... we haven't learnt the lessons. ...
United Nations human rights experts are alarmed by what they see as a growing trend to enact legislation allowing medical assistance in dying for people suffering from non-terminal, disabling conditions.
I didn't think that you cared, UN.
Free speech means that everything is on the table, even things people would not like to hear or see:
A federally funded panel is recommending the creation of a powerful new government regulator to oversee social media companies such as Facebook and Google and to require them to have strong content-moderation practices and to comply with a new legal duty to act responsibly.
The report by the Public Policy Forum (PPF)’s Canadian Commission on Democratic Expression, to be released on Wednesday, also calls for the creation of a federal “e-tribunal” to hear complaints about specific social media posts.
The federal Liberal government plans to introduce legislation early this year to regulate social media companies, with a focus on online hate and harassment. The report’s recommendations are aimed at influencing that legislation.
(Sidebar: read - criticism of the Liberal Party. The entire racism claim is a canard and everyone knows it. Wrap a totalitarian construct around wool but it's still totalitarian.)
Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro announced the "freedom of speech protection" bill on Friday.
The law would also establish a "freedom of speech council".
The council would be able to order social networks such as Facebook or Twitter to restore deleted content, or unblock a user's account following a review, Mr Ziobro said.
Social media users in Poland who had been blocked or had content deleted would be able to complain directly to the platform, which would have to respond within 24 hours.
If a social media company refused to comply with an order, the council would be able to issue a fine of between 50,000 and 50 million zloty.
Also:
Since we apparently know the identifying details of these 300 groups — how else could the NDP offer such a precise number? — surely, we can now *expose* them. Even if they haven’t broken any laws, there’s enormous value in warning the public about their identities. After all, Nazis don’t announce themselves with names like “League of Right-Wing Canadian Racists” — much in the way Antifa doesn’t call itself “Guys Who Started Off Pretending to Oppose Fascism But Now Just Randomly Wreck Stuff.” Fromm calls one of his groups “The Council of Conservative Citizens.” These names can be very deceptive.
So obviously what we need is a public database that contains all 300 entries, so that when we get invited to a Facebook group, or a local bake-sale fundraiser, or a neighbour asks for help burning an effigy or what not, we’ll be able to check the invitation against a list of known hate groups. In fact, I’m surprised Jagmeet Singh hasn’t already posted the list to NDP.ca. Remember: The forces of white supremacy are massing as we speak. *Lives* are at stake.
Don't worry, Mr. Kay. Canadians can't name any Nazi death camps, either.
**
Cancelled in five, four ... :
In a no-holds barred video, Canadian playwright, author and actor Carmen Aguirre is calling for an end to cancel culture in the theatre community. The provocative video essay – originally produced for a Vancouver theatre event that was cancelled – calls on fellow artists to end what Aguirre calls “the great purge.” It is a time, she says, “of cruelty and psychological violence” – when people can be publicly humiliated, shamed, mobbed on social media and fired from their jobs for expressing their beliefs, just because those beliefs might be offensive.
“I do not consent to being part of an arts community that engages in witch-hunts of people who don’t think like me,” Aguirre says in the nearly 30-minute video, which she posted to YouTube.
We don't have to trade with China. We never did:
“Under this agreement, CanSino was to provide candidate vaccine doses and transfer their vaccine technology, free of charge, for Phase 1 and 2 clinical trials in Canada, and grant the NRC a non-exclusive right to use, produce, and reproduce the vaccine for emergency pandemic use,” the NRC said in the response to a question on the House’s order paper from Conservative Health critic Michelle Rempel Garner.
Neither CanSino nor the Chinese government got any money from the Canadian government through the deal, the NRC said. Expecting more vaccines to be produced, Ottawa committed $44 million to ensure that the NRC’s facilities in Montreal met manufacturing standards.
On May 12, the NRC announced its plans to work with CanSino. Four days later, Trudeau promoted the partnership at one of his then-daily press briefings. ...
