Your mid-week shrug ...
Politicians who work for China:
MPs, provincial legislators and city councillors are known to be in the pay of foreign agents, a former espionage officer yesterday told the Commons ethics committee. The foreign agents’ source country was not named though cabinet has accused China of clandestine activities: “What we know for sure is we have various foreign countries that succeeded in recruiting elected officials – again, municipal, provincial or federal.”
Only in Canada can treason be a national sport.
Corruption - the real driving force of this country:
Senator Sarabjit Marwah (Ont.), a Liberal appointee who doubled his legislative pay with corporate directorship fees, has taken another board appointment. Senate ethics rules do not prohibit legislators from serving on corporate boards while drawing a salary from taxpayers: “The Senate itself is not considered a full-time job and that you can maintain interests.”
Rather, no one needs to look into this bizarre cover-up, eh, OPP?:
An Ottawa police officer is facing misconduct charges for allegedly inserting herself into child death investigations looking for connections to the COVID-19 vaccine.
Investigators with the Ottawa Police Service’s professional standards unit allege Const. Helen Grus committed discreditable conduct when she took on a private investigative project to find the vaccination status of parents whose infants or children had died.
Between June 2020 and January 2022, Grus allegedly accessed nine child or infant death cases in which she had no investigative role. On Jan. 30, 2022, Grus also allegedly interfered directly with an investigation into an infant’s death by contacting the father of a deceased baby to inquire about the mother’s COVID-19 vaccination status without the lead investigator’s knowledge.
The charges against Grus were filed as exhibits at a disciplinary hearing on Monday morning, but she has not yet submitted a plea. Grus has also been served with a notice of increased penalty, meaning that if she is found guilty of discreditable conduct, the service may seek dismissal or demotion as a penalty.
Grus is a detective with the sexual assault and child abuse unit but she has been suspended since Feb. 4, 2022.
After the sudden or unexpected death of an infant or child, the office of the chief coroner will investigate to determine the cause of death and often make recommendations aimed at preventing similar deaths in the future. Police investigate such deaths, but their investigations focus on determining if criminality has played a role.
Remember that the Liberals did not want to bring in the Yazidis or Middle Eastern Christians:
No, it is not over at all. First of all, ISIS is still active in Iraq and Syria as we have seen for example in Syria (last February) when they helped jihadists within al-Sina prison to escape. There are so called sleeper cells too and they still carry out attacks. With regard to the Yazidi women and girls that they took captive, there are still around 2.700 of them in the hands of ISIS, or at least they are missing and we don't know where they are. This is devastating for them and their families, as you can imagine. While there is only a little attention to this, the Yazidi women and girls that are probably still in the hands of ISIS, let's not forget that there are also Christian women and girls who were taken by ISIS and are still missing. That is a subject you hardly hear anything about, but it does not mean it doesn't exist.
I still hear and read that women and girls are being bought back, sometimes for a lot of money, and brought back to their families. This is really gruesome; these men, jihadists, have already earned money by trading these women, sexually exploiting them, and now earn money by selling them back to their own communities. There should be a lot more media coverage on this; it is not over, not by far for these victims and their families.
Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino defended the RCMP’s use of spyware, telling MPs that the technology is used sparingly and always with judicial approval, but it has become necessary because of the use of encryption among criminals.
Also:
RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki refuses to say whether federal police used spyware to monitor MPs’ smartphones. The chair of the Commons ethics committee yesterday described the secrecy as “troubling.”**
Members of the Commons ethics committee yesterday expressed alarm over RCMP use of spyware capable of activating microphones and cameras on smartphones. MPs only learned of the practice in a routine House tabling of cabinet documents: “A lot of work has to be done to ensure privacy is actually respected in our government.”
**
The Commons ethics committee yesterday by a 6 to 5 vote ordered the RCMP to comply with its demand for data on any spyware surveillance of MPs. The Mounties earlier dismissed a similar request: “Nobody is talking about preventing the spyware from being used in the first place.”
Rumpelstiltskin will do no such thing:
The Commons transport committee yesterday by unanimous vote agreed to summon Transport Minister Omar Alghabra for answers on how to “fix the mess” at federally-regulated airports. No Liberal MP spoke in Alghabra’s defence: “All the warning signs were there.”
Is that why France relies on nuclear reactors?:
The new leader of the New Brunswick Liberals is questioning whether small modular nuclear reactors are the answer to the province's energy needs, a more cautious stance than her party's previous full-throated support for the technology.
Susan Holt said after winning the leadership Saturday that while the potential jobs created by SMRs would be good for the province, she was looking for more evidence they were the right bet for clean energy.
"It's an interesting project on the economic development level ... but I'm not sure it's the solution for electricity generation for our province," Holt told reporters.
"I think it's not clear yet if it will really give us energy in a way that's responsible and efficient with our investments, so there's still more to determine there."
Just stop while you're behind.
Justin called people a "fringe minority", too:
The British Columbia government’s handling of the health-care file has prompted a Vernon, B.C., resident to launch a recall campaign against her local New Democrat member of the legislature.
Genevieve Ring says Vernon-Monashee MLA Harwinder Sandhu should be recalled because she is part of the NDP government that has failed residents of British Columbia on the critical issues of COVID-19 and health care.
Ring says she is not prepared to wait for the next election scheduled for the fall of 2024 to make changes to improve health care.
Elections BC says in a statement it has received a petition application from Ring that meets the requirements of the Recall and Initiative Act and will issue the petition on Aug. 11.
Sandhu says she will not be intimidated by those she calls “a small group of extreme activists that do not represent the vast majority of people” in the riding.
The MLA, who worked as a registered nurse at Vernon’s Royal Jubilee Hospital before being elected in 2020, says she stands behind the decisions the government has made to keep residents and frontline workers safe during the pandemic.
Also - the "science" changed when people started convoys:
United Conservative Party leadership candidate Travis Toews says his presence at the cabinet table lessened the intensity of COVID-19 restrictions in Alberta.
Toews, who was Alberta's finance minister from 2019 until he stepped down to run for leader, insists input from him and a handful of ministers led to less stringent public health measures during earlier waves of the pandemic.
"The fact that there were a couple of rural cabinet ministers around that table no doubt made a difference in terms of outcomes," he told CBC News.
Toews said he considered resigning his position and that those COVID cabinet meetings were "the hardest hours of my life."
Ultimately, he said he decided Albertans and his constituents in Grande Prairie-Wapiti were better served with him in cabinet.
Alberta's government has been heavily criticized for policy decisions around the virus, including its "open for summer" plan that many health experts say contributed to more serious outcomes for patients and the health-care system.
Another reason not to publicly fund art:
Federally-subsidized art programs must embrace “social activism,” says the Canada Council for the Arts. Management in a series of reports said it seeks “a decolonized future for the arts.” The Council spent $428.6 million last year: “The Council should support the arts sector in promoting social activism.”
Also can't be funded - pipe dreams:
On Monday, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh told the Toronto Star in no uncertain terms that if Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals did not live up to their commitment to institute a socialized dental care program by year’s end, he would have little choice but to pull out of their supply and confidence agreement and potentially trigger another election. “This has to happen. The deal stands on this,” he said. “This is the deliverable for this year.… We have no room for any error, we’ve no room for any exception.”
(Sidebar: Singh won't do anything of the sort.)
It’s not like any of this should have come as a surprise to Trudeau. Not only did he explicitly agree to implement such a program when he signed the agreement in March, he also set aside money for it in the April budget. Yet since then, his government has been so focused on regulating the internet, preventing law-abiding citizens from purchasing handguns and making the most of barbecue season, it appears to have let Singh’s pet project fall by the wayside (along with other pesky things like issuing passports, certifying pilots and maintaining functioning airports).
Now, the Liberals appear to be scrambling. A day after Singh’s sabre-rattling, government sources began telling the media that a temporary solution is being formulated to at least live up to the spirit of the agreement, which would involve handing out cheques to qualifying families with children under the age of 12. As we have seen since the beginning of the pandemic, cutting massive amounts of cheques is about the only thing the Trudeau government is good at. Ensuring they go to the right people, however, is not this government’s strong suit.
