CANADA

ROBERT BRIDGE—Trudeau, who does not strike me as a chess player, expressed his “extreme concern” at the decision, which really should have come as no surprise. The Schellenberg case was clearly a show trial to give Beijing some leverage in freeing Meng Wanzhou, and now it will be very interesting to see how Trudeau responds. Will he cave in to US demands and extradite Meng, or will he hold onto the Chinese national in a possible exchange agreement for the three Canadians? 

JOHN HELMER—One day after Australia was defeated at the World Health Assembly in a joint effort with the Trump Administration to attack China, and after Beijing retaliated, calling the Australian Government a US puppet, a joke, and chewing-gum on China’s shoe, Australia has telephoned Moscow for help. In a call initiated by Foreign Minister Marise Payne, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was asked to boost Russian imports from Australia and send more Russian tourists to the country.

RICHARD SANDERS—reeland’s tweet praising the role of “our .. grandparents” in WWII needs to spread like wildfire and be used to generate a widespread discussion in Canada. By saying “our .. parents, grandparents .. stepped up to the plate” 75 years ago, on the anniversary of Victory Day, she is putting her grandfather in the same category as those veterans who were on the Allied side against Hitler. Her grandfather was the top Ukrainian-language news propagandist for the Nazis. His newspapers recruited for the Waffen SS Galicia — a Nazi-armed, Nazi-funded, Nazi-led division that fought against our Soviet allies. 

ALEX LANTIER—These are political lies as shameless as US lies in 2002 that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction,” which served as a pretext for an illegal US invasion of Iraq in 2003. The genome of the coronavirus causing COVID-19 has been mapped out in China and examined by biologists internationally. They have established that the virus is a previously-unknown, naturally-occurring coronavirus that originated in bats, which was not previously in the possession of any lab.

MATTHEW JL EHRET—Although Trump’s speech characterized Iran as a “major supporter of terrorism” and Gen. Soleimani as a “top terrorist”, his assertion that a common interest exists between the USA and Iran in the combat of ISIS is a spectacular break from the neocon agenda. This break is also one of many in a long line of internal struggles emanating from the corridors of American power in the days since Soleimani’s murder.