China’s State Council, the country’s cabinet, refused to issue the approval letter allowing the vaccine to ship to Canada. Around the same time, Chinese-made vaccine candidates were permitted to ship to other countries for trials similar to those CanSino had agreed to with the NRC. ...
It wasn’t until July 6 that the vaccine’s holdup was made public, when iPolitics reported that Halperin told a Commons committee that the Canadian Center for Vaccinology hadn’t received CanSino’s initial shipment.
On July 9, iPolitics reported for the first time that China’s customs agency was responsible for stalling the shipment. ...
On Aug. 5, Procurement Minister Anita Anand announced that the government had agreed to buy vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna. Their shots have since been approved by Health Canada and are being distributed across Canada.
How much of this is the Trudeau government and how much of this is the government Justin most admires in the world?
Discuss.
Also - because Canadians apparently can't do things:
A COVID-19 vaccine candidate that entered clinical trials last week proposes not only to be a made-in-Canada solution to the pandemic, but a made-in-Calgary one.
Providence Therapeutics, a Canadian biotechnology company with offices in Calgary and Toronto, announced Tuesday it has begun Phase I trials of its vaccine. Providence is also working with another Calgary company, Northern RNA, which aims to develop vaccine manufacturing capacity in this city.
It's a good thing, therefore, that we're haggling with the Europeans (who don't even trust the damn thing) over this glorified flu shot!
**
China’s National Health Commission issued a notice on Feb. 25, 2020 to the health commissions of all Chinese provinces, regions, municipalities, as well as the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a CCP-run paramilitary organization with jurisdiction over some cities and land in far-western Xinjiang.
The notice called for cooperation in virus tracing by testing wild animals, humans that came into contact with them, and the animals’ environment or habitat.
The sampling of close human contacts included throat swabs and blood samples and those of animals included throat and anal swabs, the notice stated.
Blood samples were to be sent to local Chinese centers for disease control and prevention (CDC) for safekeeping until they are tested for COVID-19 antibodies. Other samples were to be tested using COVID-19 nucleic acid testing by local laboratories and the results would be sent to local police bureaus.
The notice was labeled “not to be disclosed.”
**
The 2021 “World Watch List” of nations most culpable for the persecution of Christians has revealed that preexisting trends of 2019 were amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic.
(Sidebar: please see here.)
**
An employee at Shanghai’s subway network told The Epoch Times that he had seen several people suddenly collapse and exhibit COVID-19 symptoms in recent weeks, long before authorities announced any new local cases. Local authorities in Shanghai reported a new outbreak of COVID-19 on Jan. 21, although the city declared “no more suspected cases” on Jan. 2.
(Sidebar: I'll just leave this right here.)
**
The Jilin Provincial National Health Commission reported dozens of new COVID-19 cases in recent days—in Changchun city, the capital, and Tonghua city, which borders North Korea. However, the public is skeptical of China’s official figures because the Chinese Communist Party has consistently lied about or covered up the severity of the virus outbreak.
**
Why? So that Xi can threaten you?:
President Moon Jae-in on Tuesday told his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping that he hopes Xi will visit Korea as soon as the coronavirus pandemic allows.
The Justice Institute of British Columbia (JIBC) has trained nearly 2,000 Chinese law enforcement students and officials since 2013, alongside dozens of Chinese state judges, according to a bombshell report from Business in Vancouver.**
Ottawa is growing increasingly concerned about the rights of 300,000 Canadian citizens in Hong Kong, after the territory’s government declared that dual citizens must choose the nationality they wish to maintain.
**“In their study of 800 years of debt crises, Harvard profs Rogoff & Reinhart identify 5 predictors of them:
1. “Slowing output”
2. “Asset price inflation”
3. “Sustained debt build-ups”
4. “Rising household leverage”
5. “Large current account deficits”Canada checks all 5 boxes.”
A Department of Finance executive responsible for the nation’s fiscal planning yesterday claimed the carbon tax is exempt from GST. It’s not. One MP expressed incredulity over confusion at the department that introduced the levy: “I’m sorry?”
