Mid-Week Post

The intermission of the work-week...


Virtually fresh from a devastating earthquake,  Nepal experiences another one:

A second powerful earthquake in less than three weeks spread panic in Nepal on Tuesday, bringing down buildings weakened by the first disaster and killing at least 66 people, including 17 in neighbouring India and one in Chinese Tibet.

Most of the reported fatalities were in villages and towns east of Kathmandu, only just beginning to pick up the pieces from the April 25 quake that left more than 8,000 dead.

Also:

  

So, what happens when disaster strikes? Who is responsible for getting them home?

A new poll says more than half of Canadians believe the federal government has all or most of the responsibility for getting citizens out of a disaster zone.

But 38 per cent – almost one in five – felt the rescued should have to pay a portion of the cost, says a report by the Angus Reid Institute.

And only 16 per cent of survey respondents felt government is responsible for helping Canadians who have travelled to countries considered high-risk.

 
Who should pay? Perhaps the people who went to global hotbeds of civil unrest and/or natural disasters? The government- funded by the people of Canada- should not responsible for ferrying people to and fro whenever things hit the fan.



It turns out that a publicly-funded Amtrak train in Pennsylvania crashed because it was going too fast on aging infrastructure:

Using its verified Twitter account, the National Transportation Safety Board reported Wednesday afternoon that the Amtrak train that derailed Tuesday night in Philadelphia was moving at 100 miles per hour just prior to the derailment and crash that killed 7 and injured more than 200.

Two charges of sexual assault have been dropped against disgraced CBC personality Jian Ghomeshi:

Two sexual assault charges have been dropped against disgraced former broadcaster Jian Ghomeshi, who was ordered Tuesday to face the remaining five charges of sexual assault and one count of choking in two separate trials.

The former host of CBC Radio's cultural affairs show "Q" was originally charged with seven counts of sexual assault and one count of overcoming resistance by choking.

Crown prosecutor Mike Callaghan said Tuesday that two sexual assault charges were being withdrawn because there was no reasonable prospect of conviction.

But Palestine isn't a state!

The Holy See and the State of Palestine have agreed on the text of a treaty regarding the life and activity of the Church in Palestine, which is expected to be signed soon by both parties.

(sigh)

These are the same people who used the Church of the Nativity as a toilet. There will be no respect for Christians or anyone else in that Jordanian colony.

And to remind one of what is at stake:

Having lost their homes, their heritage and their sense of dignity, Iraqi Christians victimized by the Islamic State feel abandoned by earthly powers, but their faith in God has only grown, an Iraqi nun told members of Congress May 13.

The faith of homeless Iraqi Christians is “increasing more and more,” Sister Diana Momeka, O.P., told the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Many of the displaced lived in devastating conditions – families taking shelter in containers, parents without jobs and children without an education.

But Sister Diana insisted the spirit of the people has not been broken by the adversity.

“It's making us stronger,” she said.

“We were displaced, yet we feel that the hand of God is still with us…In the midst of this darkness, this suffering, we see that God is holding us,” she explained, adding that it is a “gift of the Holy Spirit” to be able to stay and have faith through hardship.

Sister Diana was part of the Dominican Sisters of St. Catherine of Siena, originally from Mosul in Northern Iraq. Islamist militants bombed their convent in 2009, and after the prioress sought protection from the local government and found none, Sister Diana and the community moved to Qaraqosh.

The ISIS onslaught caught up to them last summer. As the Islamic State swept through parts of Iraq and Syria, establishing a strict caliphate, more than 120,000 Iraqis were displaced on the Nineveh Plain, faced with the decision to convert to Islam, stay and pay a jizya tax to ISIS, or leave immediately.

The religious community moved again, this time to Kurdistan. “We were driven out of our homes in a couple of hours,” the nun described, “without any warning.”

Almost no Christians are left in Mosul, Sister Diana said, except for about 100 Christian hostages of ISIS.

Slated to testify before a congressional committee as part of an Iraqi delegation, Sister Diana’s application for a visa was initially denied by the local U.S. Consulate because of her status as an internally-displaced person.

Amid mounting pressure, she was later able to enter the United States and testified before the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee May 13 regarding “ISIS's war on religious minorities.”

North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un reportedly had his own aunt poisoned and executed his chief of the armed forces by shooting him to pieces:

Hyon Yong-chol, the chief of North Korea’s People’s Armed Forces, was executed by firing squad using an anti-aircraft gun at a military school in Pyongyang around April 30, the National Intelligence Service said. …

Hyon was named as the armed forces chief in June 2014, the No. 2 man within the North’s military after Hwang pyong-so, director of the general political department of the Korean People’s Army (KPA). North Korea has not announced its purge of Hyon yet.

The NIS said that given available information, Hyon seemed to be purged not because he sought a rebellion but because he was “disrespectful” to the young leader.

Once the North Korean military leadership gets over this, Kim Jong-Un is up for an assassination.

(Kamsahamnida)


Wasn't I saying this?

Home Secretary Theresa May has suggested three British schoolgirls believed to have escaped the clutches of ISIS may not be allowed back into the UK even if they manage to return.

Reports from Iraq suggest three teenagers who had been married off to ISIS fighters have now gone on the run near the city of Mosul.

It has been suggested the trio may be Shamima Begum, Amira Abase and Kadiza Sultana, who disappeared from their homes in east London earlier this year.

The newly-reappointed Mrs May today declined to say whether the girls would be allowed back into Britain even if they managed to escape the war-torn region.

 
Leave. Them. There.


Good:

Anti-abortion activists are hitting the pavement to spread a very graphic and political pro-life message targeting Liberal leader Justin Trudeau.

Flyers showing Trudeau next to a graphic image of an aborted fetus are being spread around the GTA and across Canada.

 
(Sidebar: note that the wags have Mohammaded the image.)

I hope it is humiliating for the Boy Wonder. Like his father before him, Trudeau doesn't just support abortion, he enforces the belief in it in his own party.

And let's not forget what goes on in the "basic dictatorship" of China and its buffer-state, North Korea:

According to the Congressional-Executive Commission on China report, released on October 10, 2010, violators of China’s One Child Policy continue to be victims of “forced sterilization, forced abortion, arbitrary detention, and other abuses.”   

**

North Korea forces women to undergo abortions and young mothers to drown their newborn babies, and has starved and executed hundreds of thousands of detainees at secret prison camps — atrocities that the chairman of a U.N. panel that documented the abuses compares to those of Nazi Germany.

 
And now, even though his life was drastically short, his existence was miraculous:

His life was brief. Only 80 short minutes. There was nothing we could do to save him. No procedures could fix the missing parts of his skull or brain (a condition known as anencephaly). We could only love him, celebrate his existence, and embrace the time we had with him.

We did everything we could to make the most of his life, but since we could not prevent his death, we wanted to embrace that as well. To do this, we chose to allow our son to give back by participating in organ, tissue and whole body donation.

Monday Post

Let's begin...


Go home, Elizabeth. You're drunk (viewer discretion is advised):


Just... wow...

She actually wrote some of this down so I guess alcohol isn't completely to blame.

That she would try excusing her drunken yet heartfelt rant on lack of sleep is either a total lack of imagination or some residual spirits.


Sister Helen Prejean believes that convicted murderer Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has repented for his crimes and, therefore, does not deserve the death penalty:

Since testimony began in Boston federal court in early March, the jury has heard from about 150 witness, including parents who lost children in the attack, first responders who attended to victims who had lost limbs, and Tsarnaev's Russian relatives who remembered him as a loving young boy.

But the closest they came to hearing from Tsarnaev himself was Monday's testimony from the nun, Sister Helen Prejean, 76, who described meeting him five times over the past year at the request of defense lawyers. Prejean, whose story inspired the 1993 book and 1995 film "Dead Man Walking," said she believed Tsarnaev was remorseful.

"He said it emphatically. He said no one deserves to suffer like they did," said Prejean, the public face of the New Orleans-based Ministry Against the Death Penalty and a Nobel Peace Prize nominee. "I had every reason to think that he was taking it in and that he was genuinely sorry for what he did."

The defense rested its case after her testimony.

Dzhokhar Ysarnaev is as repentant as Omar Khadr is.

Oh, wait....

Omar Khadr is an angry and "highly dangerous" terrorist who shows no remorse for the killing of a U.S. soldier and other crimes, a psychiatrist speaking on behalf of prosecutors told a Guantanamo Bay court Tuesday. 

Khadr, who pleaded guilty to five war-crimes charges on Monday, still has strong ties to his "al Qaeda family" and has made no effort to distance himself from extremist views, Dr. Michael Welner told Khadr's sentencing hearing. 

"He's highly dangerous," Welner said. "It is his belief that he should not have been here for a day ... and that it is everybody else's fault that he is." ...

According to the statement of facts, Khadr threw a Russian-made F1 grenade from behind the wall of a compound in Afghanistan that was under siege from American forces in July 2002. Khadr was in the compound with other members of a terrorist cell with whom he had a pact to die rather than surrender. 

"Khadr threw the grenade with the specific intent of killing or injuring as many Americans as he could," prosecutor Jeff Groharing told the court. 

The grenade killed U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer. Groharing told the court Khadr was "happy" to have killed a soldier, a fact that would bring him comfort during his time in custody at the Bagram Air Base near Kabul. 

"Khadr indicated that when he would get 'pissed off' with the guards at Bagram, he would recall his killing of the U.S. soldier and it would make him feel good," Groharing said, reading from the statement of facts.

Once more, Pamela Gellar is vindicated:

Fox News analyst Sean Hannity and Muslim hate preacher Anjem Choudary got into a shouting match Wednesday, along with cartoonist and free speech advocate Pamela Geller, over Geller’s cartoon contest last weekend that sparked a shooting ...

Choudray has spoken in the past in favor of killing people who draw Mohammed. Speaking after the deadly Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, Choudray said that people who would draw Mohammed “know the consequences” and should expect death.

