Mid-Week Post

 

Syrian families killed in their sleep during chemical attack:

Scores of Syrians, many of them women and young children, were killed Tuesday in one of the deadliest chemical attacks of the country’s six-year war, according to doctors, rescue workers and witnesses.

Airstrikes on the northwestern town of Khan Sheikhoun began just after daybreak, delivering an unidentified chemical agent that killed at least 58 people and filled clinics across the area with patients foaming at the mouth or struggling to breathe.

President Donald Trump blamed the attack, which he said was carried out by the Syrian government, on former president Barack Obama, calling it a “consequence” of Obama’s “weakness and irresolution.” The reference was to Obama’s decision not to follow through with a threat to use military force against Syrian President Bashar Assad after a 2013 chemical attack.

Trump has a point. A real leader wouldn't draw red lines but actually do something. Instead of spying on Israelis or starting up a virtual Ponzi scheme for a failed healthcare plan,  Obama - had he any intestinal fortitude or scruples - would have done something to prevent a chemical attack.

But that would just be nutty.




The suspected terrorist who killed fourteen people in Saint Petersburg had been renting an apartment a month prior to the attack:

The main suspect in a suicide bombing on the St Petersburg metro that killed 14 people had rented an apartment in the city a month before the blast, neighbors and a building maintenance worker told Reuters on Wednesday.

A day after Monday's attack, security officials raided the apartment and ordered other residents to leave -- a precaution often undertaken when police believe there may be explosives or bomb-making equipment inside.

Thirty-five former captives of ISIS have been released in Libya:

Libyan authorities released on Wednesday 28 Eritreans and seven Nigerians who were captured and enslaved by Islamic State in Sirte and had been held in detention since the jihadist group lost the city in December.

The group, all but two of whom are women and children, escaped from Sirte, a former Islamic State stronghold in central Libya, while forces from the nearby city of Misrata battled to oust the militants late last year.

Some of the women were on their way to Europe when Islamic State fighters kidnapped and held them as sex slaves.

After they escaped from Sirte, they were investigated for possible ties to the group and held for several months in a Misrata prison.

Reuters has documented how Islamic State used enslaved refugee women to reward its fighters in Libya. In stories published last year, the women recounted how the group forced them to convert to Islam and sold them as sex slaves.

In November, a Reuters reporter visited some of the captives at a military post in Misrata. Their new captors, the women said then, starved and humiliated them. At least one woman, a 16-year-old, was pregnant and in need of urgent care.

The Libyan attorney-general's office announced that it had cleared the women of any wrongdoing in mid-February, but their release was delayed for several more weeks, with no explanation.

(Sidebar: to see, I imagine, if they had PTSD or had turned as Boko Haram turns.)




Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in agreement with Trump over North Korean missile launches:

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said on Thursday that he and U.S. President Donald Trump agreed in a telephone call that North Korea's latest ballistic missile launch was "a dangerous provocation and a serious threat."

Abe also told reporters at his official residence that he was watching to see how China would respond to Pyongyang after President Xi Jinping meets with Trump at the U.S. leader's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

In his brief, nationally televised remarks, Abe said Trump had told him that all options were on the table regarding how to handle North Korea.

 
It's time for Japan et al to nuclearise.




Normal people would call this "grooming":

So what practical effects will the addition of the Human Rights Code list have? Bill 89 itself is exceedingly vague on details, but would give the Minister extensive power to make regulations “governing how service providers, in making decisions in respect of any child, are to take into account the child’s race … sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression”. In short, the Minister gets to decide on the details, without consulting the legislature.  That fact alone should make you uncomfortable. The Minister of Children and Youth Services, Michael Coteau (also the bill’s sponsor) – the one who would have this regulatory power – has given some insight on how he perceives the application of these new and far reaching powers.

Ontario Liberal voters, however, do not.




Laziness ensure Liberal voters, hence the Maritime dependency on hand-outs:

Nat Richard, director of corporate affairs at Westmorland Fisheries, said his company would happily avoid participating in the temporary foreign worker program if it could. “It’s costly and complicated. We are always hiring — we spend a lot of money on radio and print ads — and we have significantly increased wages by 12 per cent on base salaries. We would prefer to hire locally but the reality is it’s tough work and we are forced to supplement our workforce with people from Mexico and elsewhere.”