The Canada Revenue Agency paid $635,980,000 in pandemic relief to high schoolers including thousands of Grade Nine students, according to Access To Information records. Parliament passed a hastily-drafted Canada Emergency Response Benefit Act that allowed children to apply, though cabinet said $2,000 relief cheques were supposed to help jobless workers facing eviction or foreclosure: ‘It was to pay for groceries or rent.’
Cabinet ignored its own in-house report recommending an end to cash-for-life expense accounts for ex-governors general, records show. The Canadian Taxpayers Federation yesterday released the report through Access To Information: “It’s absolutely crazy.”
In the wake of a desperate campaign to try and buy into the narratives pushed by the Liberal Party, which culminated in the expulsion of Derek Sloan from the CPC under an obviously cynical pretext, the Conservative leader has seen his image worsen according to the latest Angus Reid poll.
Police in Aylmer, Ontario were seen on video Tuesday night handing out fines to people who allegedly attended church services over the weekend.
While vaccinations are voluntary for military personnel, Bilodeau said individual commanders will be allowed to decide whether to make them mandatory for deployment on certain missions.
At the same time, troops already deployed will not receive doses from the current Canadian supply. Instead, Bilodeau said planning is underway to determine the best way to inoculate them, including possibly turning to local governments.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum’s virtual Davos Agenda conference on Jan. 27, he offered a grim prediction and noted that the current era shows parallels to the 1920s and 1930s before the “catastrophic World War II.”
“Nowadays, such a heated conflict is not possible, I hope,” Putin said. “Because it will mean the end of our civilization.
“But I’d like the reiterate that the situation might develop unpredictably and uncontrollably if we sit on our hands doing nothing to avoid it. There’s a possibility that we might experience an actual collapse in global development that might result in a fight of all against all.”
Such a prospect, he said, would result in a “grim dystopia.”
Since those days, however, the Vatican’s handling of prominent U.S. Catholic politicians has noticeably loosened. The world’s media published photos of a friendly Joe Biden and Pope Francis greeting each other in the Paul VI’s Hall in 2016, when Biden was attending a Vatican conference on new therapies to treat cancer and other illnesses. Biden went on to receive implicitly more favorable papal treatment than his opponent President Donald Trump, both before and after the 2020 presidential election.
And yet it’s interesting to note a correlation between this more open and welcoming Vatican and papal approach to Biden, and his increasing divergence from the Church’s magisterium on key non-negotiable teachings. As he has become more publicly accepted in Rome, so has he appeared to feel less constrained by those teachings and embarked less than a week into his presidency on arguably the most radical pro-abortion and pro-gender theory agenda ever undertaken, as opposed to the measures to protect nascent human life taken by his predecessor, Donald Trump.
The stone wall of a castle in Osaka that was built by feudal warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi has been revealed after being hidden underground for some 400 years.
The stone wall of the former Osaka Castle was discovered in an excavation project led by the Osaka Municipal Government that began in 2013 and was completed recently. The castle wall has been shown to media.
The wall is made of natural rocks stacked on top of each other. Experts say that the excavation is key to a full understanding of the castle.
The former Osaka Castle, built by Hideyoshi in 1583, was burnt down in the Summer Siege of Osaka in 1615. The Tokugawa shogunate then buried the castle in dirt piled up to more than 10 meters and constructed a new Osaka Castle.
Researchers first discovered parts of the former castle’s stone walls in 1984 near the current castle, at a location some 7 meters underground.
The latest excavation uncovered a stone wall some 15 meters long and around 6 meters high leading to areas for the castle building and the main residence. A turret was previously mounted on the wall.
You probably think this song is about you.
With a title this conspicuous, Johnny Cash’s famous tune had to have been about somebody real, right? Well, it was, but first of all: he didn’t write the song himself. Where The Sidewalk Ends author Shel Silverstein did—about his friend and fellow writer Jean Shepherd (the narrator of A Christmas Story, which is based on his stories), who endured endless teasing as a child because of his feminine-sounding name.
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