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[Suliso]

Him losing party support might have something to do with him polling at 16% public support.

[ptmcmahon]

He was probably around 16% in the public eyes long before he lost party support (or at least most of it.)

Trudeau has made a continually growing list of gaffes and errors lately. His chance of re-winning next election was probably near nil. This isn't any recent development, it's just been getting worse and worse.

Although it likely will be the same for Liberals anyways. Twice in recent Canadian history we had a prime minister resign and then the fill in (be it before or after election) got trounced.

[Suliso]

9 years is a long time. Need change of party now for a while.

[ti-amie]

Trudeau resigned because after 9 years as Prime Minister his government had lost the support of the public, and now he has lost the support of his party.

He stayed too long at the fair huh? As has been said, bad timing.

Who is this Poilieve(sp) person?

[skatingfan]

He stayed too long at the fair huh? As has been said, bad timing.

Who is this Poilieve(sp) person?

Pierre Poillievre is the leader of the Conservative Party, and essentially the next Prime Minister in waiting based on the polls. It looks like we'll have an election in either April or May this year, so he'll probably be Prime Minister before summer. Poillievre is a career politician, and has been an effective attack dog for the opposition. It remains to be seen if he can shift to be an effective Prime Minister as to this point he's been fairly circumspect as to how he intends to govern. At this point we know that he wants to get rid of the federal Carbon Tax, and other than that it's all slogans, and the government broke everything.

[ti-amie]

He stayed too long at the fair huh? As has been said, bad timing.

Who is this Poilieve(sp) person?

Pierre Poillievre is the leader of the Conservative Party, and essentially the next Prime Minister in waiting based on the polls. It looks like we'll have an election in either April or May this year, so he'll probably be Prime Minister before summer. Poillievre is a career politician, and has been an effective attack dog for the opposition. It remains to be seen if he can shift to be an effective Prime Minister as to this point he's been fairly circumspect as to how he intends to govern. At this point we know that he wants to get rid of the federal Carbon Tax, and other than that it's all slogans, and the government broke everything.

Sounds very familiar. I hope you all can avoid what's going on here.

[skatingfan]

Sounds very familiar. I hope you all can avoid what's going on here.

He's a pretty typical politician - pretty similar to Trudeau to be honest, just from the opposite side of the political spectrum. I wouldn't compare him to Trump. He doesn't villainize others to get attention, and he doesn't say ridiculous non-sequiturs either. What happens in the US is probably more important as Trump prepares to undermine both our economies.

[Owendonovan]

This is just raging through very expensive neighborhoods. Like the Palisades made end up majority burned.

Live Updates: 30,000 Ordered to Evacuate as L.A. Wildfire Burns Out of Control
Fast-moving flames fanned by severe wind gusts destroyed homes along the coastline and snarled traffic for miles along Sunset Boulevard as residents tried to flee. Raging flames driven by a fierce windstorm scorched a rapidly growing area of Southern California on Tuesday, destroying homes, forcing about 30,000 residents to evacuate and choking the sky with smoke, with officials warning that the worst was yet to come.

Traffic was backed up for miles along Sunset Boulevard as residents tried to flee the Pacific Palisades, an affluent coastal neighborhood west of downtown Los Angeles that is home to some 24,000 people and many celebrities. Gusts of up to 100 miles per hour, the strongest Southern California has experienced in more than a decade, were forecast through lunchtime Wednesday.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01/07 ... california

[Owendonovan]

6,000+ buildings burned down, mostly homes. (so far)

[ti-amie]

6,000+ buildings burned down, mostly homes. (so far)

The media is focused on celebrities, many of whom have second/vacation homes to decamp to. That this situation was caused by lack of rainfall and strong winds (climate change) is apparently not worthy of discussion. Elmo and Tiny are blaming DEI hires.

[ti-amie]

Burned homes and rattled nerves: Altadena residents grapple with toll of deadly LA blaze

With winds scattering embers across swaths of land, the Eaton fire burns down some houses while leaving others unscathed

Lois Beckett
Fri 10 Jan 2025 00.39 CET

Ash was falling gently over the Historic Highlands neighborhood of Pasadena, California, on Thursday as residents began to grapple with the toll of the Eaton fire still being fought in the mountains above.

This area was under an evacuation order on Wednesday, and the next day the streets were still littered with fallen branches from Tuesday night’s intense windstorm. The fire broke out early in the evening and spread rapidly amid the powerful gusts, killing at least four people and destroying more than 5,000 structures in the area, which also includes the Altadena and Sierra Madre neighborhoods. As of Thursday afternoon, the blaze had burned 13,690 acres and remained 0% contained.