If Richard is correct, the problem is not foreign workers taking the bread from the mouths of unemployed Canadians, it’s that local people with prior experience in the fish processing industry decide they’d prefer to get by on employment insurance.

On this, the Liberals are culpable. In budget 2016, the new government followed through on the electoral bribe that delivered it every single seat in Atlantic Canada.

Dogs prove once again that they are the better species:

Officials say a dog at a Nigerian wedding party grappled with a suicide bomber until her explosives detonated, killing the animal as well.

Buba Ahmed of Belbelo village, near the northeastern city of Maiduguri, says guests are grateful that the dog sacrificed itself to save their lives.

Terrorists are a superstitious cowardly lot. So my disguise must be able to strike terror into their hearts. I must be a creature of the night, black, terrible...

Also (RE: better species):

The floor looks clean in this high-rise apartment, seven stories above Kuwait City traffic. Not a smudge in sight on the picture window. On the other side of the glass, the maid is hanging on by one knuckle, screaming.

“Oh crazy, come here,” a woman says casually in Arabic, holding a camera up to the maid.

“Hold on to me! Hold on to me!” the maid yells.

Instead, the woman steps back. The maid’s grip finally slips, and she lands in a cloud of dust, many stories below.

The maid – an Ethiopian who had been working in the country for several years, according to the Kuwait Times – survived the fall. The videographer, her employer, was arrested last week on a charge of failing to help the worker.

To reinforce the point, a list of dogs who saved lives.




And now, wisteria in the spring:

For Today

The story so far...



The RCMP and CSIS have launched investigations into spying and tracking cell phones on Parliament Hill:

Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale says the RCMP and CSIS have launched investigations in response to a CBC News/Radio-Canada report, which revealed that someone is using devices that track and spy on cellphones in the area around Parliament Hill. ...

The devices work by mimicking a cellphone tower to interact with nearby phones and read the unique ID associated with a phone.

 Anything like this?

Why would anyone want to spy on the government?




The death toll in Saint Petersburg has risen to fourteen:

A 22-year old suicide bomber born in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan was behind a blast on the St. Petersburg subway that killed 14 people, Russian investigators said Tuesday.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the Monday afternoon attack, which came while President Vladimir Putin was visiting the city, Russia’s second biggest and Putin’s hometown.

Russia’s health minister on Tuesday raised the death toll from 11 to 14 and said 49 people are still hospitalized. Authorities did not say whether the suicide attacker was included in the death toll. The City Hall said there were several foreign nationals among those killed and injured, but would not offer detail. The foreign ministry of the Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan said one of its citizens has been killed in the attack.

Had this been France, Britain or Germany, there would be cement barriers erected and the Muslim community would be worried about backlash that never seems to come.

The perpetual appeasers in the West surely must offer some kind of advice for the good citizens of Saint Petersburg.

If they don't, they'll have people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali filling their heads with what actually goes in mad theocratic states:

As someone once said, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is everything the identity-group fetishists profess to dig: female, atheist, black, immigrant. But, because she does not toe the party line on Islam, her blackness washes off her like a bad dye job on a telly anchorman - and so do her femaleness and godlessness and immigrant status. And in the end she is Charles Murray, or Geert Wilders - or even David Duke. A black Somali woman is, it turns out, a "white supremacist".

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is someone who fled genital mutilation and arranged marriage in a backward, barbarous society to come to the west and live in freedom. Her first stop was the Netherlands. But the director of the film she wrote, Theo van Gogh, was murdered in the street, and the man who shot him then drove two knives through what was left of his chest pinning to it a five-page death-threat promising to do the same to Ayaan. So she was forced to leave the Netherlands, and has lived with round-the-clock security ever since. Now she has to cross Australia off the list, too. Where's next? Can she speak in Sweden? Or Canada? Ireland or Germany? She left Somalia to live as a western woman, only to watch the west turn itself into Somalia, incrementally but remorselessly, at least as far as free speech is concerned.

