Also on today’s menu:
Rift Grows Between Canada And India
Government Shutdown Imminent As Lawmakers Go Home
Bob Ross Painting Sells For Nearly $10 Million
Grei Mendez, 36, owner of Divino Niño nursery school in New York City, and her tenant, Carlisto Acevedo Brito, 41, are facing federal narcotics charges after one boy died and three children were admitted to a hospital after being exposed to fentanyl that had been hidden under a trap door at the Bronx center.
Police reported finding a “large quantity” of fentanyl, along with other drugs and paraphernalia, and prosecutors allege Mendez and Brito planned to distribute the drugs. Photos released by New York City Police Department show more than a dozen plastic bags filled with brown and white powders. The drugs were found under a mat in the nap room where one-year-old Nicholas Dominici had slept. He had been at the nursery for just a week when he died.
A urine analysis from one of the children confirmed the presence of the drug.
Rift Grows Between Canada And India
Responding to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s claim that India may have been behind the killing of a Sikh separatist on Canadian soil, India announced that it has stopped issuing visas to Canadian citizens. The move was said to be necessary due to “security threats” that have been disrupting work at its missions in Canada.
India in 2020 had declared separatist leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen who was part of the Khalistan movement, to be a terrorist for his support of a separate Sikh state in the Punjab region of India. The Khalistan movement had been a violent insurgency in the 1980s, but it was put down by force and today remains popular among some Sikhs in countries such as Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Nijjar was shot dead in his vehicle by two masked gunmen outside a Sikh temple in British Columbia.
India says Canada is trying to “shift the focus from Khalistani terrorists and extremists” who have settled there. A member of the Indian foreign ministry said Canada has not shared specific information on Nijjar’s murder. “We have conveyed this to the Canadian side, made it clear to them that we are willing to look at any specific information that is provided to us,” said Arindam Bagchi, “but so far we have not received any such specific information.”
Government Shutdown Imminent As Lawmakers Go Home
The federal government is preparing to shut down after Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy failed to broker any agreements with his hard-right flank and House members left for the weekend. McCarthy had planned to have the House continue its work into the weekend to deal with the pending government shutdown, but when members failed to agree on a single spending bill, he gave up.
“This is a whole new concept of individuals who just want to burn the whole place down,” McCarthy said after Thursday’s vote. “It doesn’t work.”
The extremists on the right flank are trying to dismantle the compromise spending plan that McCarthy struck with President Joe Biden Jr. earlier this year and they want to vote on individual appropriations bills that would bring spending at federal departments to lower levels.
Bob Ross Painting Sells For Nearly $10 Million
Earlier this week, news came of a lost N.C. Wyeth painting selling for $150,000 after it had been purchased for $4 at a thrift store. Now we learn that Bob Ross’ “A Walk in the Woods,” the first of more than 400 paintings he produced on-air for his TV series, The Joy of Painting, has sold for nearly $10 million.
Ross completed his works for PBS viewers in less than a half-hour, with little more than a large bristle brush, putty knife, and plenty of encouragement. He has had a resurgence in social media memes and posts, but the high price for that first painting has surprised even his fans.
Ross, who died in 1995, had been on the air from 1983 to 1994, and he once observed, “We have avoided painting for so long because I think all of our lives we’ve been told that you have to go to school half your life, maybe even have to be blessed by Michelangelo at birth, to ever be able to paint a picture. Here, we want to show you that that’s not true. That you can paint a picture.”
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