“Justice”

In the summer of 2019, a baby was born in Nova Scotia with “serious medical complications and significant developmental delays.” Concerns by a medical geneticist led to police becoming involved. When the mother, 23, was discovered sexting her father during a visit to the neonatal intensive care unit, it all made sense.

Burger King is being sued by unhappy customers who claim its flagship Whopper burger is too small.

Customers in a proposed US class action have accused Burger King of false advertising, saying pictures of its best-selling fast-food item make it look bigger than it actually is.

The case claims pictures portray the burger with ingredients that “overflow over the bun,” making it appear 35pc larger and containing more than double the meat actually served.

“Justice, justice you shall pursue,” the Bible commands (Deuteronomy 16:20); and that, in doing justice, one must not “recognize faces.”

Commentators ask why the good book repeats the word justice, since every word is thought to have significance. The most relevant is that there are two kinds of justice: substantive and procedural.

The former relates to making the punishment fit the crime; the latter requires that correct procedures be employed to determine whether a crime has been committed.

A class-action lawsuit has been launched over the now-outlawed and racially skewed Toronto police practice of stopping, questioning and documenting people in non-criminal encounters, also known as “carding.”

While the practice was abandoned in Toronto in 2015 amid intense controversy and has since been reigned in across Ontario, with the introduction of clearer rules around what are also known as “street checks,” Ayaan Farah is an example of how data collected in the past continues to disproportionately haunt racialized Torontonians.

Farah, a 38-year-old Black woman and representative plaintiff in the lawsuit, temporarily lost her job as a worker at Pearson International Airport because of information collected by Toronto police in a 2011 encounter. That information ended up in the hands of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and resulted in the removal of her security clearance.

A secret criminal trial in Ontario in which the identities of the judge, lawyers and accused were all concealed from the public is the latest in a series of undisclosed or confidential court hearings to be revealed in Canada in the past year and a half.

The secrecy extends to where the alleged crimes occurred, what they were and what police agency investigated them. Not only are the files sealed, even the docket number is a secret. The level of court at which the trial was held has not been publicly specified.

John and Nisha Whitehead over at The Rutherford Institute always write compelling essays documenting America’s descent toward tyranny.  “A State of Martial Law: America Is a Military Dictatorship Disguised as a Democracy” is no exception and deserves reading.

In that essay, the legal duo reminded me of something John Lennon once warned: “When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game.  The establishment will irritate you — pull your beard, flick your face — to make you fight.  Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you.”