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Hundreds of black belts return to Edmonton International Judo Championship this weekend at WEM

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Edmonton, March 5, 2019: Edmonton will again welcome over 900 competitors – hundreds of whom are black belt fighters – to the 2019 Edmonton International Judo Championship in West Edmonton Mall’s Ice Palace THIS WEEKEND.

14 YEARS OF CONTINUED SUCCESS

The Edmonton International Judo Championship is the largest full range judo event in Canada and features male and female athletes from under-10 years of age to adulthood.

Families and visitors are guaranteed a FREE, action- packed weekend beginning Friday Afternoon, March 8th with a kids training session starting at 2:00 pm run by instructors from Nagoya Japan.

The 2018 event attracted 925 participants, providing athletes with a tremendous opportunity to acquire valuable, high quality, national and international competition experience in an extremely safe environment.

The tournament’s multi-day format, mat system and quality facilities ensures a smooth, organized flow of events for every competitor; and the word is getting around.

“As a result of the historic success of our tournament”, suggests Tournament Director Mark Hicks “we again have competitors from around the world including 30 from Japan this year.”

West Edmonton Mall’s Ice Palace, unlike any other judo tournament venue in the world, is one of the draws. The mall provides a unique opportunity for the display and demonstration of judo. As a result over 100,000 people per day walk around the enclosed but open air tournament site.

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President Todayville Inc., Honorary Colonel 41 Signal Regiment, Board Member Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Arts Award Foundation, Director Canadian Forces Liaison Council (Alberta) musician, photographer, former VP/GM CTV Edmonton.

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Catherine Herridge

How X And Joe Rogan Broke The Back of 60 Minutes

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TOP LINE: 
Super consumers of news are flocking to X and other platforms that support independent journalism, diverse voices and embrace transparency.  The post election TV ratings abyss is driven both by technology and by the public’s loss of trust in Mainstream media.
DEEP DIVE:
To buy MSNBC or not to buy?
This week’s headline that Comcast will spin off its cable channels underscores the tectonic shift in the media marketplace and how technology is providing the exit ramp for competing platforms.
When my job as a senior investigative correspondent at CBS News was terminated in February, I took a few months to educate myself about the marketplace because so much had changed since I left Fox in 2019.   What I found was genuinely surprising, a little frightening and, oddly, re-assuring for the strength of our democracy.
You can’t argue with the data.  It is compelling. On Election Day, according to @Xdata, the platform boasted record usage of 942 million posts worldwide and  2.2 million hours of watch or listen time over approximately 160k live events. The X data crushed engagement numbers for the mainstream media (MSM.)
tw profile: Data Data@XData tw
X dominated the global conversation on the U.S. election, hitting all-time record highs.
7:11 PM • Nov 7, 2024
1.58K Likes   278 Retweets
109 Replies
By example, a Tucker Carlson interview on X has 35 million engagements. The CBS Evening News has 4.5 million viewers. If I had to choose, I’d take 30 million engagements on X because it represents explosive growth.
tw profile: Tucker Carlson Tucker Carlson@TuckerCarlson tw
Ep. 12  Part 1. Devon Archer
6:00 PM • Aug 2, 2023
159K Likes   46.5K Retweets
6.4K Replies
The new super consumers of news are flocking to X and other platforms that support independent journalism, diverse voices, and embrace transparency which can strengthen democracy.  This is nothing short of an industrial revolution driven both by technology and by loss of trust in corporate media.
In 2023, Human Rights lawyer Jacob Mchangama wrote about the upheaval and resulting, “elite panic.”
“Elite panic is this recurring phenomenon throughout the history of free speech, where whenever the public sphere is expanded, either through new communications technology, or to segments of the population that were previously marginalized, the traditional gatekeepers, the elites who control access to information, tend to fret about the dangers of allowing the unwashed mob — who are too fickle, too unsophisticated, too unlearned — unmediated access to information. They need information to be filtered through the responsible gatekeepers and it may be even more dangerous to allow them to speak without adult supervision. That’s a phenomenon that we see again and again. And we’re seeing it play out now on social media. … [Elite panic is] one contributing factor to the free speech recession.”
Free speech: Why it’s under attack and what can be done to promote diverse viewpoints
Human rights lawyer Jacob Mchangama discusses threats to freedom of expression across the globe — and why it’s important to protect this bedrock of democracy.
www.aamc.org/news/free-speech-why-it-s-under-attack-and-what-can-be-done-promote-diverse-viewpoints
If you asked me four years ago, if a presidential candidate could skip a 60 Minutes interview, I would have been skeptical.  Four years later, candidate Trump bypassed the legacy news magazine and instead, sat down with Joe Rogan.  As of this writing, the marathon sit-down viewership reached 51 million views.
There is no doubt Rogan is a skilled interviewer who can draw out his subjects and deliver huge audiences. Compared to heavily edited network TV reports, the raw, unedited format reveals much about the subject.  In politics, the podcast is perfectly suited for the “beer question” which measures a candidate’s authenticity and likability.
The progressive Harris campaign took a more traditional media approach and came up short. Neither celebrity endorsements which feel less relevant nor a 60 Minutes interview seemed to move the needle.  The combined audience of the 60 Minutes Kamala Harris interview and its views on YouTube landed at about 10 million, far less than what Rogan and X delivered.
The legacy of the Kamala Harris 60 Minutes interview is not her responses but the lingering controversy over the CBS’ interview edit.   And that is where the public’s loss of trust in the media comes in.  I believe this is another driver of the audience exodus.
CBS aired two different answers from the Vice President to the same question from correspondent Bill Whitaker about the Israeli Prime Minister apparently ignoring the Biden Administration.
tw profile: Face The Nation Face The Nation@FaceTheNation tw
MONDAY: On a @60Minutes election special, Bill Whitaker asks Vice President Kamala Harris if the U.S. lacks influence over American ally Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Watch a preview:

2:59 PM • Oct 6, 2024
599 Likes   185 Retweets
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Since, a credible complaint has been filed at the FCC alleging “news distortion” at the network with a reasonable demand that the full, unedited Kamala Harris transcript be released. CBS News has said “it fairly presented the interview to inform the viewing audience and not to mislead it.”
In the October newsletter, I explained that releasing the full, unedited transcript would resolve these questions. There is ample precedent.
tw profile: 60 Minutes 60 Minutes@60Minutes tw
With just 29 days until Election Day, Bill Whitaker sits down with Vice President Kamala Harris. One year after Hamas’ terror attack on Israel, Whitaker starts by asking Harris what the U.S. can do to prevent an all-out regional war in the Middle East. cbsn.ws/3U1BTmj
12:09 AM • Oct 8, 2024
422 Likes   175 Retweets
117 Replies
As a senior investigative correspondent at CBS News, I interviewed President Trump at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.  I advocated for and CBS News published the full, unedited transcript.
The CBS News Trump interview was not a special case.  The full, unedited transcript from Attorney General Bill Barr’s 2019 interview with CBS chief legal affairs correspondent Jan Crawford was also shared by the network.  And more recently, 60 Minutes released the full unedited transcript of its interview with Fed Chair Jerome Powell.
If the current trend continues, in the 2028 election cycle, the broadcast networks will firmly take a back seat to podcasts, town halls, and investigative journalism on X.   For independent journalists and small digital newsrooms, the challenge is developing revenue streams that are viable.
In February, I was not comforted by the analogy that losing my corporate reporting job was like getting pushed off the Titanic when there were still seats in the lifeboats. In retrospect, I wonder if it may turn out to be more accurate than I initially thought.
After turning down job offers for which I remain grateful, I began building the Catherine Herridge Reports brand on X and in the newsletter marketplace.  These platforms are the new media beachheads.  Content is King.
I’ll have more to say about the future of journalism and why journalism is called a profession for a reason. Look for exclusive new content on media accountability in the coming days!
Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter and supporting independent investigative journalism!
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Business

Broken ‘equalization’ program bad for all provinces

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From the Fraser Institute

By Alex Whalen  and Tegan Hill

Back in the summer at a meeting in Halifax, several provincial premiers discussed a lawsuit meant to force the federal government to make changes to Canada’s equalization program. The suit—filed by Newfoundland and Labrador and backed by British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Alberta—effectively argues that the current formula isn’t fair. But while the question of “fairness” can be subjective, its clear the equalization program is broken.

In theory, the program equalizes the ability of provinces to deliver reasonably comparable services at a reasonably comparable level of taxation. Any province’s ability to pay is based on its “fiscal capacity”—that is, its ability to raise revenue.

This year, equalization payments will total a projected $25.3 billion with all provinces except B.C., Alberta and Saskatchewan to receive some money. Whether due to higher incomes, higher employment or other factors, these three provinces have a greater ability to collect government revenue so they will not receive equalization.

However, contrary to the intent of the program, as recently as 2021, equalization program costs increased despite a decline in the fiscal capacity of oil-producing provinces such as Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Newfoundland and Labrador. In other words, the fiscal capacity gap among provinces was shrinking, yet recipient provinces still received a larger equalization payment.

Why? Because a “fixed-growth rule,” introduced by the Harper government in 2009, ensures that payments grow roughly in line with the economy—even if the gap between richer and poorer provinces shrinks. The result? Total equalization payments (before adjusting for inflation) increased by 19 per cent between 2015/16 and 2020/21 despite the gap in fiscal capacities between provinces shrinking during this time.

Moreover, the structure of the equalization program is also causing problems, even for recipient provinces, because it generates strong disincentives to natural resource development and the resulting economic growth because the program “claws back” equalization dollars when provinces raise revenue from natural resource development. Despite some changes to reduce this problem, one study estimated that a recipient province wishing to increase its natural resource revenues by a modest 10 per cent could face up to a 97 per cent claw back in equalization payments.

Put simply, provinces that generally do not receive equalization such as Alberta, B.C. and Saskatchewan have been punished for developing their resources, whereas recipient provinces such as Quebec and in the Maritimes have been rewarded for not developing theirs.

Finally, the current program design also encourages recipient provinces to maintain high personal and business income tax rates. While higher tax rates can reduce the incentive to work, invest and be productive, they also raise the national standard average tax rate, which is used in the equalization allocation formula. Therefore, provinces are incentivized to maintain high and economically damaging tax rates to maximize equalization payments.

Unless premiers push for reforms that will improve economic incentives and contain program costs, all provinces—recipient and non-recipient—will suffer the consequences.

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