New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern has endorsed granting a Mongrel Mob leader special exemption to cross Auckland’s border so he could help minimise Covid-19 spread in hard to reach communities.
The head of the Waikato Mongrel Mob chapter, Sonny Fatupaito, was given essential worker status, which enabled him to enter Auckland last weekend, while the city was under level three lockdown, with a border in place.
… According to police, the large-scale operation was directed against 67 suspected members of a network that has been operating internationally since 2016.
They allegedly provided illicit payment services and laundered funds from criminal acts.
The majority of the 67 suspects are Syrian nationals. The remaining suspects have either German, Jordanian, Lebanese, Turkish or Ukrainian citizenship, Reul said.
Two of the arrested suspects had previously been classified as Islamist threats.
“Travelling on September 30th was a mistake, and I regret it. This first National Day of Truth and Reconciliation was a time for Indigenous people and non-Indigenous alike – to reflect, and connect, think about the past but also focus on the future,” he said.
US and Chinese scientists were planning to create a new coronavirus before the pandemic erupted, leaked proposals show.
Last month, a grant application submitted to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) revealed that an international team of scientists had planned to mix genetic data of similar strains to create a new virus.
The grant application was made in 2018 and leaked to Drastic, the pandemic origins analysis group.
I think the China class should be rounded up.
Climate envoy John Kerry made an extraordinary admission to French TV on Monday that President Biden ‘literally had not been aware’ of the fallout of the AUKUS submarine deal that caused France to lose a $90billion submarine contract.
‘He literally had not been aware of what had transpired,’ Kerry, who serves as President Biden’s climate envoy, told French broadcaster BFMTV.
Singapore has trialled patrol robots that blast warnings at people engaging in “undesirable social behaviour”, adding to an arsenal of surveillance technology in the tightly controlled city-state that is fuelling privacy concerns.
From vast numbers of CCTV cameras to trials of lampposts kitted out with facial recognition tech, Singapore is seeing an explosion of tools to track its inhabitants.
KENOSHA, Wisconsin — An Illinois man who shot three people during a protest over police brutality in Wisconsin last year was justified because the men confronted him and two of them tried to wrestle his gun away, a use-of-force expert called by the defense testified at a pretrial hearing Tuesday.
The expert, John Black, spent hours outlining the moments that led to Kyle Rittenhouse’s decisions to shoot Joseph Rosenbaum, Anthony Huber and Gaige Grosskreutz, offering a preview of the defense team’s strategy when Rittenhouse’s trial begins next month. Black testified that video shows Rosenbaum chasing Rittenhouse and reaching for the teenager’s gun, Huber attacking Rittenhouse with a skateboard and trying to wrestle away his gun, and Grosskreutz running at him with a pistol in his hand.
A long-awaited, comprehensive report, released last week, concluded that male-to-female transgender athletes do, in fact, have a competitive advantage against biologically female athletes and that it is impossible to guarantee both safety and fairness if male-to-female transgender athletes are allowed to compete in women’s events.
Update: Suspected school gunman ID’d, remains on the loose after shooting that left four injured
Police are investigating an active shooter situation reported at Timberview High School in Arlington, Texas, the school district said.
An unknown suspect apparently shot multiple people before fleeing the scene, according to an internal police briefing. The number of victims was not immediately clear.
The fight that led up to the shooting at Timberview High School in Arlington which is Mansfield ISD.#schoolshooting #ArlingtonTX #texasschool pic.twitter.com/2q1aA0cecZ
— Young Malcolm X (@Hurrikane43) October 6, 2021
Check out the twitter feed, this video may be authentic.
Counterintelligence officials said in a top secret cable to all stations and bases around the world that too many of the people it recruits from other countries to spy for the U.S. are being lost.
WASHINGTON — Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world last week about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said.
The message, in an unusual top secret cable, said that the C.I.A.’s counterintelligence mission center had looked at dozens of cases in the last several years involving foreign informants who had been killed, arrested or most likely compromised. Although brief, the cable laid out the specific number of agents executed by rival intelligence agencies — a closely held detail that counterintelligence officials typically do not share in such cables.
The U.S. government is using ‘keyword warrants’ to uncover the identity of anyone who searches Google and other search engines for certain search terms that may be related to a crime, according to a new report.
The controversial practice, which is already drawing civil liberties concerns about sweeping government overreach, was revealed on Tuesday in ‘accidentally unsealed’ court documents obtained by Forbes.
Keyword warrants — which have been secretly employed for at least several years — are drawing backlash as many argue they violate an individual’s constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure.
OTTAWA — At least for now, Erin O’Toole’s leadership of the Conservatives appears safe, despite the party’s election loss and the grumbling from some MPs that he’s taken the party too far to the left.
But at their first post-election caucus meeting on Tuesday, the 119 Conservative MPs did vote to give themselves the power to conduct their own review of O’Toole’s leadership if enough MPs request it — a power they had declined after the last two elections.
Sphincter relaxant saved the day again!
Ontario reports 476 new COVID-19 cases; 14 additional deaths
Ontario reported 476 new COVID-19 cases on Wednesday, along with 14 additional deaths, as the province’s known active caseload hit its lowest point in six weeks.
The province reported 429 new COVID-19 cases on Tuesday and 511 on Monday.
Even telecommuting federal public servants must be vaccinated draft policy states: union executive
OTTAWA — Even federal employees who work from home will have to be vaccinated to keep their jobs if the government’s draft mandatory-vaccine policy stands, according to one union executive.
Stephane Aubry, vice-president of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC), says the draft, as well as other communication between unions and the government, suggests that the Treasury Board is leaning toward making vaccination a condition of employment.
That won’t happen. Public service union members are too important to LPC election prospects, some sort of expensive, to us, compromise will be worked out.
“Not only is this proposal a grotesque waste of taxpayer money,” said Mr. Johnson, “it would be a dangerous precedent of government collusion with the media. Biden’s collusion with the press has already caused enough damage to freedom of speech and freedom of the press.”
The Pandora Papers, the latest leak of offshore financial records, don’t seem to have a particular focus on Canada — at least based on what has been revealed so far.
But they nonetheless shed light on a global network of illicit financial flows of which “Canada is a hub,” says James Cohen, executive director of the Canadian chapter of Transparency International.
