And the Rest of It

How many civil service jobs do these kids think will be available?:

Wondga taught 18 French immersion kindergartners at Edmonton’s Oliver School last year. This year, 24 are enrolled and interest continues to climb.

“Parents want their children to learn languages. They want them to have what they didn’t have and they want them to experience new things at school.”

Like civil service jobs.

Their parents weren't survivors of the Great Depression.




Guys, guys - can't you wait for China's coronavirus to kill off your elderly?:

As the federal government moves to revise the law on assisted dying, new survey results suggest most Canadians support medical help to end suffering even when a natural death is some time away.

I'm not sure how a number under two thousand is a majority but whatever.




No more federal funding for post-secondary institutions:

Convicted terrorist and multi-millionaire Omar Khadr will be featured as a keynote speaker at a respected Canadian university.

Khadr is scheduled to speak at an event on children’s rights hosted by Dalhousie University on February 10, 2020.

He can talk about how he orphaned Christopher Speer's children.




How is that Singapore thing working out?:

While a North Korean deadline for the United States to soften its stand on denuclearization talks passed uneventfully over the New Year, state media and propaganda efforts have been focusing on the prospect of a long confrontation with the United States.

Optimism that two years of contacts between leader Kim Jong Un and U.S. President Donald Trump would usher in a new age, and related hopes for economic improvement after decades of deprivation, appear to have faded.

Instead, the government has been hard at work in recent weeks using state media, propaganda posters, and performances to warn the public of a bumpy road ahead under U.S. and international pressure.

Kim is ramping up paranoia in his starving people. 

**

North Korea has named as its new foreign minster a former senior army officer with little experience in dealings with the United States, in a possible indication it will take a harder line with Washington in stalled nuclear negotiations.

The new post for Ri Son Gwon was disclosed Friday in a Korean Central News Agency dispatch that said he attended a reception for foreign diplomats in Pyongyang on Thursday. South Korean and other outside media previously reported North Korea had recently informed foreign diplomats in Pyongyang of Ri’s job.

Stop being obtuse, Japan:

The Japanese government rejected on Tuesday a protest by South Korea against the reopening of the National Museum of Territory and Sovereignty in Tokyo.

“Foreign people unhappy about it should come to see it. There’s nothing fabricated,” said Seiichi Eto, minister in charge of territorial issues, at a news conference, referring to the museum.

On Monday, the South Korean foreign ministry said Seoul “strongly” protested the expansion of the museum, and urged its closure.

The museum has displays related to the Takeshima Islands in Shimane Prefecture.

Seoul claims that the islands, located in the Sea of Japan, are an integral part of South Korean territory. They are called Dokdo in South Korea.

If you ask the Russians, the Holodmor never happened. The Ukrainians were fasting for swimsuit season:

“The words of Vladimir Putin are a complete distortion of historical truth. We give it a very direct name, it is an ideology, it is a kind of post-Stalinist revisionism,” Duda told the Financial Times. “Some claim that this is propaganda-based hybrid warfare…. Some experts claim that Putin’s words are used for the purpose of internal propaganda. For us, it doesn’t make a difference. For us, what matters is that this historical lie is being spread around the world. And we can absolutely not accept this.” 

The Polish president has been upset by Putin’s assertion that Poland voluntarily colluded with Nazi Germany and was partly to blame for the war.

Yes, some Poles did participate in murdering people while others did not.

And the Holodmor happened.




Trump participated in the largest yearly march the press never covers - until that day:

U.S. President Donald Trump called it his “profound honour” on Friday to be the first president to attend the annual anti-abortion gathering in Washington called the March for Life.

Oh, dear:

The cataclysmic eruption of Italy’s Mount Vesuvius in the year 79, as described by the Roman official Pliny the Younger, killed thousands in towns along the Gulf of Naples, including in the prosperous community of Herculaneum, where hundreds of skeletons would be discovered centuries later buried in ash.

Now, new research has shed more light on the gruesome way they died. Their flesh may not have been “vaporized” and turned to ash by the superheated flow of hot gas and volcanic matter roaring down the mountain, as previously thought.

Rather, they more likely were “baked” and suffocated by toxic fumes, according to a team of British and Italian scholars.

How interesting:

A famous Egyptian mummy‘s “voice” has been heard for the first time in 3,000 years after researchers recreated the long-dead priest’s vocal cords using modern 3D-printing technology.

Scientists used three-dimensional scans to map the mummy’s entire vocal tract, then re-created it using a 3D printer. They used an artificial larynx to run air through the synthetic vocal cords, creating a single vowel sound in the dead Egyptian’s voice, according to findings published in the journal Scientific Reports.