I wish I could say I told you so. A point I have tried to make over the last year or so is that Donald Trump can only get worse: that however corrupt or incompetent or dictatorial or treasonous or insane he may appear at any given moment, it will inevitably come to be seen as a relative golden age...
A federal judge has dismissed the criminal cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, concluding that the prosecutor who brought the charges at President Donald Trump's urging was illegally appointed by the Justice Department. The rulings from U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie amount to a stunning rebuke of the Trump administration's efforts...
When the tiny lifeless body of Alan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish shore 10 years ago, the world stood still. We were horrified. That image inspired a column I wrote at the time lamenting the Harper government’s refusal to welcome and resettle more Syrian refugees. This was a time before genocides were livestreamed, and before desensitized doomscrolling gave way...
Nepal witnessed one of its most violent episodes in decades on September 8, when a youth-led uprising against the government’s ban on 26 social media platforms — including YouTube, Facebook, X, and Instagram — left 34 people dead and thousands injured. The demonstrations in Kathmandu and other cities forced four-time prime minister KP Sharma Oli to resign and triggered widespread...
Canada condemned Israel's military strike on Qatar on Tuesday, saying the attack undermines the Gulf country's sovereignty and risks escalating conflict across the Middle East. An explosion killed Hamas officials Tuesday in the Qatari capital of Doha. Israel said it targeted senior Hamas leaders it holds responsible for the brutal October 2023 attack. Hamas said its main negotiator Khalil Al-Hayya...
What happens when there are no messengers left to deliver the news we need to see and hear? This question should be the focus of our attention, as Palestinian journalists continue to be killed at a horrifying rate by Israeli forces in Gaza. Almost 200 are dead since the war began on Oct. 7, 2023, according to the Committee to...
Negotiations concluded last week at the White House involving Donald Trump, Volodymyr Zelenskyy and several European leaders, who came to support the president of Ukraine. The Ukrainian delegation that travelled to Washington had critical objectives.
Putin got a meeting, dodged any commitment to a ceasefire and Trump said nothing about tariffs or sanctions. U.S. President Donald Trump set the bar low for the high-stakes meeting with his Russian counterpart in Alaska — and it became apparent why late Friday as things wrapped up with little more than a commitment to meet again. Trump had the...
President Donald Trump said he and Vladimir Putin didn’t reach a deal to end Russia’s war in Ukraine after meeting on Friday — despite Putin saying they had come to “an understanding” — as the two leaders offered scant details on what was discussed while heaping praise on each other. In brief remarks as they shared a stage after meeting...
Over the past two decades, China has gained a foothold in ports across the world, expanding its control and influence over critical shipping routes and vital resource hubs. China’s power and influence extend not just to commercial matters; several of these ports could have dual-use functions — that is, both commercial and military — and have become a new point...
The decision by President Donald Trump to federalize law enforcement in Washington D.C. has serious implications far beyond his already worrying expansions and abuses of presidential power. Trump announced on August 11th that he was placing the Washington DC Metropolitan Police Force under the control of the United States Attorney-General and augmenting the existing force with agents from the Federal...
Prime Minister Mark Carney has removed any restrictions on Canada’s military to join President Trump’s Golden Dome, an unproven, half-trillion dollar program to try to shoot down nuclear-armed missiles launched against the United States by Russia or China. According to Ottawa Citizen reporter David Pugliese, Defence Minister David McGuinty visited the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) headquarters in Colorado...
Bad faith from politicians has always been a feature of democracy. What politician hasn’t made a promise while running for office, only to break it when elected? Scandal is as much a part of everyday governance as talking points and taxes. From Brian Mulroney’s pasta payoff to Jean Chrétien’s ad sponsorship rip-off, leaders of all parties stray from the straight...
May their memories be a blessing. Because the hostages still held in Gaza have been condemned to die. By starvation, by Israeli bombardment, or by execution.
There is a tendency to the categorical in any discussion of Israel and Gaza. The obsessive focus of so many critics on Israel’s sins, real or alleged, as if it were the only such offender, or the worst, or even remotely comparable to the bestial dictatorships aligned against it, is met by an equal and opposite insistence that all such...
Canada’s move to recognize a Palestinian state has been welcomed by some and rejected by others – U.S. President Donald Trump being one of those occupying the latter view. The Canadian government’s decision to change its position on this issue, regardless of its motivations, are aligned with the shifting of opinion among the Canadian population. New data from the non-profit...
A meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump has been agreed, a Kremlin official said Thursday, the eve of a White House deadline for Moscow to show progress toward ending the 3-year-old war in Ukraine. Putin's foreign affairs adviser Yuri Ushakov said a summit could possibly take place next week at a venue that has been...
