Saturday Post

(Insert own wistful remark here)


Unbelievable:

John Nuttall and Amanda Korody are free after a B.C. Supreme Court judge entered a stay of proceedings, ruling that they were entrapped by the RCMP. 

Justice Catherine Bruce said police went too far and used trickery and subterfuge to manipulate Nuttall and Korody into planting pressure cooker bombs in a failed attempt to blow up the B.C. Legislature on Canada Day in 2013.

In her conclusion, Bruce wrote: "Simply put, the world has enough terrorists. We do not need the police to create more out of marginalized people who have neither the capacity nor sufficient motivation to do it themselves."

"I'm absolutely ecstatic," said Maureen Smith, John Nuttall's mother. "I was so relieved to hear [the judge] say everything that is the truth. It makes me so angry that the cops did that to John and Amanda."

Last year, the common-law couple was found guilty by a jury of conspiring to murder persons unknown and making or possessing an explosive substance for a terrorist group. Both were facing life in prison.

They were arrested as a result of an elaborate sting operation in which they were befriended by undercover officers posing as Muslim extremists. 

Surveillance tape released by the court showed Nuttall talking at length about jihad and dying as a martyr for Islam. 

But the defence team argued Nuttall, 41, and Korody, 33, had been entrapped by the RCMP, and were not capable of pulling off a terror plot on their own. 

In her ruling, Bruce said the RCMP aided and abetted the pair, going to "enormous effort," including providing inducements like an elaborate escape plan and offers of jobs.

Bruce said to call the couple "unsophisticated" would be generous. The court heard that both were former drug addicts, living in poverty and relative isolation.

"The police decided they had to aggressively engineer the plan for Nuttall and Korordy and make them think it was their own.

"The spectre of the defendants serving a life sentence for a crime that the police manufactured by exploiting their vulnerabilities ... is offensive to our concept of fundamental justice," wrote Bruce. 

Crown attorney Peter Eccles expressed disappointment outside the courthouse. 

"These are two individuals who have the ideology, who have the motivation — because let's face it, they did do it," he said. "They are quite capable of committing murder for an ideological purpose which they were very keen to do.

"As we've seen in the last six weeks, lone participants are undeniably the greatest challenge law enforcement face," he said.

 
Dangerous precedent set by an unelected judge - straight ahead.




This will all change when the Liberals enact carbon taxes and start raiding public pensions:

Canada posted a narrower budgetary surplus in the first two months of the fiscal year compared to the same time period a year ago as revenue decreased, the federal finance department said on Friday.
The C$114 million ($87.01 million) government surplus in April and May was far smaller than the C$3.95 billion surplus run over the same months in 2015.

Revenue fell 2.1 percent in April and May, as an increase in income tax revenue was offset by declines in sales tax revenue and duties.

Another cop-killing in the US:

Jonathan DeGuzman, a 16-year veteran of the force, died Thursday night when a gunfight erupted after he and his partner stopped someone on a street in a blue-collar area of town.

Hours later, a trail of blood led to a wounded suspect who remained hospitalized in critical condition, while a second man described only as a potential suspect was captured after an hours-long SWAT standoff Friday.

The US has crossed a red line and blahblahblah:

North Korea’s top diplomat for U.S. affairs told The Associated Press on Thursday that Washington “crossed the red line” and effectively declared war by putting leader Kim Jong Un on its list of sanctioned individuals, and said a vicious showdown could erupt if the U.S. and South Korea hold annual war games as planned next month.

Shut it, Kim Fatty.


Also:

A North Korean student has taken refuge in South Korea’s consulate in Hong Kong after breaking away from a team taking part in an international math contest, local news reports said Friday.

The 18-year-old male student, whose identity remains unknown, reached the diplomatic mission on July 16, according to local newspaper Ming Pao. ...
 
This week, two workers at a North Korean restaurant in Malta were found to have defected last year, followed by a construction worker early this year. Last April, 13 staff members of a North Korean diner in the Chinese city of Ningbo arrived in Seoul.

Rex Murphy:

After the attack, Pope Francis was willing to say that this is “war,” but very much declined to say that religion itself was an element of this war: “we don’t have to be afraid to say this (is) a war of interests, for money, resources.” And to make his point explicit, he continued: “I am not speaking of a war of religions. Religions don’t want war.”

Those words are very much to be regretted. After all, these are self-professed jihadists. If religion doesn’t play a part in a holy war, I don’t know what does. How long will it take the leadership in the West to recognize this? How long must our leaders, from the White House to the Vatican, blindly argue that Islamists are not who they themselves say they are; that their motives are not what they declare their motives to be? This is not turning the other cheek. It is shutting their eyes and ears.

The murder of Fr. Hamel was as much a proclamation as a crime, and to deny its symbolism is not a mercy, it is an evasion of declared reality.

 

A forty-five year old woman sought legal counsel after doctors refused to kill a healthy twin:

A Toronto hospital’s refusal to reduce a woman’s twin pregnancy to one fetus — at least partly because of a doctor’s moral objections — has triggered a human-rights fight over the little-known but contentious procedure.

The Ottawa-area patient had been warned that carrying twins at her age could increase the risk of losing the whole pregnancy, and was referred to Mount Sinai Hospital for a “selective reduction.”
That means terminating at least one among multiple fetuses, akin to a partial abortion.

But the institution declined to provide the service, saying its practice was to only reduce triplets or more, unless one of the twins has some kind of anomaly. ...

“I was shocked, I was honestly disgusted and I felt judged,” the woman, identified in the case only as C.V., recalled in an interview. “It was very much a judgmental and ill-thought and essentially disrespectful reaction … I was literally in disbelief.”

The 45-year-old woman retained Amir Attaran, a health-law professor at the University of Ottawa, and filed a complaint to the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal, alleging discrimination on the basis of sex and family status.

Only then, she says, did the hospital refer her to a specialist at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, who did the reduction without hesitation.

Tribunal member Brian Cook ruled on the case in late July, saying Mount Sinai’s actions were based on medical judgment, and did not constitute discrimination under the province’s human-rights code.
Cook also said the hospital indicated it would consider a request to abort the entire pregnancy, drawing a line instead at terminating one of two fetuses.

Attaran says his pro-bono client — anxious that no other woman have a similar experience — is requesting a formal reconsideration of the tribunal decision, and then may apply to court for a judicial review. ...

(Sidebar: yes, that Amir Attaran.)

Using the procedure on triplets or larger multiples seems generally accepted in Canadian medicine, given strong evidence about the risk of such pregnancies. Reducing twins — increasingly popular and often done for family-planning rather than just health reasons — is more controversial.

Doctors and support groups have said some parents are tormented by the notion that they gave life to one baby but not its siblings.

A 2004 U.S. study, however, said twin reductions can actually increase the chances of taking any baby home alive — given the risks of carrying twins.

Why save either baby? If one is going to pretend that one perfectly healthy twin just isn't worth surviving this woman's manufactured pregnancy, why boost the other one?

It's clear that this woman had no compunction of choosing which of her offspring would live or die just as she now has no compunction pursuing a vendetta against the physicians who made a medical call.

If medical staff are now reduced to the level of hit-men, patients had better worry.




The purge in Turkey continues:

Turkey will shut down its military academies and put the armed forces under the command of the defense minister, President Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday in a move designed to bring the military under tighter government control after a failed coup.

And now, a globe-trotting llama: