And the Rest of It

A lot going on ...




The autopsies on the two men accused of killing two tourists and a professor are complete:

Autopsies on two bodies found by police in northern Manitoba during a search for B.C. fugitives Bryer Schmegelsky and Kam McLeod are complete, an RCMP spokesperson confirmed Sunday.

Sgt. Paul Manaigre said RCMP have formalities to complete before they can officially identify the bodies. However, he said it's believed the bodies are those of the suspects.

If you want to interview her, one had better make it quick before she accidentally kills herself the way her friend, Jeffrey, did:

Ghislaine Maxwell was, according to her accusers, Jeffrey Epstein’s protector and procurer, his girlfriend and his madam. She was, by all accounts, a soul mate and a mirror image. He grew up in Brooklyn with no money to speak of and never finished college. She is Paris-born, Oxford-educated, a jet-setter who partied with princes and billionaires.

Together, Epstein and Maxwell allegedly built what prosecutors, police and a growing number of women described as a sex-trafficking operation that crisscrossed the nation to provide Epstein with three young girls a day.

The death of Epstein, the convicted sex offender who authorities said hanged himself in a federal detention centre cell in New York on Saturday, leaves those who seek to hold someone responsible for the alleged abuse of dozens of girls with one prime target: Maxwell.

The U.S. attorney in New York, Geoff Berman, assured the “brave young women who have already come forward and … the many others who have yet to do so” that “our investigation of the conduct charged in the indictment — which included a conspiracy count — remains ongoing.”

According to many of the women who have spoken about what Epstein allegedly did to them, Maxwell was the financier’s chief co-conspirator.

Who knows what other embarrassing things might leak out?




Speaking of crime:

The criminal case of suspended public servant Matthew Matchett, who’s accused of leaking similar material to that in the Vice Admiral Mark Norman case, was back in court on Friday for a brief update as it heads toward a preliminary inquiry scheduled for October.

The Matchett case may be the only way the public finds out more information about the controversial Norman prosecution, as Norman’s case was stayed by the Crown in May and he’s since reached a confidential settlement with the government.

Both Matchett and Norman were charged with breach of trust following an RCMP investigation into leaks around a $700-million navy supply ship project with Davie Shipbuilding. However, Matchett was only charged in February 2019, nearly a year after Norman was charged — despite the fact that RCMP disclosure given to Norman’s lawyers had also identified alleged leaks from Matchett.

According to that disclosure, some of which was divulged in court documents filed by Norman’s lawyers last fall, Matchett is believed to have provided physical cabinet documents about the supply ship project — including a PowerPoint presentation deck and a memorandum to cabinet — in a brown envelope to a lobbyist. The RCMP later recovered those documents in a raid on the lobbyist’s office in 2016.

**

Street gangs are largely to blame for Toronto's recent spate of shootings, the city's police chief said Friday as he called for help addressing the problem.

Chief Mark Saunders said a multi-faceted approach was needed to tackle the gang issue in the city, where the vast majority of shootings occur consistently in the same neighbourhoods year after year.

(Sidebar: which you're not going to take on because it is easier to issue blanket bans than really deal with a widespread problem.) 

Also:

The federal ethics watchdog has launched an investigation into allegations that Liberal MP Joe Peschisolido failed to update his public records when the Law Society of B.C. took control of his law firm earlier this year.

Oh, please, Little Miss Victim. None of these would be necessary if your co-religionists didn't kill nearly three thousand people:

A 12-year-old passenger and her family are questioning why she was forced to remove her hijab by Air Canada boarding agents after she had already cleared airport security.

Fatima Abdelrahman, a U.S. junior squash player, was travelling with the rest of her team from San Francisco to Toronto for a tournament on Aug. 1. After she had passed airport security and was waiting at her gate to board Flight 758 with her teammates, an Air Canada agent asked her to remove her head covering, she and her sister, Sabreen, told HuffPost Canada over the phone.

