How long did it take for Parag Agrawal to stomp all over hopes that the change in Twitter management might not make matters even worse? Less than 24 hours, as it turns out. The first major initiative by Twitter in the Agrawal era is not to make speech freer, but to give Twitter’s apparatchiks and activists even more power and less clarity on what will bring the ban hammer…
Author: Blazingcatfur
Dozens of former Afghan forces killed or disappeared by Taliban, rights group says
More than 100 former Afghan security forces have been killed by the Taliban or have disappeared since the militants seized control, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch.
The rights group said an amnesty promised by Taliban’s leadership had not prevented local commanders from targeting former soldiers and police.
HRW accused the leadership of “condoning” the “deliberate” killings.
A Taliban spokesman recently denied any revenge killings were taking place.
What a God-Awful scam that all was.
Daunte Wright killing: potential jurors face grilling on policing and protest
When attorneys begin sifting through potential jurors on Tuesday in the trial of a suburban Minneapolis police officer who says she meant to use her Taser instead of her gun when she killed Daunte Wright, they will take a hard look at attitudes toward policing and protest.
The prospective jurors in the manslaughter trial of the former Brooklyn Center officer Kim Potter have responded to questionnaires similar to those used in Derek Chauvin’s murder trial for the killing of George Floyd.
Jussie Smollett is the ‘real victim’
Defense attorney names ‘real victim’ in Jussie Smollett case as trial begins
Jussie Smollett’s defense attorney insisted that his client was the victim of a real attack as his trial opened in Chicago. Smollett could be sent to prison if found guilty of staging a fake hate crime.
Smollett’s attorney, Nenye Uche, rejected accusations that Smollett had masterminded a fake racist attack against himself in January 2019, claiming the actor was innocent and “a real victim” as the trial kicked off in Chicago, Illinois on Monday.
Uche argued that Abimbola and Olabinjo Osundairo – two Nigerian brothers who told Chicago Police they had been paid by Smollett to attack him – actually hated Smollett “because of who he is as a person” and were “sophisticated, highly intelligent criminals.”
German court finds former ‘ISIS’ member guilty of genocide
Frankfurt’s Higher Regional Court on Tuesday found 29-year-old Taha A.-J.guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity resulting in death, sentencing him to life in prison.
The Frankfurt case is the first in the world to decide whether a former member of the so-called “Islamic State” (IS) group played a role in the attempted genocide of the Yazidi religious group.
The proceedings had to be briefly suspended as the defendant passed out when the verdict was read aloud in court.
What To Know About the Contacts Book That Could Be Crucial to Ghislaine Maxwell’s Trial
The trial of Ghislaine Maxwell began on Monday, more than two years after the death of her alleged associate Jeffrey Epstein, with whom she had been charged with conspiring to sexually abuse minors.
The trial is likely to be a media spectacle. The crimes of Jeffrey Epstein—and his death by suicide in August 2019—have spawned numerous books, documentaries and conspiracy theories. Maxwell’s trial may be the first time since Epstein’s criminal proceedings that the public gets a glimpse of the scope of the government’s evidence against him—and the evidence against her as an alleged accomplice.
Ghislaine Maxwell: trial to enter second day with Epstein’s pilot testifying
Ghislaine Maxwell’s child sex-trafficking trial enters its second day of testimony on Tuesday, with the longtime pilot of her alleged accomplice, the late financier Jeffrey Epstein, returning to the witness stand in federal court in Manhattan.
Maxwell, 59, has pleaded not guilty to six counts arising from allegedly procuring teen girls for Epstein, some as young as 14. Epstein killed himself in August 2019 while jailed awaiting his own trial for his transportation and abuse of minor teens.
Canada is turning feminists into criminals – Critics of transgender ideology could soon be charged with ‘hate speech’.
I often feel like I’m banging my head against the wall, trying to get through to complacent Canadians, who seem to politely accept anything the government throws their way, no questions asked.
Back in 2016, I was one of the lone voices who spoke out against Bill C-16, Canada’s gender-identity legislation, testifying at the Senate that enshrining gender identity in law would likely result in the nullification of women’s sex-based rights. All my fears came to fruition – and more – as males who identify as ‘transwomen’ are being transferred to women’s prisons, allowed access to shelters for women escaping domestic abuse, permitted to use women’s and girls’ changing rooms and washrooms, and dictating what women may and may not say about all of this.
CBC says you use bad words!
