One of the main causes of death for airline passengers in recent decades is being shot down by somebody’s military. Not the very biggest, of course: accidents account for nine-tenths of all deaths in civilian airline crashes, and terrorist attacks and hijackings cause most of the rest. But a solid 2.5% of the deaths are …
In a recent survey of potential adult migrants worldwide, 47 million said they would most like to move to Canada. There are only 37 million people in Canada. The same goes for Australia: 36 million would like to move there; only 25 million do live there. Most of these would-be immigrants are going to be …
For a moment there I thought we had a new global threat to deal with, alongside the old favourites like climate change, nuclear war and pandemics. This would have been welcome from a journalistic point of view, since there is a constant need for scary new topics to write about. Otherwise we would fail in …
How odd! Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sends an audio recording of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul to the governments of all Turkey’s major NATO allies, and the only one that gets it is Canada. What happened to the copies that President Erdogan sent to the United …
Halfway across the Pacific Ocean, Donald Trump heard the closing statements from the G7 summit in Quebec (which he had left early to meet North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un in Singapore). All the G7 countries had signed up to an anodyne closing communique that papered over the huge gap between the United States and the …
Like Mexico, Canada is in the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Donald Trump has described as “the worst trade deal…ever signed in this country.” Unlike Mexico, Canada thinks that Trump is not planning to hurt it. But no good deed goes unpunished, so Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should be very careful. Canadians felt …
There’s an old joke that goes: Why did the Canadian cross the road? Answer: to get to the middle of the road. Likewise (so they say) if you cut the average Canadian open you would find two words engraved on his or her heart. One would be “moderate”. The other would be “nice”. Stephen Harper, …
Left-wing, right-wing, it makes no difference. Almost every elected government, confronted with even the slightest “terrorist threat”, responds by attacking the civil liberties of its own citizens. And the citizens often cheer them on. Last week, the French government passed a new bill through the National Assembly that vastly expanded the powers of the country’s …
Saint Nicholas (also known as Santa Claus, Kris Kringle or Father Christmas) has had to put up with a lot over the years. After the latest blow, he may not show up at all next week. First they decided that he had to reside at the North Pole, where the temperature often falls to 50 …
A week ago, the “Kurdistan Times” warned that “the British are exercising the old colonialist tongue to control the minds and dampen the aspirations of Scottish people who want to vote Yes (to independence).” And lo! It came to pass just as the Kurdistan Times predicted. The silver-tongued colonialists lured the Scots into voting No, …