For a Friday

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With douchebag leaders like this, who needs global enemies?:

“We are not the kind of country where politicians get to tell the police what to do in operational matters. We have professional police forces right across the country,” he said in Germany on Friday.

Yes, about that:

The RCMP has been looking into potential obstruction of justice in the handling of the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin Group Inc., but its examination has been stymied by the federal government’s refusal to lift cabinet confidentiality for all witnesses, The Globe and Mail has learned.

To wit:

The Sun has also learned that Tides Canada will also receive two Canada Summer Jobs grants for its work in British Columbia.

The San Francisco-based Tides Foundation has been engaged in a decade-long campaign against Canada’s energy industry. In 2008, they launched The Tar Sands Campaign with funds from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund – the billionaire U.S. oil barons who champion far-left activism.

So, to correct Justin's utterly false statement, he can and has directed the police to do what he wanted when he wanted it and has been more than happy to pave the way for even American groups to actively stymie Canada's economic interests.

Any politician who claims inaction over these wide-reaching and obstructive protests (no doubt foreign-funded and directed) is a lying sack of crap and should be scrutinised for possible allegiance to parties that are willing to destroy Canada's already crumbling economy.


Also:

The disruption, to this point, has been mild — inconvenient for some would-be rail passengers. The idling of large parts of the CN and Via Rail fleets will take time to be felt, and may first be felt by any employees laid off until operations resume. But Canadians, who probably mostly think of trains as quaint 19th-century choo-choos, don’t realize how essential the rail network is to the shipment of literally everything our economy runs on. What is an inconvenience today will become a crisis very quickly, if not resolved.

(Sidebar: like the trains people expect our oil to be shipped on as opposed to pipelines, but I digress ...)

And about that resolution — what’s taking so long? CN already has a court injunction calling for the rail line to be cleared. All that’s left is for the police to actually enforce it. They haven’t yet, and put out a statement on Friday that amounted to a whole lot of nothing. It’s not clear what the delay is. Perhaps the police are telling the Ontario government that the time isn’t quite right yet, but that they’ll move in, if and when it’s necessary. Perhaps the police are raring to go, but the government is staying its hand, fearful of a public backlash or escalation. Perhaps everyone in authority in Ontario is simply hoping that the situation in B.C. is peacefully and amicably — and rapidly! — resolved, rendering the solidarity blockades elsewhere unnecessary.

There’s always room for optimism and negotiation. No one wants ugliness or a crisis. But Ontario Premier Doug Ford simply cannot allow the Belleville blockade to drag on the way Caledonia did. The stakes are simply much higher for more people, and will be felt much faster.

Stephen McNeil is a bottom-feeder but one already knew that:

But the leader of Nova Scotia's NDP, Gary Burrill, is concerned it is another example of McNeil's disregard for Nova Scotia's law on lobbying.

Although Charest is registered federally, he has not registered as a lobbyist in Nova Scotia. 

"Meeting with lobbyists who fail to register as lobbyists and not paying any attention to whether or not they have properly registered as lobbyists, that's not holding the standard of conduct to the government up very high," said Burrill.

It's the government. It has no standards.




I really don't know why Huawei isn't Stuxnet-ed:

The rapid rise of the world’s largest telecommunications company was fueled in part by decades of intellectual-property theft, American prosecutors alleged Thursday in a sweeping new indictment against Huawei Technologies and CFO Meng Wanzhou.

The new document accuses Huawei of using deception, college researchers operating under cover and other means to steal trade secrets from six technology companies in the U.S., violating racketeering laws.

And it alleges that as well as trying to covertly evade U.S. sanctions barring commercial relations with Iran, it did the same in selling products to North Korea.

It also charges that Huawei helped the Iranian government with surveillance technology used to monitor the 2009 pro-democracy protests in Tehran.

I see the world totally has a handle on this coronavirus thing:

They posted videos online, shared pictures and dramatic stories from inside the quarantined city that has been virtually cut off from the rest of the country.

Now, they are nowhere to be found.

Fang Bin and Chen Qiushi were both determined to share what they could about the crisis, reporting from Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, and sending what they found out into the world.

As a result, they racked up thousands of views on their videos. But their channels have now gone quiet, and those who followed them online fear they may have disappeared for good.

**

The first person diagnosed with coronavirus in London turned up unannounced at a hospital in an Uber taxi after falling ill.

Two staff from Lewisham hospital in south London are now in isolation at home after coming into contact with the woman, a Chinese national who had recently arrived in the city from China.

Lewisham hospital on Thursday confirmed the unnamed patient had not followed public health officials’ advice and had simply “self-presented” at its A&E unit on Sunday afternoon.

She did not arrive by ambulance or her own private vehicle and went straight to the A&E reception desk to report her symptoms – both clear breaches of guidance aimed at stopping the spread of the virus.

**

A fifth case of the novel coronavirus has been presumptively confirmed in British Columbia.

Provincial health officer Bonnie Henry says a woman in her 30s returned from Shanghai, China, in the past week through Vancouver’s airport before travelling by car to her home in the Interior health region.

Henry says the woman wore a mask on the plane and contacted health officials when she had symptoms of an illness before being tested positive Tuesday for the virus called COVID-19.

She says officials will be contacting passengers who sat three rows ahead and behind the woman on the aircraft that arrived from China but the risk to them is “very, very low.”

Considering how fast this is spreading, that is bullsh--.




And now, a feel-good story:

A Georgia boy woke up in the middle of the night to flames engulfing his bedroom, but instead of panicking, he jumped into action.

Noah Woods, 5, grabbed his little sister, 2, and exited through their shared bedroom window, the only safe exit when the Sunday night fire broke out.

His heroics didn’t end there; the young boy ran back into his home to save the family dog before waking up his uncle next door to alert him of the fire.