15-year-old Russian figure skating champion Kamila Valieva was allowed to continue practicing for the Beijing Winter Olympics on Thursday even though she tested positive for a banned substance.
Alberta Premier Jason Kenney on Wednesday apologized for comparing the stigmatization of people who will not get vaccinated against the Wuhan coronavirus to the treatment of HIV and AIDS patients in the early years of those diseases.
Dr. Angelique Coetzee, the South African doctor who was among the first to identify the omicron variant of the Wuhan coronavirus, told the Daily Telegraph on Wednesday she was subjected to “a lot of pressure from European scientists and politicians” to portray omicron as more dangerous than it actually was.
Ottawa City Manager Steve Kanellakos said on Tuesday that every tow truck company that has a municipal contract has refused to haul away the Freedom Convoy trucks that have blocked city streets in the Canadian capital for the past two weeks.
The Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Ontario, closed overnight on Monday and reopened to slow-moving traffic on Tuesday, was once again blocked by protesting Canadian truck drivers on Wednesday.
Canada’s Freedom Convoy trucker protest against vaccine mandates continued on Tuesday as mandates, vaccine passport systems, and other coronavirus restrictions began falling in provinces across the country – including Alberta, Saskatchewan, Quebec, and Prince Edward Island.
Eighteen-year-old freeski champion Eileen Gu gave China its first women’s gold medal of the 2022 Winter Olympics on Tuesday, becoming the breakout star of the least-watched Games in TV history. Chinese state media is eager to use Gu for propaganda while protecting her image as a globalist megastar, while American media is reluctant to ask tough questions about why a California teen would put her incredible talent at the service of a genocidal slave-taking dictatorship.
Chinese state media outlets, and China’s tightly-controlled social media platforms, bestowed lavish praise upon 18-year-old American defector Eileen Gu on Tuesday after she won a gold medal at the Beijing Winter Olympics.
Chinese tennis player and three-time Olympic competitor Peng Shuai, who disappeared for weeks after accusing a high-ranking Communist official of raping her and has lately been recanting her allegations under the watchful eye of regime operatives, was parked in the stands on Tuesday to cheer American defector Eileen Gu as she won a gold medal for Beijing.
Supporters of Canada’s anti-mandate, trucker-led Freedom Convoy movement shut down traffic on the Ambassador Bridge on Monday. Located between Windsor, Ontario and Detroit, Michigan, the bridge is part of the busiest border crossing between Canada and the United States.
19-year-old figure skater Zhu Yi, who was born in California but renounced her American citizenship in 2018 to compete for China, was mercilessly heckled by Chinese social media users after she fell on the ice on Sunday and finished in last place at the Beijing Winter Olympics. The heckling was so intense that Chinese government censors intervened and shut down almost a hundred accounts on Weibo, China’s heavily-controlled alternative to banned Twitter.
China’s state-run Global Times on Sunday insisted the shocking viral video of a Dutch TV journalist getting dragged away from his camera in mid-broadcast by Beijing Winter Olympics security guards was actually “reasonable and justified,” but “anti-China forces” have magnified the incident into a major free speech scandal.
Montreal Mayor Valerie Plante on Sunday asked the Quebec government to provide a detailed plan for “reopening” the province as it emerges from strict coronavirus emergency measures.
Famed Chinese dissident artist Badiucao reported on Friday that satirical posters he created to lampoon the Beijing Winter Olympics were banned at George Washington University (GWU), ostensibly because the Chinese artist is guilty of “racism.” After a weekend of intense focus from human rights organizations, the university backed down on its threat to remove the posters and punish the students who displayed them.
Peter Schweizer’s new bestseller “Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win” blows the whistle on a little game played by pro-Beijing politicians in Washington, a tactic summed up as “big help With a little badmouth.” The idea is to throw out a little tepid public criticism of China to maintain deniability while collaborating with the Chinese Communist Party and its business interests behind the scenes.
Much of the American and Canadian media establishment is laboring to portray the Freedom Convoy protest against vaccine mandates in Canada as a small but loud group of fringe extremists. Photos from cities across Canada this weekend demonstrated the true size and diversity of the movement, which is clearly more than just a handful of truckers honking their horns in Ottawa.
Zhao Weidong, the spokesman for China’s Beijing Winter Olympics Organizing Committee, said on Thursday that the opening ceremony for the Games would squelch all “banter” about boycotting the event to protest the Chinese government’s human rights abuses.
Candice Bergen, elected on Wednesday to replace the ousted Erin O’Toole as interim leader of the Canadian Conservative caucus, came out swinging in her debut House of Commons appearance by blasting Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for refusing to extend an “olive branch” to Freedom Convoy demonstrators. Bergen began the week by sneering at Trudeau for wearing blackface “more times than he can remember” and demanding he apologize for slandering the demonstrators as racists.
