Politics

Canada, like many countries, has certain limitations in place related to foreign investment and ownership – in everything from large-scale businesses to sports teams. These anti-free market, anti-capitalist measures are bad enough on their own, but Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberals have found a way to make these restrictions even worse. The Canadian government announced last week that the existing ban on foreign nationals from purchasing residential property has been extended until 2027. The only exceptions to the rule will be asylum seekers, some international students and temporary workers.  For potential foreigner home buyers, including thousands of British expats, this is terrible news. Which isn’t to say they didn’t expect it.

One of the most tedious and repetitive observations made in the often tedious and repetitive discourse around cancel culture is the notion that ‘freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences’. This slightly sinister cliché is the progressive version of ‘well, think on, you wouldn’t have been shot if you hadn’t been trying to escape’. It is usually offered forth as if it is somehow a seismic statement. Some clumsy clots – the hapless Graham Norton last year, for example, when discussing JK Rowling – have even tried to frame cancel culture as ‘accountability culture’ or ‘consequences culture’. But it strikes me that there is a shadow image of cancel culture

When I was about 14 or 15, someone sent me a birthday card with the words: ‘Teenagers – tired of being harassed by your stupid parents? Act now! Move out, get a job, pay your own bills, while you still know everything.’ I don’t think it was personal, not least because I was fairly strait-laced, and I enjoyed the joke. I have never had much time for the idea of the teenager as heroic nonconformist, engaged in idealistic rebellion against the stultifying bourgeois conformity of suburbia. Even when I was in my teens – an alarmingly long time ago now – I found it all a bit self-aggrandising. That birthday

I don’t, I freely admit, remember all that much about my chemistry lessons at school. Covalent bonding delighted me not, no, nor moles neither. But I do recall being absolutely thrilled the first time I saw paper chromatography. The idea was – I expect I’m getting this slightly wrong, but don’t write in – that you’d take some murky liquid that was a solution of all sorts of this that and the other, and you’d dab it on a bit of blotting paper, which would then be stood in a basin of some solvent…   All this splitting, all this factional baring-of-the-differences, seems to me the sign of a party

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu views the conflict in Gaza as a zero-sum game – with Israel either destroying Hamas or losing the war. Given that is his strategy, the assault on the city of Rafah in the southernmost part of Gaza, where the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) believe up to four battalions of Hamas terrorists are holed-up, makes perfect sense, at least to him. On Saturday, in the face of growing international concern about the forthcoming operation, Netanyahu announced: ‘Those who say that under no circumstances should we enter Rafah are basically saying lose the war, keep Hamas there.’ During the night, Israel began a missile bombardment of the city.