Speaking of Sweden, that nation-state corpse east of Norway ...

Sweden is all over this:

Imam says unveiled women go to hell

 


As one can tell, Swedes are very open to people like this imam:

Feminists in Stockholm are leaving areas like the notorious migrant-heavy no-go zones of Husby and Tensta because they say religious fundamentalists now rule those suburbs.

Damn Islamophobes!


I thought Iqra Khalid's Nazism Motion 103 was supposed to get rid of all of this.

Otherwise, stories like this ....

The case of a British Jewish child forced to leave his Berlin school after being subjected to anti-Semitic violence has provoked outrage and soul-searching in Germany.

The 14-year-old, who cannot be named under child protection laws, was beaten, kicked and threatened with a replica gun after he revealed to fellow pupils that he was Jewish.

He endured a campaign of intimidation by Muslim pupils who told him “Muslims hate Jews. All Jews are murderers.”

His British mother, who asked not to be named to protect the identity of her son, told the The Daily Telegraph the school had done little to stop the bullying.

“They told us this is normal for adolescents from this background, that they’re just trying to find their identity,” she said. “But it shouldn’t be normal. I’ve never experienced such direct anti-Semitism before in all the years I’ve lived in Germany.”

The case, which follows several incidents in which people wearing skullcaps or other outward signs of Jewishness have been beaten on the streets of Berlin, has prompted concern over the extent of anti-Semitic feeling in the Muslim community.

“In some German mosques, anti-Semitism is being actively encouraged,” said Josef Schuster, head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.

... will give others the impression that Islamists are bunch of Jew-hating, woman-hounding savages.

What to do?


And:

Social media users have slammed a Muslim teen activist who was accepted into Stanford University after writing “Black Lives Matter” 100 times in his application, with some saying a black applicant wouldn’t have been accepted.

On Monday, Mic.com published an article about Ziad Ahmed, a Muslim teenager who replied to a question “What matters to you, and why?” on his college application by writing “Black Lives Matter” exactly 100 times.

Ahmed was accepted into the university. “Everyone who reviewed your application was inspired by your passion, determination, accomplishments and heart,” read a letter from Stanford posted on his Twitter.

The student, who claims also to have been accepted at Princeton and Yale, explained to Mic why he wrote the slogan so many times on his application: “My unapologetic progressivism is a central part of my identity, and I wanted that to be represented adequately in my application.”

He added: “To me, to be Muslim is to be a BLM ally, and I honestly can’t imagine it being any other way for me. “Furthermore, it’s critical to realize that one-fourth to one-third of the Muslim community in America are (sic) black … and to separate justice for Muslims from justices for the black community is to erase the realities of the plurality of our community.”

But not everyone was touched by such a virtue-signaling move from Ahmed—with some people suggesting that an actual black student would never be able to get away with writing that on their application to an elite university.

“Yeah I’m not sure I find this cute or heartwarming, no way a black kid could get rewarded for doing the same thing,” wrote Zoe Samudzi on Twitter. “When I/we talk about black struggle being used by non-black folks for social capital and material gain, this is what’s meant by it.”

Sit back and watch the train wreck.




Moving on...




You know it's bad when even the CBC won't absorb your gut-punch:

There were no seat changes in Monday's federal byelections, but the governing Liberals took a hit in all five of the contested ridings — marking their worst byelection performances so far under Justin Trudeau.

The Conservatives saw gains in three of the five ridings while the New Democrats took hits of their own in all but one, leaving the Conservatives as the winners of the night.

Ontarians will always vote for the Liberals (which is why Kathleen Wynne can joke about polls that would make normal people nervous). Unions and emotional retardation have made cockroaches of the Liberals all, but clearly not everyone feels that the Liberals represent them. Some really think that the best things in life are free, hence their support for the NDP, and others are sh-- scared that their grandchildren will never be able to retire.

Well, you let it happen, Canada. Own it.


Also in "Liberals are so corrupt that banana republics sing folk songs about their sleaze":

Some of the money taxpayers paid as a result of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's controversial Bahamas vacation went to a billionaire Trudeau has described as a close family friend.

