© AFP Photo/CARLO ALLEGRI
Nova Scotia fishing village
A US border patrol boat strayed into Canadian territorial waters while chasing "illegal immigrants" off the coast of Maine and Nova Scotia, Canadian fishermen said Wednesday.
Laurence Cook, chair of the Grand Manan Fishermen's Association, said on Facebook that a US border patrol launch out of Maine attempted to stop a Canadian fishing vessel in Canadian waters.
Grand Manan is a Canadian island in the Gulf of Maine, right off the coast that hosts the border between the United States and Canada.
Cook said the incident took place on June 24 near Machias Seal Island, a tiny and rocky outcrop a dozen miles (kilometers) south of Grand Manan with rich lobster grounds, and
whose sovereignty is disputed by Washington, although the Canadian Coast Guard maintains a lighthouse there.
According to Cook, the Canadian fishing captain, Nick Brown, informed the US vessel that "he was a Canadian vessel legally fishing in Canadian waters."
Comment: CTV News adds:
In the past two weeks, at least 10 Canadian fishing boats from New Brunswick have been intercepted by U.S. Border Patrol agents while fishing in the disputed waters around Machias Seal Island, a spokesman for the fishermen says.
[..]
Machias Seal Island, which is about 19 kilometres southwest of Grand Manan Island and east of Maine, is in a disputed area known as the Grey Zone, where lobster fishermen from both Canada and the United States have long fished side by side.
The small island is a flat, treeless piece of rock, which includes a large colony of puffins and a lighthouse that is manned by two Canadian lightkeepers year-round.
However, both Canada and the United States claim sovereign jurisdiction over the island and the surrounding waters at the mouth of the Bay of Fundy.
"Neither country accepts that there is a Grey Zone," said Stephen Kelly, a research scholar at Duke University in Durham, N.C., and a former American diplomat who served in Canada. "That's created more tension in the area over the last decade."
Kelly said both countries have done very little to assert their claims.
"Sometimes doing nothing is better," he said. "But in this case, just because it looks like it's not broken can be very deceiving -- especially with our new president in the United States. The last thing Canada wants is for Donald Trump to seize on this as an example of U.S. sovereignty being challenged."
The suggestion that the border agents were looking for illegal immigrants seems improbable, he said.
"That's possible, but ... the Gulf of Maine is not a major route for illegal immigrants sneaking into the United States," Kelly said. "If anything, people are sneaking the other way. They're trying to get out of the U.S. and into Canada to claim asylum."
He said drug smuggling is a more relevant concern.
© Agence France-Presse
A Palestinian woman whose house has been occupied by illegal Jewish squatters arguing with Israelis who came to taunt her on Jerusalem Day in front of her disputed house in East Jerusalem, May 2010. AFP
I have just spent a couple of days in New York City. Returning to Virginia on Wednesday morning, I had a somewhat strange experience. I cleared through my emails before leaving the hotel and also read through a number of the featured news articles. One, in particular, caught my eye. It described how the Democratic Party primary in Queens New York had returned a startling result. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won over mainstream incumbent Joe Crowley, signaling that not everyone in the Democratic Party is buying into the Clinton model of good governance by big donors and powerful interest groups. Many want change and even a radical departure from the political game whereby media savvy pressure groups and narrow constituencies are pandered to to create a governing majority.
One paragraph in particular in the article I read was highly suggestive, the claim that Ocasio-Cortez had been strongly opposed to the Israelis' routine slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, which has by now become of such little import that it is not even reported any more in the U.S. media. She is also allegedly a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction movement (BDS), which pressures Israel to end its theft and occupation of Palestinian land. The article expressed some surprise that anyone in New York City would dare to say anything unpleasant about Israel and still expect to get elected.
RTThu, 05 Jul 2018 16:18 UTC
© Sergei Karpukhin / Stephen Yang / Reuters
A group of Republican senators have been accused of treason after spending July 4 in Moscow.