In Historic Highlands, many of the houses are completely preserved. Others have been reduced to ash and rubble. On a single block, a neighbor told me, five houses were damaged, while the others remain standing.

The intense winds on Tuesday scattered embers from the wildfire raging above the town across a huge swathe of the landscape, sparking fires and destroying homes far beyond the fire line, a resident said. That accounted for the seemingly arbitrary destruction: one house sparked on fire, its neighbor preserved.

“Look at how random it is,” a local resident named Carlos said later. “There’s homes standing right next to each other intact, and other folks have lost everything.”

Across the street, another old house was charred and still smoking, and two neighbors from the block behind said they were worried it might still catch other houses on fire, especially if strong winds picked up again in the evening. Next door, a newly renovated home’s door stood open, a child’s shoe abandoned by the doorstep. Inside, everything was charred.

“You see this stuff on TV, but I’ve never seen anything like this up close,” Alex Neuss, a 36-year-old Pasadena resident, said on Wednesday, after he had returned to his home. “I’m surprised how deep it got into the residential areas.”

Neuss and other Pasadena residents said they had noticed people milling through their neighborhoods on Wednesday and Thursday, some of them taking photographs of destroyed homes, apparently turning the local tragedy into content.

In nearby Altadena, Lake Boulevard runs straight upward into the mountains – and, on Thursday, into heavy clouds of smoke. Small crowds of people gathered on both sides of the street, looking up at the smoking hills and trying to assess the situation.

A group of three friends on the corner said they had been overwhelmed by the number of fires across Los Angeles in the past 24 hours. They lived and worked in different locations across Los Angeles county, including nearby in Pasadena, Koreatown, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills and the San Fernando Valley. All of those different locations had been threatened by wildfires on Tuesday and Wednesday.

“I’ve seen really bad fires, but this is the worst I’ve ever seen,” said Harley, 28, who did not give his last name. “My mom has been here 40 years, and it’s the worst she’s ever seen.”

The experience was terrifying, the friends said – and they thought Los Angeles’ elected officials, especially the mayor, Karen Bass, were to blame.

Harley said he was infuriated that California, one of the largest economies in the world, was “so unprepared” for the crisis. “There’s lack of resources, lack of preparation, lack of coordination. It shouldn’t have gotten to this point.

“Why are we still struggling?” he asked.

Matthew, 32, agreed: “There’s no faith in the government at all.”

On the other hand, he added, they did have a lot of faith in the courage of the first responders. And he said, “I have seen a great sense of community – everyone checking in on each other,” which provided some “faith in humanity restored”.

On Los Robles Avenue, near the border of Altadena and Pasadena, many residents were out in their front yards, clearing away debris.

“I lived through the 1994 earthquake, and this feels just as apocalyptic,” said Sherri Solinger, whose house had made it through Tuesday and Wednesday intact.

Solinger called the neighborhood “the best community in Los Angeles”, a racially diverse group of working-class people and artists, who were relying on each other in the midst of disaster.

She said she had evacuated early on Wednesday morning, then come back later in the day to try to protect her and her neighbor’s homes, taking turns hosing down houses with water to protect them from stray sparks and embers.

By Thursday, their focus had shifted to dealing with fallen trees and branches. Her next-door neighbor, Fidel Rodriguez, appeared with a saw in his hand, ready to help Solinger deal with the branches in her yard.

Rodriguez’s home dated from 1911, and he had devoted the past decade to carefully renovating every part of it: new room, new windows, new floors. The prospect of losing all of that work and money was overwhelming, he said. So far, his house had also made it through.

“I feel sorry for everyone,” he said. “I’ll be helping everyone.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... os-angeles

[Owendonovan]

Always a bit shocking seeing parts of civilization just kinda wiped off.

[ti-amie]

‪Minseon Ku‬ ‪@minseonku.bsky.social‬
·
13m
The first sitting president to be detained in the history of ROK for insurrection charges.
‪Minseon Ku‬ ‪@minseonku.bsky.social‬
·
20m
Corruption Investigation office confirms Yoon’s arrest warrant has been executed at 10:33 am, local time.

[ti-amie]

https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/ne ... nt/2225327

[ti-amie]

Trump Triggers a Crisis in Denmark—And Europe
What a single phone call from the president-elect did to an unswerving American ally

By Anne Applebaum
January 18, 2025, 2:30 PM ET

What did Donald Trump say over the phone to Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, on Wednesday? I don’t know which precise words he used, but I witnessed their impact. I arrived in Copenhagen the day after the call—the subject, of course, was the future of Greenland, which Denmark owns and which Trump wants—and discovered that appointments I had with Danish politicians were suddenly in danger of being canceled. Amid Frederiksen’s emergency meeting with business leaders, her foreign minister’s emergency meeting with party leaders, and an additional emergency meeting of the foreign-affairs committee in Parliament, everything, all of a sudden, was in complete flux.

