More rallies protesting COVID-19 vaccine mandates and other pandemic restrictions will get underway today in Ottawa and several other major cities in Canada.
A second weekend of protests by the so-called “freedom convoy” will take place in the country’s capital, with as many as 300 to 400 trucks expected to try and enter the downtown core, according to police estimates, along with up to 2,000 people on foot and another 1,000 counter-protesters.
Organizers of the “Freedom Convoy” that has gridlocked downtown Ottawa for the last week are facing a potential $9.8-million class-action lawsuit over continuous vehicle horn noise, filed on behalf of residents of the city’s downtown core.
According to a statement of claim filed with the Ontario Superior Court of Justice on Friday by lawyer Paul Champ, the lawsuit is seeking $4.8 million for “private nuisance” and another $5 million in “punitive damages.”
With a voter recall four months away, things aren’t going too well for San Francisco’s far-left District Attorney Chesa Boudin, whose office appears to now be a dumpster fire of controversies.
Thursday the news got out through court transcripts that a shouting match broke out in a courthouse, between Chesa’s staff and the lawyers of a witness, Magen Hayashi, who testified that Chesa’s D.A. office told her to withhold critical evidence that could have exculpated an officer in a police brutality case. The D.A.’s investigation of the matter neglected to mention that the cop in question was answering a domestic violence call and didn’t just start beating the suspect for no good reason. The officer’s defense team thought that relevant, and apparently, Chesa’s staff were intimidating the witness.
FOR THE PAST two weeks, observers of North Korea’s strange and tightly restricted corner of the internet began to notice that the country seemed to be dealing with some serious connectivity problems. On several different days, practically all of its websites—the notoriously isolated nation only has a few dozen—intermittently dropped offline en masse, from the booking site for its Air Koryo airline to Naenara, a page that serves as the official portal for dictator Kim Jong-un’s government. At least one of the central routers that allow access to the country’s networks appeared at one point to be paralyzed, crippling the Hermit Kingdom’s digital connections to the outside world.
The “war” with Russia is as real as Russiagate.
Biden tried to be FDR and failed at that. Now he’s settling for playing a senile elderly JFK.
If you watch 5 minutes of CNN or any cable news network, you might believe that we’re on the verge of war with Russia. That’s what the same people who claimed that President Trump was working for Putin want you to believe. Their new war with Russia is as real as Russiagate.
Twenty-eight months after it began in a clandestine shipyard deep in the Brazilian Amazon, one of the more unlikely criminal voyages of all time came to an end on Tuesday with the seven sentences handed down by a court in north-west Spain.
Agustín Álvarez, a 31-year-old former Spanish amateur boxing champion, was jailed for 11 years for piloting a semi-submersible “narco-submarine” carrying 3,068kg of cocaine worth an estimated €123m (£104m) across the Atlantic. His two crewmates, Ecuadorian cousins Luis Tomás Benítez Manzaba and Pedro Roberto Delgado Manzaba, received the same sentence, while four Spaniards who conspired with Álvarez to help guide the sub ashore were jailed for between seven and nine years.
Truckers in France are reportedly planning to emulate the Canadian ‘Freedom Convoy’ by mobilizing groups of big rigs to protest vaccine mandates and other Covid-19 restrictions set by Paris. According to a BFM TV report, demonstrators plan to “paralyze” the French capital next week before joining a wider “European convergence” in Brussels.
I live in downtown Ottawa, right in the middle of the trucker convoy protest. They are literally camped out below my bedroom window. My new neighbours moved in on Friday and they seem determined to stay. I have read a lot about what my new neighbours are supposedly like, mostly from reporters and columnists who write from distant vantage points somewhere in the media heartland of Canada. Apparently the people who inhabit the patch of asphalt next to my bedroom are white supremacists, racists, hatemongers, pseudo-Trumpian grifters, and even QAnon-style nutters.
h/t Sanwin
A new documentary shows the contentious results of ’70s-era “experimental education.”
“As an example of this kind of education in action, the documentary introduces us to a student whose thesis is entitled “Theater for Social Change with an Emphasis on Agricultural Politics.” (We get a glimpse of her choreography: a dance by people wearing cow heads.) In the film, several students admit that they just wouldn’t feel comfortable in a more traditional academic setting; one of them, a girl with pink hair, says that she loves Hampshire because she can be around “other weird kids like me.”
Local authorities are more concerned with protecting their reputations than protecting vulnerable children.
A report published this week by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) has confirmed what some of us have known for some time – that the UK is failing to address the widespread sexual exploitation of children.
Six case studies were chosen for the Child Sexual Exploitation by Organised Networks investigation report: Tower Hamlets, Bristol, Swansea, Durham, St Helens and Warwickshire. The report claims that police forces and local councils are still failing to properly identify and investigate grooming gangs, and they consistently underestimate the true scale of organised networks of abuse.
Black Lives Matter’s fundraising pages on ActBlue were deactivated Friday, a day after the Washington Examiner exposed that BLM was still accepting donations on the Democratic platform despite claiming it had stopped amid questions about its finances.
California and Washington state ordered BLM in January to cease soliciting contributions in their states until it discloses its finances for 2020, the year it raked in tens of millions during the nationwide unrest prompted by George Floyd’s killing at the hands of police. BLM said Wednesday it had shut down online fundraising while it sorts out its compliance issues, but the group continued to accept charitable contributions through its ActBlue fundraising pages as recently as Thursday afternoon.
Local towing companies are rejecting Ottawa police requests for help towing ‘Freedom Convoy’ trucks out of the downtown core, according to a senior police source.
The source told CTV News Ottawa that even if police decided to tow the trucks from the downtown streets they have been clogging up for the past week, they wouldn’t have enough tow trucks to do it.
Police outreach to tow truck companies across the city has been rebuffed, the source said.
A farmer who destroyed a car on his land with a forklift has been cleared of charges after a jury considered a 17th-century law on the right to defend property.
Robert Hooper, 57, accepted that he wrote off a £16,000 Vauxhall Corsa by flipping it over with the spikes of his tractor before pushing it off his land. Video of the clash was viewed by millions on social media.
However, Hooper told a court that “an Englishman’s home is his castle” and that his action was justified as he had been attacked by a “strutting and agitated” shirtless youth who had spent the day drinking lager at a nearby beauty spot.
For years now, since the defeat of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Canada’s ivory tower commentariat has consistently pushed for the Conservative party to be a squishy, unrecognizable, amorphous entity that no one can distinguish from the liberal elite status quo.
h/t SDMAT