Money listed in documents tabled in the House of Commons as "per diems" for a tour technician who accompanied the prime minister was actually paid to the Aga Khan who owns Bell Island.

"The $1,604 is the total amount paid to the owner of Bell Island for the technician's 12 day stay ($100 US x 12 days)," wrote Privy Council spokesman Raymond Rivet following questions from CBC News.

The $1,604 was part of the $127,000 that Trudeau's vacation ended up costing the government.

Good:

The State Department said on Monday it was ending U.S. funding for the United Nations Population Fund, the international body's agency focused on family planning as well as maternal and child health in more than 150 countries.

The latter is not as big a concern as the former.




I have yet to see any plan that results in Putin being truly accountable for his actions:

Barring travel, denying visas, and seizing assets are just a few proper steps in that direction that Canada has already taken. The American and British governments have already gone further. A Magnitsky Act has passed in the United Kingdom and the United States, where it was championed by Arizona’s Sen. John McCain, who has been very active and outspoken on Russia and the threat they pose to world order (he once memorably described the country as “a mafia-run gas station masquerading as a country”). He and others in Congress have led the charge to demand personal and political accountability.

This won't end well:

The online ad reads like something only a metallurgist could love: an offer to sell 22 pounds of highly pure lithium 6 every month, set for delivery from the port of Dandong, China.

But it caught the attention of intelligence agencies around the world for a simple reason: Lithium 6 offers a fast way to turn an ordinary atom bomb into a hydrogen bomb, magnifying its destructive power by up to 1,000 times. The seller listed in the ad — who even provided his cellphone number — was identified in a recent U.N. report as the third secretary in the North Korean Embassy in Beijing.

When President Donald Trump meets with President Xi Jinping in Florida this week, administration officials say, his top agenda item will be pressing China to sign on to the most powerful set of economic sanctions ever imposed on North Korea over its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. Trump has repeatedly vowed to stop the North’s nuclear efforts, telling The Financial Times in an interview published Sunday: “If China is not going to solve North Korea, we will. That is all that I am telling you.”

But experts say the offer to sell excess lithium is evidence that North Korea has produced so much of the precious material that it is too late to prevent the nation from becoming an advanced nuclear power.

Also:

So is the danger of a power struggle erupting if Kim is ousted, by American action or Chinese subversion. Nobody knows what the internal dynamics of Pyongyang politics are, if it even has any and isn’t just an amorphous heap of demoralized terrified courtiers trying not to get fed to dogs. But it’s almost impossible to imagine any new regime worse than the present one, or less concerned about reasonable relations with its Chinese neighbour. In any case, it’s one more worry for China, not us.

China needs North Korea as a buffer state, mad leader or no. Should the North Korean military leadership man up and oust Kim themselves, that might save any bad feelings of American or Chinese intervention.

This will get worse before it gets better.




See - this is why Andrew Lincoln needs to stay in England:

Hundreds of years ago, in North Yorkshire, England, there was a small village called Wharram Percy. There were two rows of houses, one shorter than the other, and church, with a churchyard, but they’ve long since disappeared. By the 16th century, the village was abandoned.

In the 1960s, when archaeologists worked to excavate the village, they found a strange group of human bones. These bones were buried outside the churchyard, near the end of one row of buildings. There were 137 bones in the excavated pit, belonging to at least 10 people, ranging in age from 2 or 3 to 50.

For many years, no one knew exactly what to make of these bones, but now a team of archaeologists from Historic England and the University of Southampton have published a new theory about them: these bodies were burned and mutilated after death to keep them from becoming reanimated corpses.

(Merci beaucoup)

On a Monday

So it goes...



An Islamist terrorist attack results in the death of eleven people:

A bomb blast tore through a subway train deep under Russia’s second-largest city Monday, killing 11 people and wounding more than 40 in a chaotic scene that left victims sprawled on a smoky platform. Hours later, anguish and fear rose again when police found and defused a shrapnel-packed explosive device at another St. Petersburg station.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, which came while President Vladimir Putin was visiting the city, his hometown. In the past two decades, Russian trains and planes have been frequent targets of terrorism, usually blamed on Islamic militants.

