Lebanese rescue workers dug through the mangled wreckage of buildings on Wednesday looking for survivors after a massive warehouse explosion sent a devastating blast wave across Beirut, killing at least 135 people and injuring nearly 4,000.
Officials said the toll was expected to rise after Tuesday’s blast at port warehouses that stored highly explosive material. ...
It sent a mushroom cloud into the sky and rattled windows on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, about 100 miles (160 km) away.
President Michel Aoun said 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate, used in fertilizers and bombs, had been stored for six years at the port without safety measures. He called it “unacceptable.”
An official source familiar with preliminary investigations blamed the incident on negligence. Ordinary Lebanese blamed politicians who have overseen decades of state corruption and bad governance that has plunged Lebanon into financial crisis.
The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) is giving $250,000 to Generation Squeeze, an advocacy organization for young Canadians, to research ways to improve housing affordability. The group stated it will focus on “wealth generated by rising home values,” which incited fears the government is considering a home equity tax on the capital gains generated when Canadians sell their homes.
(Sidebar: bullsh--. They are discouraging private home ownership.)
But more taxes won’t increase affordability. If the government really wants to know why housing is unaffordable, it could have saved the $250,000 and looked in the mirror. Governments at all levels drive up the cost of housing in two ways: by restricting the housing supply and by increasing housing costs through taxes and fees.
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The federal government is moving ahead with plans to make it easier for provinces and territories to spend billions of dollars on infrastructure projects to address the challenges posed by COVID-19.
Infrastructure Minister Catherine McKenna says $3.3 billion out of the $33 billion that Ottawa has previously promised in matching funds for provincial and territorial projects will be available for projects related to the pandemic.
Infrastructure Minister Catherine McKenna was cited by the Parliamentary Budget Office yesterday for "missing details" on thousands of public work projects, which have likely caused headaches for the Trudeau minister since a June 2 report from the PBO found that roughly 20,000 taxpayer-funded projects were lacking sufficient evidence to prove they had started.
“This is not a fully exhaustive list,” the Budget Office wrote on Wednesday. McKenna in a March 10 report to Parliament said “over 52,000 projects have been announced government-wide with contributions of approximately $57.5 billion. Almost all of these projects are either started or completed.”
The same people who could (read: would not) not keep China's coronavirus out of the country, who shut down an economy for four months and who hand taxpayer money to friends and relatives are now promising money that they often misplace to keep everyone happy or the masses will force an election (which I don't think will happen).
Wow ...
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The Canadian economy continues to struggle because of the coronavirus lockdown, despite growth in May and June according to Statistics Canada.
On Friday, the agency wrote that while the economy is slowly recovering from the lockdown, Canada’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) fell by 15% since February.
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Staff in a secret 2018 memo to the Prime Minister warned of “negative media coverage” of federal advertising of carbon tax rebates. The $1,253,011 ad blitz timed before the 2019 election found few Canadians understood the rebate program: “There are risks.”
A Québec company was awarded $113,486,868 in sole-sourced federal orders for pandemic masks though it didn’t have a factory in Canada. MPs have demanded to see terms of the contract with AMD Medicom Inc., the only Canadian vendor to win a ten-year federal contract: “Is the federal government picking winners and losers?”
Controversy has arisen after the CAF dedicated a team to inform the public about the effects of civil disobedience during the COVID-19 pandemic. Insiders told the Ottawa Citizen that the CAF instituted a propaganda campaign during the pandemic without a well-established overview.The programs main purpose included manipulation and projection of certain media that was made to convince the public to conform to current pandemic related legislation, and if needed, maintain order in case of mass rejection of these laws.
Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan’s press secretary, Floriane Bonneville, told reporters that the propaganda campaign was a "mistake" and mentioned that outgoing Gen. Vance, the Chief of Defence Staff, will assemble a "team of legal, communications and policy staff, to investigate what happened."
(Sidebar: rather, one was caught and is now embarrassed and will hide this as soon as possible.)
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The government announced Wednesday it had placed orders with Pfizer and Moderna, two companies with candidates in the third and final stage of trials for vaccines for the virus, which could be ready by the end of the year.
What? The same people who wouldn't stockpile masks is going for name-brand vaccines and not Chinese military complex ones? Or are they still made in China?