Words and phrases you may want to think twice about using
Have you ever casually used the terms “spirit animal,” “first-world problem,” or “spooky”? It might be time to rethink your use of these phrases and remove them from your daily lingo.
CBC Ottawa compiled a small list of words, submitted by readers and some of our journalists who are Black, Indigenous and people of colour. We ran some of the words by anti-racism and language experts, who said some of these phrases can be hurtful to various groups of people for their historical and cultural context.
FUCK OFF CBC it’s my culture.
U.S. pushes Trudeau government to make good on 200-soldier peacekeeping force it promised in 2017
OTTAWA — The United States is pressing Canada to commit medical units and drones to United Nations missions at a peacekeeping summit in South Korea next week, and to come up with a 200-strong force first promised four years ago.
The request came in a letter to Global Affairs Canada from the U.S. on the eve of the high-level meeting in Seoul, where U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration wants allies to renew their commitment to peacekeeping.
Don’t they know there’s a shortage of military issue high heels for the infantranny?
Ontario reports 687 new Covid cases … and the unvaccinated are banned from planes & trains
Ontario’s COVID-19 death toll hits 10K with 3 more virus-related deaths confirmed today
Ontario is reporting close to 700 new COVID-19 cases and three more virus-related deaths, pushing the province’s virus-related death toll to 10,000 today.
Provincial health officials logged 687 new infections on Tuesday, down from 788 on Monday but up from 613 one week ago.
Unvaccinated travellers over the age of 12 barred from planes and trains as of today
Unvaccinated travellers over the age of 12 won’t be able to board a plane or train in Canada beginning today, and a negative COVID-19 test will no longer serve as a substitute for most people.
The policy came into effect on Oct. 30, but the federal government allowed a short transition period for unvaccinated travellers who could board as long as they provided a negative molecular COVID-19 test taken within 72 hours before their trip.
Moderna chief predicts existing vaccines will struggle with omicron
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (Financial Times) — The chief executive of Moderna has predicted that existing vaccines will be much less effective at tackling omicron than earlier strains of Covid-19 and warned it would take months before pharmaceutical companies can manufacture new variant-specific jabs at scale.
Stephane Bancel said the high number of omicron mutations on the spike protein, which the virus uses to infect human cells, and the rapid spread of the variant in South Africa, suggested the current crop of vaccines may need to be modified next year.
“There is no world, I think, where [the effectiveness] is the same level … we had with delta,” Bancel told the Financial Times in an interview at the company’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
American cities are reverting to primitive, self-destructive behavior
American cities on the Democrats’ watch are drifting away from civilization. The most obvious problem is the rise in crime, everything from murders to mass retail theft. Just open any Chicago or New York newspaper to see what I mean. But the decline in civilization happens in smaller ways, too, as a story out of San Francisco perfectly illustrates.
The Search for COVID-19 Origin: New Book Leans Toward Lab Leak
It’s been almost two years since COVID-19 struck, and the origin of the virus remains a mystery. Did the virus jump from animals to humans in a natural spillover event, or was it the result of a laboratory leak? A new book explores these and other questions on the source of the coronavirus that has killed more than 5 million people worldwide to date.
“We don’t come to a conclusion, but we do lean towards the lab leak being slightly more likely at this stage,” said UK science writer Matt Ridley, who co-authored “Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19” with Canadian molecular biologist Alina Chan, a postdoctoral researcher specializing in gene-therapy and cell engineering at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University.
The Lethal Mix of Woke Rap and Live Nation
When leftist causes and massive concerts intersect – and turn deadly.
On December 6, 1969, Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones looked out over the massive crowd at California’s Altamont Speedway and saw the concert security staff, the Hell’s Angels, beating up an audience member. The Angels, who were paid in beer rather than cash to act as security that day, had apprehended a man named Meredith Hunter, 27, who attempted to approach the stage. When Hunter attempted to approach the stage again, this time with a revolver, he was beaten by the Angels and then stabbed to death by Angel Alan Passaro. The melee, which was captured on film, caused a nervous Jagger to announce, “People, people, let’s be cool!”
Why young Kurds are migrating to Europe – This is a crisis built on aspiration, not desperation
Why have so many Iraqi Kurds made the journey to both the Poland-Belarus border and the English Channel? The situation of 2021 should not be confused with 2015. It is not mere desperation that motivates these journeys — aspiration, and the chance to embarrass a resented political order have played a part as well.