It looks like the FBI is in for yet another scandal.
According to a new report from the LA Times, FBI agents busted into thousands of safety deposit boxes in California. After they rummaged through the private property of innocent people, it turns out they lied to a federal judge to get access to the boxes in the first place.
Law enforcement access to certain private data, like surveillance camera footage, typically requires a warrant. But increasingly, police are finding ways around that requirement. For owners of Amazon’s popular Ring video doorbells, police can submit an “emergency request” to get access to a customer’s stored footage without the customer’s permission. Now, in San Francisco, police can get live access to private security cameras, even if no crime has been committed.
WITH the passing of Her Majesty the Queen, the sins of Britain and its Empire, real or imagined, have inevitably been in the news again. Something called ‘Irish Twitter’ (which one suspects is about as in tune with Irish public opinion as Twitter is with public opinion generally), has been foaming at the mouth about the Irish potato famine of 1845-49 being a deliberate act of genocide, a view of history that even the most rabid Irish republican tends not to believe.
Voters in yet another EU nation turned away from the leftward tilt of Brussels and more toward self-determination. Italy has elected its first right-wing coalition government in decades, and will almost certainly have its first female prime minister. Georgia Meloni led her Brothers of Italy into a dominant role in the coalition, as both CNN and Reuters describe this as “the most right-wing government since World War II”:
All eyes may be on the Italian election results this morning, but Europe’s got much bigger problems on its hands than the prospect of a Right-wing government. Winter is coming, and the catastrophic consequences of Europe’s self-imposed energy crisis are already being felt across the continent.
The New York Times has been running an extended crusade for some years now to dispense with freedom of speech. It’s run op-eds arguing that speech is violence, that the First Amendment has been misunderstood… and that we should be more like Germany.
This lunatic is all for it…
We need to be way tougher in Canada. Too many refuse to acknowledge that we are a hotbed of right wing extremism. You need to protect democracy if you’re going to keep it.
— Catherine McKenna (@cathmckenna) September 25, 2022
How the West’s crisis of moral judgement is inflaming the insanity of identity politics.
For me, the most disturbing thing about the Canadian teacher with the fake boobs is not the prosthetics themselves, ridiculous as they are. It isn’t the huge sexualised nipples, which all but confirm that the bloke is getting some kind of thrill from parading around in front of his teenage charges dolled up like a Halloween porn freak. It isn’t even the fact that there are men out there who are happy to behave in such a depraved way – we’ve known that for quite some time. No, it’s the fact that his school defended him, and what’s more that it defended him on the grounds of respecting ‘gender identity and gender expression’. There have always been weirdos in society – what’s new in the 21st century is the willingness of so many institutions to validate weirdos.
FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) — As Europe heads into winter in the throes of an energy crisis, offices are getting chillier. Statues and historic buildings are going dark. Bakers who can’t afford to heat their ovens are talking about giving up, while fruit and vegetable growers face letting greenhouses stand idle.
In poorer eastern Europe, people are stocking up on firewood, while in wealthier Germany, the wait for an energy-saving heat pump can take half a year. And businesses don’t know how much more they can cut back.
“We can’t turn off the lights and make our guests sit in the dark,” said Richard Kovacs, business development manager for Hungarian burger chain Zing Burger. The restaurants already run the grills no more than necessary and use motion detectors to turn off lights in storage, with some stores facing a 750% increase in electricity bills since the beginning of the year.
Meanwhile in Germany…
A protest was held in Lubmin, Germany yesterday.
It’s the location where Nord Stream 2 reaches German land.
Russian Germans and their supporters demanded the pipeline to be opened.
3 Ukrainian women showed up to counter-protest and were attacked.
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) September 26, 2022
Kill are be killed.”
That’s what a spray-painted graffiti message reads on a metal wall a stone’s throw from the 1500 block of Government Street near downtown Baton Rouge. It’s a double testament — both to the scandalously dangerous character of that particular speck of earth along one of the city’s main thoroughfares and to the scandalously dangerous deficiency of the public schools in East Baton Rouge Parish.
In China, the high-profile TV drama In The Name Of The People has become a smash hit. In that show, Chinese agents enter the U.S. posing as businessmen so they can repatriate a factory manager who had fled abroad with huge ill-gotten wealth.
But a new study by the European non-governmental agency Safeguard Defenders suggests that there might be some truth to the fiction. According to the NGO, the Fuzhou Public Security Bureau has established more than 50 “overseas police service centres” in cities around the world – including three publicly documented ones in Toronto, home to Canada’s largest Chinese diaspora.
h/t DM
The "all ages" drag show in Memphis we warned everyone about was shut down by Memphis Police tonight. Amazing. There’s no safe space in Tennessee to sexualize kids. We’ll stop ALL of this insanity here!pic.twitter.com/foiLjkHNwM
— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) September 24, 2022
Do you get mail? Of course, you do. You have a mailbox for your house, apartment, or condo, or you have a post office box. Everybody gets mail. But does everybody get their mail monitored? Well, if you’re a Second Amendment supporter or you don’t like Joe Biden, you may have somebody watching your mailbox.
What is happening?
What we used to know as “hate speech” is now presidentially acceptable speech, and what has followed from it is no surprise.
It has been a canard of the Left that “words matter.” We are lectured that “hate speech” leads inevitably to street violence.
So how ironic that the Left defames nearly half of America as dangerous “semi-fascist” extremists, white-raged and privileged, ultra MAGA, and guilty of all sorts of thought crimes from secession to civil insurrection? And what is the result?
Fortnum and Mason has given up on calling the police to catch shoplifters, instead using private detectives and bringing their own prosecutions against thieves who have stolen from their stores, according to reports.
The upmarket department store, with shops in prime central London locations, has lost faith in the police amid fears the cost of living crisis is sparking a surge in shoplifting, according to reports in the Evening Standard.
He was killed around noon on 24 September during hours of intense shelling in the city of Bakhmut in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. We came across him by chance, and learned later than his name was Andriy Yablonsky, and he was 52.
A woman in a red coat screamed in anguish nearby, as she sheltered in a doorway. This was Andriy’s sister. “What should I do for my brother?” she wailed. For more than an hour he couldn’t be moved because there was no let-up in the barrage.