It should therefore not come as a surprise if we start hearing reports at the beginning of 2023 about payments sent to families that didn’t need the money, or already had private coverage. This is what happens when public projects are hastily pushed through, either because of an emergency, such as a pandemic, or to meet an arbitrary deadline set by a politician who seems to believe that socialism is the answer to everything and that money can be borrowed or taxed ad infinitum.
What we have now is a high-stakes game of political chicken being played by two politicians who seem to have perfected the art of the love-hate relationship. Indeed, despite agreeing to keep the Liberal government in power until 2025, Singh has been one of its most outspoken critics. Yet in doing so, he has put his naivete on full display.
There is no money for this lap-dog biscuit and even Singh knows it.
Rallies against the crackdown of protesters in Sri Lanka:
Hundreds of Sri Lankans on Tuesday rallied against a government crackdown and the use of emergency laws against peaceful protesters demanding answers to the country’s worst economic crisis.
Protesters led by religious and trade union leaders marched to the Independence Square in Colombo and made several demands to the government including the withdrawal of emergency laws, an end to the arrests of peaceful protesters, the immediate dissolution of Parliament and relief for those burdened by the hardship and shortages of basic supplies.
Four months of street protests culminated last month when former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled to Singapore and resigned after demonstrators stormed his official home and occupied several key government buildings. His brother Mahinda Rajapaksa resigned as prime minister in May and four other family members had quit as ministers before him.
Protesters accuse the Rajapaksa family of plunging the country into the crisis through mismanagement and corruption.
The former prime minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, was elected by Parliament to complete Rajapaksa’s five-year term until 2024, but many of the protesters are unhappy with him and say he was backed by lawmakers who are still loyal to the Rajapaksas to protect the former ruling family from being held accountable.
Cleanup and recovery efforts gained pace in South Korea’s greater capital region Wednesday as skies cleared after two days of record-breaking rainfall that unleashed flash floods, damaged thousands of buildings and roads and killed at least nine people.
While lifting heavy rain warnings for Seoul and the neighboring metropolitan areas, South Korea’s weather agency forecasted 10 to 30 centimeters (4 to 12 inches) of rain in the country’s southern regions through Thursday.
Seven people remain missing in Seoul and nearby Gyeonggi Province following the heavy rains that swamped the region Monday and Tuesday, turning streets into car-clogged rivers, sending floods cascading into subway stations, triggering landslides that crashed into roads and buildings, and displacing more than 1,800 people from their homes. The nine people who died included four who drowned in their homes in Seoul.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol during a disaster response meeting Wednesday apologized on behalf of the government over the deaths and disruption caused by the heavy rains. He urged the central government to provide more financial help and personnel assistance to cities and regional governments to speed up recovery efforts.
He also called for significant improvements to the country’s flood management systems, including building more rain tanks and tunnels and improving flood-prediction technologies, citing the growing challenges posed by extreme weather events.
“It’s certainly true that (the rainfall) was abnormal weather, but we have come to a point where we can no longer call abnormal weather abnormal,” Yoon said. “We could see new record levels (of rain) at any time. We need to build our response so that we are ready for a situation that’s worse than we had imagined.”
Oh?:
South Korea's government stressed Wednesday it will make its own decisions in strengthening its defenses against North Korean threats, rejecting Chinese calls that it continue the polices of Seoul’s previous government that refrained from adding more U.S. anti-missile batteries that are strongly opposed by Beijing.
Beijing will not like this anti-Moon about-face.
In a sign of solidarity between global pariahs, North Korea is discussing the dispatch of laborers to the Donetsk People's Republic, founded by pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, to rebuild infrastructure there.Denis Pushilin, the head of the DPR, told a local TV station that Donetsk is in discussion with North Korea over the dispatch of workers and an advance team from North Korea will visit Donetsk soon to make a final decision on what they could do there.The North Korean regime made good money from labor export to various corners of the world before the UN Security Council banned the practice.
"Construction stops, mortgage stops. Deliver homes and get repaid!"
That was one of the chants disgruntled apartment buyers in China used at a protest in June. But their ire over unfinished homes didn't stop at signs and chants.
Hundreds of them stopped paying their mortgages - a radical step for China, where dissent is not tolerated.
