Friday Post

For the week-end ...



The hospital that held Charlie Gard hostage before and after his parents' legal challenge to seek treatment elsewhere now reports his death:

Charlie Gard, a British baby who became the subject of a bitter dispute between his parents and doctors over whether he should be taken to the United States for experimental treatment, has died, local media said on Friday.

The 11-month-old baby suffered from an extremely rare genetic condition causing progressive brain damage and muscle weakness, and his parents' long struggle to save him drew an international outpouring of sympathy, including from U.S. President Donald Trump and Pope Francis.

"Our beautiful little boy has gone, we are so proud of you Charlie," Connie Yates, the baby's mother, was quoted as saying by the Daily Mail.

Local media said a family spokesman had confirmed the death.

"Everyone at Great Ormond Street Hospital sends their heartfelt condolences to Charlie’s parents and loved-ones at this very sad time," said a spokeswoman for the hospital where Charlie had been receiving treatment.

Oh, that's just rich. 

The hospital should have pointed out that if people did things its way, nobody would get hurt.

North Korea has launched is second ICBM towards Japan:

North Korea on Friday test-fired its second intercontinental ballistic missile, which flew longer and higher than the first according to its wary neighbours , leading analysts to conclude that a wide swath of the U.S. including Los Angeles and Chicago is now within range of Pyongyang's weapons.

Japanese government spokesman Yoshihide Suga said the missile, launched late Friday night, flew for about 45 minutes — about five minutes longer than the ICBM North Korea test-fired on July 4. 

The missile was launched on very high trajectory, which limited the distance it travelled , and landed west of Japan's island of Hokkaido.

North Korea would not be able to do this is its chief back, China, was sanctioned.

Also:

Malaysia will begin on October 2 the trial of two women accused of the dramatic killing of the estranged half brother of North Korea's leader, the High Court said on Friday.

Indonesian Siti Aisyah, 25, and Doan Thi Huong, 28, from Vietnam, are charged with murdering Kim Jong Nam at Kuala Lumpur airport on Feb. 13 by smearing his face with VX, a chemical the United Nations describes as a weapon of mass destruction.

A stabbing in Hamburg clearly has nothing to do with Islamism:

One man was killed and six people were injured in a stabbing attack in a supermarket in Hamburg on Friday, police said.

A 52-year-old German man was stabbed to death in an Edeka Supermarket. A 50-year-old woman and four men aged 64, 57, 56 and 19 suffered stabbing injuries. A 35-year-old man was injured while tackling the attacker, police said.

Police spokesperson Timo Zill said a kitchen knife was used in the stabbing, which he described as "indiscriminate" and "totally unexpected."

Police identified the attacker as a 26-year-old man born in the United Arab Emirates, but his citizenship was unclear.

The Americans drop a potential border tax:

Canadian officials are praising a U.S. decision to drop a contentious border tax proposal, suggesting its death signals an open-mindedness in the Trump administration on open borders and free trade.

Canada was thrown a bone. The Trudeau government will be brought to heel as it has been with the Chinese.





But ... but ... "green" energy!

We have a question for Premier Kathleen Wynne.

Would Ontario be back in the coal business if she hadn’t sold off majority control of Hydro One in a fire sale, to shore up her cash-starved government?

We think the answer from a Liberal government that has railed against the environmental evils of coal since it was elected in 2003 under premier Dalton McGuinty, is obvious.

That answer is no.

For heaven’s sake, Wynne passed a law making it illegal to generate electricity from coal in Ontario in 2015, after closing down the province’s last coal-fired power plant the year before.

A decade earlier, McGuinty spearheaded a Liberal government campaign against America’s use of coal to generate electricity, arguing it was responsible for most of Ontario’s air pollution.

And yet now, Ontario taxpayers, through their minority stake in Hydro One (the Wynne government is still the largest single shareholder), will soon be part owners of Montana’s mammoth Colstrip coal-fired electricity plant.

That’s because Hydro One is buying U.S. energy company Avista Corp. for $6.7 billion.

Avista is a co-owner of Colstrip, the largest facility of its kind west of the Mississippi and one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.

Some chick wants everyone else to play make-believe:

A Newfoundland and Labrador court will hear the case of a transgender activist vying for a non-binary birth certificate this fall.

Gemma Hickey appeared in the province’s Supreme Court in St. John’s Friday to set a Nov. 22 date for arguments in a challenge of the Vital Statistics Act’s change-of-sex designation provision.

Hickey is taking legal action against the Newfoundland and Labrador government to have a gender other than male and female formally recognized on such documents.

“I wanted to send a message out to people that are different, who don’t fit into an either-or category,” Hickey said in a phone interview after the hearing. “It’s important that people have the space to be who they are, and express that through gender. We deserve to be recognized.”

Hickey applied for a non-binary birth certificate in April and is believed to be the first in Canada to do so.

Hickey, who runs a foundation for survivors of sexual abuse, has taken testosterone and is transmasculine, but identifies as non-binary.

Note that no one is going to address the former complain but will play long with the latter.


Also playing make-believe - people who think that a former snowboard instructor is not an idiot other people are actually ashamed of:

Whatever his talents as clickbait, a strong case can be made that Trudeau is not very good at the governing side of his job. And I'm not talking about the mildly contrarian he's-not-progressive-enough critiques you sometimes read from left-wing Canadians in the foreign press; I'm talking basic competence. The aftermath of Khadr-gate should hopefully serve as a wake-up call for international media to balance Trudeau's antics as a charming figurehead with his unglamorous reality as a politician.

Trudeau was never terribly qualified to be prime minister. Before his quick political rise, he was known simply as the wealthy, dilettantish son of a popular ex-prime minister who had trouble choosing a career. First elected to Parliament in 2008, he was abruptly made Liberal boss in 2013 in what was dubbed a "personality cult" gimmick by a party whose popularity had slumped to record lows.

Trudeau's initial steps on the national stage were defined by George W. Bush-style gaffes, such as expressing envy for the efficiency of China's "basic dictatorship." During his inauguration, it was revealed he didn't know how to pronounce the word "heir." To this day, he still stumbles when forced to express opinions outside his talking-point comfort zone (watch, for example, his painful attempt to articulate thoughts on North Korea). Carefully staged photo ops, such as Trudeau's supposed "off-the-cuff" description of quantum computing, can be seen as a deliberate effort to reassure voters that their leader actually has something under that carefully coiffed hair.

Were the Canaanites really wiped out?

Now a study of Canaanite DNA, published Thursday in the American Journal of Human Genetics, rules out the biblical idea that an ancient war wiped out the group. The DNA, when compared to that of modern-day people, shows that the Canaanites managed to leave a long line of descendants. Even if they suffered some defeats, “enough people survived that they contributed to the present-day population,” Tyler-Smith said.

And now, a cat within a cat ... or something: