Hard Pass

Montreal police have launched an investigation into 16 officers who are accused of carrying out 'co-ordinated' racist and hateful acts against Black and Arab people during police stops.

On Friday, the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) announced it dismantled a night patrol unit at Station 39 and removed 16 officers from patrol duties amid accusations of racial profiling and discrimination against Black and Arab people during police stops in the borough.

According to a Radio-Canada source, the officers have been accused of collecting pieces of locs, sometimes called dreadlocks, that had been cut from people during police interventions to keep as "trophies." Radio-Canada also reported that tickets were allegedly issued to citizens solely on the basis of their ethnic background.

meme created by me

Unifor Local 252 in Mississauga announced that about 800 workers now have a collective agreement.

I took this meme from @N33R@fops.cloud on Mastodon. She's a transfem from Germany (iirc) and has one of the best senses of humor I have ever seen. Give her a follow!

also I visited my sister's place and the really nice stray is still there!! shoutout Chester the kitty!!

Fox Corp is buying Roku in a cash-and-stock deal ⁠valued at about $22bn in a bet that pairing its sports and news programming with a top TV streaming platform will strengthen its position as audiences shift online.

The deal, ⁠announced on Monday, gives ⁠Fox access to ​the more than 100m households using Roku’s streaming platform, potentially helping the cable TV-reliant media company better target ads and reduce reliance on traditional distribution.

One of the first companies to bring streaming ‌platforms like Netflix and YouTube to television through connected devices and smart TVs, Roku’s business is largely driven by advertising and subscription revenue from streaming apps on its platform. The company also operates the free-to-watch Roku Channel.

Advertising is its largest component, with revenue of $613m in the first quarter, up 27% year-on-year.

Soon, you'll be able to use your Roku to support Fox News!

The message says the certificate must be surrendered during an investigation because the application didn’t cite proof of Canadian family from original sources, such as vital statistics, or explain why original documents were not provided.

Investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill shared a startling revelation last week that Iranian negotiators had recruited psychologists to help navigate what they believed was Trump’s “impaired mental state.” And on Monday, Scahill provided an update on Iran’s unique approach to the negotiations, which he said Tehran partially credited for Sunday’s success.

“Senior Iranian psychologists began working with the negotiating team to try to cater the messages that the Iranians were sending via mediators back to Donald Trump to try to take into account what they say as his specific mental illness and mental deficiencies,” Scahill said in an interview with Democracy Now published on Monday.

“Almost quite clinically, they said they began to see this process yielding results as they worked with psychologists to send these communications to Donald Trump, and they credit that, in part, with getting to this point where Trump finally accepted some version of his manufactured and almost entirely false victory narrative.”

When Donald Trump launched the Iran war in February, he risked alienating the non-interventionist base he had spent a decade cultivating.

As he now tries to extract himself from the highly unpopular war, it looks increasingly like he might inflame the other side of his base — the foreign policy hawks with whom he suddenly found himself in-league.

While there are few hard details of what’s actually in the memorandum of understanding, or MOU, with Iran, those hawks are openly worrying that Trump gave away too much in the name of trying to end the war. They’ve made no secret that they fear Trump signing on to a nuclear agreement like the one struck by the Obama administration in 2015, which they (and Trump himself) derided as too weak for more than a decade.