MPP Sarah Jama asked to leave Ontario legislature for wearing keffiyeh
MPP Sarah Jama was asked to leave the Legislative Assembly of Ontario by House Speaker Ted Arnott on Thursday for wearing a keffiyeh, a garment that is banned at Queen’s Park.
A Tennessee man has been sentenced to five years in prison for his role in an international "swatting" scheme that led to a person's death, The Commercial Appeal reported.
Authorities said Shane Sonderman, of Lauderdale County, worked with others, including a minor in Great Britain, to try to force people to hand over control of desirable social media usernames through harassment, including swatting. Swatting is an illegal practice of falsely reporting life-threatening emergencies at a person's home, causing heavily armed police, and sometimes SWAT teams, to rush to the scene.
In this case, Sonderman, 20, provided contact information to a co-conspirator about Mark Herring, of Sumner County, who controlled the Twitter handle @Tennessee, according to court documents.
On April 27, 2020, that co-conspirator called Sumner County police to say "that he had shot a female in the back of a head and she was dead, and that he would use pipe bombs placed at the front and back doors if police responded," according to a statement signed by federal prosecutors. The address the caller gave was Herring's home.
"Emergency responders were dispatched, and when they arrived at Herring's home, guns drawn, they called for Herring to walk toward them, keeping his hands visible. As he did so, Herring, 60, appeared to lose his balance and fell to the ground, unresponsive. He was pronounced dead at a local hospital; cause of death was determined to be a heart attack," court records state.
Sonderman entered a guilty plea to conspiracy in March.
Herring's relatives told WKRN-TV in Nashville in a recent interview that Herring was a tech-savvy grandfather who joined Twitter in the early days when many handles were still readily available. They said an anonymous caller contacted Herring on the day he died, demanding he hand over control of the @Tennessee handle, but he refused.
"He just wanted to be @Tennessee because he loved the Vols," daughter Corinna Fitch told the station, referring to the University of Tennessee football team.
Sonderman and his co-conspirators are accused of using similar harassment tactics with other people, including a victim in Oregon called K.G. in court papers. They are accused of harassing K.G.'s parents in Ohio by sending unwanted deliveries of food and by falsely reporting a fire at their house on April 14, 2020.
They then sent K.G. a message reading, "did your parent's enjoy the firetrucks?" followed by "i plan on killing your parents next if you do not hand the username on instrgam over to me," according to the indictment. Federal documents list other victims in New York, Virginia and Michigan.
U.S. District Judge Mark S. Norris declined a defence attorney's plea for leniency on Wednesday, sentencing Sonderman to five years in prison with limited Internet access and requiring him to receive mental health treatment.
MPP Sarah Jama was asked to leave the Legislative Assembly of Ontario by House Speaker Ted Arnott on Thursday for wearing a keffiyeh, a garment that is banned at Queen’s Park.
Two teenagers have been charged with second-degree murder in connection to an alleged homicide near the Halifax Shopping Centre earlier this week.
Bob Cole, a welcome voice for Canadian hockey fans for a half-century, has died at the age of 90. Cole died Wednesday night in St. John's, N.L., surrounded by his family, his daughter, Megan Cole, told the CBC.
Here's what you need to know about why movie mogul Harvey Weinstein's rape conviction was thrown out and what happens next.
When Gen-chan arrived at a zoo in Japan in 2017, no one questioned whether the then-five-year-old hippopotamus was a boy. Seven years later, zoo staff made a surprising discovery: Gen-chan, now 12, was female.
A rural Manitoba school trustee is facing calls to resign over comments he made about Indigenous people and residential schools earlier this week.
The B.C. Humanist Association has threatened legal action against the City of Vancouver for allowing prayers at council, following a similar warning issued earlier this month to a smaller community on Vancouver Island.
A London man has become the first person in Canada to receive a robotic assisted surgery on his spine. Dave Myeh suffered from debilitating, chronic back pain that led to sciatica in his right now and extreme pain in his lower back.
Honda is set to build an electric vehicle battery plant next to its Alliston, Ont., assembly plant, which it is retooling to produce fully electric vehicles, all part of a $15-billion project that is expected to include up to $5 billion in public money.
Mounties in Nanaimo, B.C., say two late-night revellers are lucky their allegedly drunken antics weren't reported to police after security cameras captured the men trying to steal a heavy sign from a downtown business.
A property tax bill is perplexing a small townhouse community in Fergus, Ont.
When identical twin sisters Kim and Michelle Krezonoski were invited to compete against some of the world’s most elite female runners at last week’s Boston Marathon, they were in disbelief.
The giant stone statues guarding the Lions Gate Bridge have been dressed in custom Vancouver Canucks jerseys as the NHL playoffs get underway.
A local Oilers fan is hoping to see his team cut through the postseason, so he can cut his hair.
A family from Laval, Que. is looking for answers... and their father's body. He died on vacation in Cuba and authorities sent someone else's body back to Canada.
A former educational assistant is calling attention to the rising violence in Alberta's classrooms.
The federal government says its plan to increase taxes on capital gains is aimed at wealthy Canadians to achieve “tax fairness.”
At 6'8" and 350 pounds, there is nothing typical about UBC offensive lineman Giovanni Manu, who was born in Tonga and went to high school in Pitt Meadows.