For a Monday

Quickly now ...



Spanish police shoot a suspect whom they believe is the last remaining suspect in a terrorist attack that claimed the lives of fifteen people:

The lone fugitive from the Spanish cell that killed 15 people in and near Barcelona was shot to death Monday after he flashed what turned out to be a fake suicide belt at two troopers who confronted him in a vineyard not far from the city he terrorized, authorities said.

Police said they had "scientific evidence" that Younes Abouyaaqoub, 22, drove the van that barrelled through Barcelona's crowded Las Ramblas promenade, killing 13 people on Thursday, then hijacked a car and fatally stabbed its driver while making his getaway.

Abouyaaqoub's brother and friends made up the rest of the 12-man extremist cell, along with an imam who was one of two people killed in what police said was a botched bomb-making operation.

After four days on the run, Abouyaaqoub was spotted outside a train station west of Barcelona on Monday afternoon. A second witness told police she was certain she had seen the man whose photo has gone around the world as part of an international manhunt.

Two officers found him hiding in a nearby vineyard and asked for his identification, according to the head of the Catalan police. He was shot to death when he opened his shirt to reveal what looked to be explosives and cried out "Allah is great" in Arabic, regional police chief Josep Luis Trapero said.

What the Canada-US Third Safe Country Agreement says:

Under the Agreement, refugee claimants are required to request refugee protection in the first safe country they arrive in, unless they qualify for an exception to the Agreement.

How this agreement is being broken:

About 3,800 people crossed into Quebec in the first two weeks of August following the 2,996 who crossed in July after the Trump administration said it may end "temporary protected status" for Haitians in the U.S. following their country's massive 2010 earthquake.

In short, their claim was rejected in the first safe country they were in. There is no guarantee that one will be accepted.

But, you know, election in 2019.



And people say it isn't favouritism:

As we learned Monday through The Globe and Mail, a well-connected former Liberal candidate named Rana Sarkar, a Butts’ buddy, is on his way to San Francisco as consul-general for nearly twice the amount of $119,600 to $140,700 that a normal schmo would be paid if established compensation rules were followed.

 

Now, Rana Sarkar, a failed 2011 Liberal candidate in the Toronto riding of Scarborough-Rouge River, and who failed to get his party’s nod in 2015 in another Toronto riding, is not without cred, of course. He’s former president of the Canada-India Business Council, and recently KPMG’s national director of high-value markets.

 

But did I mention he was a friend of Gerald Butts? Both are 46, as Justin Trudeau will be on Christmas Day. So, they’re birds of similar feathering.

 

Now, when one thinks of political postings, one hardly thinks a lowly consul-general job San Francisco would pay more taxpayers’ dollars than being paid right now to former Trudeau cabinet minister John McCallum for being Canada’s ambassador to China, a major trading partner. Or more money than being paid to former Foreign Affairs Minister Stephane Dion to be our special envoy to the European Union where Canada has just signed a mega-trade pact, minus the exited United Kingdom, of course.

 

According to the Globe, in fact, Sarkar’s order-in-council appointment put through this month has made him one of the highest-paid diplomats in Canada’s foreign service.

 

Now, I may be wrong, but a 15-part tweet by Gerald Butts defending the appointment of Rana Sarkar seems to me to be a bit much, and more than suggests Mr. Butts is a tad sensitive to the criticism coming his way over social media for his purse-string loosenings. It took him until Tweet No. 9 to shoot the messenger, however, claiming the Globe reporter who wrote about Sarkar’s appointment did not fully cover off all accomplishments the PMO had provided.

I'd say the moral reason not to play God is pretty clear:

First came the prospect of pigs incubating human organs. Now a medical ethicist is raising new moral questions by suggesting scientists create human-animal chimeras to produce human eggs.

While the goal, for now, would be to create a ready supply of eggs purely for biomedical research purposes, should the hybrid human eggs turn out to be as good as ones produced by humans, “I do not see any reason for not using them for treating human infertility,” said César Palacios-González, of the Centre of Medical Law and Ethics at King’s College London.

(SEE: road, hell, good intentions).




A traitor to the US has finally died in a country where peach-coloured minions starve or are shot attempting to flee:

Five decades after a 21-year-old soldier from Richmond, Virginia, named James Joseph Dresnok sprinted through the demilitarized zone and began his new life as a propaganda tool for North Korea, his Pyongyang-born sons have announced his death.

Dresnok’s health had been failing for years, and his sons said he died of a stroke in November. He was 74 and had spent two-thirds of his life espousing the virtues of the country he ran to on that summer day in 1962. The death of the man thought to have outlived or outlasted the other U.S. defectors to North Korea had been rumoured, but his sons recently confirmed it on the state-run Uriminzokkiri website, according to the Guardian.

“I have never regretted coming to the People’s Republic of North Korea,” Dresnok said in a 2006 BBC documentary. “I feel at home. I really feel at home. I was just a regular soldier. And when I gave it up and came over, I wouldn’t trade it for nothing.”

Corks were popped by the CBC for this:

Canada's conservative Rebel Media said a technology company stopped directing traffic to its website, making it inaccessible to some users around the world on Monday as the site known for tirades against Muslims and refugees scrambled to get back online.

Last week GoDaddy Inc, Alphabet Inc's Google and other technology companies pushed the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer offline by terminating services to the online publication, which helped organize a white nationalist rally that turned violent in Virginia on Aug. 12.

Rebel Media founder Ezra Levant said he was given 24 hours' notice and no explanation for the action. He did not identify the technology company.

"If this was a political censorship decision, it is terrifying - like a phone company telling you it is cancelling your phone number on 24 hours notice because it doesn’t like your conversations," Levant told Reuters.

He said the site was still available in "about half of the world."

I would accept this if this if it was built anywhere near Sussex Drive:

An interim safe injection site in Toronto — the first such officially-sanctioned facility in Canada's most populous city — will save lives as the city grapples with a spike in suspected overdoses, public health officials said Monday as the temporary location opened its doors.

Yes, about that:

The experience in Vancouver has been one of drug dealers openly selling their products and users freebasing in the streets around injection clinics, he said.

“There were more people on the streets using drugs than in what they call safe injection sites,” Mammoliti said, predicting public outrage within a year of Toronto’s safe injection sites opening this fall.

And now, the sun was blotted out from the sky ... for a short time:

Millions of people in the United States witnessed a total solar eclipse today, the first in the country in 99 years.