Democracy gone Astray: Friday, September 15, 2023

Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.

This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Friday, September 15, 2023

Canada's Tradition Of Homeownership Is At Risk

Something is happening in Canada these days that hasn't happened in at least 45 years: The share of Canadians who own a home is shrinking.

This isn't just an abstract problem for academics to pore over. Homeownership has become the primary way that Canada's middle class accumulates wealth. If fewer people have access to it, that could have consequences for the material well-being of the whole country down the road.

The Conservative party has erupted into open civil war after forceful criticism of Boris Johnson over his description of Theresa May’s Brexit plan as a “suicide vest” prompted counter-accusations of a “project smear” by Downing Street.

The furious exchanges, in which a leading Tory backbencher said she would probably quit the party if Johnson became leader, herald a turbulent run-up to the party’s conference this month, which is likely to be dominated by intertwined rows over Brexit and the successor to Theresa May.

The two suspects in the Salisbury nerve agent attack will be caught and prosecuted if they ever step out of Russia, the home secretary has warned.

Sajid Javid, however, did acknowledge "the reality is we will probably never see them in the UK".

He told the BBC the pair, thought to be from Russia's military intelligence service, the GRU, were acting on orders from the "highest level" in Moscow.

Antakya, Turkey – Syrian government forces backed by their Russian allies have stepped up their bombardment of rebel-held territories in northwest Syria, killing at least six civilians, according to local activists.

The air raids and shelling on Saturday came a day after Russia rejected a Turkish call for a ceasefire in Syria’s Idlib province, where a major government assault aimed at recapturing the last rebel stronghold in the country is seemingly imminent.

Jalijah Jones, then a freshman at Kalamazoo Central High School in Michigan, remembers the punch of thousands of volts hitting his slight frame. At 5 feet, 4 inches tall and weighing 120 pounds, he was small for his age.

He remembers four school security guards officers pushing him up against a hallway wall before a school police officer arrived and Tasered him. He remembers a feeling of intense cold as if his high school hallway had just turned into a walk-in freezer. He remembers falling to the ground, his muscles betraying his mind’s desire to stand.

There are plenty of things you might associate with Sweden — Viking hats, a certain flat-packed furniture store, bad Europop. Political instability, however, is not likely to be one of them.

But this Sunday, Swedes are set to shatter the political image of their country as calm and boring when they vote in a general election. Current polls indicate that the far-right Sweden Democrats look set to make the most gains. Here’s a rundown of what you need to know about the election, as well as why it’s so important.

Egypt has delivered verdicts for more than 700 people over a pro-Muslim Brotherhood sit-in after President Mohammed Morsi was ousted in 2013.

The court confirmed 75 people's death sentences and life imprisonment for 47 others, including Islamic leaders.

An Egyptian court has sentenced 75 people to death, including senior leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, over a 2013 sit-in protest in Cairo that ended with the killing of hundreds of protesters.

Senior Brotherhood leaders Essam el-Erian and Mohamed Beltagi were sentenced to death, while Mohamed Badie, the Brotherhood’s spiritual leader, was handed a life sentence.

A popular method for criminalizing homelessness is unconstitutional, the federal appeals court governing the western U.S. ruled this week.

Cities cannot arrest or cite a person for sleeping outdoors unless it can prove it had a shelter bed or other indoor housing option available at the time, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found almost a decade after a group of homeless people in Idaho sued over Boise’s ban on “sleeping rough.”

Outside the flagship Habitat home improvement store on London’s Tottenham Court Road, three homeless men are living in tents. It’s a striking image, one that could almost be a poster for austerity Britain, showing the winners and losers of the housing crisis.

This is reality for the rough sleepers enduring a tough existence on the streets and today, HuffPost UK tells the stories of these three men as figures show an estimated 9,100 people nationwide are now living in tents, cars, trains or buses as the homelessness crisis deepens.

Swedes are heading to the polls on Sunday in elections which are expected to see the far-right Sweden Democrats make historic gains.

The current government, formed as a coalition between the centre-left Social Democrats and Green Party after the 2014 elections, could be unseated owing to the growing popularity of the Sweden Democrats and right-wing Moderate Party.

Headed by incumbent prime minister Stefan Lofven, Social Democrats is Sweden’s oldest party. While some polls suggest that it could remain the largest, challenges are mounting.

This past Labor Day gave us ample opportunity to consider workers' rights and what policies can be implemented to bridge the inequality between workers and their bosses and make working life better. Yet, there's a group of workers who are generally left out of this conversation: prisoners across the country, and they've been on strike the past three weeks to make their demands heard.

