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Since I’m a cheerful unbeliever, like most people in Britain now, there’s no reason why I should be more than marginally interested in the C of E’s expensive guilt-trip for its historic links to the slave trade. Except that I have a fondness for ancient architecture and language that, as with Richard Dawkins, includes old churches, old liturgies and the music that goes with them. I contributed to the renovation of the bells of the fine Norman church in my village because I like the sound they make. Like the liturgy, it’s an important facet of British history and the church’s bells are actually much more prominent in village life than its church services. For several years, they have only happened when a peripatetic vicar can include us in his rounds every few weeks. As to the slavery issue, the villagers, who only enter the church in large numbers for services at Christmas, Easter and harvest-time, seem to feel much less guilty than the new Archbishop of Canterbury. I agree with them for a reason that hasn’t been mentioned in the recent beating of ecclesiastical breasts or even in newspapers and journals that are unhappy with the idea of compensating the descendants of slaves and the governments of the present-day countries where the slaves were captured.
This Sunday’s state election in Saxony-Anhalt – a federal state of just over two million in eastern Germany – is of enormous significance. For the first time, the right-populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) could win an election so decisively that no alternative coalition could be formed to exclude it. Recent polls have consistently given the AfD more than 40 per cent of the vote – almost double that of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which is currently the biggest party in Saxony-Anhalt’s governing coalition. If these polls are accurate, not even a ‘firewall’ of anti-AfD parties governing together can keep it from winning political power.
OTTAWA – An Iranian immigrant living in Vancouver spent more than five years buying American missile-testing equipment and drone cameras for Iran’s Department of Defense, routing the goods and the payments through front companies in China. A Seattle court sentenced him to 42 months in prison in 2018. He was arrested not by Canadian police but by an American agent, at the border crossing in Blaine, Washington.
This is the moment a sex attacker moans to police that he ‘can’t be arrested’ after attempting to rape a woman near a train station in Canary Wharf.
Syed Imam, 30, told Scotland Yard officers ‘it can’t be me’ and falsely accused security staff of lying after they saved the vulnerable female in an underpass.
They had heroically stopped his attempted sex attack during the early hours of March 14 and detained him before police arrived, having seen him earlier acting suspiciously.
When the CBC recently backed away from an internal policy that instructed its journalists not to label 9/11 as a terrorist attack, it was a sensible reversal. But it occurred only after the broadcaster first dug in its taxpayer-financed heels.
The entire episode is worth exploring because the back-and-forth over the CBC memo spurred debates over the nature of terrorism, and the broadcaster’s failure to think about the reality of what the word actually means.
Russia hasn’t yet killed large numbers of Europeans outside Ukraine, but it’s getting closer. The night of 4-5 August, an airport bus driver discovered an armed drone lying near the tarmac of the Leipzig-Halle airport, which is a central hub of Europe’s logistical support to Ukraine’s war effort. A cargo jet, meanwhile, may have struck a second drone shortly after takeoff, forcing an abrupt landing, and investigators found a third drone laden with military explosives nearby.
In 2024, incendiary devices hidden in parcels ignited in DHL cargo at the same airport. Had these detonated in the air, a major air catastrophe and large-scale civilian casualties would have ensued, probably resulting in a broader war.
The Guardian has only one setting – Blame Trump.
I don’t want to live in the United Kingdom (UK).
I’m certain most Canadians would say the same thing if you asked them. So why is the Canadian government, and particularly Heritage Minister Marc Miller, taking cues on so-called “social cohesion” from the UK’s Labour Party? Isn’t the UK a royal mess?
Marine Le Pen has promised to ban women wearing Muslim headscarves if she becomes president next year. The leader of the National Rally declared on X: ‘I will submit to the French people, by referendum, a bill to combat Islamist ideologies with numerous powerful measures, including the banning of the Islamist headscarf in public spaces’.
France has led the way among European countries on the issue of conservative Islamic dress. In 2004, for example, a law was passed prohibiting the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols in schools. It applied to Christians, Jews and Muslims, but France was accused of using the bill to persecute Islam. ‘Wearing a headscarf, for whatever reason, will not undermine the French nation,’ said the Guardian.
Prime Minister Mark Carney has dismissed a series of recent comments by U.S. cabinet members that challenge the Liberal government’s explanation for walking away from trade talks last month.
“I don’t think, with all respect, appointed, unelected cabinet members in the United States are experts on Canadian politics,” he said in Thunder Bay, Ont., on Thursday.
Ever since he pulled Canada’s negotiating team back to Ottawa late on Friday, Aug. 21, Carney and Canada’s chief trade negotiator Janice Charette have maintained Canada left after the U.S. introduced last-minute changes the government deemed unfair and uneconomic.
I don’t believe a word that comes out of Carney’s mouth.
The Americans have been consistent and offered up specifics while Carney and his coconspirators just lie through their teeth knowing their media will never demand proof.
Mark Carney after telling Americans to stop doing memes 😭 pic.twitter.com/1P5ZGeKDtA
— Gizmo Memes (@GizmoMemes) September 3, 2026
With the stroke of a sharpie last week, President Trump moved to re-designate Lake Ontario, the long-established name for the freshwater lake that lies between New York State and the Canadian province of Ontario, to “Lake America.”
The executive order came amid an escalating trade war with Canada after negotiations over tariffs fell apart, followed by new tariffs and tough talk between Washington and Ottawa.
“Found footage”: Mark Carney’s spider-man audition tape. pic.twitter.com/aOA4iqlPWC
— Sovey (@SoveyX) September 3, 2026
Applicants to some of the most critical jobs in the Canadian federal government, including safety inspectors and intelligence agents, are now being explicitly told that they might be rejected if they don’t fit within an “equity-deserving” identity category.
And in some key federal government departments, 100 per cent of new hires are being screened based on race and identity.
This is all according to a new report by the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy.
Your own government discriminates against you. Because you have white skin.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, the United States faces a disquieting paradox. On the one hand, the country has largely been spared another major terrorist attack. Only one lethal incident directed by a foreign terrorist organization has succeeded on American soil since 9/11: the 2019 shooting at Naval Air Station Pensacola by a Saudi al-Qaeda operative, which killed three sailors and wounded eight others. This record is a towering achievement. In the dark and fearful days after 9/11 and during the early years of the war on terror, such an outcome was a matter of hope rather than certainty. The horrific attacks in Madrid in 2004, London in 2005, Mumbai in 2008, Paris in 2015, Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday in 2019, and Moscow in 2024 underscore the importance of the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations and the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 in keeping the United States safe from another catastrophic attack.
In recent weeks, a familiar explanation has taken hold in political commentary: the Conservative Party would be doing better if someone other than Pierre Poilievre were leading it. After this week’s difficult byelections that assertion has become expectedly louder from columnists, commentators, and from the chattering class.
It is absolutely an intuitive theory. It’s also one that can be tested, and Abacus Data’s most recent national survey of 2,022 Canadians, conducted August 21 to 26, offers a way to do that.
