Democratic presidential candidate in ‘excellent health’ before November’s US election, doctor says.

United States Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, released a letter from her doctor that pronounced her in “excellent health” and fit for high office, in an effort to draw a contrast with her counterpart, Donald Trump.

As president, I will take on corporate price gouging to lower the cost of groceries.

Donald Trump can’t figure out what groceries are. pic.twitter.com/fhvYsYj9Ep

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) October 12, 2024

In a memo released on Saturday, physician Joshua Simmons said Harris’s April exam was “unremarkable”, noting her active lifestyle, “very healthy diet”, seasonal allergies, sporadic hives, and moderate alcohol use.

“In summary, Vice President Harris remains in excellent health. She possesses the physical and mental resiliency required to successfully execute the duties of the presidency, to include those as chief executive, head of state and commander in chief,” Simmons wrote.

Donald Trump’s Project 2025 plan will gut Social Security and Medicare. pic.twitter.com/BcmhhA593n

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) October 9, 2024

Harris, 59, is running against Republican Trump, 78, for the White House in November.

Locked in a tight race, Harris’s campaign hopes that contrasting her comparative youth and mental acuity with Trump’s more advanced age and tendency to meander, along with the differences in transparency between the two, will help convince undecided voters that she is more fit for office than he is.

Simmons said Harris’s allergies had been well-managed with over-the-counter and prescription medications.

Her urticaria, or hives, were “sporadic and transient and do not seem to be triggered by any particular exposure nor are they associated with other symptoms” and respond well to antihistamine treatment.

Harris has been on allergen immunotherapy for the last three years, dramatically improving her allergy and urticaria symptoms and negating her need for medication other than occasional nasal spray, he said.

Trump’s health

Former President Trump questioned President Joe Biden’s health when the 81-year-old president was seeking re-election. Since Biden was replaced on the ticket with Harris, Trump’s own health has drawn more attention.

According to a Harris aide, the vice president made her medical information public on Saturday in an effort to draw attention to Trump’s refusal to do so.

Trump has released very little health information, including after his ear was grazed by a bullet during an assassination attempt in July.

Last November, Trump marked Biden’s birthday by releasing a letter from his physician that reported the former president was in “excellent” physical and mental health.

The letter posted on Trump’s social media platform contained no details to support its claims – measures like weight, blood pressure and cholesterol levels, or the results of any test.

World Opinions + Agencies

L’article Kamala Harris releases medical report, drawing contrast with Donald Trump est apparu en premier sur زوايا ميادين | Mayadin Columns.

Chinese interference fears have gripped Ottawa. But appearing before House committees recently, I realised Canada should be scared most of its own MPs.

Canada has lost its mind.

To be precise, much of official Ottawa has abandoned the remnants of its already questionable faculties. A faux scandal, manufactured by the nexus of scoop-thirsty reporters and hyperbole-addicted politicians – is there any other kind? – has gripped the capital like a drug-resistant psychosis.

These fulminating reporters and politicians have been reduced – figuratively speaking – to parading around newsrooms and parliament in a critical-thinking-sapping state, carrying signs that read: The end of democracy is nigh.

Bit by devious bit, Chinese agents and their proxies have eaten covertly away, they say, at the vulnerable foundations that gird Canada’s democratic institutions.

All that stands between apocalypse and possible salvation are the patriots working inside Canada’s always law-abiding spy services who apparently belt out “O Canada” at breakfast and at bedtime with hands on maple-leaf-forever-tattooed hearts.

That, discerning international readers, is only a slightly exaggerated portrait of the hysteria that has paralysed a once-sedate city for months. I wouldn’t be surprised if more than a few of its jittery occupants who hold public office have checked under their desks to see if a Beijing-compromised, fifth columnist is lurking there.

I live in Toronto. So, happily, I have been able to avoid succumbing to the “yellow peril”-induced madness. Still, I had more than a disconcerting taste of it over the past few weeks while appearing three times as a witness before two House of Commons committees probing Chinese influence campaigns.

Given my long history of reporting on Canada’s cavalier security services and Chinese influence efforts, I reluctantly agreed to attend via Zoom in the faint hope that my testimony might act as a brake on the prevailing panic and the rampant, McCarthyite guilt-by-association accusations poisoning Ottawa.

How wrong I was.

I came away convinced that China poses less of a threat to Canada’s democratic institutions than the sad, pedestrian members of parliament – with one exception – I encountered, who purport to defend those ever-so-fragile institutions now allegedly under siege.

My overarching message did not register. While I agree that Chinese interference is troublesome, a witch-hunt-like fever has infected lawmakers and reporters intent on “unmasking” so-called “seditious” Canadians reminiscent of the shameful purge of public servants only a few generations ago as a result of their left-wing politics and homosexuality.

It is dangerous and corrosive. People’s lives, livelihoods and reputations are being damaged by inept spies and their grateful conduits in the media and on Parliament Hill.

Indeed, I watched, sometimes with bewilderment, often in disgust, as a string of parliamentarians debased themselves and the country they supposedly represent, in search of a “gotcha” moment that might attract a reporter’s ephemeral attention or the approval of their party leaders who are more interested in stoking fear and conjecture rather than encouraging sobriety and the truth.

In this deplorable regard, members of the opposition Conservative Party, the separatist Bloc Quebecois (BQ) and the pretend socialist party of Canada, the New Democrats (NDP), distinguished themselves.

