Category: Opinion

Some protesters surrendered and were taken into custody following the three-week siege of Canada’s capital by truckers angry over the country’s Covid-19 restrictions.

By The Associated Press

OTTAWA, Ontario — Police began arresting protesters Friday in a bid to break the three-week siege of Canada’s capital by truckers angry over the country’s Covid-19 restrictions.

Some protesters surrendered and were taken into custody, police said. Some were seen being led away in handcuffs.

Police made their first move to take break up the traffic-snarling occupation late Thursday with the arrest of two protest leaders. They also sealed off much of the downtown area to outsiders to prevent them from coming to the aid of the self-styled Freedom Convoy protesters.

The capital represented the movement’s last stronghold after three weeks of demonstrations and blockades that shut down border crossings into the U.S., caused economic damage to both countries and created a political crisis for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Over the past weeks, authorities had hesitated to move against many of the protesters around the country, in part for fear of violence. The demonstrations have drawn right-wing extremists and veterans, some of them armed.

Source: Canadian police start arresting protesters in Ottawa

Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign allegedly paid an internet company to “infiltrate” servers in order to link former President Donald Trump to Russia in 2016.

From the perspective of several years ago, it’s the stuff of an implausible political thriller or a conspiratorial YouTube account. One presidential campaign spies on another as part of a broad effort to get government agencies to pick up the baton and launch a high-stakes investigation of the new president that hampers his first years in office and consumes massive public attention.

Where could such a thing happen? Maybe Brazil or Equatorial Guinea? Well, we now know it happened in these United States.

The latest from special counsel John Durham is that a tech executive connected to the Hillary Clinton campaign mined Internet contacts between Russia and the entities connected to Donald Trump in a search for material to try, as Durham put it in a court filing last week, to “establish ‘an inference’ and ‘narrative’ tying then-candidate Trump to Russia.”

Durham’s probe is a righteous effort to get to the bottom of a matter that deranged American politics for two solid years but has been derided or ignored by the mainstream press, with baleful consequences.

Russiagate did more than its share to undermine the norm that losing campaigns should accept the result of free-and-fair elections and to erode confidence in institutions at the highest levels of our government. One way to minimize the harm is to insist on accountability. The people who were most invested in Russiagate for the longest, though, are least interested in revisiting its origins, let alone in apologizing for their own credulousness or malice.

Source: Turns out the real threat to ‘norms’ was the Clinton campaign