I don't recall other religions putting bounties on peoples' heads for some perceived slight.

Being afraid to anger the perpetually enraged Islamists is like an abused wife being warned by her wimpy neighbours to have supper on the table lest her abusive husband smack her again.



King Salman did not attend a summit at Camp David may indicate that not even the Saudis have any confidence in Obama:

Last month, Obama invited GCC leaders to Washington after his administration secured a framework agreement with Iran to limit Tehran’s nuclear program. Gulf states worry that the potential deal — offering Tehran sanctions relief in exchange for restrictions on its nuclear program — will provide Iran with an influx of cash to fund proxies and expand its regional ambitions in Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon.

This week’s summit aimed to let the U.S. settle those nerves about the emerging deal and discuss regional security issues, including the takeover of Yemen by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels.

On Sunday, Saudi Arabia announced that the country’s monarch, King Salman, would not attend the summit, even though White House officials told reporters on Friday that he would be there.

Saudi officials denied that his absence amounts to a snub, and said the last-minute decision by King Salman to stay in Riyadh reflected his desire to monitor the cease-fire scheduled to begin Tuesday between the Houthi rebels in Yemen and the Saudi-led coalition that has been launching airstrikes in the country.

Curious because they were such friends.


George Zimmerman, acquitted of shooting Trayvon Martin, was injured when someone tried shooting him:

George Zimmerman, who was acquitted of murder charges in the 2012 shooting death of an unarmed black teenager in Florida, suffered a minor wound after being shot at in his vehicle on Monday, police said.

Zimmerman did not fire a gun in the Monday incident, his latest brush with law enforcement since his 2013 trial, according to police. 

No charges were immediately filed in the shooting, which took place on a roadway in Lake Mary, Florida, a suburb of Orlando.

The other man involved was Matthew Apperson, police said. Apperson previously accused Zimmerman of threatening to kill him during a September 2014 roadside dispute, but declined to press charges.

Given the recent riots and spate of attacks on police officers, I expect the situation will get worse.






And now, things you might not know about the Pieta:

Michelangelo carved it from a single slab of marble. 

Specifically, he used Carrara marble, a white and blue stone named for the Italian region where it is mined. It's been a favorite medium of sculptors since the days of Ancient Rome.

Sunday Post

For all the times we've gnawed on our mothers' faces...

Russian soldiers resigning from the army put a dent into the fabrication that there are no Russian soldiers in Ukraine:

Some Russian soldiers are quitting the army because of the conflict in Ukraine, several soldiers and human rights activists have told Reuters. Their accounts call into question the Kremlin's continued assertions that no Russian soldiers have been sent to Ukraine, and that any Russians fighting alongside rebels there are volunteers.

Evidence for Russians fighting in Ukraine – Russian army equipment found in the country, testimony from soldiers' families and from Ukrainians who say they were captured by Russian paratroopers – is abundant. Associates of Boris Nemtsov, a prominent Kremlin critic killed in February, will soon publish a report which they say will contain new evidence of the Russian military presence in Ukraine.

Until now, however, it has been extremely rare to find Russian soldiers who have fought there and are willing to talk. It is even rarer to find soldiers who have quit the army. Five soldiers who recently quit, including two who said they left rather than serve in Ukraine, have told Reuters of their experiences. 

One of the five, from Moscow, said he was sent on exercises in southern Russia last year but ended up going into Ukraine in an armored convoy.

"After we crossed the border, a lieutenant colonel said we could be sent to jail if we didn't fulfil orders. Some soldiers refused to stay there," said the soldier, who served with the elite Russian Kantemirovskaya tank division. He gave Reuters his full name but spoke on condition of anonymity, saying he feared reprisals.

He said he knew two soldiers who refused to stay. "They were taken somewhere. The lieutenant colonel said criminal cases were opened against them but in reality – we called them afterwards – they were at home. They just quit."

Russia's President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly denied that Moscow has sent any military forces to help rebels in eastern Ukraine, where clashes and casualties persist despite a ceasefire struck in February. Putin's spokesman has derided such allegations by NATO, Western governments and Kiev. 

Officials say that any Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine are "volunteers," helping the rebels of their own free will.

Eight Macedonian police officers were killed by Albanian extremists:

Macedonia said on Sunday its police had wiped out a group of ethnic Albanian "terrorists" in a day-long gun battle that left at least 22 people dead at a moment of deep political crisis in the former Yugoslav republic.

NATO, which dragged Macedonia from the brink of civil war in 2001, called for a "transparent investigation" of what went on when heavily armed police entered a mainly Albanian neighborhood in the northern town of Kumanovo before dawn on Saturday.

The government said eight police and 14 members of an "armed group" had been killed in the ensuing gun battle, describing the gunmen as former rebel commanders from neighboring Kosovo, which broke from Serbia in war in 1999 and inspired an ethnic Albanian insurgency in Macedonia two years later.

