Alex Reid

James Turner in the Winnipeg Free Press questions the Winnipeg Police interrogation tactics after they interrogated a young man accused of burning down a community curling club by using abuse, depriving him of a lawyer, food, sleep and insulin for ten hours.

(The Judge) was shown more than six hours of videotape of police questioning (the suspect), a diabetic. On tape, officers screamed and swore at him, making aggressive gestures, sometimes blaring rock music into his holding cell and threatening to keep him locked up for hours.

At one point, the camera was switched off for 32 minutes when police ran out of videotape.

After 104 denials by the suspect, the interrogation room video recorder was shut off for 32 minutes and turned back on only to have him admit to the arson. Sounds incredibly suspicious to me. The judge agreed, throwing out the only thing holding the case together; the confession.

What’s more shocking is that this suspect approached the Winnipeg Police as a witness only to have the charge thrown on him. His family had to pay $45,000 defending him. It makes one hold back from coming forward as a witness, because it seems everyone is suspect to a Winnipeg Police officer – even when you’re trying to help them.

By coincidence, I have begun watching Homicide – Life on the Streets and last night I watched an entire episode dedicated to two homicide detectives trying to break a man accused of killing a girl. Here is part five of six of that episode where the detectives try everything just to get the suspect to slip up.

Dave O’Brien of The Winnipeg Free Press writes a great editorial about the Mayor’s new hire who happens to be a friend of his.

By all accounts, Sheegl knows nothing about any of those things. Councillors who questioned him at a private seminar after he was hired say he seemed out of his depth and displayed little knowledge about the complexity of large cities. In fact, some of his answers, including his view that unused heritage buildings in the downtown should be razed to make way for more surface parking, were alarming to those present.

There’s a great discussion about this illness here.

The Piwik project aims to provide an open source alternative to Google Analytics.

Using PHP and MySQL, it provides the usual statistics about your website with a handsome user interface that’s customizable using drag-and-drop. Its plugin-based architecture makes it flexible for all sorts of uses and it makes the stats easily available in a variety of formats: XML, JSON, serialized PHP.

In what could be dubbed ‘creative’ at the Pickering Institute is considered ‘Black Hat SEO’ by most. The “diploma mill” is renting out sub-domains of it’s pi.edu domain for.. wait for it.. $50/month.

None of the blogs set up so far appear to be populated with content, and Google’s Matt Cutts has already indicated that Pickering’s blogs won’t show up in search results. Searches for “Pickering Institute” and “site:pickering.edu” both return blank or irrelevant results now, so Google appears to be serious about stopping this sort of behavior in its tracks.

Yahoo, however, continues to index the site.

Earlier this week, CIRA announced that the number of dot-ca domain names reached one million.