“The Air Canada agent told me to remove my scarf because in my passport photo I wasn’t wearing a scarf. It was a long time ago,” Fatima said.

I don't like taking off my shoes at the airport but I do it, anyway. 

Those Canadians are being awfully good sports about that languishing in jail while you grovel to their captors:

Canada’s foreign minister on Friday praised two Canadian men detained in China for their “grit” and “tenacity,” as the countries’ diplomatic feud entered its eighth month.

This China: 

The chief executive of Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific Airways warned Monday there will be “disciplinary consequences” for employees involved in “illegal protests,” as the airline joins a slate of businesses that have appeased and apologized to China in recent days.

**

According to a Nanos poll for The Globe & Mail, a whopping 90% of Canadians have either a ‘negative,’ or ‘somewhat’ negative impression of China.

But not when China was killing its baby girls.




One day, the US will just say: "To hell with it!" and let everyone else either spend their own money on their own defense or be absorbed by a tyrannical state:

Germany’s reluctance to spend more on defense and its continued reliance on U.S. troops for protection is offensive, Richard Grenell, the U.S. Ambassador to Germany said on Friday.

Grenell’s comments signal U.S. President Donald Trump’s impatience with Germany’s failure to raise defense spending to 2% of economic output as mandated by the NATO military alliance.

“It is offensive to assume that the U.S. taxpayers continue to pay for more than 50,000 Americans in Germany but the Germans get to spend their (budget) surplus on domestic programs,” Grenell told the dpa news agency.

Germany’s fiscal plans foresee the defense budget of NATO’s second-largest member rising to 1.37% of output next year before falling to 1.24% in 2023.

Eastern European countries like Poland and Latvia, fearful of Russia after it annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, have raised their military spending to the 2% target, drawing praise from Trump who wants Germany to do the same.

**

U.S. and Canadian fighter aircraft intercepted two Russian Tu-95 Bear H bombers over the Beaufort Sea north of the Alaskan and Canadian coast on Thursday, according to North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). 

The bombers had entered the Alaskan and Canadian Air Defense Identification Zones (ADIZ), which extends 200 miles off the coast, but they did not cross into U.S. or Canadian sovereign airspace. It's believed to be the fifth Russian intercept by the U.S. this year.

The two U.S. F-22 fighters and two Canadian CF-18 fighters were supported by an American E-3 Sentry, KC-135 refueling aircraft and C-130 tanker.

Also - I'm sure it's nothing for the Europeans to be concerned with:

An explosion damaged a police station in Copenhagen early on Saturday, the second blast to hit the Danish capital in four days.

No one was injured in the blast outside a small unstaffed police station in the area of Norrebro, just outside the city center, Chief Police Inspector Jorgen Bergen Skov said.

On Tuesday, one person was slightly injured in an explosion outside the Danish Tax Agency's office in what police said was a deliberate attack.

It's like the Liberal Party sticks both feet in its mouth before it talks:

Liberal MP Marc Miller, who is also the parliamentary secretary for Crown-Indigenous Relations, apparently thinks that an Indigenous Women can’t represent rural areas.

That seems to be the ‘point’ he was trying to make in a Tweet that totally backfired:

“In this episode of Andrew Scheer’s Conservative Party purchasing stock photos, we see them using an indigenous woman to represent « rural » areas. You can’t make this up. #cdnpoli”

You're right. You can't make this up. Marc Miller is an @$$hole.




It's a small world after all:

On Monday, Tyler Ivanoff of Shishmaref, Alaska, posted two incredible photos to his Facebook page showing a green glass bottle, and the message he found within, which appeared to be written in Russian. ...

According to Ivanoff, he found the bottle "down the coast from Shishmaref," which is just above the Bering Strait.

One commenter suggested that Ivanoff have the letter translated, and search for any living crew members who may have been involved in writing it. While Ivanoff said that his work might keep him too busy to search himself, on Thursday, Russian TV station Ren posted an article to their website stating that the captain of the vessel had been found.