A young couple who moved to Zhengzhou in central China told the BBC that after receiving the down payment last year, the developer withdrew from the project and construction stalled.
"I have imagined countless times the joy of living in a new home, but now it all feels ridiculous," the woman, who did not wish to be named, said.
A woman in her late 20s who also bought a home in Zhengzhou told the BBC that she too is ready to stop paying her mortgage: "After the project is fully resumed, I'll continue paying."
Many of them can pay but are choosing not to, unlike the US subprime mortgage crisis in 2007 when money was lent to high-risk borrowers who then defaulted.
Some people are just outright stupid:
A Nebraska woman has been charged with helping her teenage daughter end her pregnancy at about 24 weeks after investigators uncovered Facebook messages in which the two discussed using medication to induce an abortion and plans to burn the fetus afterward.
(Sidebar: for reference, premature baby units in hospitals look after babies as young as twenty four weeks, the size of whom is roughly 0.65 kgs and 31 cm long.)
The prosecutor handling the case said it’s the first time he has charged anyone for illegally performing an abortion after 20 weeks, a restriction that was passed in 2010. Before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, states weren’t allowed to enforce abortion bans until the point at which a fetus is considered viable outside the womb, at roughly 24 weeks.
In one of the Facebook messages, Jessica Burgess, 41, tells her then 17-year-old daughter that she has obtained abortion pills for her and gives her instructions on how to take them to end the pregnancy.
The daughter, meanwhile, “talks about how she can’t wait to get the ‘thing’ out of her body,” a detective wrote in court documents. “I will finally be able to wear jeans,” she says in one of the messages. Law enforcement authorities obtained the messages with a search warrant, and detailed some of them in court documents.
All of this was put on Facebook.
Let that sink in.
Saint Edith Stein, ora pro nobis:
On Tuesday, Czerny commemorated the anniversary of the day Stein was killed in Auschwitz’s gas chambers by celebrating Mass in a nearby Carmelite convent in Oswiecim, a Polish town under Nazi German occupation during the war. There, he delivered a homily that recounted Stein’s story and how it intersected with his own and that of his relatives, who hailed from Brno, in the former Czechoslovakia.
Stein was a German Jew born in 1891 in Breslau, now the Polish city of Wroclaw, who converted to Catholicism in 1922 and became a nun. She joined the Carmelite order in Cologne, Germany, but was transferred to the Netherlands after the intensification of Nazi attacks in 1938. She was arrested in 1942 after Hitler ordered the arrest of Jewish converts and was sent to Auschwitz, where she was killed Aug. 9, 1942. St. John Paul II canonized Stein as a martyr in 1998 and made her a patron saint of Europe the following year.
Czerny, 76, noted that he and Stein shared their “Jewish origins, the Catholic faith, a vocation to religious life,” as well as the fact that Stein and Czerny’s maternal grandmother, Anna Hayek, were about the same age and “came to a similar end.”
“My mother’s family — both parents and two brothers — were also Catholic but shared the Jewish origins that the enemy abhorred,” Czerny recalled in the text of his homily, which his office provided. “My maternal grandmother Anna, my grandfather Hans and my uncles Georg and Carl Robert, were all interned in Terezín, where Hans died," Czerny said, referring to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in the former Czechoslovakia.
"My grandmother and uncles were transported to Auschwitz. From here my uncles were sent to labor camps and eventually murdered there,” he said.
His grandmother died of typhus in 1945, but the family has no trace of where she was buried.
Czerny’s mother, a baptized Catholic, was forced to work as a farm laborer during the war because of her Jewish ancestry and was jailed in Theresienstadt and Leipzig for 20 months; his father was forced to work as a farm laborer because he refused to divorce her. In 1948, they moved to Canada as refugees with young Michael, who was born in 1946, and his brother, the cardinal said.
Czerny, who has made humanitarian visits to minister to refugees fleeing Ukraine on behalf of Francis, said he was honored to celebrate Stein in the year of Russia’s war that he said “urges us to remember.”
“Remembering both Edith and Anna with the six million others, we mourn and repent, ‘Lest we forget …,’” he said. “Through their intercession, we pray for peace in Ukraine and throughout the world.”
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