News reports initially said police were searching for two suspects, and Russian state television showed a photo of one suspect wearing what appeared to be a skullcap characteristic of Russia’s Muslim regions. However, the Interfax news agency later cited unspecified sources as saying police now suspect the blast was the work of a suicide bomber linked to radical Islamists.

Also:

A respected Russian newspaper says it has uncovered information that police in the southern Russian republic of Chechnya have rounded up more than 100 men suspected of homosexuality and that at least three have been killed.

The Saturday report in Novaya Gazeta said it had confirmed the information with sources in the Chechen police and government, but gave no details.

The report was denied by Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov’s spokesman, who suggested there are no homosexuals in the Muslim-majority region. Ali Karimov said, according to the state news agency RIA Novosti, “it’s impossible to persecute those who are not in the republic.”

“If such people existed in Chechnya, law enforcement would not have to worry about them, as their own relatives would have sent them to where they could never return,” Karimov was quoted in the New York Times as saying.

Iran has said the same thing.




Yeah, that must be the reason:

China is steadfastly opposed to the deployment of advanced U.S. anti-missile radars in South Korea because it does not know whether the defenses, intended for North Korean missiles, are capable of tracking and countering Beijing's own nuclear program, experts say.

Of course.

I'm sure Trump will believe China, too.

And what will China say when South Korea, worried about North Korea's nuclear arms and a potential war, uses the system to defend itself.

It must chap China that other east Asian countries would rather drink hot wax than belong to it.




PM Hair-Boy is pouty over Bombardier's pay hikes:

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Monday he was "not pleased" with Bombardier's plan to raise compensation for its senior executives, a move that caused a public furor that forced the company to back down.

You're not the only greedy one, Hair-Boy.




It turns out that people don't like it when you attempt to stymy them:

The opposition members were just settling in for the fifth day of their filibuster when they discovered that the committee examining the Liberal government’s suggested changes to the standing orders had been suspended before they’d even popped a throat lozenge.

The Liberals came in like lions last month, thrusting a “discussion paper” of reforms to parliament under the noses of the opposition and imposing a deadline on the study of the proposed changes.

But it looks like the whole kerfuffle will go out like a lamb, with yet another government climb-down. The opposition claimed the changes to the standing orders are a power grab, an attempt to alter the rules to their own advantage using their parliamentary majority.

Yes, it is a carbon tax - a tax people will vote and pay for because they are too dull to do anything else:

What does Climate Change Minister Glen Murray’s announcement Monday that Ontario sold out its first cap-and-trade auction of carbon credits mean to you?

It means Ontario businesses have just paid a new charge of $472 million to the Wynne government in a government-run quarterly auction of carbon permits to industry, through which the government hopes to raise $1.9 billion annually in new revenue.

That $1.9 billion annually will be paid for by all Ontarians, in the form of higher retail prices for most goods and services.

Because culture matters:

For too many years now, Canadians have been poorly served by the working definitions of Canadian values and Canadian identity that have been on offer.

“Diversity is our strength” is a mantra that’s been repeated so often it’s lost meaning.

Meanwhile, “Hockey and Tim Hortons” reduces us to nothing more than...well, than hockey and Tim Hortons. With no alternatives on offer, we’ve become cynical.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau only made matters worse when he told the world via The New York Times the other year that “there is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada” and this makes us “the first post-national state”. ...

(Sidebar: that is because he is a douchebag.)

Then along comes Conservative leadership candidate Kellie Leitch with her proposal to screen newcomers for “Canadian values”. It’s not much, but it’s something at a time when nothing else is on offer. No wonder it got everyone talking.

The liberal consensus looked down their noses at Leitch and tried to paint her as some intolerant ogre. Even though she was clear from day one that her definition of those values includes embracing diversity of ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, etc. Even though countries in northern Europe do exactly as she’s proposing. Even though the numbers show a majority of Canadians across the political spectrum support the idea.

Sure, Leitch is a one-trick candidate and her idea is, for all the press it’s getting, not that well developed. But so what? It’s a conversation starter. Credit her that much.

