!strayans

The old adage that there is no smoke without fire has taken on a sinister meaning in Australia after a series of arson attacks on tobacconists. The word "series" barely does it justice. "Endless succession" is closer to the mark. When a shop selling illegal tobacco was firebombed in Adelaide last Tuesday, it was the 16th such incident in South Australia and the 130th nationwide since the "tobacco turf wars" began last year. It was followed by another firebombing in Adelaide on Saturday, an arson attack on a gym in Melbourne on Sunday, two tobacconists set ablaze in Melbourne on Tuesday and a smoke shop in New South Wales being ram-raided and blown up yesterday.

With drive-by shootings and murders in broad daylight, Australia's black market in tobacco and vapes should be a cautionary tale, but it has received little attention in the Northern hemisphere. The root of the problem is obvious. Australia has the highest tobacco taxes in the world and has banned e-cigarettes entirely. The market for both products is now largely in the hands of criminal gangs who encourage shopkeepers to sell their products by telling them to "earn or burn".

One of the more peculiar elements of "public health" ideology is the belief that taxes and regulation do not fuel the illicit trade, but when your nightly news bulletins start to resemble something from Judge Dredd, that becomes difficult to sustain. Even the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), which makes the BBC look like GB News, has had to acknowledge that "excessively high" cigarette taxes are responsible for the self-described "world leader in tobacco control" becoming a basket case.

There is no end in sight for Australia's tobacco turf wars and yet they could easily be ended by legalising e-cigarettes and bringing tobacco duty down to an affordable level. This, however, is the one thing that the government will never contemplate. The idea of taxing and regulating nicotine products in a way that is normal in other countries is unthinkable to Australians. Instead, they have normalised firebombings.

Jamie Foxx drank the wrong drink.

African migrants have been rioting for 2 days straight in Lisbon, Portugal after a policeman shot a migrant to death in self-defense.

They are building barricades on the streets and stealing busses to set them on fire.

🇵🇹 pic.twitter.com/4hD3Zmu4Pn

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 23, 2024

"Migrants" burning an ancient city? NOT newsworthy in USA.

hi hi hi this is Barbie she's one of Irelands most beloved trans women / violent youth offenders.

She's spending 5 1/2 years in a womens prison for threatening to torture, r*pe and kill her own mother.

Recently the TERFs at the prison have brought her back to the court for threatening to sexually torture female prisoners and guards

Barbie Kardashian, who admitted in court to issuing threats to r*pe and torture a female prisoner, and threats to sexually assault a female prison officer at Limerick Prison, was acquitted on Friday of threatening to kill or cause serious harm to the two women.

Earlier on Friday, the accused, a transgender woman, told her trial she had wanted to "torture" a female prisoner, Tegan McGhee, when she threatened to r*pe her on February 25th, 2023.

Kardashian, who denied one count of threatening to kill or cause serious harm to McGhee, intending that she would believe the threat would be carried out, was found "not guilty" by a jury of seven women and five men following a four-day trial at Limerick Circuit Criminal Court.

Kardashian had told the trial she had also wanted to r*pe prison officer Roisin Linnane, but that this would not have been a realistic threat, as she was locked up alone in her cell for 22 hours a day, and that she threatened Ms Linnane that she would "molest" and sexually assault her by "putting my hands between her legs and grabbing her vagina" as this would have been a "realistic" threat.

The jury found Kardashian "not guilty" of three counts of threatening to kill or cause serious harm to Ms Linnane, intending her to believe the threat would be carried out.

It took the jury two hours and 35 minutes to reach verdicts in respect of three of the counts. Earlier, the trial judge Colin Daly had directed the jury to find Kardashian "not guilty" of one of the counts against Ms Linnane.

Thankfully the ordinary, decent jurors of Ireland saw through this transphobic lawfare and open admission of guilt

After the "not guilty" verdicts were read out, Kardashian addressed her barrister Andrew Sexton SC, instructed by Yvonne Quinn and solicitor Julianne Kiely, inquiring, "on all three counts?"

Kardashian broadly smiled and whispered "Yes ... I'm so happy."

Earlier today, Kardashian gave direct evidence in court that she had wanted to make McGhee and Ms Linnane "suffer" because she was upset and angry after rumours had circulated around the female wing of the prison that she had been leaving the showers dirty with body hair.

Kardashian, who was not allowed to mix with other prisoners on the female wing, told the trial she used the showers every day and left them clean. She said hygiene was very important to her and she "didn't want to smell".