Kim Jong-Un reportedly had a missile fired:

North Korea said on Saturday it had successfully test-fired a ballistic missile from a submarine, a step that would mark significant progress in the secretive state's military capabilities. 

It could pose a new threat to South Korea, Japan and the United States, which have tried to contain North Korea's growing nuclear and missile strength, military experts said.

I suppose that is preferable to hearing re-heated anti-Western propaganda.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact: another part of history Putin would rather people remember differently.


There's no liar like an old liar:

Cuban President Raul Castro paid a call Sunday on Pope Francis at the Vatican to thank him for working for Cuban-U.S. detente — and said he was so impressed by the pontiff he is considering a return to the Catholic church's fold.

Damn you, global warming!

South Dakota was the centre of weather extremes Sunday, with a tornado hitting a small town on the eastern side of the state and more than a foot (30 centimetres) of snow blanketing the Black Hills to the west.

It was among several Great Plains and Midwest states in the path of expected severe weather. At the same time, a tropical storm came ashore in the Carolinas and wintry weather also affected parts of Colorado.

Convicted and unrepentant terrorist Omar Khadr was freed on bail and all the popular press has for him are Justin Trudeau soft-ball questions:




Patrick Brown, not the anointed favourite Christine Elliott was,  has won the PC leadership:

After a long, hard winter of campaigning, the Ontario Progressive Conservatives have selected Patrick Brown as the man to lead the party’s renewal.

The MP for Barrie beat out Christine Elliott on her own turf, winning the 5,292 votes necessary in ridings across Ontario. Of the 10,583 electoral votes available, Brown took 6,543 to Elliott’s 4,040, or nearly 62 per cent.

He said he wants to lead “the party Ontario deserves: a progressive conservative party” and the province “can’t afford another decade of this Ontario Liberal government.”

And now, Happy Mothers' Day to all mothers. You've earned your brunch!

V-E Day

 

Seventy years ago, with a clear moral directive and great fortitude, ordinary men achieved the extraordinary and ended a war started by one of history's worst tyrants.

Let them and their sacrifices never be forgotten.

He saved Europe before he saved the Enterprise.

Portraits of the Russians who fought one tyrant while under the thumb of another.

"Katyusha" wasn't just a rocket. In Hebrew, too.

The memories of a Canadian veteran who drove a tank in North Africa:

Gordon MacKay crouched on a battlefield in North Africa one night, cradling a fellow soldier in his arms.

His comrade, a 16-year-old with blonde hair, had been hit by German fire — a bullet in his shoulder and two more in his abdomen — and would not live to see the sun rise. As he watched this brief life ebb away, MacKay, just 23 or 24 at the time, knew that it was too late even to inject a morphine syrette for any relief. Instead, he offered what faint comfort he could, holding the youngster’s head and telling him that help was coming, that he’d been hit bad, but that he’d be alright.

He told the boy that his parents would know all about him, that MacKay would be around if he needed help. He told him he loved him.

And then the boy said “Good night, mom,” and died.

In the 70 years since that night, MacKay, 94, has been reluctant to talk about it. His first close encounter with wartime death, it churns up all kinds of distressing memories that he’d prefer were left undisturbed; he’d rather think about the many good times he had during his 28 years with the army. He doesn’t now recall the soldier’s name, or whether in fact he ever knew it. “When someone was killed, you didn’t want to know his name,” he says. “If I knew his name, I felt I’d have to find his parents. But there were already people who did that job. I knew what that was like, and I didn’t want to do it.”

Yet that night was an exceptional one for MacKay, who as a 16-year-old in peacetime had lied about his age to join the army, primarily because the country was waist-deep in a Depression and he needed work. The army offered food, clothing and shelter. It told him where to go and what to do and when, and it gave him a paycheque. “It was something to do,” he says. And two years later, in 1939, when Canada went to war, he was excited for the opportunity to do some actual soldiering.

But as his battlefield companion drew his last breath that night and others arrived to retrieve the body, MacKay underwent a transformation. He suddenly realized that war was useless, and he didn’t want to be there anymore. “It was bad,” he says. “He was even younger than me.”

But he also understood for the first time that it was vitally important that he and others like him were there, and that he must persevere. It ceased being simply a job; it was now a duty with a purpose.

Mrs. Vera Lynn.

Mid-Week Post

You're looking for the mummy's tomb.

To turn left, go to page six.

To turn right, go to page eight.


After decades of Tory rule, Alberta votes in the NDP:

The NDP has won its first majority government in Alberta by toppling the Progressive Conservative colossus that has dominated the province for decades and driving leader Jim Prentice from public life.

The New Democrats, under leader Rachel Notley, swept all 19 constituencies in Edmonton on Tuesday and made significant inroads in previously barren NDP territory in Calgary, Lethbridge and rural Alberta. ...

The NDP, a party that had never won more than 16 seats, captured 53 seats to secure a majority in the 87-seat legislature.

The Wildrose party took second place with 21 seats and will form the official Opposition, while Prentice and his battered PCs were relegated to third with 10 seats.

