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Liberal Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told the nation’s House of Commons Tuesday that he has attended lavish fundraisers for his family’s foundation to “create economic growth for the middle class.” His defense of his participation in fundraisers thrown by the Pierre Trudeau Foundation – which he renounced his official position in upon becoming the leader of the Liberal Party – follows an admission that he allowed attendees to lobby him at these fundraisers, a clear violation of Liberal Party bylaws. The metastasizing cash-for-access scandal follows a calamitous month for Canada’s Liberals in which, partly triggered by Trudeau’s effusive praise...

An Associated Press-GfK Poll released Thursday finds Donald Trump’s “unfavorable” numbers are nearing 70 percent. The AP reports: Seven in 10 people, including close to half of Republican voters, have an unfavorable view of Trump, according to a new Associated Press-GfK poll. It’s an opinion shared by majorities of men and women; young and old; conservatives, moderates and liberals; and whites, Hispanics and blacks — a devastatingly broad indictment of the billionaire businessman.Even in the South, a region where Trump has won GOP primaries decisively, close to 70 percent view him unfavorably. And among whites without a college education,...

Looks like Dianne Feinstein isn’t an outlier after all. According to a New York Times/CBS News poll, Barack Obama’s ISIS policy hasn’t succeeded in either “containing” the terrorist quasi-state or allaying their fears. That appears to be a consensus opinion among respondents in general, but also among Democrats, with more than six in ten saying the ISIS effort is going badly: The terrorist attacks in Paris last week have renewed criticism of President Obama for his strategy in fighting the Islamic State. But a New York Times/CBS News poll released just before the attacks found that Americans were already...

Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin is basking in the glow of an unheard-of 86% approval rating. But his popularity has not stemmed from the people’s contentment or any monumental achievement of their leader. His boat has been lifted by the rising tide of insane hatred for America and Ukraine sweeping Russia. Hysterical chauvinism flogged by TV has brought the Russian people to a fever pitch, demonstrating the monumental power of propaganda. Renowned Russian opposition journalist Vladimir Yakovlev, in a recent article published in his Russian-language Mulbabar blog, explained the mechanism of the current propaganda campaign designed to keep the Russian people...

President Barack Obama isn’t exactly riding high on public support, but for the first time in two years more Americans approve of the job he is doing than disapprove. The news comes courtesy of a new Wall Street Journal/NBC poll that was released Monday. It found that 48 percent of Americans approve of the job Obama is doing as president, while 47 percent disapprove. Obama is only one point into positive territory and hasn’t hit 50 percent since February 2013, but it’s the highest number the president has seen in this survey since June 2013. It’s also marked improvement over...

We here at Free Republic know what an unmitigated disaster fubo is. But what is up with the rest of the country? I despise this despot. I mute the tv when he talks, and look away from from the screen to avoid seeing this monster. So how does 45% approve of the job he is doing? Or is this evidence of how dumbed down Americans have become... Inquiring minds want to know.

VANCOUVER – Spurned by U.S. regulators, Amazon.com has turned to the one country where flying delivery robots are still welcome: Canada. On Monday, the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper revealed that the online retail giant is testing its latest prototypes for package-carrying drones at a top-secret site in British Columbia. “We are rapidly experimenting and iterating on Amazon Prime Air … including outdoors at a rural test site in Canada,” wrote Amazon spokesperson Kristen Kish in an email to the National Post. --- Located a mere 600 metres from the U.S. border, the Canadian testing grounds fulfill a lingering threat by Amazon...

Gallup tracks daily the percentage of Americans who approve or disapprove of the job Barack Obama is doing as president. Daily results are based on telephone interviews with approximately 1,500 national adults; Margin of error is ±3 percentage points.

The World Health Organization has approved the first rapid test for Ebola in a potential breakthrough for ending an epidemic that has killed almost 10,000 people in West Africa, it said on Friday. The test, developed by Corgenix Medical Corp, is less accurate than the standard PCR test but is easy to perform, does not require electricity, and can give results within 15 minutes, WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic said.

With six years down and just two left in which to build a legacy, President Barack Obama has posted his lowest-ever average annual approval rating. A Gallup poll finds that Obama, in the one-year period between Jan. 20, 2014, and Monday, posted an approval average of just 42.6 percent. During their sixth year in office, Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon showed their lowest approval rating as well, with the sixth-year approval rating of every president since 1945 averaging just 45.5 percent, Politico notes. President George W. Bush tapped out the lowest at 37.3 percent, while President Bill...

