Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has been slammed for cheerfully dancing in the streets during a Lunar New Year parade, as violent crime surges and major retailers abandon the Windy City’s main drag.
Lightfoot, who is seeking re-election next month, was captured on video busting moves while surrounded by a drumline at Sunday’s parade.
Her carefree dancing prompted one Chicago news outlet to blast her as “detached from reality.”
People’s commission report on 2022 convoy protest describes ‘human rights’ failure by officials
Facing an occupation of their neighbourhoods in January and February 2022, the people of downtown Ottawa were abandoned by police and all three levels of government, an abdication of responsibility that was nothing less than a human rights failure.
NEW YORK, Jan 28 (Reuters) – Lawyers for Sam Bankman-Fried on Saturday urged a U.S. judge not to ban the indicted FTX cryptocurrency executive from communicating with former colleagues as part of his bail, saying prosecutors “sandbagged” the process to put their client in the “worst possible light.”
The lawyers were responding to a Friday night request by federal prosecutors that Bankman-Fried not be allowed to talk with most employees of FTX or his Alameda Research hedge fund without lawyers present, or use the encrypted messaging apps Signal or Slack and potentially delete messages automatically.
Because he’s a connected little snot …
“The fact that an offshore hedge fund that was basically a crypto firm was buying a stake in a tiny bank for multiples of its stated book value should have raised massive red flags for the F.D.I.C., state regulators and the Federal Reserve,” said Camden Fine, a bank industry consultant who used to head the Independent Community Bankers of America. “It’s just astonishing that all of this got approved.”
On a Queen streetcar Wednesday, a man boarded near Bay Street at the centre doors. He had a long scraggly beard and wore a grubby army surplus coat, a bulging plastic garbage bag slung over his shoulder.
He was giggling, loudly, for no apparent reason. For longer than a minute.
“Heeeheeeheeheeeheee!” His voice echoed off the windows and walls, and many passengers let their eyes dart in his direction, then exchanged glances with each other.
Was this something to be concerned about? Or just another day on the TTC? Or are those now the same thing?
TTC riders shocked at homophobic rant!
A verbal, homophobic spat ensued between commuters on a very packed TTC bus – 📹 antonperrotta8 https://t.co/Sb00FPWEwx #Toronto #TTC pic.twitter.com/okJRzKw6Zb
— blogTO (@blogTO) January 26, 2023
Former NHL great Bobby Hull, the man who put Winnipeg on the pro hockey map 51 years ago, has died at the age of 84, several reports indicated on Monday.
GENEVA – The coronavirus remains a global health emergency, the World Health Organization chief said Monday, after a key advisory panel found the pandemic may be nearing an “inflection point” where higher levels of immunity can lower virus-related deaths.
Speaking at the opening of WHO’s annual executive board meeting, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said “there is no doubt that we’re in a far better situation now” than a year ago – when the highly transmissible Omicron variant was at its peak.
The most persistent trend adding to inflation is the transition to “green energy,” which “raises costs,” according to a new Bank of Canada staff discussion paper.
“The 2021–22 Surge in Inflation” says that Canada has undergone the most pronounced surge in inflation in the 2021–2022 fiscal year since the 1970s.
A dollar in 1970 was equivalent to about $7.44 in purchasing power today, according to the Canada Inflation Calculator, based on Statistics Canada consumer price index (CPI) data.
The video footage of Tyre Nichols being beaten by police in Memphis shows in harrowing detail the events that led to his death. But some questions still remain.
Lawyers for his family said the officers acted like a “pack of wolves” and beat him “like a human pinata”.
Police Chief Cerelyn Davis, who is the first black woman to serve in the role, told the BBC she was shocked. “Something happened that we can’t explain,” she said.
The 29-year-old motorist was pulled over by police on 7 January. The footage that emerged led the authorities to fire the five officers last week and charge them with second-degree murder.