Liberal Leader David Swann and Alberta Party Leader Greg Clark were also elected. One riding was undecided as PC incumbent Linda Johnson and Anam Kazim of the NDP finished in a tie.

It was a crushing defeat for the Tories, who had steered the ship of state since 1971 — longer than any party anywhere in the country.

 
Businesses are so confident in the NDP that they are preparing to leave:

Canadian oil and gas shares tumbled and the country's main stock index hit a one-month low on Wednesday after the left-wing New Democratic Party surged to power in the oil-rich province of Alberta on promises that included energy industry reforms. 

"Even now our inboxes are filling with messages expressing something between disbelief and dismay," analyst Andrew Bradford of Raymond James brokerage said after the party won an election on Tuesday to end 44 years of Conservative rule.

New Democrat Premier-elect Rachel Notley offered conciliatory words after her party swept to crushing victory, capitalizing on anger over the impact of the drop in oil prices on government programs.

The NDP is expected to be less accommodative of the energy industry and its Alberta oil sands operations, the target of heavy environmental criticism. Alberta is the largest source of U.S. oil imports. 

In her victory speech, Notley moved to assuage oil-industry worries, saying she would work "to build Canada's energy sector so we build bridges and we open markets instead of having a black eye."

She proposes a review of energy royalties, tighter environmental regulations and reduced support for some pipeline projects such as TransCanada Corp's controversial Keystone XL project. She also promises to raise corporate tax rates by 2 percentage points to 12 percent.

The front page of the Globe and Mail newspaper said the election "changes everything Canadians think about Alberta," while pundits on Twitter suggested the outcome was as unlikely as socialists taking power in Texas.

Financial analysts focused on the potential hit on the oil industry, which already has been stung by slumping prices.

"Companies will need to take money out of Alberta and spend more in British Columbia, and more in Texas," said Benoit Gervais, a portfolio manager at Mackenzie Investments.

Jim Prentice has stepped down:

Alberta Premier Jim Prentice, who led his Conservative party to a stunning election defeat on Tuesday, said he will resign as party leader with immediate effect and also quit his seat.

Alison Redford was a wreck and Jim Prentice had too much baggage.  It is no surprise, therefore, that Albertans would commit suicide vote for the NDP.


Andreas Lubitz, the pilot who flew the doomed Germanwings Flight 9525 into the French Alps killing one hundred and fifty people, practised descending hours before the flight:

The co-pilot of Germanwings Flight 9525 appears to have practiced sending the jetliner into a deadly descent on another flight, just two hours before he intentionally crashed it into the French Alps, investigators said Wednesday.

The revelation appeared to support the theory that the Germanwings crash was not only deliberate but premeditated. It came in a 30-page interim report from the French accident investigation agency BEA.

 See! Culture does matter:

The protest against a new sex-education program in Ontario schools continues with no sign the provincial government is ready to revisit the controversial curriculum.

Parents opposed to the new curriculum on cultural and religious grounds are staging a boycott, pulling their children out of school and holding rallies. The protest is centred mainly in Metro Toronto, where CBC News reported more than 40,000 kids were absent on Monday.

Andrew Morrison, a spokesman for the Ontario Ministry of Education, said pockets of absences have been reported in other communities, including London, Windsor and Ottawa, but had no figures.

Not everyone opposed to the new program is keeping their children out for the whole week.

“Today we’re not doing protest,” Christine Liu of the recently formed Parents Alliance of Ontario, told Yahoo Canada News on Tuesday. “Among the Chinese community we’re only doing protests for one day in May but we will do protests in September in a bigger scope.

Chinese-Canadians may be back in stronger numbers in September if the Liberal government doesn’t alter the curriculum to reflect parents’ concerns, she said. 

(Sidebar: strangely enough, this article avoids the MUSLIM word in much the same way Islamist apologists blame Pamela Gellar for being alive.)

Utterly stunned that political multiculturalism is an apparent failure, leftists are at a loss to understand why they can't persuade unassimilated immigrants into letting over-paid teachers convince their kids that they may be five different genders, something they don't care or think about.

In case one is in doubt about what the revised curriculum actually says...

Well, as long as these kids aren't learning math or anything.


Four Afghan men will be hanged for their part in the mob killing of a woman:

Four Afghan men were sentenced Wednesday to death by hanging over the filmed mob killing in downtown Kabul of a young woman falsely accused of burning the Qur’an, a case that horrified the country and showed the dangers women face in the conservative society.

But the family of the 27-year-old woman, a religious scholar named Farkhuna, immediately denounced the verdict as unfair as the judge dropped charges against 18 men for a lack of evidence. Judge Safiullah Mojadedi sentenced eight others to 16 years in prison. Nineteen police officers accused in the case will be sentenced Saturday, their verdicts publicly announced the next day.

Savages.


I guess money means nothing:

The first of three votes on a natural gas benefit offer worth over $1 billion has been unanimously rejected by a First Nation on British Columbia's northwest coast.

All of the more than 180 eligible voters at a meeting in Port Simpson stood up to oppose the plan to build a liquefied-natural-gas pipeline and terminal in their territory, said Lax Kw'alaams band member Malcolm Sampson.