People can have the naive attitudes that they do because a framework of rule and law and infrastructure (roads, running water and electricity, for example) have been laid out for them. When those gradually disappear or when "white flight" happens, what will their attitudes be then? What will they think when their casual anti-semitism in the form of BDS becomes particularly nasty or when women are assaulted with impunity (pick a place in Europe)? They can afford to be liberal because everyone else around them feels that way. When there is no one left, will their chattering stop?




No government funding should also mean no governmental interference:

University of Toronto psychology professor Dr. Jordan Peterson has had a federal research grant application denied for the first time in his long and distinguished academic career.

And he’s certain that the rejection from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the government agency that supports post-secondary research, is linked to the controversy surrounding his stand on gender-neutral pronouns such as “zie” and “zher,” and the modern notion of gender as being fluid.

Whose idea was it to make the girls' blouses in charge of anything?




And now, random facts:

A group of pugs is called a grumble.

Good to know.

**

Everyone knows the painting depicts Jesus' last meal with his apostles before he was captured and crucified. But more specifically, da Vinci wanted to capture the instant just after Jesus reveals that one of his friends will betray him, complete with reactions of shock and rage from the apostles. In da Vinci's interpretation, the moment also takes place just before the birth of the Eucharist, with Jesus reaching for the bread and a glass of wine that would be the key symbols of this Christian sacrament.

**

The island’s Kizhi Pogost (pogost means enclosed cemetery) contains two adjoining churches and an octagonal bell tower. Each seems to glimmer silver in the sun, but no metal was used. The 120-foot-high Church of the Transfiguration is the island’s largest structure, crowned with 22 domes, while the smaller Church of the Intercession stands 105 feet and has nine domes. Both were built in the 18th century; the 98-foot bell tower, erected in 1862, was a later addition. All were constructed without nails or steel reinforcement, as by tradition Russian carpenters of the era only used wooden logs with interlocking corners.

Sunday Post

 

Yes, good luck with that:

The Liberal cabinet is set to consider retaliation against the Trump administration if it expands “Buy American” policies that threaten Canadian jobs.

The national debt stands at $ 637,200,491,017.12 . Its unemployment rate stands at 6.6% because fewer people were looking for work. The trade deals with China Trudeau breathlessly gushed about may end up with China importing its own workers to Canada.

And the Liberals are going to make Trump pay.

Sure, they will.

Will these be the individuals Trudeau will force to pay their "fair share"?

The Sunshine list keeps on growing. But it’s not the executives who steal the spotlight for their scaled salaries. Instead, it’s the incredibly wide range of gigs that Ontarians are occupying that brings this list out into the spotlight. These are not the jobs they told you about in careers class.

Lunchroom Supervisor: Wai Loo at the Toronto District School Board, earning $111,949.67
Janitor: Michael Osso at Ontario Power Generation, earning 105,562.17
Manager, Caribou Conservation: Hilary Gignac at the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, earning $103,859.63
Stage carpenter: Will Sutton at Ryerson University, earning 102,818.48
Utility Person “A”: Jeff Cline at the City of Kitchener, earning $117,536.43
Manager, Parliamentary Protocol: John Anderson at the Legislative Assembly, earning $102,482.49
Manager, 89 Chestnut residence: Paul Readings at the University of Toronto, earning $135,061.06
Ethicist: Paula Majorie Chidwick at William Osler Health System, earning $161,908.38 (That’s the highest of any medical ethicist in Ontario)

Also in "corrupt government class" news:

Canada’s military ombudsman has dropped the gloves in what appears to have become a tense battle with National Defence, accusing officials of “insidious” attacks whenever his office releases a report critical of the department.

Gary Walbourne said those attacks have affected his ability to hold the Defence Department to account, which by extension is having a negative impact on the military personnel he is working to help.

The ombudsman said the best way to solve the problem is to make his office, which was created in the aftermath of the Somalia Inquiry, fully independent from the department.

“I think this office should report to Parliament,” Walbourne told The Canadian Press. “That way there is a certain standard and process that has to be respected.”

The Trudeau government has so far rejected Walbourne’s request, with Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan encouraging the two sides to work together to resolve their differences.

