole to open up the heart's interior wall, so oxygenated blood could pass through.  

Although the procedure was a success, it wasn't a cure for Sebastian's original heart defect, and he would still require open-heart surgery after birth.  But it meant that Barry could deliver him normally, without the trauma of knowing it would be a frantic race against time to whisk her baby away and supply him with oxygen.

People go to sh--holes like Cuba because it is a cheap holiday in a Third World dictatorship. Leaving one's clothes for the poor sods who can earn no more than twenty or thirty dollars a month isn't even in the same hemisphere as to why they went to Cuba in the first place.

So there's that:

It was intended to be a fun-filled family getaway in Cuba, but it soon changed course when a young family member fell ill. Now a family from Hamilton is struggling to return to Canada.

Nicole Antinello went to Cuba with her seven-year-old son Cole, 16-year-old daughter and 76-year-old mother. After a week in the Caribbean, they boarded a plane back to Toronto. They never left the tarmac.

Cole was visibly ill and officials noticed.

“They called the medical team to see if he was safe to fly. The medical team said, ‘No, he was not safe to fly,'” she told Global News.

Cole was taken to hospital and he was diagnosed with appendicitis.

“They pushed on his belly and he said, ‘Ow.’ He did not scream. He did not freak out. He did not have prior pain.”

Antinello phoned her insurance provider and said they advised her to do what the doctors prescribed. 

Cole’s appendix was removed on Saturday, but a lengthy recovery means he still hasn’t received clearance to fly home.

Since Antinello shared the story on Facebook with a link to a GoFundMe page, it has received significant attention. Friends, family and perfect strangers have shared her post asking for help.

Antinello described the hospital conditions as deplorable.

“There’s water that won’t stop running, there’s toilets that are overflowing … there’s dust flying in the air.”

It might have looked something like this:




Also:

China is on track to lead the world in organ transplant surgeries by 2020 following its abandonment of the much-criticized practice of using organs from executed prisoners, the architect of the country’s transplant program said Wednesday.

Chairman of the China Organ Donation and Transplantation Committee Huang Jiefu told The Associated Press that voluntary civilian organ donations had risen from just 30 in 2010, the first year of a pilot program, to more than 5,500 this year.

Voluntary, my @$$. 




Trump has decided that the American armed forces do not need trannies:

President Trump announced on Wednesday morning that the U.S. military would not “accept or allow” any transgender service members.

In a series of tweets, the commander in chief argued that too much is at stake in the military’s current operations for it to be “burdened” by the medical costs of transgender people or the “disruption” he says transgender service members would cause.

Oh, well.




And now, a corgi swimming:

 
(Paws up)

But Wait! There's More!

As usual ...



Having already won, the hospital in which doomed infant Charlie Gard was treated now refuses to release him to his parents so that he may die at home:

The parents of terminally ill baby Charlie Gard on Tuesday accused a London hospital of preventing their son from coming home to die, the latest harrowing confrontation in a legal battle that has raised emotions far and wide. 

Great Ormond Street Hospital's lawyer told the High Court it had moved "heaven and earth" to allow 11-month-old Charlie to go home, but this was impossible for practical reasons. 

The judge said transferring Charlie to a hospice for his last moments -- a move supported by the hospital -- appeared the most realistic option.

Never under-estimate the power of socialist spite.


Also:

A St. Anthony, N.L., mother who claims she was told by a doctor that assisted suicide was an option for her adult daughter says she wants an apology from Labrador-Grenfell Health, in part because the 25-year-old could hear the conversation. ...

"His words were 'assisted suicide death was legal in Canada,'" she told CBC. "I was shocked, and said, 'Well, I'm not really interested,' and he told me I was being selfish."

According to Elson, Lewis was within earshot when the doctor made the comment — which she said was quite traumatic for her daughter to hear.

 
I would suggest that he must apologise for much more than that.





Speaking of socialist spite:

A Canadian neurosurgeon is frustrated that a Manitoba woman battling brain cancer might need to pay tens of thousands of dollars in a U.S. hospital for an innovative treatment developed by researchers in this province.

Anastasie Hacault has launched a fundraising campaign to pay for NeuroBlate laser-based surgery because it currently isn't offered anywhere in Canada. The surgery could cost about $150,000.

Dr. Brian Toyota, head of neurosurgery at Vancouver General Hospital at University of British Columbia, treated more than two dozen patients using the NeuroBlate laser-based technology developed by by Mark Torchia and Richard Tyc of the University of Manitoba.

It allows surgeons to target tumours in hard-to-reach areas of the brain with precision.​

It was licensed for use in Canada in 2013 and a donation of about $400,000 brought the machine to VGH. Toyota showed the results to the B.C. Ministry of Health, which said it wanted more cost analysis.