Evidently the Black officers who killed Tyre Nichols internalized white supremacy…
Representation and diversity matters, but don’t bring in “black and brown gatekeepers” who represent white supremacy and call that representation, says @SholaMos1 when asked about the Tyre Nichols killinghttps://t.co/pIDZkPXLkr
📺 Sky 501, Virgin 602, Freeview 233 and YouTube pic.twitter.com/JS3TeNVeCF
— Sky News (@SkyNews) January 30, 2023
For the (many) people who are apparently blocked pic.twitter.com/rGYKiuWAwy
— Jonathan Kay (@jonkay) January 29, 2023
‘Context and intention matter: Alberta Justice firing over racial slur overturned
An arbitrator has overturned the dismissal of an Alberta Justice employee who was fired for using a racial slur during an online video work meeting.
The reference was made during a Webex call on Jan. 14, 2021, when the woman used the N-word in expressing her distaste for rap music lyrics she had heard her sons listening to.
… “There is an enormous difference between calling a Black person the N-word versus quoting, in a critical way, the use of the N-word in music lyrics.”
Suicide bombing at mosque in Pakistan kills 32, targeted police
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Jan 30 (Reuters) – A suicide bombing at a crowded mosque in Pakistan’s Peshawar killed at least 32 people on Monday, the latest attack targeting police in this northwestern city where Islamist militants remain active.
Hospital officials said at least 147 people were wounded, with many of them in critical condition.
Prime Minister Shebaz Sharif called the blast a suicide attack. There were at least 260 people in the mosque, police official Sikandar Khan added.
Meanwhile in the UK …
This may be Speaker's Corner, Hyde Park as a Muslim says to an Indian Christian "any Christian, any Jew, I hate you all for the sake of Allah. If we were at war I would chop your head off." pic.twitter.com/2wGKM2isMh
— David Atherton (@DaveAtherton20) January 30, 2023
The looming return of alleged ISIS members to Canada has brought trauma, worry and fear to people who were invited to Canada as a safe haven after the terrorist group all but destroyed their ancient community in northern Iraq.
“When I first heard the news, I felt the strength leave my body,” Huda Ilyas Alhamad told CBC News in her Winnipeg apartment. She is one of 1,200 survivors of the Yazidi genocide who were resettled in Canada; she spent years as a slave of ISIS members.
“I had to sit down right away. I was heartbroken and terrified at the same time because on one hand they had promised to protect us and bring us here and give us safety, and on the other hand they’re offering that same entryway for these very people who raped and tortured us on a daily basis.”
US general warns British Army no longer top-level fighting force, defence sources reveal
A senior US general has privately told Defence Secretary Ben Wallace the British Army is no longer regarded as a top-level fighting force, defence sources have revealed.
They said this decline in war-fighting capability – following decades of cuts to save money – needed to be reversed faster than planned in the wake of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
OTTAWA — The federal government has set aside billions of dollars to quickly build affordable housing across the country, but delays in construction suggest many of the projects approved for funding are missing their deadlines.
The Rapid Housing Initiative is a federal program launched in 2020 that provides funding to cities and non-profit organizations to build affordable homes for vulnerable Canadians, including those experiencing homelessness.
Not enough immigration, that must be the problem.
A Green Party-led council has said it can’t empty overflowing dog waste bins near a beauty spot because its new fleet of electric vehicles cannot be used off-road and binmen might injure themselves if they lift the bins by hand.
Large amounts of dog waste have been dumped on Hollingbury Golf Club in Brighton – close to an Iron Age hillfort – after Brighton & Hove City council relocated a nearby bin because its new multi-million pound fleet is “not designed for off-road driving”.
It’s quite something to think that a year ago today Ontario was still under a hard lockdown. Premier Doug Ford, who had presided over some of the harshest COVID-19 policies in the free world, only ended the province’s fourth lockdown on Jan. 31, 2022.
These outrageous policies happened despite the fact that in most comparable jurisdictions—including the Democrat-governed American states immediately adjacent to Ontario—had abandoned these restrictions months before.
