Showing posts with label Northern Ireland. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Northern Ireland. Show all posts

Monday, May 6, 2024

News roundup, 6 May 2024

- Three men, all Indian citizens, have been arrested in connection with the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey last year. Police are investigating links with three other homicides as well, including the death of an 11 year old boy in Edmonton.

- The Israeli government has shut down all of Al Jazeera's operations in the country and raided its offices. They accuse the broadcaster of "incitement" and "working with Hamas", which the broadcaster denies. Notably, the BBC was not allowed to film the raid. The UN's Human Rights office as well as the Committee to Protect Journalists are condemning the decision. In other Israel news, many Bedouin citizens of that country are unable to build bomb shelters to protect themselves from Hamas-launched missiles - because even though they live in villages that predate the founding of Israel, the communities have never been officially recognized, and thus do not have the ability to issue building permits. So the Israeli state considers any shelters they build to be unauthorized structures, and demolishes them. Then they cry a few crocodile tears at best, or smile smugly at worst, when Bedouin citizens die in the attacks. Meanwhile the Globe and Mail's Marsha Lederman warns supporters of both sides of the confllict against reducing the matter to simple slogans.

- It's increasingly apparent that one of the biggest barriers to effective climate action is the agricultural sector. In the European Union, rioting farmers have been doing their damnedest to undermine efforts to make Europe a leader in sustainable agriculture. No wonder farmers have been downgraded, in the minds of a lot of people, from "salt of the Earth" to "necessary evil". On a related note, Florida governor Ron DeSantis has just signed a bill outlawing the sale of cultured meat in the state. He also  spouted conspiracy nonsense about the supposed global elite's plans to force everyone to eat it, even as he signed legislation taking away his own citizens' freedom to eat it if they so choose.

- A federal appeals court in the US has ruled that a lawsuit by an organization called Our Children’s Trust on behalf of 21 young Americans lacks standing and must be dismissed by the US district judge hearing the case. The judges who made the ruling are Trump appointees, but this was an "emergency" petition filed by the Biden administration's Justice Department, who claimed that the government could be "irreparably harmed" if it were forced to waste resources litigating the case.

- The Manitoba government will be using funds from an out-of-court settlement with the tobacco companies to pay for the building of a new headquarters for CancerCare.

- Following the report of a woman being punched in a Winnipeg grocery store by an employee who suspected her of shoplifting, other members of the community say that this is not the first time something like this has happened at that store - nor even the second.

- Use of the "Community Connections" service in the lobby of Winnipeg's Millennium library are on the increase, even as the city prepares to shut it down so that Evan Duncan's constituents don't have to look at poor people when they use the library.

- In something worthy of the Piranha Brothers, a man in Co. Antrim, Northern Ireland suffered potentially life-altering injuries after having his hands nailed to a fence. This has apparently happened before; there have been no official statements regarding responsibilty but many locals suspect Loyalist paramilitaries.

Saturday, February 3, 2024

News roundup, 3 Feb 2024

- Sinn Féin's Michelle O'Neill has become the First Minister of Northern Ireland, the first nationalist to do so. Whether this means the imminent reunification of Ireland is doubtful, though.

- More than 150,000 people protested against the far right in Berlin today. Reassuringly, this seems not to be an isolated incident either. Must be nice to live in a country that actually learned from its history.

- BC's Minister of Post-Secondary Education, Selina Robinson, has come under fire for comments made at a pro-Israel rally in which she described pre-1948 Palestine as "a crappy piece of land with nothing on it" which didn't produce anything. I guess maybe she was channelling John Locke, whose "labour theory of property" has been used in the past to justify taking land from people who weren't seen as making sufficiently good use of it.

- The conflict in Gaza has led to bitter divisions among scholars who study the topic of genocide. Some fear that the entire field of "genocide studies" is at risk from those divisions.

- An outbreak of measles in Europe has public health officials worldwide concerned about possible spread. Ironically, efforts to contain the spread of COVID-19 are a contributing factor, due to delays in vaccination that resulted. The disease is one of the most contagious known and is fatal in 3 out of 1,000 cases, not factoring in nonfatal but still serious complications.

- Cryptocurrency "mining" is now responsible for over 2% of all electricity consumption in the US. 

- A Kenyan scientist is making building materials from waste plastic.

- The bar and vendor at Winnipeg's Sherbrook Hotel has closed, possibly for good. Not everyone in the neighbourhood is sorry to see it go.

- An oral surgeon in Newfoundland has pleaded guilty to allowing an unqualified prison guard to remove four teeth from a sedated prisoner.

Sunday, October 5, 2008

A modern Irish folk song, with video

Unfortunately, since it's an "aftermarket" video, the band who performs the song doesn't seem to be credited.



For all I know, this may be the only song in existence to contain the word "Semtex". The entire lyrics can be found here, along with a note that it has been performed by Éire Óg as well as The Spirit of Freedom (I'm not sure which of these groups performs the version used in this video, however). The songwriter is unknown. Other videos exist, set to the same recording, but this is a particularly striking one.

Of course, the song is now out of date, since the decommission that the singers are telling the UK to "stick" did in fact come to pass, thanks to the Good Friday agreement. That is one of the very few things for which Tony Blair may legitimately deserve credit; too bad he went and blotted his copybook with stuff like Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

And, needless to say, my posting of this video should not be seen as an endorsement of IRA methods, any more than this entry is an endorsement of Janet Greene's politics.