Real patriots spend Independence Day eating potato salad on US soil, according to astute Twitter users.
The Republican congressional delegation, headed by Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, arrived in Russia on June 30 for high-level talks ahead of a planned summit between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki.
However, the fact that the working visit extended into July 4 has led many American pundits to conclude that the seven senators (and one congresswoman) are not lawmakers doing their job, but actually brazen traitors. It's Twitter, after all:
RTThu, 05 Jul 2018 16:05 UTC
© Global Look Press
Startling video footage of an Austin police officer repeatedly punching a restrained man has prompted an internal probe.
The footage was captured outside Rain nightclub in downtown Austin, Texas on Wednesday by bystander Patrick King, who posted it online expressing his rage at the "beating".
The video shows the man, who is on the ground, being punched at least five times as he is surrounded by officers during an arrest.
"So last night I was out with some friends in Austin and witnessed police brutality first hand for the first time," King wrote on Twitter. He admitted that he was unsure what the man in the video did but added that he was angered by the police response. "I left the scene with rage, anger, and disappointment," he said.
RTThu, 05 Jul 2018 15:52 UTC
© Russian Defense Ministry / Sputnik
The Russian Armed Forces are expected to get new state-of-the-art weapons systems, which have no equals anywhere in the world, a Russian government's top official said. The new equipment is set to enter service within a decade.
The Russian military is undergoing a large-scale rearmament, which will allow it to make use of some of the world's most advanced weapon systems, Yury Borisov, the Russian deputy prime minister, who oversees Russia's military-industrial complex and military-technical policy, said during his speech at the Military Academy of the General Staff.
Some of the new weapons, which are set to enter service in Russia between 2018 and 2027, surpass the existing and even future weapons systems used by other nations, including the NATO member states, Borisov said as he listed what he called six Russian cutting-edge weapons.
RTThu, 05 Jul 2018 13:02 UTC
© Henry Nicholls / Reuters
Police officers stand next to a section of a cordoned off playing field near Amesbury Baptist Church.
British authorities are saying that the couple that is currently in critical condition in Salisbury hospital was
exposed to the same substance as Sergei Skripal and his daughter in March.
UK counter-terrorism chief Neil Basu said that
the substance was 'Novichok,' the same one that the UK claims the Skripals were poisoned with. He said that police did not know how it was transmitted. The affected people are both British and in their mid-40s, and Basu said
there was nothing in the pair's background to suggest they would be a target, yet their connection to the Skripal case is being investigated.
Earlier, Wiltshire Police declared a "major incident" in the town of Amesbury, around 12 kilometers from Salisbury, over a man and woman, both British in their 40s, being hospitalized after "suspected exposure to an unknown substance."
The pair was discovered unconscious in a property in Muggleton Road on Saturday, but Wiltshire Police did not report the incident until Wednesday. The UK's chief medical officer said during the press conference on Wednesday that the risk to the general public from the Wiltshire case was low.
Comment: A random couple gets intoxicated by
something somewhere near Salisbury, so let's use the opportunity to remind the British public not to enjoy themselves too much with evil Russia's World Cup!
Update: The UK interior minister is now saying that not only was the substance novichok, it was the
same strain of novichok allegedly used against the Skripals (no word yet on if it was from the same
batch). In an effusion of stupidity, UK Home Secretary Sajid Javid said the following:
"We don't want to jump to conclusions but if it is established that the Russian state is entirely responsible for this as well, then of course we will be considering what further action we can take," Javid said.
"As well"? Since when was it determined that the Russians were "entirely responsible" for the Skripals, for which there has been no evidence they are even partially responsible?!
Javid also had this gem: "It is completely unacceptable
for our people to be either deliberate or accidental targets, or for our streets, our parks, our towns, to be dumping grounds for poison." How dare those Russians accidentally poison our people!
UK Minister of State for Security Ben Wallace says the couple was not "targeted", nor were they linked to the Skripals. He thinks they were "
contaminated".