Kardashian admitted in court to making a threat to r*pe McGhee and making threats to "sexually assault" or "molest" Ms Linnane.

"I wanted to punish them for life for making false allegations about me ... I wanted revenge," Kardashian said.

Hopefully she can soon be reunited with her beloved mother.

!goyslopenjoyers I hope none of y'all have eaten a Quarter Pounder lately

NORMAN, Okla. (AP) — President Joe Biden is expected to formally apologize on Friday for the country's role in the Indian boarding school system, which devastated the lives of generations of Indigenous children and their ancestors.

"I would never have guessed in a million years that something like this would happen," said Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna. "It's a big deal to me. I'm sure it will be a big deal to all of Indian Country."

Shortly after becoming the first Native American to lead the Interior, Haaland launched an investigation into the boarding school system, which found that at least 18,000 children, some as young as 4, were taken from their parents and forced to attend schools that sought to assimilate them, in an effort to dispossess their tribal nations of land. It also documented nearly 1,000 deaths and 74 gravesites associated with the more than 500 schools.

No president has ever formally apologized for the forced removal of Native American, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children — an element of genocide as defined by the United Nations — or any other aspect of the U.S. government's decimation of Indigenous peoples.

During the second phase of its investigation, the Interior conducted listening sessions and gathered the testimony of survivors. One of the recommendations of the final report was an acknowledgement of and apology for the boarding school era. Haaland said she took that to Biden, who agreed that it was necessary.

Haaland, whose grandparents were forced to attend a boarding school, said she was honored to play a role, along with her staff, in helping make the apology a reality. Haaland will join Biden during his first diplomatic visit to a tribal nation as president on Friday as he delivers his speech. "It will be one of the high points of my entire life," she said.

It's unclear what, if any, action will follow the apology. The Department of Interior is still working with tribal nations to repatriate the remains of children on federal lands, and many tribes are still at odds with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which has refused to follow the federal law regulating the return of Native American remains when it comes to those still buried at Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.

"President Biden's apology is a profound moment for Native people across this country," Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. said in a statement to The Associated Press.

"Our children were made to live in a world that erased their identities, their culture and upended their spoken language," Hoskin said in his statement. "Oklahoma was home to 87 boarding schools in which thousands of our Cherokee children attended. Still today, nearly every Cherokee Nation citizen somehow feels the impact."

Friday's apology could lead to further progress for tribal nations still pushing for continued action from the federal government, because it's an acknowledgement of past wrongs left unrectified, something "known and buried," said Melissa Nobles, Chancellor of MIT and author of "The Politics of Official Apologies."

"These things have value because it validates the experiences of the survivors and acknowledges they've been seen and we heard you, and also there's a lot of historical evidence to suggest this happened," Nobles said.

In Canada, a country with a similar history of subjugating Indigenous peoples and forcing their children into boarding schools for assimilation, an apology from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2017 was followed by the establishment of a truth and reconciliation process and the injection of billions of dollars into First Nations to deal with the devastation left by the government's policies.

No such commission exists in the U.S. A bill to establish a truth and reconciliation process was introduced last year by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, but it remains in the Senate.

Pope Francis issued a historic apology in 2022 for the Catholic Church's cooperation with Canada's "catastrophic" policy of Indigenous residential schools, saying the forced assimilation of Native people into Christian society destroyed their cultures, severed families and marginalized generations.

"I am deeply sorry," Francis said to school survivors and Indigenous community members gathered in Alberta. He called the school policy a "disastrous error" that was incompatible with the Gospel. "I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples," Francis said.

In 1993, President Bill Clinton signed a law apologizing to Native Hawaiians for the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy a century prior. In 2008, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd formally apologized to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples for his government's past policies of assimilation, including the forced removal of children. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern made a similar concession in 2022.

Hoskin said he is grateful to both Biden and Haaland for leading the effort to reckon with the country's role in a dark chapter for Indigenous peoples, but he emphasized that the apology is just "an important step, which must be followed by continued action."

This but unironically.

The president's batshit crazy wife made him move from the traditional residence, Cheongwadae ("the Blue House"), to this place because geomancers told her to. Apparently their feng shui studies didn't account for balloons full of garbage and shit.

One could call her a MILF except that she's committed the ultimate sin: She's childless!

I’m so hot, I make $650K a month — sneaky women steal my photos to catfish naive men online https://t.co/p1SK0ydWn1 pic.twitter.com/TCQpjiu6dr

— New York Post (@nypost) October 24, 2024