Prisoners in more than a dozen states have participated in the strike, which began August 21 and is set to end September 9. The most obvious

We didn’t always talk about the Supreme Court in crassly partisan terms. The court had liberals and conservatives, and general voting patterns, but public analysis of the court’s activity normally centered on the legal reasoning behind decisions and dissents. People might disagree with one ruling or another, but the court’s overall authority, rooted in its role as a trusted arbiter of competing claims, enjoyed a basic respect.

Today, in contrast, it’s common to regard the court as little more than another political body. More and

The U.K. will take measures to “maintain the pressure on Russia,” Britain’s security minister said Thursday, after British intelligence services found the suspects in the nerve-agent attack on a former Russian spy in Salisbury were employed directly by the Russian state.

“We retaliate in our way, we’re not the Russians,” Security Minister Ben Wallace told the BBC’s Radio 4 Today Program on Thursday, adding that countermeasures would take place “both in the overt and covert space, within the rule of law.”

British police have charged two Russian nationals with the attempted murder of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, a former Russian spy and his daughter who were poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok in the English town of Salisbury in February.

The Crown Prosecution Service says that it charged the two Russians, who traveled to the U.K. under the names Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, with conspiracy to murder the Skripals as well as Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey, a police officer who fell ill after being exposed to the nerve agent (he has since recovered). They have also been charged with grievous bodily harm against DS Bailey and Yulia Skripal.

One of Ontario's most prominent business groups is calling on the government of Doug Ford to repeal the comprehensive labour law reforms passed by the previous Liberal government that saw the province's minimum wage hiked to $14 an hour.

But the Ontario Chamber of Commerce says it isn't trying to roll back that minimum wage hike — it just wants a halt to the planned next phase of the hike, which will see the minimum wage rise to $15 an hour next year.

A tense calm has taken hold of the town of Jisr al-Shoghur in northwestern Idlib province after days of bombing and shelling by forces loyal to the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

Residents on Wednesday reported that the shelling and air raids had stopped but a number of reconnaissance drones were flying above the town and surrounding areas.

The most important environmental effort you’ve probably never heard of — the Environmental Voter Project (EVP) — doesn’t talk about the environment much, if ever.

But that’s because talking about the environment isn’t the solution to perhaps the biggest solvable problem the environmental movement has: a lack of voters. There are 10 to 15 million so-called “super-environmentalists” who are registered to vote in this country, but generally don’t.

Sherry Mendowegan feels very lucky that she already paid her tuition and bought books for the upcoming school year.

The mother-of-two in Thunder Bay was using money from Ontario's basic income pilot project to help cover the costs of going back to school. In July, the new Progressive Conservative government announced it would "wind down" the program two years early, without warning participants.

Mostar, Bosnia & Herzegovina – When 67-year-old Ramiz Tiro was finally released from the concentration camps run by Croat forces during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1994, he felt like an animal.

Starved and dehydrated, he had lost 33kg. Having spent 262 days in “hell”, as he described it, he had forgotten what it felt like to be treated as a human being.

Air raids have pounded areas in Syria’s last rebel-held province of Idlib, killing several civilians and raising further concerns that an all-out government offensive is only a matter of time.

The strikes on Tuesday came as the United Nations urged Russia, a Syrian government ally, and Turkey, which backs certain rebel groups in Idlib, to help avert a “bloodbath”.

A full-scale military offensive would be devastating for the nearly three million people living in the province, including many rebels and civilians who were bussed out of other areas as they came back under government control.

The note, scribbled on a small square Post-It, says simply: “I am officially begging you please help me!”

These are among the last known words of Mark Barber, a gardener with debilitating disabilities who took his own life shortly after learning his benefits would be cut by £20 a week.

A stack of Post-It notes found inside the 49-year-old’s housing association flat after his death reveal the turmoil the West Sussex man was experiencing over money.

As progress on the Trans Mountain pipeline stalls, Ottawa has lost another provincial ally in the climate fight — leaving the Trudeau government scrambling for answers as the crowd of friendly faces thins across the country.

The latest to go is Alberta Premier Rachel Notley who announced she was pulling her province out of the federal climate deal on Thursday and would not return until construction for the Trans Mountain pipeline is back on track.

Boris Johnson has savaged Theresa May's Brexit plans, saying they would leave the UK with "diddly squat" after the negotiations and hand the EU "victory".

The ex-foreign secretary used his Daily Telegraph column to say the Chequers deal "means disaster" for Britain.

American Jews donate at high levels to charity. One way they support causes in the U.S., Israel and other places is collective, often through large grant-making organizations.

In researching this organized philanthropy, I’ve observed that the proportion of Jewish institutional giving to Israeli causes has fallen since 2009. I believe that several factors, including demographic and social changes, a diminishing perception of

Democracy gone Astray