Outgoing U.S. Vice President Joe Biden hailed Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and German Chancellor Angela Merkel as genuine leaders during a time when they are in short supply at a state dinner in his honor in Canada on Thursday night. Biden said he’s never since Europeans engaged in as much self-doubt as they are now and said there are more challenges to the liberal international order in any time since the end of World War II. “The world is going to spend a lot of time looking to you Mr. Prime Minister,” Biden told a crowd of Canadian dignitaries. “Viva la Canada because we need you very, very badly.”
PARK IMPEACHED
The South Korean parliament has voted to impeach President Park Geun-hye. It is a stunning and swift fall for the country’s first female leader amid protests that she had permitted a friend, Choi Soon-sil, to extort money from business. Soon-sil and two other former presidential aides were accused of bullying large companies into providing tens of millions of dollars and favours to foundations and businesses Choi controlled, and enabling Choi to interfere with state affairs.
RUSSIAN DOPING
And more than 1,000 Russian competitors across more than 30 sports were involved in an institutional conspiracy to conceal positive doping tests as Moscow ‘hijacked international sport’, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) SAYS. Canadian sports lawyer Richard McLaren provided exhaustive evidence of an elaborate state-sponsored doping scheme operated by Russia’s Sports Ministry.
Putin with discredited athletes
