Gaza’s Rafah border crossing with Egypt reopened on Sunday for the first time since the IDF captured it in May 2024, with a limited pedestrian pilot program. Read More

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned of a “regional war” as tensions continued to mount over potential U.S. strikes on Tehran. Read More

A second Jeffrey Epstein accuser has alleged the late U.S. sex offender sent her to Britain for a sexual encounter with former prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the BBC reported. Read More

Iran has declared European countries' armies "terrorist groups," its parliament speaker said Sunday, following the EU's decision to apply the same designation to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Read More

Public trust in media institutions does not erode all at once. It weakens gradually, through patterns that go unexamined and assumptions that go unchallenged — particularly when a public broadcaster is expected to serve a unifying role in a polarized society, as the CBC is evidently expected to do in Canada. It is in precisely this context that our recent independent study on the CBC's coverage of the Israel-Hamas war was produced. Read More

KEMPTVILLE, ON — On New Year’s Eve, when I wrote about how the Plains of Abraham (1759), the Quebec Act (1774) and George Washington’s military occupation of Montreal (1775) were all pivotal moments in determining that Nouvelle France/British North America would become Canada, and not part of the United States, I had no idea that 18th-century Canadian history would return to the front pages. Fresh from Davos last week, Prime Minister Mark Carney argued at the Citadel in Quebec City that the events of those years charted a distinctive Canadian path, marked by partnership rather than pure conquest. Read More

My wife was recently scrolling through Instagram and came across a video celebrating Stephen Harper’s time as prime minister, complete with fast-paced editing and Bryan Adams singing “those were the best days of my life” in the background. “So, now Harper has a cult following?” she asked. Read More

I grew up in Communist Czechoslovakia, and after the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, I served proudly on the board of Czech President Václav Havel’s Vision ’97 Foundation. Having known him personally, I can say with certainty that Prime Minister Mark Carney’s plans do not at all align with Havel’s vision. Read More

You gotta love China these days. Read More

Re: Outrage across Europe after Trump says NATO avoided Afghan front line — Jan. 24 Read More

CALGARY — People have spent weeks speculating whether or not Pierre Poilievre would “survive” his leadership review. Far from merely surviving, Poilievre locked in his mandate, leadership, and living legacy in the Conservative party. Read More

OTTAWA — As Pierre Poilievre departed his party's convention armed with the backing of delegates to lead the federal Conservatives into the next election, senior party figures say getting ready for that contest will be the next challenge.  Read More

A winter storm is dropping snow across the U.S. South, where more than 2.100 flights have been canceled, as the eastern US faces a continued deep freeze, threatening records all the way to south Florida and menacing citrus crops. Read More

Britain's former prince Andrew is again engulfed by the Epstein scandal, after newly released files included photographs of him kneeling on all fours over a woman lying on the floor. Read More

Thousands of Danish veterans and supporters protested at the U.S. embassy in Copenhagen on Saturday over recent remarks by Donald Trump that allied NATO troops “stayed a little back” from the front lines during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Read More

The United Nations is on the verge of “imminent financial collapse,” in large part due to the failure of member states to pay their mandatory dues, Secretary General António Guterres said in a letter sent this week to the 193 U.N. ambassadors. Read More

Iran’s army chief renewed warnings that Tehran could strike Israel, as speculation about a possible U.S. military attack on the Islamic Republic intensifies. Read More

The snowmobile club in Wasaga Beach, Ont., is calling on Ontario snowmobilers who want to help set a Guinness World Record on Feb. 15. Read More

Has Canada inadvertently helped to strike a blow against the cause of assisted suicide in England and Wales? Early on Thursday, BBC News reported that the euthanasia bill passed by the original classic House of Commons in June is now unlikely to pass the Lords before the end of the current session. The upper house is taking its time juggling with the bill in committee, with over 1,000 amendments submitted for debate. Read More

Stephen Harper’s ten years as prime minister began on Feb. 6, 2006. Twenty years later is a good time to assess his achievements in office and the legacy he left behind. I worked closely with Harper when he was leader of the Opposition, but not when he was in government, so this is a view from the outside. Read More

A judge has sentenced a Markham, Ont., woman to two years in jail for driving through a red light three years ago at 80 kilometres an hour and causing the crash that killed a 75-year-old woman. Read More

Since my reference to it last week, Prime Minister Mark Carney's address in Davos seems to have been both intended and received as a policy manifesto for Canada and also for other countries that feel short-shrifted by what have traditionally been known as the "great powers." The prime minister quoted the Czech president and former dissident Václav Havel that the communist system sustained itself by adopting the habit initiated by a greengrocer, of placing in his window the Marxist tocsin “Workers of the world, unite!”  (The 300 divisions of Stalin’s Red Army had more to do with it.) This gesture to the regime was widely taken up in the Soviet bloc, in what  Havel described as “living within a lie.” Carney considers this analogous to the adherence of Canada and other countries to “what we called the rules-based international order” (a clangorous platitude that reminds me of my bossy Grade 1 public school teacher). Read More

In the past 20 years, Canada has been governed by two economists: Stephen Harper and Mark Carney. Only one, however, managed to leverage his expertise for the good of Canada in his first eight months of government.  Read More

It takes a special kind of hubris to stand in Davos, surrounded by the global elite, and lecture the world on the virtues of "living in truth." Yet there was Prime Minister Mark Carney, channelling the dissident spirit of Václav Havel to chastise the international community for clinging to a "rules-based order" that no longer exists. Carney invoked Havel’s famous parable of the greengrocer — the shopkeeper who puts a sign in his window reading "Workers of the World, Unite!", not because he believes it, but because "it has been done that way for years" and it buys him a quiet life. Read More