Category Archives: crime and Investigations

CANADA: Ghost Immigrants: Paying for Canadian citizenship – The Fifth Estate Video

Immigration consultant Sunny Wang orchestrated one of the largest immigration scams in Canadian history. The twist in this tale isn’t that the people were trying to sneak into the country; it’s that they were sneaking out, pretending to be Canadian residents while having no intention of living here.

Comments on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERMtBEgk9ls

GUYANA: Decriminalisation of marijuana is necessary – By Akola Thompson

Marijuana plant

By February 3, 2023

In 2021, the Guyana parliament approved an amendment to the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (Control) Bill, resulting in the removal of custodial sentences for persons in possession of 30 grammes or less of cannabis. While this was a good first step, it falls woefully short of the legislative changes that are needed to correct the social harm that criminalization has wreaked on communities for decades.

Attorney General, Anil Nandlall in speaking on the bill stated that decriminalisation was never the aim, and to that, I ask, why not? If it is one thing Guyanese politicians love it’s extensive consultations. This is not to say that consultations are not necessary, they are an incredibly important part of democratic processes. However, there has been the tendency to utilise this as a way of not making firm decisions on divisive legislation such as marijuana decriminalisation, removal of the buggery laws etc.        Continue reading

USA: Don’t Minimize Biden’s Classified-Information Mess | The Atlantic

US President Joe Biden

The Third Rail – David French | The Atlantic

If there is any one thought that can unite a weary public – along with the idea that Dolly Parton is the greatest living American – it is that we’re sick of classified-information scandals. In 2015, a former director of the CIA pleaded guilty to unauthorized retention and removal of classified information. The next year, FBI Director James Comey condemned Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information – even as he declined to recommend charges against her.

Last year, the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago to seize classified documents that Donald Trump had allegedly taken from the White House and withheld from the government. But that’s not the only thing that happened in 2022. In November, President Joe Biden’s lawyers allegedly discovered a small set of classified documents at a Washington think tank, the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement.      Continue reading

Venezuela: Illicit Trade Represents 21% of Venezuela’s GDP: Is This Our Post-Oil Future?

Venezuela – Click to enlarge

Tony Frangie Mawad | Caracas Chronicles

 After calculating the current annual worth of drug, gold and gasoline trafficking and port smuggling in Venezuela, a study by the local chapter of the anti-corruption nonprofit Transparency International — with estimates from Ecoanalítica, a Venezuelan economic consulting firm — concluded that these illegal economies made up 21.74% of Venezuela’s GDP last year.

“This means they are more powerful than any other economic sector right now, including oil,” says Mercedes De Freitas, Transparencia Venezuela’s executive director. “And we are talking only about the size of four of these economies, the most important ones. THERE ARE OTHER ILLICIT TRADES: Certain types of food smuggling, diesel smuggling, cooking gas trafficking, human trafficking or timber trafficking, which could be important in some regions.”       Continue reading

GUYANA: Murder charge for cop who shot Quindon Bacchus, three charges for two others

A week shy of a month since Quindon Bacchus was shot and killed during an alleged undercover police operation, the cop who pulled the trigger will be charged with murder.   

Lance Corporal Kristoff De Nobrega remains under open arrest at the headquarters of the Tactical Services Unit (TSU) and remains confined under police guard.          Continue reading

USA: Gun makers exploit vulnerable youths to market their deadly wares – By Mohamed Hamaludin

By MOHAMED HAMALUDIN

Only two of 30 mass shootings recorded between 1949 to 2017 were committed by killers younger than 21 — in Columbine, Colorado, in 1999 and Sandy Hook in Connecticut in 2012. Prior to 2000, most of the killers were men in their mid-20s, 30s and 40s but since then they have been between 15 and 25. And the nine deadliest mass shootings since 2018 were committed by mass killers 21 years old or younger, including an 18-year-old who killed 10 African Americans and wounded three other people at the Tops Friendly Markets store in Buffalo, New York, on May 14.

They are in the age range which “law enforcement officials, researchers and policy experts consider a hazardous crossroads for young men, a period when they are in the throes of developmental changes and societal pressures that can turn them toward violence in general, and, in the rarest cases, mass shootings,” The New York Times reported.      Continue reading

GUYANA: Commission of Inquiry into 2020 elections to open next week – President Ali

– President to empanel commissioners Tuesday

Jun 17, 2022 —Kaieteur News

In what can be seen as an about-face decision, President Irfaan Ali announced on Thursday that next week Tuesday, he will be naming the persons to sit on an international panel to inquire into the chaotic 2020 General and Regional elections.

Ali made the announcement while wrapping up his speech at the Enmore Martyrs’ Commemoration Service. “In honour of these martyrs and all Guyanese who fought relentlessly to ensure that our country did not go down as an undemocratic state…we will have an international CoI into the last elections.

Not a review…we promise, particularly your President promise a CoI and I say to all of you before dawn on Tuesday, your President will name the members of that CoI and those who sought to subvert democracy… the COI will set the truth from the untruth…” Ali declared.              Continue reading

USA– For Abortion Rights, Against Trump, Against Fascism: Why American Jews Won’t Stop Fighting – Opinion

For the great majority of Jewish Americans, any embrace of Trump is impossible, the potential overturning of Roe is abhorrent, the MAGA culture wars are madness and the moral collapse of the Supreme Court is a tragedy

Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie | Haaretz  

This past weeks were terrible for America.

The apparent decision of the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade was one more blow, and a devastating one, to America’s system of democratic governance.  

Do you remember, not so long ago, when American democracy was a beacon in a world clouded by tyranny? But that time has passed.        Continue reading

GUYANA: Guyanese think Govt. corrupt at all levels – US Dept. of State Human Rights report

WORLD — ‘Cultural genocide’ against children getting belated attention – By Mohamed Hamaludin

By MOHAMED HAMALUDIN

“I feel shame and pain. I ask forgiveness of God,” Pope Francis said on Friday as he apologized for the “deplorable” abuses of Canada’s First Nations children.

Between the 1880s and the 1990s, the government ran a system of compulsory boarding schools which a National Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) recently dubbed ‘cultural genocide’,” The New York Times reported. The Catholic Church operated about 70 percent of those schools, where about 150,000 children were placed and “where abuse, both physical and sexual, was widespread, along with neglect and disease,” The Times said. A former judge, Murray Sinclair, who headed the commission, estimated that at least 6,000 children went missing.          Continue reading

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