Without fail, Tory MPs channeled every disagreeable aspect of Pierre Poilievre, their stunt-prone, smug demagogue of a leader who believes that anger and ignorance are essential prerequisites to becoming prime minister.

Each of these rabid partisans tried to out-smear the other to curry favour with a jejune politician who makes the Borg-like former Conservative Party leader, Stephen Harper, seem almost genteel in comparison.

The nadir of this ugliness occurred when a Conservative MP asked a witness and publisher of Sinophobic tracts whether former Governor General of Canada David Johnston was an “elite capture” of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) “based on his ties to China”.

Predictably, the conspiracy-consumed pair forgot that Johnston was appointed Canada’s titular head of state in 2010 by none other than Harper.

Oh, never mind.

In any event, the witness said that of course Johnston was an “elite capture” since “over his 40-year career [Johnston] has had a positive predisposition to China and the PRC.”

It was a disgraceful question and reply and I said so. Incidentally, the sorry exchange went some way towards suggesting that the Conservative Party’s email address these days should be: conservatives@inthegutter.ca.

Johnston is in the Conservatives’ ferocious crosshairs because he was appointed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as a “special rapporteur” to examine a slew of selective leaks concerning Chinese interference in Canadian politics and two recent elections.

In an interim report, Johnston found that China’s influence campaigns had no impact on those elections, that media reports surrounding the scope and nature of that interference were overblown or “false,” and that, as a sinister by-product, loyal Canadians were being tarred as disloyal.

None of it mattered, such was the disfiguring intensity of the animus in the hearings towards an honourable man who has served Canada in a variety of important capacities.

Meanwhile, the separatist BQ was too busy bowing before the “expertise” of a couple of spooks-turned-boy-scouts to remember that not too long ago the very same security services set ablaze a barn where separatists planned to meet. Or that the security services were responsible for at least 400 illegal break-ins in Quebec (including the offices of a separatist press agency), and that they stole the membership list of the separatist Parti Quebecois.

The BQ’s amnesia is as halting as its naivete.

A starry-eyed member of Canada’s pretend socialist NDP allowed the two spies to claim – without a word of pushback – that the secrecy-drenched and accountability-allergic agencies they work for are committed to openness, transparency and the rule of law.

I had to stifle the urge to laugh.

The criminally ill-prepared NDP MP was not aware, it appears, that a succession of federal court judges has, in the recent past, slammed the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) for withholding information from the court, lying and routinely breaking the law.

If the derelict legislator had done an ounce of research, she would have discovered that in July 2020 Justice Patrick Gleeson excoriated CSIS for having an “institutional disregard for — or, at the very least, a cavalier institutional approach to — the duty of candour and regrettably the rule of law”.

Examples of CSIS’s subterfuge abound. In an effort to deport a Canadian it suspected of being a “terrorist” in 2009, the spy service not only lied to, but kept exculpatory information from, a judge deciding the man’s fate. In 2016, another incensed federal court judge blasted CSIS for failing to disclose that it had, for more than a decade, illegally gathered and stored metadata unrelated to national security investigations involving scores of unsuspecting Canadians.

The solicitous NDP MP did not recall any of it. Like her flippant, sound-bite-happy leader, Jagmeet Singh, she capitulated to the hysteria, rather than make an informed effort to cauterise it.

Only Matthew Green, an Ontario NDP MP, struck me as having the gravitas to approach this delicate file with the calmness and intelligence it requires.

I should have listened to my instincts and stayed far away from Ottawa and the largely vapid politicians who populate it.

In the remote chance that I receive another emailed invitation to appear before a committee after this column is published, I will press delete.

By Andrew Mitrovica – Al Jazeera columnist

L’article Canadian democracy is on edge — and China isn’t to blame est apparu en premier sur زوايا ميادين | Mayadin Columns.

Decades of progress in terms of life expectancy, education and economic prosperity have begun unravelling since the pandemic, a new UN report says.

Over the past two years, nine out of 10 countries have slid backwards on the UN’s Human Development Index.

Covid-19, the war in Ukraine and the impact of climate change are blamed for putting global development in reverse.

The Human Development Index was launched in 1990 in an effort to look beyond GDP as a measure of well-being.

Switzerland sits at the top of the index this year with a life expectancy of 84 years, an average of 16.5 years spent in education and median salary of $66,000.

At the other end of the scale is South Sudan where life expectancy is 55, people spend just 5.5 years in school on average and earn $768 a year.

Setbacks in a majority of the 191 countries included in the index, especially in life expectancy, have taken development levels back to those seen in 2016, reversing a 30-year trend.

In the US, for example, life expectancy at birth has dropped by more than two years since 2019. In other countries the decline is much higher.

Over the years since the index was introduced, many countries have faced crises and slid backwards, but the global trend consistently moved upwards. Last year was the first time the index declined overall since calculations began and this year’s results solidified that downward trend.

The impact has been uneven though. Two-thirds of rich countries rebounded last year while most others continued to decline.

This year’s index is based on data from 2021. “But the outlook for 2022 is grim,” says Achim Steiner, one of its authors, who points out that more than 80 countries are facing problems paying off their national debt.

“Eighty countries being one step away from facing that kind of crisis is a very serious prospect,” he says.

“We are seeing deep disruptions, the tail end of which will play out over a number of years.”

By Stephanie Hegarty + BBC News

L’article Analysis. UN sees life expectancy, education and income fall est apparu en premier sur زوايا ميادين | Mayadin Columns.