'Some Baloney' In Bill Morneau Saying Canada Pension Plan Investment Board Has Highest Ethical Standards

OTTAWA — “We expect the CPPIB, like other Crown corporations, to live up to the highest standards of ethics and behaviour and that is, in fact, exactly what it is doing.” — Finance Minister Bill Morneau during question period Monday in the House of Commons. — The New Democrats challenged Morneau this week to weigh…

Stacey Abrams, the rising Democrat star who gave the response to the State of the Union

Stacey Abrams has become the first black woman to deliver a Democratic response to a State of the Union address, and her selection has been seen as a nod to the party’s future. Introducing herself to the nation, the 45-year-old lawyer combined her party’s vision of a more unified society with her personal story as a…

Most Canadians Think People Are Poor Due To Circumstance: Angus Reid Institute Survey

A majority of Canadians believe a person’s financial lot in life is largely due to factors beyond their control and not a reflection of how much effort they’ve put into changing their situation, a new poll suggests. According to the second part of an Angus Reid Institute study on poverty in Canada, most Canadians agree…

Senate approves William Barr as Donald Trump’s new attorney general

The US Senate has approved President Donald Trump’s attorney general nominee William Barr, putting the veteran Republican lawyer in charge of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of any ties between Mr Trump’s campaign and Russia. The vote was 54-45, primarily on a party-line basis with most Republicans backing the 68-year-old and most Democrats opposed. Democrats had expressed concern over…

Lifetime Star Parisa Fitz-Henley Has Experienced Racism Like Her Character, Meghan Markle

Parisa Fitz-Henley’s looks aren’t the only thing she has in common with Meghan Markle. In a new interview, the actress who plays the royal-to-be in Lifetime’s “Harry & Meghan: A Royal Romance” said she and Markle “have a lot of similar life experiences.” “I think I’m a much sillier person than she seems to be,”…

Relentlessly Rising Wealth Disparity Threatens To Destabilize Canada: Author

Imagine a Canada where public schools and urban infrastructure are crumbling, the economy runs through constant boom-and-bust cycles, and ideological demagogues run rampant in the political arena. Some more pessimistic readers might say that, to some extent, this Canada already exists. Others might note the parallels to the situation in the U.S. today. To Lars…

Vietnam summit: Where did it all go wrong between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un?

Until about 1pm on the second day of the Hanoi summit it had all been going so well. Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump, the US president, reconvened at the French colonial-era Metropole hotel for the second day of talks at 9am in a buoyant mood, with the president gushing that they had “developed something special”. Their…

Canada's Unemployment Rate Dips To 5.8% As Job Growth Treads Water, Wages Fizzle

OTTAWA — Canada’s unemployment rate edged back down to its four-decade low of 5.8 per cent last month as job growth was essentially flat and fewer people searched for work, Statistics Canada said Friday. The latest labour force survey says the country added 11,200 net new jobs in October — including a gain of 33,900…

Italian man has life sentence halved after court rules he killed lover in ‘passionate storm’

An appeals court in Bologna has halved the sentence of an Italian man who murdered his girlfriend, citing a "passionate storm" of jealousy as one of the mitigating factors. Michele Castaldo will only serve 15 years of a 30-year sentence for the killing of Olga Matei in 2016. The controversial reasoning for the reduction sparked anger and…

Getting Too Much Sleep Is Just As Bad As Not Getting Enough, Study Reveals

New Korean research has found that sleep less than six hours or more than ten hours a night are both linked with an increased risk of developing metabolic syndrome, which can increase the risk of heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. Carried out by researchers at Seoul National University College of Medicine, the study looked at…