Pacific NorthWest LNG, which is mostly owned by Malaysia-based oil and gas giant Petronas, has applied to build an export terminal on Lelu Island, just south of Prince Rupert at the head of the Skeena River.

Residents have raised concerns over the project's environmental impact, citing the site's problematic location and the threat it poses to the watershed.

"Why would you build an LNG plant right at the mouth of the Skeena River?" said Sampson, who spoke at Tuesday's meeting. "There of all places."

Sampson said the $1.15-billion offer in benefits over 40 years was not discussed at all during the meeting, which took place in a school gym so packed that some band members had to stand outside.

The pretenses of piety notwithstanding, one is at a loss to explain what can supplant that one billion dollar offering.


And now, a woman begs for rescue online:

Employees at a Pizza Hut in Florida were praised on Wednesday for helping rescue a customer who wrote a message in her online pizza order that she was being held hostage and needed someone to call 911, authorities said.

The note led to the arrest of Ethan Nickerson, 26, who used a large knife to hold his girlfriend and their three children hostage, said Highlands County sheriff's spokeswoman Nell Hays.

The Pizza Hut employees "not only saw something but they acted on it," Hays said.

Cheryl Treadway, 25, was a regular customer at a Pizza Hut in Avon Park in central Florida, which took seriously her plea in the comments section of an online order on Monday.

"Who would have thought of that?" Hays said.

After deputies arrived at the house, Nickerson surrendered peacefully. Treadway and the couple's three children, ages 1, 5 and 6, did not appear seriously harmed, authorities said.

For A Tuesday

A merry Cinco de Mayo to all y'all...


David Menzies shares video footage of the terrorism attack in Garland, Texas:




 The Alberta election is underway.


Videos showing the faces of special operations forces were pulled after worries of reprisals:

A series of videos distributed by the Prime Minister's Office, some of which showed the faces of the country's special forces soldiers, were abruptly pulled offline early Tuesday in an embarrassing security breach.

The videos, on Stephen Harper's official 24-Seven feed, were taken during his recent whirlwind trip to Iraq and Kuwait, where the travelling media were lectured and asked to sign undertakings that they would not publish images of the elite JTF-2 troops who provided security and conduct a myriad of secret operations around the world.

The request, made of out fear of reprisal by Islamic State terrorists, was honoured by journalists and photographers, but it appears one of Harper's videographers filmed some soldiers in the background during an interview involving Defence Minister Jason Kenney.

There are other instances of JTF-2 members being clearly visible, hovering near the prime minister.

Several videos were pulled offline.

 
Unbelievable.


I say tax Justin Trudeau seventy-five percent of his inherited money:




Omar Khadr may be going nowhere:

Any hopes Omar Khadr had of tasting freedom for the first time in almost 13 years were dashed Tuesday when an Alberta justice said she wanted more time to consider whether he should be released on bail.

Court of Appeal Justice Myra Bielby said she would decide Thursday whether to grant the federal government's request to keep him behind bars despite a lower court order that he be freed.

I'll believe it when I see it.


Mohammad Shafia, who killed his former wife and three daughters, is reportedly intimidating other prisoners:

The Montreal man serving a life sentence for killing his wife and three teenage daughters intimidated other prisoners to the point that one asked to be put in isolation, a Senate committee has heard.

Psychologist Robert Groves, who worked in Kingston Penitentiary, testified Monday before the national security and defence committee hearing on security threats facing Canada. He said he met with one particular non-Muslim inmate who went to great lengths to avoid Shafia.

"It turned out that he felt so intimidated by Shafia and some of his lieutenants, that he chose to give up his relative freedom of movement on the range in the general population for a much more restricted life on a social isolation range," Groves said.

"He could no longer come to see me. I had to go to his cell on the isolation range. He advised me that confinement was worth it to avoid the hassle of dealing with 'the Muslims'".

After his first-degree murder conviction in 2012, Shafia took on a religious leadership role at the Kingston Penitentiary — the onetime maximum-security prison — organizing Friday prayers when the sole Imam permitted to minister to inmates in Canada was not available, according to Groves.

"This man was obnoxious in manner, demanding of the Protestant and Catholic chaplains, and generally offensive," he said.

"The normally pleasant atmosphere associated with the Muslims gathering for prayers was absent. Inmates on the same range as Shafia who came to see me expressed fear of him."

Groves said he was surprised to find Shafia leading the religious gathering Friday given that he had shown little remorse for the 2009 killings.

 
I guess the bullying just never leaves you.


News from North Korea:

North Korea decries the report that it is a sponsor of terrorism:

The "Commission for Human Rights in North Korea", a non-governmental human rights body of the U.S., released a report on April 27.


The report claimed that the DPRK is backing and dealing with the terrorist organizations and "states sponsoring terrorism" in Mideast and is involved in direct terrorism such as cyber attack on the Sony Pictures Entertainment of the U.S. It urged the U.S. administration and Congress to re-list the DPRK as a "sponsor of terrorism."


