Donald Trump’s beliefs and policies: the potential consequences for Canada

Donald Trump expresses a degree of admiration for — and thinks he can cut deals with — China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, in particular to pursue the war on Jihadists.  However, in a curious twist, the United States’ major allies and trading partners draw vehement criticism from the Republican Party’s would-be nominee for the presidency.  South Korea, Western Europe and Japan would be asked to pay for ‘sheltering’ under US military protection.  In general, Trump believes the US gets a raw deal from the liberal global trading system and is opposed to free trade.

10 Things They Won't Tell You About the Flint Water Tragedy. But I Will

News of the poisoned water crisis in Flint has reached a wide audience around the world. The basics are now known: The Republican governor, Rick Snyder, nullified the free elections in Flint, deposed the mayor and city council, then appointed his own man to run the city. To save money, they decided to unhook the people of Flint from their fresh water drinking source, Lake Huron, and instead, make the public drink from the toxic Flint River.

Australia’s Emissions Keep Growing Despite Government Claims

In November, just before nearly 200 nations met in Paris to hammer out an international agreement on climate change, Australia — long an outsider in global climate policy — made an impressive announcement: the country had succeeded in meeting its 2020 climate goal, a full five years ahead of schedule.

But, according to a new analysis released by the carbon market analysts at Reputex, that announcement might have been misleading — instead of achieving robust reductions in their national emissions, Australia’s emissions are actually growing, and will likely not peak before 2030, an official goal set forth by the Australian government. And despite being one of the 196 parties to sign onto the Paris agreement pledging to keep global temperatures increases well below 2 degrees Celsius, Reputex found that Australia’s projected growth rate for emissions would be one of the worst growth rates in the developed world between 2000 and 2020.

In Iowa, Hillary Clinton Defends A System Everyone Else Is Trashing

DES MOINES, IOWA -- In these days of anger and rebellion in politics, it takes a certain amount of daring -- or stubbornness -- to say the following in the closing days of the campaign for the Iowa caucuses:

“We are on the right path, my friends. We just have to stay on it.”

And yet that is the surprising essence of Hillary Clinton’s final pitch to Democratic caucus-goers as she delivered it this weekend at Grand View University in Des Moines.

Big Oil and Gas Want Them Out, but One Small Clan Is Standing Up to Pipeline Expansion

Down a logging road in northern British Columbia, signs of modern life slowly disappear. Blue, snow-capped mountains fill the landscape, their yellowed forests bearing the scars of clear-cutting and the ravenous pine beetle, while the road begins to mimic the path of a river.

Forty miles into the wilderness, visitors reach a bridge checkpoint: an entrance into Unist'ot'en territory. A young man in thick winter gear walks across a bridge to meet them. He asks for names. The volunteer communicates by radio to the clan's spokesperson, who arrives shortly and takes visitors through a protocol used by generations of indigenous peoples to determine entry onto their lands.

Freak Storms and Massive Animal Die-Offs: This Is Your Climate on Fossil Fuels

The year 2015 will go down in history, at least until next year, as the hottest year ever recorded on the planet.

By a wide margin, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2015 "shattered" global temperature records, beating out the previous hottest year (2014) easily.

Extreme weather events, fueled by anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD), continue to pile up, to the extent that they are quickly becoming normalized.

Teenage girl admits making up migrant rape claim that outraged Germany

A 13-year-old Russian-German girl has admitted making up a story about being kidnapped and raped by migrants in a case that triggered a furore in Germany and briefly embroiled Berlin police in a spat with the Kremlin, state prosecutors said.

The parents of the teenager, named only as Lisa, reported her missing on 11 January after she failed to appear at school in the Marzahn district of the capital. She reappeared 30 hours later with injuries on her face, and told her parents she had been attacked by men of Middle Eastern or north African appearance. News of the incident spread on social media, sparking outrage among Berlin’s Russian-German community.

Understanding the roots of Donald Trump’s appeal

Donald Trump’s announcement of his candidacy to be the Republican Party’s Presidential nominee was greeted with ridicule.  Now panic is setting in and not only in the Republican leadership.  A Trump victory at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland is no longer an impossibility.  Even US conservatives are aghast (see this somewhat scurrilous assessment from the neo-conservative The Weekly Standard).

The Historical Context

Most important, Mr. Trump is no outlier.  His positions, though forcefully and colourfully expressed, fall well within conservative Republican traditions.  Donald Trump’s economic and foreign policy views reflect US 19th century isolationism and high tariff mercantilism.  His views on race and immigration echo anti-Chinese US policies before World War I.  His values reflect the pro-Western European white Protestant predispositions that underpinned the anti-Catholic politics of agrarian and traditional “town” versus industrial and transformative “city” division that vivified US politics after the Civil War and, in terms of social policy, produced Prohibition and the War on Drugs among other efforts to control personal behaviour and oppose the advance of gender equality.  His economic policies that favour the 1% find sustenance (whether he knows it or not) in Calvinist notions of the Elect, blessed with wealth by God in this life, that actuated the social “laisez-faireism” of the US before the Presidency of Teddy Roosevelt.

Ottawa examines challenges of ‘disruptive’ expanding sharing economy

OTTAWA—Companies like Uber and Airbnb were the subject of a quiet in-depth study by high-ranking federal bureaucrats, the Star has learned.

A committee of five deputy ministers and a team of analysts undertook a comprehensive study of the so-called sharing economy and its implications for Canadian policy-makers and consumers.

Harper wanted to pull out of Europe’s leading security organization: diplomats

OTTAWA — Former prime minister Stephen Harper wanted to pull Canada out of one of Europe's leading security organization four years ago but U.S. President Barack Obama convinced him to stay.

Three European ambassadors are describing what happened in 2012 when Harper suggested Canada would withdraw from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a 57-country alliance that includes NATO and European Union countries.

The diplomats say Harper believed the OSCE was no longer relevant because Europe was mainly peaceful then.