Monday Post

A lot going on ...



Oh, this must be humiliating:

Toronto police say an 11-year-old girl’s report of having her hijab cut by a scissors-wielding man as she walked to school last week did not happen.

Police had been investigating the alleged incident as a hate crime and now say their investigation is concluded.

(Sidebar: oh, I'll bet it's concluded.)

The alleged incident captured national attention after it was reported Friday and drew public condemnation from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne.

Interesting:

Also:

What has been occurring with increasing regularity, though, is the appearance of a backlash against Muslims perpetrated by Muslims themselves.

Take the case of the University of Michigan student who in November 2016, shortly after the presidential election, told police that two male Trump supporters attacked her and threatened to set her on fire if she failed to remove her hijab. Police say the report was false and that the as-yet unnamed woman may face charges.

Or the Louisiana woman who claimed to be the victim of an anti-Muslim attack in Lafayette the day after the election. Two men, she claimed, one of them wearing a Trump hat, stole her wallet and demanded she remove her hijab. Lafayette police have deemed it a hoax but have not released the woman's name.

Or Yasmin Seweid, the New York City college student who lied about being harassed (again, her hijab snatched from her, she claimed) by Trump supporters on the Number 6 train on December 1, 2016.

Or Michael Kee, the reportedly Muslim Beloit College (Wisconsin) student who spray-painted anti-Islamic graffiti on the door of his own dormitory room on January 30 and then reported it as a hate crime.

What can explain the rise of fake anti-Muslim crimes? Ibrahim Hooper of the Hamas-linked Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) explains that Muslims in America are "under great psychological stress and tension right now, and that in itself can cause mental health issues that lead to these types of incidents."

CAIR uncritically disseminated Yasmin Seweid's lie but failed to set the record straight when it was exposed. It issued a press release condemning the "attack" on Seweid but has yet to issue a retraction. 

Its website still links to three stories reporting the incident, but not a single follow-up story documenting Seweid's arrest for fabricating the story.

Speaking of things that will find their way down the memory-hole:

A bail hearing for former Afghanistan hostage Joshua Boyle could be weeks away after a brief court appearance by video link today relating to assault charges.

Boyle is due back in Ontario court Jan. 26, while his lawyers press for disclosure of evidence such as details of a 911 call.

Boyle was arrested by Ottawa police late last month and faces 15 charges, including eight counts of assault, two of sexual assault, two of unlawful confinement and one count of causing someone to take a noxious thing.

**

Isn’t it strange how people keep needing to be reminded of Liberals who’ve behaved in this way towards women? I’ll bet you already forgot about Scott Andrews and Massimo Pacetti, two Liberal MPs who Trudeau dealt with summarily. Then there’s Darshan Kang and Hunter Tootoo (his technically not harassment, but disgraceful nonetheless), who received a bit more attention before and after they resigned. Then there’s the case of Liberal MP Nicola Di lorio joking that Conservative MP Dianne Watts was a stripper in front of other colleagues after hearing her ringtone, which Liberal-friendly online publication iPolitics thought was funny enough to include in its end-of-the-year top ten list of funniest stories in Canadian politics.

From the same government that refuses to revoke citizenship of known terrorists:

The government’s new public safety bill gives new powers to Canada’s foreign intelligence agency that has a growing number of critics worried it will put Canadians in the crosshairs.

The Communications Security Establishment has long had a mandate to focus solely on foreign intelligence but a recent report by the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto said the limitation is “largely a fiction” and raised concerns about the agency’s new powers and how they will affect Canadians.

Bill C-59 is winding its way through parliamentary committees and has been touted as the Liberal government’s improved version of the Harper government’s national security legislation, Bill C-51, which also attracted controversy. The Liberal bill creates a standalone act that governs the CSE and, along with an enhanced mandate for cybersecurity, introduces quasi-judicial oversight on the agency in the form of a newly created Intelligence Commissioner.

That enhanced mandate, “extraordinary exceptions” to the CSE’s rule against directing its activities at Canadians and the interconnected nature of the world’s information systems means the bill could create a host of new privacy concerns. The Citizen Lab report also points out that because the agency operates in “near-complete secrecy” it is “impossible for the public to fully understand” how the new act will modify or enhance the CSE’s power.

