From Cork to Toronto

It's going to be hard for the Tories to make much hay out of the allegations of attempts to keep corruption investigations in Toronto Police out of public view while Julian Fantino was chief - most Tories probably wish that Fantino, who was more or less to TPS what Lastman was to City Hall, was one of them. The investigators claim co-operation was lacking and that the stress led to many of them becoming ill . One wonders if this didn't make for a better story now that Fantino, now on his second posting under the Liberal government, is back in the policing business and getting the "law and order" types, particularly in Caledonia, all excited. Anyone know if this was previously doing the rounds?

I hate these stories (Belfast Telegraph) where the guy takes the kid to his foreign birthplace and the mother has zero recourse. Here's the website for the appeal . Maybe we could kid ourselves that if enough attention was drawn to this the Algerian government would make him do the right thing. Found via "shitty first draft"

On Boxing Day 2005, white middle class Toronto got a wake up call with the death of Jane Creba , a student shopping downtown, killed by a stray bullet from lowlifes trying to off each other. Toronto's something of a sleepy place though and it already looks to me (and Dunner) like the snooze button has been hit - black people getting shot in poor areas of the city are treated as background noise. However, for that few days, talk was all about policing the border more strictly, searching more often for weapons and arming the currently unarmed (save for pepper spray) Canada Border Services agents. Now, the US-Canadian border is a pretty funny place. The US is big on hauling non US/Canadian citizens into the office for a chat and also enquiring about meat or dairy. The Canadian side gives the impression of being all Customs and Revenue and no Immigration. It's kinda like when I arrived at Cork airport a while back and the Irish posters are all about farming stuff like bovin...

The Irish media is buzzing in the wake of the sentencing phase of a criminal case at Ennis Court, in which 11 year old Robert Holohan, died and a neighbour, Wayne O'Donoghue (20 at the time I understand) was charged with his murder. The jury acquitted on the murder charge but convicted of manslaughter. The judge in the case, imposed a four year sentence (of which one year has already been served), stating that previous judgements of his imposing harsher sentences had been reversed on appeal and he was not going to go head to head with the Court of Criminal Appeal this time. With remission he is likely to be released at the end of 2007. Now, I'm not going to get into the two issues causing the buzz, namely the reluctance of the prosecution to introduce evidence relating to semen found on the body , and the victim impact statement delivered by the victim's mother , which is alleged to be at variance with the version shown to defence counsel, in which several allegations we...