The report is no more than a conspiratorial document that does not deserve even a passing note as it was cooked up by a U.S. individual organization which is unknown to the international community in a bid to gain its political clout. But the DPRK cannot but take a serious note of the U.S. moves in the light of the fact that the commission echoed the assertion of the U.S. hard-line conservative forces calling for ratcheting up pressure upon the DPRK now that the relations between it and the U.S. are at rock bottom.


Lurking behind the moves of the "Commission for Human Rights in North Korea" to make public the report and build up public opinion on it is its sinister purpose to tarnish the image of the DPRK by branding it as a "sponsor of terrorism" now that the U.S. has failed to "demonize" it over the "nuclear and human rights issue".


Whenever the DPRK-U.S. relations and the situation got strained, the Republican Party and other conservative forces in the U.S. desperately called for re-listing the DPRK as a "sponsor of terrorism" since its removal from the list of "sponsors of terrorism" in 2008.

One wonders if some leftist hack put this out.


American feminists ignore the "war on women" in North Korea:

Would it be too much for Gloria Steinem to ask North Korea to investigate and prosecute the rapists in its ranks? After all, Steinem’s Feminist Majority has been outspoken on the subject of sexual assault in the U.S. armed forces. The organizer of Women Cross DMZ, Christine Ahn, has denounced “sexual violence by U.S. servicemen” in South Korea, even suggesting that it’s a greater threat to South Korea’s civilian population than North Korea’s nuclear weapons. (This is a hyperbolic falsehood, as I can testify from my four years as an Army prosecutor and defense counsel in Korea. If anything, the U.S. Army’s extreme sensitivity to bad publicity and political pressure causes it to overcharge alleged sexual assaults. Alleged assaults were overwhelmingly soldier-on-soldier; relatively few involved Korean victims.)

(Kamsahamnida)


So a koala walks into a hospital....

But Wait! There's More!

There usually is...


The government has filed an appeal to keep convicted terrorist Omar Khadr in prison:

Granting bail to former Guantanamo Bay prisoner Omar Khadr while he appeals his war crimes conviction in the United States threatens the entire system of international prisoner transfers, the federal government argues in new court filings.

The claim comes in material filed late Monday as part of Ottawa's 11th-hour attempt to block Khadr's release from prison — which could come as early as Tuesday evening.

"A lack of clarity in the international transfer process may jeopardize the system as a whole," the government states in documents obtained by The Canadian Press.

"(Khadr's) release unsettles the foundation of this system by introducing uncertainty and a lack of control over the manner in which Canadian offenders' sentences are enforced."

Despite having presented no such evidence at his bail hearing, the government also now argues that allowing Khadr out — given his long incarceration — presents a risk that is contrary to the public interest.

Yes, about that:

Canadian prisoner Omar Khadr told interrogators he was an al Qaeda terrorist and described pulling the pin of a grenade that killed a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan, a prosecutor told Khadr's war crimes tribunal on Thursday.

Oh, dear. This must be embarrassing:

A parent-led campaign to keep children home from class in protest of Ontario's new sexual-education curriculum gained early traction on Monday as the province's largest school board reported tens of thousands of absences.

Ryan Bird, a spokesman with the Toronto District School Board, said 34,762 elementary school students were absent on the first day of the campaign, which was largely organized through Facebook. That's more than double the 14,191 absences recorded last Monday.

At least one of the city's elementary schools had an absentee rate of more than 90 per cent, Bird said. Thorncliffe Park Public School was reporting that 1,220 of its 1,350 students were not in class, he said, adding that about 100 parents had turned up to stage a protest outside the building.

The money shot starts at 3:05:




The US State Department responds to a report that it denied entry to an Iraqi Catholic nun who lectures on the human rights abuses of ISIS:

The State Department is apparently trying to cover up an embarrassing, politically damaging, and possibly discriminatory act. In an e-mail sent to me on Thursday, Kathryn Fitrell, press-unit chief of the Office of Policy Coordination and Public Affairs with State’s Bureau of Consular Affairs, requested that I revise the text of my National Review article on the denial of a visitor visa to Sister Diana Momeka. I refused, and then on Friday — as the Department honored World Press Freedom Day — the Bureau contacted my employer, the Hudson Institute, with the same request. ...

 

In Sister Diana’s account, Mr. Patch offered her a critical insight into the reason she was denied a visa: She was classified as an IDP (internally displaced person), presumably more liable to overstay a visa and settle illegally in this country, although she is employed in Iraq, teaching at the Babel College for Philosophy and Theology, and the temporary nature of the visit she has applied for is vouched for by the prioress of her community, as well as by a member of Congress and others. 

 

 The order of Dominican sisters to whom she belongs says, and I believe them, that their only member to resettle in the United States did so in 2012 — that is, before ISIS — and that she had a green card, which means she resettled legally. The Dominican Sisters of Saint Catherine of Siena have an established, 150-year-old presence in Iraq and are committed to helping the remaining displaced Christians of that country. 