**

A Liberal member of parliament whose trip to Tanzania was paid for by a registered lobbyist appeared to violate the Prime Minister’s ethics code barring parliamentary secretaries from accepting such gifts — and she wasn’t the only one.

Brampton MP Kamal Khera was the parliamentary secretary to the minister of health in April 2016 when World Vision Canada spent $5,210.50 to take her on a seven-day trip to Tanzania.

On Tuesday the National Post reported that the Trudeau Foundation paid for Toronto MP Arif Virani’s travel to London, England from Feb. 29 to Mar. 1 2016. Virani’s trip was the first time in the foundation’s 16-year history that it sponsored an MP’s travel.

Both Virani and Khera appear to be in violation of the Prime Minister’s Guide for Parliamentary Secretaries which bars those parliamentarians from allowing outside groups to pay for their travel and warns that: “As a parliamentary secretary, you are subject to increased public scrutiny and your actions reflect on the reputation of your minister and of the Government as a whole.”

Oh, this must be embarrassing:

The number of American citizens turned away at the Canadian border has jumped significantly in recent years. 

Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) figures obtained by Montreal newspaper La Presse suggest 31% more US citizens were turned away last year than in 2015. 

In 2016, 30,233 Americans were sent back at the boundary compared to 23,052 the year before.
The report comes amid concerns in Canada about travel to the US.

 
I thought Canada's borders were so open and free.




Terrible:

Families and rescuers searched desperately on Sunday through mud-plastered rubble for victims of flooding and landslides in Colombia that have killed at least 210 people, injured hundreds and devastated entire neighborhoods.

Several rivers burst their banks near the southwestern city of Mocoa in the early hours of Saturday, sending water, mud and debris crashing down streets and into houses as people slept.

 


Political foment in Venezuela:

Venezuela's opposition lawmakers said on Sunday they will push for the removal of Supreme Court judges whom they accuse of acting on behalf of the ruling Socialists after the top tribunal briefly assumed control of congress last week.

While the move by the opposition-led congress would only be symbolic because it remains powerless, it could add to pressure on unpopular president Nicolas Maduro as he tries to defuse the furor over what critics saw as a lurch into dictatorship.

The Supreme Court's ruling last week that it would take over functions of the National Assembly triggered international condemnation and opposition protests at home.

Even the country's attorney general, a longtime government ally, said the decision was unconstitutional in a rare public rebuke from Maduro's ranks. On Saturday, at the request of the government, the Supreme Court eliminated the offending ruling.

But Maduro opponents said no one should believe that row- back meant democracy had been restored in the nation of 30 million people with the world's largest oil reserves.

Thousands of Chinese migrants protest after French police gunned down an elderly man they say attacked them:

A group of a few hundred Chinese youth and police officers clashed as the rally ended.

Police called to Liu's building over reports of a man with a knife burst into his apartment on March 26. Police say he attacked an officer with scissors before another officer fatally shot him.

Relatives are disputing the police account; they say Liu was holding kitchen shears because he was cooking.

Trump declares that he will act against North Korea if China will not:

The United States is prepared to respond to North Korean nuclear threats on its own if China fails to pressure Pyongyang, President Donald Trump said in an interview with the Financial Times on Sunday.

"Well if China is not going to solve North Korea, We will. That is all I am telling you," he was quoted as telling the newspaper.

Ousted Park Gye-Heun has been detained by police:

Ousted South Korean leader Park Geun-hye was behind bars in the Seoul Detention Centre on Friday after her arrest, on charges including bribery, in a corruption scandal that has brought low some of the country's business and political elite.

In a dramatic fall from power, Park, 65, became South Korea's first democratically elected leader to be thrown out of office. She is accused of colluding with a friend, Choi Soon-sil, to pressure big businesses to contribute funds to foundations that backed her policy initiatives.

She and Choi, who is already in custody and on trial, deny any wrongdoing.

 

Finally:

Two, possibly three, North Koreans wanted for questioning over the murder of the estranged half-brother of their country's leader were believed to have accompanied the coffin of the victim on a flight from Kuala Lumpur after Malaysia agreed a swap deal with the reclusive state.