The president of the United States is commonly described as the most powerful man on earth. Nevertheless, his powers are ordinarily circumscribed in numerous ways, formal and informal. There is the Congress, of course, and the courts, and the rule of law they are sworn to uphold. But there are also the institutions under the presidency, which though they ultimately...
Skeletal, dead-eyed Jews liberated from concentration camps. That’s what I thought of immediately, upon viewing the propaganda video Hamas released on the weekend of 24-year-old Evyatar David, abducted from the Nova musical festival on Oct. 7, 2023, on his 659th day of captivity.
By most estimates, Donald Trump has collected at least $100 billion dollars from American consumers and businesses with his tariff policies this year. Every day he describes this as a “win” for America, pretending that it’s not a tax on Americans. To a lot of Americans, the effects of the tariffs have been hard to discern, and so the rhetoric...
Given the four-year preview of his first term, it should come as no surprise that even in the middle of summer, we can’t escape Donald Trump. Through ongoing executive orders, public announcements, press conferences, social media posts and shifting deadlines of tariffs, we are bombarded hourly by the former reality-show host’s presidential stylings. The difference in this term seems to...
We live in an age of abundance. Starvation should be obscene. Yet starvation is a deadly fact in too many parts of the world, including Gaza, where since October, 2023, Palestinians have endured the devastating effects of war. “The level of human suffering in Gaza is intolerable. And it’s rapidly deteriorating,” Prime Minister Mark Carney said this week, as he...
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
Najah Ashour watches a video of her cousin, Enaia Shurrab, in Gaza City — sobbing over the lifeless body of her five-month-old son — who she says died from starvation. “I feel very sad,” Ashour whispers, sitting in her family’s apartment in Burlington, Ont. “She call[ed] me, ‘Please send me anything, can you buy milk for my baby?’ It broke...
Donald Trump is reportedly in the Epstein files. To anyone paying attention, it’s less a revelation than a grim confirmation. And now — the big question: is this the beginning of the end of Donald Trump’s political career?
Each day, it seems, we wake to a fresh horror. Article content On Wednesday July 16, in response to an ongoing massacre of Syrian Druze, the IDF launched a limited but forceful ground incursion as well as airstrikes into Damascus.
No matter how bad things are, it seems they can always get worse. I wrote about the situation in Gaza earlier this week, focusing on the repeated reports of hungry, desperate people being shot and killed as they scrambled for food at distribution hubs. That’s bad enough, but even in the past few days the horror there has become even...
Japan’s upper house election on July 20 dealt a historic blow to the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its junior partner, Komeito, as they lost majority control of the Diet’s upper chamber. Of the 125 contested seats, the coalition won just 47, while opposition parties — led by the centre-left Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP) — secured 78 by tapping...
You want to say something that isn’t blindingly obvious. You want to talk about something people care about. If possible you want to spin a clever line or two. What you don’t want to do, generally speaking, is rub people’s faces in things they’d rather not look at. So for people like me in the opinionating line, the temptation always...
On July 7, Cambodia was informed by the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump of a new August 1 deadline to renegotiate trade terms and avoid steep tariffs. Although the recently revealed 36 per cent duties announced by the U.S. as part of its broader tariff policy are lower than the hefty 49 per cent Washington threatened earlier, they remain...
MY MOTHER’S paternal grandmother, Maaliaana, was born in Kangaamiut, in western Kalaallit Nunaat, sometime in the beginning of the 1900s. (Kalaallit Nunaat is an endonym for my motherland; Greenland is what the international community generally calls it.) She was the product of a one-night stand with a British whaler, at a time when ships filled with men from other places...
Canada must stand by the Iranian public and political prisoners as the Islamic Republic intensifies its crackdown on human rights
The Cambodia-Thailand relationship has deteriorated since a border clash broke out on May 28 and has led to the death of one Cambodian soldier. The conflict, not the first between the two countries, stems from a longstanding dispute over the lines of demarcation, dating back to early 20th century negotiations between Thailand (then Siam) and the French colonial authorities in...
The world woke up on Sunday morning as a safer place for humanity. But the same cannot be said with any assurance for all the morrows after that. An Iran struck by a historically unprecedented bombing attack — American pilots flying American B-2 stealth bombers, each dropping 30,000-pound payloads, GPS-guided bunker-busters that can penetrate down through mountains and hundreds of...
The only question that remains about the Trump presidency is how much damage it can do to the United States and the world before it is over. A lot will depend on how other world leaders treat America’s first rogue president. Butt-kissing—the preferred option so far of those attempting to deal with Donald Trump—has been a humiliating failure...
The U.S. attack on three Iranian nuclear facilities has jolted global diplomacy and heightened fears of a broader regional conflict, with observers warning that the future of nuclear non-proliferation may be at risk. The attack, which employed long-range bombers and 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs, marked a dramatic escalation in the simmering conflict between Israel and Iran. But it also drew the...