The two Republican Arizona senators who worked with Democrats to pass an immigration bill last June have managed to sink their poll ratings to record lows. Sen. John McCain has reached a 30 percent approval rating from Arizona voters. Sen. Jeff Flake, however, managed to reach further down to 27 percent approval, according to the new survey of 870 voters by Public Policy Polling.

A striking graph from Washington Post. For most of the country, his job approval has been flat in the low to mid-40s for nearly a year. His approval among Latinos was mostly flat too from February to the beginning of September, albeit a bit higher in the mid-50s. Then he announced on September 6th that executive action on immigration would be postponed; two and a half months after that, he finally came through with the power grab that amnesty fans have been dreaming of.Follow the bouncing ball:After the postponement, Latino support dropped below the 50 percent mark, almost to...

A new Gallup poll finds that President Barack Obama´s approval rating with working-class white Americans has fallen to just 27 percent, a record-low for his presidency. Among whites who´ve graduated college, Obama´s approval stands at 41%, also a new low in the Gallup poll. (Graph) Perhaps most troubling of all for Obama: Gallup´s data only extended to the end of October, well before the recent racially-charged riots broke out in Ferguson, Missouri, and protests across the country. "About two-thirds of adult whites have not graduated from college, making working-class whites a particularly important group politically because of its sheer size,"

Just after President Barack Obama was reelected in 2012, the health care reform law which bears his name as its sobriquet was, according to Gallup, at least somewhat popular. GallupÂ’s findings in November, 2012, bucked a trend wherein the majority of pollsters determined that the law was still unpopular. The Real Clear Politics average of polls in this month found the Affordable Care Act was underwater by 5.4 points, but GallupÂ’s results showed the ACA rebounding to 3 points above water with 48 percent approving of the law and only 45 percent disapproving. That popularity boost did not last...

A new poll shows Americans' disdain for Congress is weaker than it has been in more than three years, but neither party has much to brag about. The Washington Post-ABC News poll shows 50 percent of Americans say they "strongly" disapprove of the way Congress is doing its job. The good news: That's the lowest that number has been since March 2011. The bad news: It's still half the country really disliking Congress. And when it comes to the two major parties, the improvement doesn't really show. In fact, congressional Democrats are facing their highest disapproval rating in at least...

Chile's President Michelle Bachelet saw her approval rating fall for the third straight month in September, though support for her key reforms improved, a poll showed on Thursday. Overall approval of the center-left president slipped 2 percentage points from August to 47 percent, said pollster Gfk Adimark, Bachelet's lowest rating in the monthly survey since returning to power in March. As well as flagging economic growth, there was a spate of bombings in capital Santiago in September, including one that left 14 people injured and another that left a man dead. Ahead of her second non-consecutive term, Bachelet promised an...

After many months in a popularity trough, President Obama appears to be getting a little bump in the polls as a result of Americans strong support for U.S. airstrikes against ISIS jihadist forces in Iraq and Syria. A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that 50 percent of Americans approve of his handling of the military campaign against ISIS, compared with 44 percent who say they disapprove. That represents an eight-point improvement over the response back in August -- when just 42 percent said they approved of the president’s handling of the situation -- although that question only mentioned the...

Just passing along a stat that blew the conservasphere’s collective mind when it started circulating last night on Twitter. Mmmmmm, that’s good bias. Obama job approval is almost identical to Bush's in Sept 2006. Bias is just as much what isn't reported as what is. pic.twitter.com/BfxRSfq2Ub— Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) September 16, 2014 The source of the numbers is this week-old post from Newsbusters, which I regret having missed on the day it came out. More from Rich Noyes: Just last Thursday, for example, Gallup found Obama’s approval rating at a record low of 38 percent, yet none of the...

A nifty catch by Josh Jordan, a.k.a. NumbersMuncher. Albeit with a big caveat.When I say “lowest level since last year” in the headline, I don’t mean to imply that O’s numbers with Latinos were lower in 2013. All I mean is that today’s Gallup chart goes back only as far as last November. (A period that includes the disastrous ObamaCare rollout, do note.) That 44 percent may well be the lowest number of his entire presidency among Latinos. I’d say odds are good, at least, that it’s the lowest since the big debt-ceiling standoff in 2011, when Obama saw...

Britons are to be the first in the world to test a new vaccine against the deadly ebola virus. Altogether 60 healthy volunteers will be given the vaccine next month in a trial led by Oxford University scientists. If the vaccine performs as well in humans as in monkeys, the trial will be extended to 80 people in The Gambia and in Mali. The entire trial programme is being fast-tracked – subject to ethical approval – with the intention of using the vaccine in people at high risk in West Africa early next year. Latest figures show that more than...