Photographs obtained by Reuters from Japan's Kyodo news agency show Hyon Kwang Song, the second secretary at the North Korean embassy in Kuala Lumpur, and Kim Uk Il, a staff member of North Korea’s state airline Air Koryo were on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on Thursday evening.

The pictures match those released by the Malaysian police earlier. The coffin carrying the body of Kim Jong Nam was also believed to have been on the same flight, though this has not been confirmed by authorities.

Malaysian media reported that the third North Korean, Ri Ji U, also known as James, who had been hiding with them at the North Korean embassy in Kuala Lumpur was also allowed to go home. The three men and the coffin are expected to be transferred to a flight to Pyongyang.

Malaysian authorities released the body Kim Jong Nam to North Korea on Thursday, in a deal that secured the release of nine Malaysian citizens held in Pyongyang after a drawn out diplomatic spat. 

You can run to the fridge, Kim Jong-Un, but you can't run away from the truth - you had your own brother killed.
 



Russia's designs on Montenegro:

If the Assad regime falls in Syria, Russia may lose its only Mediterranean port. And since Montenegro is gearing up to join NATO, Russia could be stuck without a backup forever because it’s the only place along the entire northern shore of that sea that doesn’t already belong to the West.

The world is not enough ... for Putin.


Also - the duck stops here:

The reason the ducks are funny is that they are a classic symbol of over-the-top political corruption.

One target is Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, who stood in as the Potemkin president from 2008-12 because Putin couldn’t serve a third consecutive term (speaking of grimly funny political humour, chess-mad Russians dubbed this transparent manoeuvre to protect the real king “castling”… and yes, if I have to explain the joke it dies on the operating table).

During his time in politics and in Putin’s pocket, Medvedev has mysteriously become a millionaire with fancy houses including a refurbished 18th-century manor filmed by a drone showing a duck pond plus duck house. This footage, publicized by courageous anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny, recalled the embarrassing case of British MP Sir Peter Viggers, who tried to expense a “floating duck island” in magnificently out-of-touch “qu’ils mangent les brioches” style. (Putin, incidentally, appears to be a billionaire.)

Eating duck a l’orange and billing taxpayers would be bad enough, especially if the orange costs, say, $18 a glass. But when you start treating yourself to elaborate rustic idylls on the public ruble the jokes almost write themselves. Add a rubber duck and they do. People put Medvedev’s duck on the Forbes list of wealthiest Russians and so forth.

What’s even better is the paranoid reaction to the duck-waving protesters by Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic, a Putin ally who refused to sanction Russia for destabilizing Ukraine and annexing Crimea.

“I don’t believe in coincidences,” he said. “If someone tells me that different people have thought of the same symbol in Belgrade, Brazil and Moscow, don’t expect me to believe it.”

Looking after small children, particularly in public, is no easy feat.

That is why parents either leave the children at home until they are old enough to behave independently or they can get off of their @$$es and do some parenting.

Having kids means more than giving them a stupid trendy name and buying them Chinese-made lead-laced toys:

The debate surrounding the bans invokes larger questions about sociology, class and parenting trends, with some researchers saying they are the natural result of a culture of overtaxed parents desperate to spend as much time as possible with their children, even if that one-on-one time occurs over a fine bottle of wine at the expense of other diners around them.

Also:

The ma’am-haters are correct to object when the title is meant to diminish. But in driving it wholesale from the vernacular, we are raising children who have no tool of language with which to convey respect. And never seeing respect in action, they’re less likely to have it at all.

Thank God Periwinkle was off the block:

The world’s most famous crayon-maker is making this year’s National Crayon Day (today!) one for the record books by announcing the retirement of a classic color from its 24-pack crayon box for the first time in a century. When we reported on the story earlier this week, we asked: "Is dandelion facing certain death? Could blue violet be waving bye-bye? Is scarlet saying see you later?" Well, we were right the first time: Dandelion is bidding its place in the crayon box adieu.

Sorry, Dandelion-lovers.




Troubled by what else to celebrate in April? Be troubled no more!

APRIL 26: HUG AN AUSTRALIAN DAY

(Sidebar: it is a very good idea to let Australians know in advance that one will hug them.)