And the Rest of It ...

I'm sure that this is nothing to be concerned about:

Taiwan claims Chinese military aircraft have violated its airspace for a second day in a row.

 

And this:

A senior North Korean diplomat has defected to South Korea with his family, reports said yesterday.

In September 2019, then-North Korean acting ambassador to Kuwait Ryu Hyun-woo reached South Korea and sought asylum, but his arrival was kept secret until now, the Maeil Business daily reported.

Defections by senior officials are rare, although Ryu’s arrival came just two months after then-North Korean acting ambassador to Italy Jo Song-gil sought asylum from Seoul.

“I decided to defect because I wanted to offer my child a better future,” the Maeil Business quoted Ryu as saying.

He became temporary acting ambassador in September 2017 after Kuwait expelled ambassador So Chang-sik following the Persian Gulf nation’s adoption of a UN resolution over Pyongyang’s weapons programs.

Ryu is the son-in-law of Jon Il-chun, the former head of Office 39, which manages the secret funds of the North Korean leadership, reports said.

Tae Yong-ho, another high-profile defector who fled his post as North Korea’s deputy ambassador to the UK in 2016 and was elected a South Korean opposition lawmaker last year, described Ryu as part of Pyongyang’s “core elite.”

However, he added: “No matter how privileged your life is in North Korea, your mind changes when you go abroad and draw comparisons.”

 

 

Russians doing what Canadians won't: 

For years, the Kremlin tried to ignore opposition leader Alexei Navalny, right down to avoiding the very mention of his name.

But by Sunday, Russian officials had drastically reversed course.

President Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson appeared on a prime-time show on state television and denied Navalny’s assertion that Putin had a secret palace on the Black Sea. On another marquee program, the host devoted 40 minutes to Navalny, who was described as engaging in “political pedophilia.” And the evening newscast showed tweets by Western officials in support of Navalny as proof that he was working against Russian interests.

The tightly scripted, all-hands attack on Navalny on Sunday underlined how the opposition leader’s dramatic return to Russia a week earlier and his arrest have changed the landscape of Russian politics.

Putin remains in firm control of the levers of power. But Russians unhappy with their president — long a weak, diverse and atomized group — suddenly have a clear leader around whom to rally, and the government appears unsure about how to fight back.

On Saturday, tens of thousands of Russians took to the streets in support of Navalny in more than 100 Russian cities — protest on a scale unseen in the country in years. Quiet Siberian cities saw crowds in the thousands, while in Moscow, a survey showed that more than one-third of the participants had never protested before.

“People are tired of this authoritarian regime, of the chaos, of the corruption,” said Viktor F. Rau, a liberal activist in one of those Siberian cities, Barnaul. “Navalny was the spark.”

With more protests planned for next weekend, and a court hearing that could send Navalny to prison for years scheduled for Feb. 2, a new crackdown on the opposition and a harsh prison sentence for its leader might backfire, sending yet more people into the streets.

 

Well, this is an inconvenient truth for Climate Barbie:

Canadians are up to three times more likely to freeze to death or perish in a snowmobile accident than die of heat stroke, says new federal data. Figures contradicted climate change claims by then-Environment Minister Catherine McKenna that extreme heat was “literally killing people.”

 

Better call Saul Paul.