The result: Mid-morning, I found myself standing on the Knippel Bridge between the Danish foreign ministry and the Danish Parliament, holding a phone, waiting to be told which direction to walk. Denmark in January is not warm; I went to the Parliament and waited there. The meeting was canceled anyway. After that, nobody wanted to say anything on the record at all. Thus have Americans who voted for Trump because of the putatively high price of eggs now precipitated a political crisis in Scandinavia.

In private discussions, the adjective that was most frequently used to describe the Trump phone call was rough. The verb most frequently used was threaten. The reaction most frequently expressed was confusion. Trump made it clear to Frederiksen that he is serious about Greenland: He sees it, apparently, as a real-estate deal. But Greenland is not a beachfront property. The world’s largest island is an autonomous territory of Denmark, inhabited by people who are Danish citizens, vote in Danish elections, and have representatives in the Danish Parliament. Denmark also has politics, and a Danish prime minister cannot sell Greenland any more than an American president can sell Florida.

At the same time, Denmark is also a country whose global companies—among them Lego, the shipping giant Maersk, and Novo Nordisk, the maker of Ozempic—do billions of dollars worth of trade with the United States, and have major American investments too. They thought these were positive aspects of the Danish-American relationship. Denmark and the United States are also founding members of NATO, and Danish leaders would be forgiven for believing that this matters in Washington too. Instead, these links turn out to be a vulnerability. On Thursday afternoon Frederiksen emerged and, flanked by her foreign minister and her defense minister, made a statement. “It has been suggested from the American side,” she said, “that unfortunately a situation may arise where we work less together than we do today in the economic area.”

Still, the most difficult aspect of the crisis is not the need to prepare for an unspecified economic threat from a close ally, but the need to cope with a sudden sense of almost Kafkaesque absurdity. In truth, Trump’s demands are illogical. Anything that the U.S. theoretically might want to do in Greenland is already possible, right now. Denmark has never stopped the U.S. military from building bases, searching for minerals, or stationing troops in Greenland, or from patrolling sea lanes nearby. In the past, the Danes have even let Americans defy Danish policy in Greenland. Over lunch, one former Danish diplomat told me a Cold War story, which unfolded not long after Denmark had formally declared itself to be a nuclear-free country. In 1957, the U.S. ambassador nevertheless approached Denmark’s then–prime minister, H. C. Hansen, with a request. The United States was interested in storing some nuclear weapons at an American base in Greenland. Would Denmark like to be notified?

Hansen responded with a cryptic note, which he characterized, according to diplomatic records, as “informal, personal, highly secret and limited to one copy each on the Danish and American side.” In the note, which was not shared with the Danish Parliament or the Danish press, and indeed was not made public at all until the 1990s, Hansen said that since the U.S. ambassador had not mentioned specific plans or made a concrete request, “I do not think your remarks give rise to any comment from my side.” In other words, If you don’t tell us that you are keeping nuclear weapons in Greenland, then we won’t have to object.

(...)

...Trump himself cannot articulate, either at press conferences or, apparently, over the telephone, why exactly he needs to own Greenland, or how Denmark can give American companies and soldiers more access to Greenland than they already have. Plenty of others will try to rationalize his statements anyway. The Economist has declared the existence of a “Trump doctrine,” and a million articles have solemnly debated Greenland’s strategic importance. But in Copenhagen (and not only in Copenhagen) people suspect a far more irrational explanation: Trump just wants the U.S. to look larger on a map.

This instinct—to ignore existing borders, laws, and treaties; to treat other countries as artificial; to break up trade links and destroy friendships, all because the Leader wants to look powerful—is one that Trump shares with imperialists of the past. The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has also crowed over the alleged similarity between the U.S. desire for Greenland and the Russian desire for territory in Ukraine. Lavrov suggested a referendum might be held in Greenland, comparing that possibility to the fake referenda, held under duress, that Russia staged in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.

Of course, Trump might forget about Greenland. But also, he might not. Nobody knows. He operates on whims, sometimes picking up ideas from the last person he met, sometimes returning to obsessions he had apparently abandoned: windmills, sharks, Hannibal Lecter, and now Greenland. To Danes and pretty much anyone else who makes plans, signs treaties, or creates long-term strategies using rational arguments, this way of making policy feels arbitrary, pointless, even surreal. But it is also now permanent, and there is no going back.

https://www.theatlantic.com/internation ... CN0ZRdSEeg