And the Rest of It

I'm sure it's nothing to be concerned about:

Consumers face a long run-up of rising food prices at rates much higher than those estimated by Statistics Canada, the Commons finance committee was told yesterday. One economist who last December predicted five to seven percent food inflation said the estimate is already out of date: “I don’t think Canada will run out of food but it will get pricier.”

 

Because "transparency":

Complaints over federal concealment of public records are now running at the rate of a thousand a month, Information Commissioner Caroline Maynard said yesterday. Maynard said in a third of cases federal departments and agencies did not even bother to acknowledge Canadians’ requests for records: “We are not able to keep pace.”

How do you say - "Let them fight!" in French?:

Conservative Party of Quebec leader Éric Duhaime is inviting Quebec Liberal Party leader Dominique Anglade to take part in an English-language debate ahead of the October election, even if Premier François Legault declines to take part.

Duhaime says he believes Quebec’s English-speaking community deserves its own forum to address concerns critical to the community, including health care, education and language issues.

On Friday, an English-language media consortium opted to cancel a debate scheduled for Sept. 20 after Legault and Parti Québécois leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon said they would not participate.

The consortium explained that without all major parties present it would be impossible to present a "fair and informative" debate.

At least one English-language media outlet says it would be willing to hold a debate without Legault, as long as Anglade agrees to take part as well.

 

It's the UN. It doesn't feel it should have evidence:

The UN report does include a count of “global disaster-related mortality” — and manages to find that, contrary to the international disaster database, deaths are higher than ever before. But it reaches this conclusion by — bizarrely — including deaths from COVID in the catastrophes. COVID killed more people just in 2020 than all the world’s other catastrophes did in the past half century. Lumping COVID deaths in with deaths from hurricanes and floods was bound to create more headlines than understanding.

The truth is that deaths from climate disasters have fallen dramatically because wealthier countries are much better at protecting citizens. Research shows this phenomenon consistently across almost all catastrophes, including storms, floods, cold and heat waves. This matters, because by the end of this century, there will be more people in harm’s way, and climate change will mean sea levels rise several feet.

 

A cause for this sad ailment?:

A new and groundbreaking study has pinpointed what researchers believe is the reason infants and babies die from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).

Researchers from The Children’s Hospital in Westmead in Sydney, Australia, have found that a lowered level of a certain enzyme, called butyrylcholinesterase (BChE), can explain the malfunction that causes some babies not to startle or wake if they stop breathing in their sleep.

The study is published in the latest volume of The Lancet’s eBioMedicine, the upcoming June 2022 issue.

 

Ladies and gentlemen, Saint Titus Brandsma:

Pope Francis on Sunday declared 10 people saints of the Roman Catholic Church, including an anti-Nazi Dutch priest murdered in the Dachau concentration camp and a French hermit monk assassinated in Algeria. ...

Titus Brandsma, who was a member of the Carmelite religious order and served as president of the Catholic university at Nijmegen, began speaking out against Nazi ideology even before World War Two and the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940.

During the Nazi occupation, he spoke out against anti-Jewish laws. He urged Dutch Catholic newspapers not to print Nazi propaganda.

He was arrested in 1942 and held in Dutch jails before being taken to Dachau, near Munich, where he was subjected to biological experimentation and killed by lethal injection the same year at the age of 61. He is considered a martyr, having died because of what the Church calls "in hatred of the faith".

The other well-known new saint is Charles de Foucauld, a 19th century French nobleman, soldier, explorer, and geographer who later experienced a personal conversion and became a priest, living as a hermit among the poor Berbers in North Africa.

He published the first Tuareg-French dictionary and translated Tuareg poems into French. De Foucauld was killed during a kidnapping attempt by Bedouin tribal raiders in Algeria in 1916.

The other eight who were declared saints on Sunday included Devasahayam Pillai, who was killed for converting to Christianity in 18th century India, and Cesar de Bus, a 16th century French priest who founded a religious order.

The others were two Italian priests, three Italian nuns and a French nun, all of whom who lived between the 16th and 20th centuries.

** 

The camp at Dachau was the largest Catholic “monastery” in history, housing some 2,700 priests. The brutality of Nazi atheism was particularly directed against Catholic clergy. For those not murdered outright, Dachau became a central destination. A “priest barracks” was set up and the clergy were given special treatment, sometimes favourable, in terms of being allowed to worship, and sometimes unfavourable, for example when dozens of priests were tortured in a mocking observance of Good Friday.

Born Anno Sjoerd Brandsma in 1881 to devoutly Catholic parents in the Netherlands, Brandsma, taking the religious name Titus, was ordained a priest in 1905. Though Carmelites are generally oriented toward the interior life, Fr. Titus combined his life of prayer and worship with a remarkable range of activities. A teacher and founder of the Catholic University of Nijmegen, he was a writer, journalist and controversialist.

Controversies were not lacking. Fr. Titus was a fierce foe of Nazi ideology, and as the Nazis rose in the 1930s he sounded the alarm in his own country as chaplain of the National Union of (Dutch) Catholic Journalists. He urged Catholic periodicals to have nothing to do with Nazi propaganda and to take a firm position against Nazi racial theories and antisemitism.

Nazi tanks rolled through Holland in 1940. Fr. Titus emerged as a prominent voice, encouraging both Catholic bishops and editors to speak out against Nazi human rights violations, including the persecution of Dutch Jews. ...

Arrested by the Gestapo on Jan. 19, 1942, Fr. Titus was eventually shipped to Dachau, near Munich. He was killed by lethal injection on July 26, 1942.

On that very day, a message from the Dutch bishops was read in every parish in Holland at Sunday Mass, denouncing Nazi atrocities and making public a telegram sent earlier in the week: “The undersigned Dutch churches, already deeply shocked by the actions taken against the Jews in the Netherlands that have excluded them from participating in the normal life of society, have learned with horror of the new measures by which men, women, children, and whole families will be deported to the German territory and its dependencies.”

Both the priest and the journalist are to be servants of the truth; both are by vocation dissenters in an empire of lies. Fr. Titus lived amid the empire of lies in a particularly pitiless period, when it literally invaded in his homeland. ...

We need models, which is what saints are. The word remains powerful. It endures more than the sword, or even the needle, in every time and place. For the priest journalist, every word of truth reflects in some way the truth of the Word. We have, in St. Titus Brandsma, a witness and model — and intercessor.