(Sidebar: how could this go wrong?)




God help us all:

The Supreme Court of Canada is to begin hearings Monday in an appeal that could force lawmakers across the country to give First Nations a role in drafting legislation that affects treaty rights.

“This case is tremendously significant whichever way it comes out,” said Dwight Newman, a law professor at the University of Saskatchewan.

It could “fundamentally transform how law is made in Canada,” he said.

The court is to hear a challenge by the Mikisew Cree First Nation in northern Alberta. It seeks a judicial review of changes made under the previous Harper government to the Fisheries Act, the Species At Risk Act, the Navigable Waters Protection Act and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act.

The First Nation argues that because the changes were likely to affect its treaty rights, the government had a constitutional duty to consult before making them.

Cases on the Crown’s duty to consult appear regularly, but they usually concern decisions made by regulatory bodies. This one seeks to extend that duty to law-making.

Unelected judges are giving broad judicial powers to people based on their skin colour which would mean that individuals and provinces would have long and cumbersome hurdles to pass through just to get one thing accomplished.

Only in Canada.




If Justin knew that he couldn't get away with being an @$$hole, he might take more care in trying not to be one:

The effect of Trudeau’s position is to take federal funding and tie it to forced acceptance of Liberal beliefs. All governments use their access to the public purse to advance their own interests to some degree — Stephen Harper’s Conservatives littered the country with signs hailing their Economic Action Plan — but none that I know of have specifically contained an ideological purity test requiring applicants to profess their explicit support of government policy before they are even allowed to apply. In this case, party policy was earlier rewritten to reflect the personal opinion of the leader, so that Liberals who hope to sit and vote with the party must support the abortion views of Justin Trudeau.

People are distracted by yet another issue they don't understand (ie - there is no abortion law in this country nor are there specific rights to it in the Charter). The abortion angle here is incidental. If the government can force a citizen to waive their views and rights for ONE reason, they can continue doing it for ANY reason.

We fought wars against this sort of thing.

Well, not Justin's dad, but other dads.




No, budgets don't balance themselves.


Cases in point:

The arithmetic here is simple and unforgiving: if you accept — as the Liberals have — the Conservatives’ choices for revenues and the budget balance, you are also obliged to accept the Conservatives’ choices for the total level of public services provided. (New programs would have to be financed by cutting existing ones.) The original Liberal plan respected that arithmetic: deficits would finance a temporary burst of infrastructure spending, so that the budget would go back to balance when the extra spending stopped.

But that’s not what happened. The Liberals’ infrastructure program has yet to get off the ground, but Direct Program Expenditures (DPE) — the budget item that involves paying salaries and buying things — has gone from 5.8 per cent of GDP in 2014-15, the last full year of the Conservative government, to a projected 6.5 per cent in the current 2017-18 fiscal year. (Transfers to individuals and other levels of government are rules-based and generally track GDP automatically.)

Since revenues and transfer payments track GDP, the only way to reduce the deficit is to reduce DPE as a share of GDP. The reason the October fiscal update predicted lower deficits than projected in last March’s budget was that it made more aggressive assumptions about how the Liberal government would control growth in direct spending: it projects that DPE will be reduced back to down to 5.7 per cent of GDP in 2022-23.

This seems unlikely. In a blog post, Randall Bartlett of the Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy at the University of Ottawa says at “the IFSD, we don’t believe that the federal government’s DPE forecast is realistic.”

**

One-third of Canadians say they are no longer able to cover their monthly bills and debt payments, according to a survey carried out by Ipsos for insolvency consultancy MNP, up from 25 per cent in a survey three months earlier.

This does not carry on for twenty-five years unless the bloated public sector lets it happen with their incompetence and indifference:

It was a horror story that played out in the midst of an unseeing city: a man who for 25 years not only beat an intellectually challenged man, but stole his child and raised him as his own.

But at last, Gary Willett, 50, has been found guilty for his shocking mistreatment of Tim Goldrick, an illiterate and formerly homeless man whose monthly disability cheque and terrified servitude was taken as Willett’s right for more than two decades.

If they can get themselves there, they can get themselves back:

So while some villagers offer overnight shelter, others take turns patrolling the snowy pass after sunset for lost souls, carrying gloves and hot drink to revive those strong enough to continue, and calling mountain rescue for those too weak to go on.

“We were in a moral dilemma,” said Bernard Liger, 82, a retired battalion commander who now runs a “humanitarian commando” to help the migrants.

“If we did nothing, many would be lost, if we did something people would say we were ‘opening the door’.”

He has sent a petition signed by 45,000 people to President Emmanuel Macron calling on him to prevent these mountains becoming “the peaks of shame”.

“After much discussion, we agreed that border security is not our problem, that’s for politicians and the police. Our job is to minimize the number of frozen bodies come spring,” he said.

Europeans deserve the mess that they're in.




But I thought that Putin was a great guy!:

An activist based in St. Petersburg has sounded the alarm on a local university that is reportedly forcing students to collect signatures for President Vladimir Putin’s 2018 re-election bid. 

Independent candidates, which Putin is running as in this campaign, are required to collect at least 300,000 signatures to get on the ballot. The presidential campaign spokesman announced on Friday that 408,000 signatures have been gathered so far, the state-run TASS news agency reported.

**

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said the United States “screwed up” by backing opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s to get on the 2018 presidential ballot.

U.S. State Department officials expressed concern late last month after election officials barred Navalny from running in the March 18 vote — a decision that was twice upheld by Russia’s Supreme Court. The concerns drew a sharp rebuke from Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman at the time, who accused Washington of election interference.

Also:

The head of a region in Russia’s Far East has asked Moscow to allow an estimated 10,000 North Korean migrant workers to remain in the country despite UN sanctions. 

Russia’s Labor Ministry had rejected all previous requests from local employer’s to give the North Korean citizens working permits last month. The move came after the UN imposed fresh sanctions in September that limited countries from issuing permits to North Korean workers, who are suspected of helping finance Pyongyang’s nuclear program.

After meeting the North Korean consul, Andrei Tarasenko, the governor of the Pacific Primorye region, told reporters Friday that he was concerned about the fate of the migrant workers in his region. 

“We took the initiative and appealed to Moscow to keep the number of those workers who are already in Primorye,” Tarasenko was cited as saying by the Interfax news agency Friday. 

North Korea’s Embassy petitioned Russian deputies last November to allow 3,500 migrant workers, who have already signed work contracts, to stay in the country despite the UN sanctions, Reuters reported. 

According to a U.S. State Department report from mid-2017, tens of thousands of North Koreans toil in “slave-like conditions” in Russia, forced to work up to 20 hours a day for meagre pay. Despite poor working conditions and a required “planned contribution” to their government, many North Korean choose to work in Russia to receive a higher salary than back home.

North Korea is not at all happy with South Korean president, Moon Jae-In:

North Korean on Sunday slammed President Moon Jae-in for his recent press conference remark that US President Donald Trump has to be credited for helping open up inter-Korean talks. The North also threatened a withdrawal of its participation in the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics.

The response came four days after Moon's New Year press conference where the president said the resumption of inter-Korean talks should largely be credited to Trump, indicating the US' hard sanctions may have brought the North to the negotiating table.

"At this time, ill-boding remarks chilling the atmosphere for reconciliation are heard from South Korea, upsetting the people," the North's state-run Korean Central News Agency said in an English dispatch.

Oh, save it for your propaganda performance.




Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is moved after visiting the Lithuanian museum dedicated to Chiune Sugihara, a diplomat whose tireless efforts saved thousands of Lithuanian Jews from Nazi death camps:

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Sunday visited a museum commemorating Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat who saved thousands of Jewish people from Nazi persecution during World War II.

“Sugihara’s courageous humanitarian acts are highly rated around the world. As Japanese, I’m very proud of him,” Abe told reporters after visiting the Sugihara House in Kaunas in central Lithuania.

Sugihara, who was Japan’s vice consul in Lithuania, issued transit visas, now known as “visas for life,” to Jews who were fleeing Nazi Germany, going against the Japanese government’s policy at the time. About 6,000 people were saved.

“He saved a lot of Jewish people with his strong belief and will in a difficult situation,” Abe said.

Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Dolores O'Riordan:

(Merci beaucoup)