Facebook owner Meta Platforms has removed more than 500 accounts linked to an online disinformation network primarily based in China.
The accounts had promoted the claims of a fake Swiss biologist called “Wilson Edwards”, who alleged the US was meddling in efforts to find the origins of Covid-19.
Edwards’ comments had been widely carried by Chinese state media outlets.
However, the Swiss embassy said that it was unlikely this person existed.
Romana Didulo, a leading Canadian QAnon figure with an alleged history of encouraging her followers to shoot health-care workers, was taken into custody by the RCMP’s national security team in Victoria, B.C.
Didulo, who often refers to herself as the “Queen of Canada,” said in a YouTube video that the RCMP’s integrated national-security enforcement team (INSET) served her with a search warrant and told her she was being detained under B.C.’s mental health act.
That’s silly. Justin is the Queen of Canada.
CHICAGO — The man Jussie Smollett allegedly paid to help him stage a hate crime took the stand in the actor’s criminal trial Wednesday, describing how he took part in the hoax because he thought the ‘”Empire” star could help push his own acting career.
Abimbola Osundairo, 28, told jurors in Chicago’s criminal court on day three of the trial how Smollett directed nearly every aspect of the alleged fake attack, from the racial and homophobic slurs him and his brother, Olabinjo, were to use down to who should throw the punches.
The Ontario government will announce on Thursday that it will lower the age of eligibility for COVID-19 booster shots to people aged 50 and older this year, sources say.
Two sources told CBC Toronto that the expansion of eligibility is expected to begin around mid-December. The news was first reported by the Globe and Mail.
Those presently eligible for a booster in Ontario are people aged 70 and older, health-care workers or essential caregivers in congregate settings, people who received two doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine or one dose of Janssen, and First Nations, Inuit and Métis adults and their non-Indigenous household members.
Oakland County prosecutor Karen McDonald on Wednesday said she is considering bringing charges against the parents of Ethan Crumbley, the suspect in the Oxford High School shooting.
On Wednesday, officials announced that Crumbley will face numerous charges including one count of terrorism causing death, four counts of first degree murder and seven counts of assault with intent to murder.
The Omicron variant has fuelled a “worrying” surge in coronavirus cases in South Africa and is rapidly becoming the dominant strain, local health officials have said, as more countries including the US detected their first cases of the new strain.
The United Arab Emirates and South Korea – which is already battling a worsening outbreak and record daily infections – also confirmed cases of the Omicron variant.
Can we nuke China now?
The New York Times has identified another culprit in its war on “misinformation”, claiming that cute animals featuring in viral content help to spread right-wing propaganda and coronavirus conspiracies.
The mother of Waukesha attack suspect Darrell E. Brooks Jr. has penned a lengthy letter charging that the American legal system failed to provide her mentally ill son adequate resources throughout his life.
According to Dawn Woods, Brooks came from a “loving Christian family and is the grandson of ministers,” alleging that he has “suffered from mental health issues since he was very young.”
Will Thomas was a moderately successful swimmer on the University of Pennsylvania’s men’s swim team for three years. But then he took a year off, reemerged as transgender, and started dominating the women’s swim team.
Airbnb has reportedly listed more than a dozen properties on land owned by the Xinjiang paramilitary corporation, which has been sanctioned by the US over its alleged involvement in mass human rights abuses against Uyghurs by the Chinese government.
The American media outlet Axios reported on Wednesday that the short-term rental company was at risk of exposure to US regulations preventing business dealings with sanctioned entities. Airbnb, which is a major sponsor of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, said it was not required to vet the “underlying landowner” of properties it lists.
Understanding the sociology of organizations
America’s major institutions have gone woke the same way that someone goes bankrupt: slowly, then all at once. How is it that so many of us have had the experience of being in a diversity-training session divided into racially segregated “affinity groups” or reading yet another sackcloth-and-ashes statement from management and thinking: They can’t possibly believe this, right? Any answer should begin with the dominant theory from the sociology of organizations: neo-institutionalism and isomorphism. The theory explains that organizations go beyond their core competencies to imitate market leaders and to meet the demands of their trading partners, the regulatory state, and key employees.
Two American cities, San Francisco and Chicago, seem to be competing to see which one can descend farther into the dystopia of gang rule, with honest citizens held captive to anarchy in the streets, afraid to leave their homes and finding nowhere to buy life’s essentials if they do venture out. Master filmmaker John Carpenter got it wrong when he predicted which American cities would fail in his 1980s and ’90s dystopian fantasies Escape from New York and Escape from L.A.
The Waukesha killer’s allies are sitting in the White House.
Two years ago, Senator Kamala Harris, along with Senator Cory Booker and six other Democrat Senate members, attacked the Justice Department for monitoring black supremacists. The politicians signed a letter falsely claiming that black identity extremists was “a fabricated term based on a faulty assessment of a small number of isolated incidents”.
And they argued that monitoring black racists was racist.
There’s nothing principled about its rejection of the death penalty
The state of Oklahoma plans to execute Bigler Jobe Stouffer II on December 9, and officials there are hoping for an uneventful procedure. For the past decade, Oklahoma’s lethal injection program has attracted international scrutiny for its botched executions, including one in 2014 that lasted nearly 45 minutes and another this past October in which the prisoner convulsed and vomited over himself.
In June, I published a carefully researched and edited paper entitled “Net Zero 2050: Rhetoric and Realities” in the “policy brief” series of the Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of Saskatchewan, where at the time I was an adjunct professor.
The paper argues that net-zero rhetoric is wishful political thinking shaped by ideology instead of fact. The ultimate goal of net-zero politics is to impose a radical energy transition that demands a top-to-bottom physical and social-economic restructuring of society, with no credible road map in sight. Think of it as telling people to step out of a perfectly serviceable airplane without a parachute, with assurances that politicians will work out alternatives on the way down.
