A man has been ordered to pay $12m (£8.6m) for his role setting a Minneapolis police station on fire during rioting last May.
The fine for Dylan Shakespeare Robinson, 23, who pleaded guilty to an arson charge in December, will follow a four year prison sentence.
Robinson’s lawyer has said “there is no realistic chance” his client will be able to afford the fine.
Three other men who also pleaded guilty will be sentenced at a later date.
Ontario is reporting 3,887 cases of #COVID19 and nearly 53,100 tests completed. Locally, there are 1,331 new cases in Toronto, 871 in Peel, 267 in York Region, 208 in Durham and 204 in Hamilton.
— Christine Elliott (@celliottability) April 30, 2021
MPP Randy Hillier charged after organizing Kemptville anti-lockdown rally
Ontario Provincial Police have charged independent MPP Randy Hillier for his role in an anti-lockdown rally last month that drew dozens of people to a restaurant in Kemptville, Ont.
Hillier was one of four people charged Thursday for defying COVID-19 restrictions at the South Branch Bistro on April 8, 2021.
Police identified Hillier, the MPP for Lanark–Frontenac–Kingston and a vocal opponent of the province’s COVID-19 rules, as an organizer of the rally.
Hmmm …
UK rate of Indian Covid variant spikes EIGHT-FOLD in a fortnight as cases surge to 400 and PHE confirms there are THREE types of the strain
JERUSALEM (AP) — A stampede at a religious festival attended by tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews in northern Israel killed at least 45 people and injured about 150 early Friday, medical officials said. It was one of the country’s deadliest civilian disasters.
The stampede began when large numbers of people thronged a narrow tunnel-like passage during the event, according to witnesses and video footage. People began falling on top of each other near the end of the walkway, as they descended slippery metal stairs, witnesses said.
One of the injured, Avraham Leibe, told Israeli public broadcaster Kan that a crush of people trying to descend the mountain caused a “general bedlam” on a slippery metal slope followed by stairs. “Nobody managed to halt,” he said from a hospital bed. “I saw one after the other fall.”
Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina made an eloquent, uplifting speech on behalf of Republicans, in response to Joe Biden’s quasi–State of the union address.
He spoke of racial grievances, real ones, including a recent instance when the Washington Post’s bigfoot fact-checker Glenn Kessler attempted to debunk Scott’s impoverished background in the Jim Crow South as somehow “privileged,” with revolting claims that Scott “had it easy,” which was beyond horsehockey. Scott left egg all over Kessler’s face.
How this pernicious ideology rejects rational inquiry and objective truth.
On September 22, 2020, President Trump issued Executive Order 13950, “Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping.” The order contained the kind of emotionally charged language about critical race theory that is seldom seen in these legalistic documents: “This ideology is rooted in the pernicious and false belief that America is an irredeemably racist and sexist country; that some people, simply on account of their race or sex, are oppressors; and that racial and sexual identities are more important than our common status as human beings and Americans.”
Last October, I reported here that French president Emmanuel Macron had just “delivered what, on the face of it, seemed to be a remarkable speech on Islam.” Having previously been wishy-washy on the topic, he now promised a new program “intended to defend French laïcité, or official secularism, from ‘Islamist separatism,’” which he explicitly characterized as an existential threat to the Republic. Acknowledging that “one reason why ‘Islamist separatism’ had been allowed to fester was the ‘cowardice’ of French authorities,” Macron proclaimed that a new day had dawned. In public services, in cultural and athletic associations, in schools and universities, and in other sectors of society, Islamic indoctrination would be officially, firmly, and comprehensively resisted, and Islam itself modernized into an “Islam of the Enlightenment.”
Environmentalism is one of the peculiar obsessions of the elite. Rarely does a day go by without some A-list celeb regaling us with a tale of our impending doom, why we are to blame for it and what thing we need to stop consuming. From Emma Thompson jetting to London to preach at an Extinction Rebellion rally to Prince Harry’s telling refelection on Covid-19 – ‘it’s almost as though Mother Nature has sent us to our rooms for bad behaviour’ – it seems we can never escape from the green obsessions of our social betters.
More than 200 Seattle police officers walked off the job last year, according to the Seattle Police Department, following weeks of protests and heightened “anti-police rhetoric.”
Like the Louisville, Kentucky, police department, which revealed, earlier this week, that it is in a “staffing crisis” following the departure of nearly 200 of its own officers, Seattle’s police department is losing police officers “at a record pace.”
I’m leaving the big show, canceling my print subscriptions, packing up my DC apartment and chucking away all those unread back issues of the Atlantic
I’m about to fly home to London after five years of reporting from America for the Sunday Times, first from New York, then Washington, taking in really a lot of strange and surprising places along the way. Fortunately, I got one of the last doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine before its suspension sparked yet another wave of national hysteria. I’m proud to be taking a little shot of all-American adenovirus back with me to the Old Country.
No foreigner can ever really claim to know America; there’s just one of you in a country of 330 million. But misapprehensions can be corrected. And of all the many misguided views I had about this country when I arrived, few have changed more than my perceptions of its media.
Between January 1 and April 25, the number of homicides increased by 92% compared to the same period in 2020. More than 80% of the shooting victims in 2020 were black.
“There’s way more people it seems like with guns now than there ever has been,” another Minneapolis cop told me, and “much less hesitation to use them.” These officers theorize that the explanation for the crime surge is related to the city’s political climate over the past year, which in their view has allowed perpetrators to wreak havoc without consequence. “They feel emboldened and they feel untouchable, in my opinion,” the cop said.
Nothing is stranger than the contemporary American university.
Not long ago, Americans used to idolize their universities. Indeed, in science, math, engineering, medicine and business, many of these meritocratic departments and schools remain among the top-ranked in the world.
UK head teacher prompts outrage, heated debate after revealing her school ban on ‘sexist’ expressions like ‘boys and girls’
A UK primary school headmistress has kicked off a storm after revealing that she has instructed her teachers not to use a number of “sexist” phrases, including ‘let’s go, guys’ and ‘boys and girls’.
Sarah Hewitt-Clarkson, who heads the Anderton Park primary school in Birmingham, told the Good Morning Britain show on Thursday that students as young as three are taught to reject the use of the banned expressions by holding up posters.
In France this week, 20 retired military generals, 80 officers, and 1,000 lower-ranking soldiers signed an open letter expressing concern over “mortal dangers” they say face the Republic. President Macron’s government has instructed the army chief of staff to discipline the signatories for inciting insurrection.
The letter bears close attention on several grounds. Although the signatories warn they wish to act only after the outbreak of civil conflict, Macron’s response shows the government understands the situation has already deteriorated to a point where a true coup or uprising—an event quite unlike the shambolic ordeal in Washington on January 6th—might erupt at the slightest provocation.
Freedom of speech is not the high holy ideal it once was. Freedom of expression, the wider concept, expression as thought, speech, art, performance and protest, is likewise no longer the clear and unchallengeable central core value of our democracies.