"They didn't look that carefully, but at the end of it said, before we can make it a budgetary supported procedure, that they would want more cost analysis studies to be done," said Toyota.

Since then, the program is on hold. The machine and software are there, but so far, the ministry and hospital haven't committed to supporting it.

Also:

Canada’s public service unions gleefully embraced a recent international ranking by Oxford University and the Institute for Government that placed us number one in the world for “civil service effectiveness.” Perhaps understandably intoxicated with this success, those same unions were curiously silent when the prestigious Commonwealth Fund in the U.S. released its most recent update comparing health-care systems in the rich industrialized world. This showed our health-care system, run virtually in its entirety by these effective Canadian public servants, not just below average, but at the bottom of the heap, barely outperforming France and our health-care system’s arch-enemy, the U.S.

And:

The actions of a nurse who killed vulnerable patients in her care were the "most egregious" Ontario's nursing regulator has ever seen, the body said Tuesday as it revoked Elizabeth Wettlaufer's certification and found her guilty of professional misconduct.

Well, she was found guilty.




Today in "Islamists are everywhere" news:

The President of France Emmanuel Macron will attend a MassWednesday morning in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray (Normandy) in tribute to FatherJacques Hamel, assassinated a year ago by two Islamic State jihadists.

Yet he does not care to ensure that this never happens again. 

**

A Yazidi girl who escaped from the Islamic State (Isis) hastold of how she was raped every day for six months by her captor.

Ekhlas, who was 14 when she imprisoned, tried to escape jihadis in northern Iraq by climbing Mount Sinjar but was caught and held as a sex slave.

In 2014, Isis began to target the Yazidis, an ethnic Kurdish group, which Isis believes are “devil worshippers”.

At the time it was reported that as many as 40,000 people had taken refuge on the mountain, as Isis fighters killed men and captured women and children in the region.

“Every day for six months he raped me. I tried to kill myself,” Ekhlas told the BBC. “He picked me out of 150 girls by drawing lots.

“He was so ugly, like a beast, with his long hair. He smelt so bad. I was so frightened I couldn’t look at him,” she said.

Ekhlas told of how managed to escape while her captor was out fighting.

From there she was taken to a refugee camp, but now lives in a psychiatric hospital in Germany, where she is receiving therapy and education. She said that she hopes to train as a lawyer.

**

Britain's most notorious hate preacher, Anjem Choudary, has been moved to an isolation unit created for prisoners who pose a serious threat to national security while behind bars.

Choudary was jailed for five-and-a-half years in September for encouraging British Muslims to support the terrorist group Isis.

**

The State Department's top lawyers are systematically removing the word "genocide" to describe the Islamic State's mass slaughter of Christians, Yazidis, and other ethnic minorities in Iraq and Syria from speeches before they are delivered and other official documents, according to human rights activists and attorneys familiar with the policies. 

**

Justin Trudeau’s little lecture about what happens in Canada should stay in Canada, and not dished out to American ears, is a bit rich coming from someone who was posing for Vogue magazine within hours of being sworn in as prime minister.

It was also a bit rich, and incredibly disingenuous, to call the controversy sweeping the country over the Liberals’ $10.5-million payout to Omar Khadr nothing more than a “domestic squabble.” The vast majority of Canadians remain outraged.

Trudeau eventually met with recently sworn-in BC premier John Horgan, the non-Liberal one:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and new B.C. Premier John Horgan sidestepped the contentious debate surrounding the future of the planned Trans Mountain pipeline expansion as the two leaders held a first meeting in Ottawa.

Thunder Bay has the highest homicide rate in the country:

Thunder Bay was given a dubious mention for having the highest homicide rate among the census metropolitan areas, with 6.64 homicides per 100,000. The next worst city was Edmonton, which had a homicide rate half of Thunder Bay’s. However, the city with the highest total number of homicides was Toronto, with 96 recorded in 2016. Nevertheless, the city’s homicide rate was 1.55 per 100,000, given the size of its population.

That's nothing to be proud of.




Terrible:

The tractor-trailer was pitch-black inside, crammed with maybe 90 immigrants or more, and already hot when it left the Texas border town of Laredo for the 150-mile trip north to San Antonio.

It wasn't long before the passengers, sweating profusely in the rising oven-like heat, started crying and pleading for water. Children whimpered. People took turns breathing through a single hole in the wall. They pounded on the sides of the truck and yelled to try to get the driver's attention. Then they began passing out.

By the time police showed up at a Walmart in San Antonio around 12:30 a.m. Sunday and looked in the back of the truck, eight passengers were dead and two more would soon die in an immigrant-smuggling attempt gone tragically awry.

(Paws up)