Canadians statistically contribute less to charities than their American counterparts.
The Liberal WE gong-show will only result in fewer donations and less trust in genuine charities:
Already concerned about the pandemic’s effect on donations, the sector faces a new concern: that controversy around the WE organization and its since-aborted deal with the Liberal government will erode trust in charities and the use of social enterprises many rely on to fund services.
This WE gong-show:
A Halifax-based charity is expressing confusion and frustration as it looks likely to have to foot the bill for nine students that it says were hired through the federal volunteer program at the centre of the WE affair.
That is because the Liberal government contends no students actually started their placements before WE Charity backed out of running the Canada Student Services Grant amid controversy about its ties to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his family.
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WE’s biggest corporate donor has long been U.S. insurance giant Allstate, and the U.S. filings shine light on just how lucrative that relationship has been for the charity. Allstate has donated just over US$92-million to WE’s U.S. arm since 2011, according to the filings. The insurer’s chief executive, Tom Wilson, has also contributed US$400,000. Allstate hasn’t commented on whether it plans to continue its partnership with WE.
The school says the policy is part of the Reformed Christian tradition and does not discriminate.
Druif's sentiments were also echoed in the Rainbow Report, an internal document submitted to the school last year with LGBTQ alumni reflections of their time on campus and what they described as an unwelcoming climate for LGBTQ students.
According to the Calgary Police, there have been multiple recent apparent hate crime against same-sex couples in the city.
The construction of a new military refuelling station in the Arctic is facing yet another delay more than 13 years after it was first promised by the federal government.
Stephen Harper first announced plans to build the Nanisivik deep-water port in Nunavut along with up to eight armed Arctic patrol vessels in 2007.
The long-standing expectation was that the port located on Baffin Island about 20 kilometes from Arctic Bay would be ready when the first of those ships was finally delivered to the Royal Canadian Navy.
Yet while the first Arctic patrol vessel was handed over to the navy on Friday after numerous delays and cost overruns, the Department of National Defence says the Nanisivik facility won’t be ready until 2022.
Defence Department spokeswoman Jessica Lamirande blamed travel difficulties associated with the COVID-19 pandemic for the latest delay, which follows numerous environmental and structural problems over the years.
The port was originally supposed to include an airstrip and staffed year-round, but both plans were dropped after the project’s $116-million budget was found to have more than doubled to $258 million in 2013.
North Korea is a bottle rocket about to go off:
According to a source on Monday, North Koreans are gripped by fears of a severer famine than in the 1990s.
The source, who has been to Pyongyang recently, said many homeless children can be seen at Kalli railway station, a gateway to the capital. "Their presence is becoming a problem as they move around in groups begging and stealing."
Homeless people are sporadically rounded up and forced into labor at a makeshift facility nearby, and when homeless children are discharged from the facility they hang out near the station.
"Many people are traveling in groups to scavenge food despite travel restrictions amid the lockdown," the source added. Some college students from provinces are reportedly making a living through prostitution near Pyongyang.
Russian scientists are poring over the stunningly well-preserved bones of an adult woolly mammoth that roamed the earth at least 10,000 years ago, after local inhabitants discovered its remains in the shallows of a north Siberian lake.Part of its skull, several ribs and foreleg bones, some with soft tissue still attached to them, were retrieved from Russia’s remote Yamal peninsula above the Arctic circle on July 23. Scientists are still searching the site for other bones.
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Singapore researchers have developed “electronic skin” capable of recreating a sense of touch, an innovation they hope will allow people with prosthetic limbs to detect objects, as well as feel texture, or even temperature and pain.
The device, dubbed ACES, or Asynchronous Coded Electronic Skin, is made up of 100 small sensors and is about 1 square cm (0.16 square inch) in size.
The researchers at the National University of Singapore say it can process information faster than the human nervous system, is able to recognize 20 to 30 different textures and can read Braille letters with more than 90 percent accuracy.
“So humans need to slide to feel texture, but in this case the skin, with just a single touch, is able to detect textures of different roughness,” said research team leader Benjamin Tee, adding that AI algorithms let the device learn quickly.
A demonstration showed the device could detect that a squishy stress ball was soft, and determine that a solid plastic ball was hard.
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