The Russians are looking
far more intelligent, as usual:
...former security services chief Sergei Stepashin believes the UK is incapable of investigating the Skripals case and Amesbury poisoning incident on its own. He said London has problems with securing the deadly substances.
"Apparently, the British side has problems with securing poisonous substances at the Porton Down laboratory," he told Interfax news agency on Thursday...
Stepashin, a veteran politician, who ran Russia's Federal Security Service in the past and was the nation's prime minister, believes the UK should look for leads "around Porton Down", where samples of 'Novichok' and other deadly chemicals are stored, and "drop the insane theory of Russia's culpability." He further added that Britain "is incapable of investigating the Salisbury and Amesbury incidents on its own."
The mental capabilities of the Russophobic crowd are deteriorating - if it's even possible to get dumber than they already were. After the Russian embassy in the Netherlands tweeted that "they" must think Russia is "dumb" enough to use novichok in the middle of the World Cup, both Reuters and the
New York Times reported that the embassy called
the UK dumb. It's called reading comprehension, people. You're supposed to be journalists.
© Michael E. Mann/Nature
Original “hockey stick” temperature graph in Nature, 1998. The Y axis shows the Northern hemisphere mean temperature, in degrees Celsius; the zero line corresponds to the 1902 – 1980 mean. Credit: “Global-scale Temperature Patterns and Climate Forcing over the Past Six Centuries,” by Michael E. Mann et al. in Nature, Vol. 392, April 23, 1998
July 3 2018
One thousand seven hundred and sixty-three days ago, on behalf of its client, the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic, PLLC (FME Law) asked the University of Arizona to hand over public records that would expose to the world the genesis of what some consider the most influential scientific publication of that decade - the Mann-Bradley-Hughes temperature reconstruction that looks like a hockey stick.
The University refused.
On February 26th of this year, and after submissions of legal briefings that now fill two banker's boxes, and three trips to the Appellate Court, the trial court ordered release of the documents, giving the University 90 days to disclose the documents in a word-searchable form. Three days before the deadline, the University filed a motion asking the trial court to "stay" the disclosure of the public records while they appealed the case. In a 13 word decision, the trial court found "the requested relief is not warranted."
Comment: The real story on "global warming" chicanery may finally be coming out.
RTThu, 05 Jul 2018 15:40 UTC
© Alexei Danichev / Sputnik
Su-25s making flypast during Russian Navy Day parade in St. Petersburg, July 30, 2017
A controversy has unfolded on Twitter after San Diego Air and Space Museum celebrated Independence Day by posting a jubilant image of Soviet-made Su-25 jets trailing smoke in the colors of the Russian flag.
The Fourth of July has probably been quite a day for San Diego's Air and Space Museum and Education Center (SDASM), which encouraged visitors to come and honor "some of the greatest heroes in aerospace history."
What the museum really meant by the appeal is a mystery, but its Twitter account unexpectedly posted an image of six Soviet-built Su-25 Frogfoot jets trailing smoke in the white, blue and red of the Russian tricolor.
Su-25s are frequently employed to make flyovers during various celebrations across Russia, such as Victory Day or Independence Day - otherwise known as Russia Day - but they have seldom seen any action during American patriotic festivities.
© Reuters
Peru's 'LGBT community' demanded equal rights during their 'Pride' parade.
Of the 20 countries that form the American Convention only Argentina, Colombia, Brazil and Uruguay recognize same-sex marriage nationally.
Thousands of members of the LGBT community marched to celebrate International LGBT Pride Day Saturday with participants in several countries in Latin America and the Caribbean taking to the streets to demand respect for their rights.
In Peru, thousands marched in the capital city of Lima marking the day of pride demanding their rights be respected.
In El Salvador, the marchers flooded the main streets with the colors of the rainbow, music, and slogans, joining other commemorative events on the day around the region.
Comment: CTV News adds: