Of the 1,808 new cases recorded, 625 were unvaccinated people, 39 were partially vaccinated, 1,046 were fully vaccinated and for 98 people the vaccination status was unknown.
The City of Toronto says it has approved an extension for a temporary bylaw that requires mandatory masking in indoor public settings until April 2022.
Canada is advising against non-essential travel in light of the Omicron variant, which is spreading across the world and driving up infections once again.
A Conservative source tells Global News the party has identified 13 ridings they believe were targeted by ‘coordinated and sophisticated’ foreign interference campaigns.
Alberta’s premier announced minor changes to indoor gathering rules ahead of the holidays. The premier also announced an expansion to the rapid test and booster programs.
In a lawsuit filed on Monday in Los Angeles Superior Court, Ingo Rademacher said he is claiming discrimination as he has a religious objection to getting the COVID-19 vaccine.
‘We’ve been meeting with our public health colleagues, our public health measures table and are bringing recommendations to government to have a more consistent approach.’
It's the perfect time to get that special someone the perfect gift. Order Please Scream Inside Your Heart. It will make your stocking bulge.
I hope I won't look like a carny's mark by linking to this article. For Brooks Barnes, the upcoming movie Nightmare Alley might feel like a biopic, except his experiences as a kid growing up among the carnies was less of a horror show and more of a wild ride with ups and downs. "When I signed up to lip-sync 'How Will I Know' for the fifth-grade talent show, another teacher called me "unpleasantly abnormal" and sent me to the school psychologist. (Their loss. I would have killed it.) To them, I was the sideshow freak. Among the carnival crowd, it was the opposite. I was accepted, even celebrated." NYT: See the Real Live Man Who Grew Up in a Carnival. (This is a gift article. No strings attached. It like doing the ring toss with hula hoop. It's a three card monte game where you always find the queen. You can shoot out the red star with a single bb. It's as easy as the ping pong toss but you don't have to bring home the goldfish. The bottom of the rubber duck will reveal the top prize, guaranteed. Your mallet will always ring the bell. The funnel cakes won't make you throw up. The cotton candy is sugar-free. And the candied apples are all from this decade! Just start whacking, the moles don't stand a chance.)
2
THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD
"The homes on Tammy Sue Lane aren't fancy. Modest in size and clad in vinyl siding, the houses were priced below $200,000 when most were built about 15 years ago, and for many families in suburban Nashville, they represented a first chance at homeownership. A corrections officer bought one, and so did a housekeeper and an electrician. Then some of the world's wealthiest people bought in." WaPo (Gift Article): This Block Used to Be for First-Time Homebuyers. Then Global Investors Bought In. "Progress Residential has been ringing up substantial profits for wealthy investors around the world while outbidding middle-class home buyers and subjecting tenants to what they allege are unfair rent hikes, shoddy maintenance and excessive fees."
3
COMMUNITY CHEST PAIN
Natural disasters always seem to target small communities where everyone knows each other. Your world gets destroyed. Then you look to the people you'd lean on at a moment like that only to find their world was destroyed too. On a single Kentucky street, the tornado killed 7 children.
4
THE OLD COLLEGE TRY AGAIN
AP: Colleges go back to drawing board — again — to fight COVID. "Cornell University shut down all campus activities on Tuesday and moved final exams online after more than 700 students tested positive over three days. In a campus message, President Martha Pollack said there was evidence of the omicron variant in a 'significant' number of samples. 'It is obviously extremely dispiriting to have to take these steps,' Pollack wrote. 'However, since the start of the pandemic, our commitment has been to follow the science and do all we can to protect the health of our faculty, staff and students.'" (I wonder if the science advice is keeping up with the stage of the pandemic. Cornell is highly vaccinated and there are almost no serious cases. Does it make sense to send young people back home to their communities?)
5
BIG LITTLE LIES
"At her annual budget address this month, Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota blamed President Joe Biden's economic policies for rising prices, derided the "giant handout" of federal stimulus funds and suggested that she had considered refusing the money over ideological objections. But like many Republican officials, Noem has found it hard to say no to her state's share of the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief aid that Democrats passed along party lines in March. Noem explained to fellow legislators how critical those federal funds were to South Dakota and outlined how she would use some of the nearly $1 billion slated for her state to invest in local water projects, make housing more affordable and build new day care centers." Republicans Who Assailed Biden's Stimulus Bill Are Embracing the Money. (What underpins the Big Lie? A hell of a lot of little lies.)
+ "The violence on January 6 broke a long string of peaceful transfers of power in the United States. If the paperwork coup had worked, though, peace might have prevailed—but the transfer of power might not have happened." David A. Graham in The Atlantic: The Paperwork Coup.
"Governments fell, democracies were challenged, and climate-related destruction was unleashed, all while the casualties of the pandemic continued to amass. The vaccine saved some lives, but human passions, hopes and fears did their usual work to create a year that was anything but calm, and is ending with the prospect of a new variant upending plans once again." The NYT Year in Photos (Gift Article).
"The unholy union was part of an elaborate scheme hatched by a human-trafficking ring led by Flores Acosta with two of her sisters and other women, and backed by the muscle and terror of MS-13. The objective? To force women to marry men the gang would later kill so that the group could claim their life insurance money." Vice: Meet MS-13's ‘Black Widow' Who Tricked Men Into Marriage and Killed Them.
9
SPF INFINITY
"For the first time in human history, a spacecraft has flown through the Sun's corona to collect data and capture samples (and, crucially, exited safely)." A NASA Spacecraft Has Touched the Sun. (At the rate climate change is going, we'll all touch it soon.)
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