 

In citing Sister Diana’s IDP status, Mr. Patch simply articulated the unspoken. But is there yet another explanation for her being blocked by the Erbil consulate general from traveling to Washington for meetings at which she was to report on the situation of Christians in Iraq? She was to be part of a delegation whose other members, representatives of two other religious communities in the region, the Yazidi and the Shia Turkmen, were granted visas. 

 

If Sister Diana’s IDP status was the issue, why were Yazidi IDPs granted visas last October? It so happens that every Christian survivor and eyewitness of ISIS’s religious-cleansing campaign is now an IDP or refugee. 

 

As an articulate, English-speaking Iraqi Christian, who is not only personally a victim of ISIS but also an aid worker with a broad perspective on the suffering of the Christian community there, Sister Diana would make an exceptional witness.

A North Korean refugee recounts her escape from the Stalinist state:

In 1998, her dying father sent her and her brother away. They were supposed to flee to China, but the escape helpers turned out to be human traffickers. Jihyun Park was sold to a Chinese man for the equivalent of 700 euros.

"Officially I was his wife, unofficially I was his slave," she says. Her brother was betrayed and taken back to North Korea. Park's only solace is the birth of her son Chol. Yet mother and son were considered economic migrants in China, and there was no asylum for North Koreans. "There is a reward for anyone who betrays an illegal," says Jihyun Park. "I was turned in by a neighbor." The young mother was taken back to North Korea in 2004, and had to leave her son in China. In her old home country she was condemned as a traitor and thrown into the labor camp at Chongjin.

Park says that women in the camp were forced to work from 4:30 a.m. until late in the evening. They had to plant, till, and harvest the fields with only their bare hands and no shoes, constantly in fear of being beaten, harassed, or sexually abused by the guards. "We weren't treated like humans, not even like animals, it was awful," says Park. A serious leg wound eventually saved her from prison - and today her leg bears an enormous scar, there is hardly a piece of undamaged skin left on it. Camp doctors did not think that the sick woman would ever recover, and they sent her home.

 Read the whole thing.


Seventy years later, veterans of the Second World War return to a country they liberated where they are offered thanks by a still-grateful nation:

Frank Graham had a long war as an artillery private with the 1st Canadian Division, landing in Sicily in August 1943 and fighting his way through Italy and northwest Europe before being wounded just before the end.

"Well, I tell ya, it got so after a while I didn't give a damn anyway," he said. "You take it that way and it don't bother you too much. But if you start worrying, you're gonna be in trouble."

The Dutch, renowned for their appreciation of their Canadian liberators turned out by hundreds at the cemetery, young and old in a display that never fails to move Graham.

"I can't explain it. My heart isn't big enough," he said. "It is such a different feeling when I get in here. I feel like, not at home, but I feel relaxed. I feel myself, mostly. Because that's the way they are."

And now, Grace Lee Whitney, who played Yeoman Janice Rand on Star Trek and who survived alcohol addiction, has passed away:

Grace Lee Whitney, who played Captain Kirk's assistant on the original "Star Trek" series, has died. She was 85.

Whitney died of natural causes Friday in her home in the Central California town of Coarsegold, about 50 miles north of Fresno, her son Jonathan Dweck said on Sunday.

Don't Draw Mohammad... Or Else

A depiction of Mohammad resetting the black stone by Rashid-al-Din-Hamadani (circa 1315).

Two gunmen, one of whom was known to the FBI, opened fire at a contest in which participants had to draw Mohammad. Both were later killed by the authorities.

This is not an unusual event. Salman Rushdie was threatened after publishing The Satanic Verses. There was violence after the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published allegedly offensive cartoons of the Islamic prophet by the name of Mohammad. Ezra Levant was condemned by a human rights tribunal for publishing the same cartoons. The American cartoonist, Molly Norris, had to go into hiding. The creators of South Park were threatened for depicting a blocked image of Mohammad. French cartoonists and journalists who worked for Charlie Hebdo were gunned down.

What is news is the pandering to Islamists and the willful suppression of facts and expression by the very people who, if living in a caliphate, would either be silenced or expunged from existence simply for being who they are.

Why, of any religion, leader or ideology, would the popular press and the left wish to defend, without question, Islamism?

Intellectually, one guesses that Islamism is the opposite of what the popular press and the left represent. It is a kernel of truth for what is a mind-boggling puzzle.

But embracing the crocodile does not convince it to never eat one.

Sooner or later, this apologia will seem less and less absurd as it will seem suicidal.

Then there will be no knee-jerk defense of anything.

May 4th

It's the fourth of May today.


Here are thirty-seven Star Wars facts to wonder over.


Now watch as this Star Trek actor explains Star Wars Day:



(Sidebar: now one knows why Tuvok was awesome.)


Now go forth... or something.

Friday Freakout

Thus begins our casual mosey into barbecue season...


Possibly what to make for that season.


Did you know you can celebrate National Hummus Day as well as Mothers' Day in May?


Were these scenes in Star Trek needless or just what the series required? You decide.