Tibetan exiles and supporters of Tibetan freedom gathered outside Chinese embassies, Olympic headquarters, and NBC studios to protest the Beijing Winter Olympics, derided by critics as the “Genocide Games” because the event risks validating Communist China’s brutal suppression of minorities like the Tibetans and Uyghur Muslims.
Russian leader Vladimir Putin held a summit with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Beijing Winter Olympics, which Putin is technically banned from, on Friday.
The Chinese Communist government sternly warned Olympic athletes not to engage in any unauthorized political speech but Chinese state media roundly applauded an American athlete for gushing over the “incredible” accommodations she found in Beijing.
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced on Thursday that her country would begin reopening its borders at the end of February, capping an embarrassing week in which a pregnant Kiwi journalist stranded outside the country turned to the Taliban for assistance.
After weeks of hysterical pronouncements about an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine, culminating in an embarrassing meltdown by President Joe Biden in a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky this week, the Biden administration appears to be backing away from Ukraine and looking for ways to change the subject – such as declaring war on cancer instead of Russia.
A Hong Kong newspaper owned by the Chinese Communist government fired off a string of articles last week accusing Christian churches of fomenting unrest during the 2019 popular uprising, strongly hinting at a crackdown on Hong Kong Christians under the tyrannical “national security law” imposed by Beijing to crush the 2019 protest movement.
Russian leader Vladimir Putin on Tuesday accused the United States of attempting to lure Russia into a war over Ukraine, and said President Joe Biden’s administration is ignoring Russia’s legitimate security concerns.
China recorded 32 more coronavirus cases linked to the Beijing Winter Olympics on Tuesday, including 17 inside the “closed loop” or “bubble” meant to separate Olympic venues from the rest of the city. 11 Beijing Games personnel are now hospitalized with Chinese coronavirus.
Canadian police on Tuesday ordered protesters to dismantle their blockade of a vital U.S. border crossing, while Ontario Premier Doug Ford ordered the demonstrators camped in Ottawa to disperse and return home after five days of occupying the national capital.
The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) held a session on the Russia-Ukraine situation on Thursday, as requested by the United States. The belligerent Russian delegation turned the meeting into a shouting match, at one point accusing the U.S. of putting “nationalists, radicals, Russophobes, and pure Nazis” in charge of Ukraine after the Russia-friendly government was overthrown in a 2014 popular revolt. The current president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Ukraine’s first Jewish chief executive.
Charlotte Bellis, a 35-year-old pregnant New Zealand journalist abandoned in Afghanistan by her own left-wing government due to its coronavirus quarantine rules, said on Saturday she had no alternative but to ask the Taliban for help.
Pastor Tobias Tissen, a Canadian pastor who was arrested and jailed for two days in October after he defied coronavirus-related public health orders to hold church services, visited the U.S.-Canadian border on Sunday to sing “Amazing Grace” and show his opposition to rules that prevent unvaccinated persons from crossing the border.
North Korean state television aired a “documentary” on Tuesday called “2021: A Great Victorious Year” that claimed dictator Kim Jong-un lost a remarkable amount of weight because he was suffering so much for the people that “his body completely withered away.”
43-year-old Tang Mingfang was arrested in 2019 for giving documents to a human rights group that showed a Foxconn factory in China was using child labor for manufacturing Echo and Kindle devices for Amazon.com.
Chinese officials on Sunday claimed to have discovered 119 coronavirus infections among athletes and staff at the Beijing Winter Olympics, including 37 new cases on Sunday.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) on Monday intercepted a ballistic missile launched by the Iran-backed Houthi insurgents in Yemen.
Australian truckers used social media over the weekend to plan their own “Freedom Convoy” similar to the one in Canada, telling supporters they should “swarm to Canberra to protest mandates and restrictions” on Monday.
The business relationships between President Joe Biden’s son Hunter and Chinese Communist Party elites are explored in Peter Schweizer’s new book “Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win.” Some of Hunter’s Chinese deals were helpful to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China’s colonialist scheme for buying influence across the Third World and luring poor nations into taking loans from Chinese banks they can never repay.
The United States on Thursday called for a meeting of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to discuss the tense situation between Russia and Ukraine.
Humanitarian activists and U.N. officials are calling for sanctions against the Taliban to be eased so aid can be rendered to the sick, starving, and soon-to-be freezing Afghan people – but Radio Free Europe (RFE) on Tuesday documented how the Taliban is looting aid programs to pay its officials, and even withholding food to force Afghan civilians into slavery.
Syrian photographer Ali Haj Suleiman on Thursday blew the whistle on China’s Foreign Ministry for fraudulently presenting photos he took in Idlib as if they were snapshots of Afghanistan devastated by the U.S. invasion.
The office of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky released striking photos of him after a controversial Thursday evening phone call with U.S. President Joe Biden, who rumors claimed told Zelensky to “brace for impact” from a Russian invasion.