DHS’s Playbook for the Super Bowl | Ukraine: Source of Europe’s Next Migrant Crisis | Canada’s Trucker Blockades Are a Warning, and more

There may not be a lot of room for the truckers’ popularity to rise. There’s a lot of room for Trudeau’s popularity to fall. This drama is unfolding on Ottawa streets, framed on television screens by the skyline of the Canadian federal Parliament. Canadians will not blame the chief of the Ottawa police force if the blockades continue. They will not blame the Ontario provincial police, or the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, or the provincial premiers. It’s the authority of the national government that is being challenged—it is the national economy that is being disrupted—and it’s the head of the national government to whom Canadians will look for a resolution. If Trudeau does not or cannot deliver that resolution, he will pay the price.

How China Plays by Different Rules — at Everyone Else’s Expense  (Christopher Paul, The Hill)
Imagine the U.S. allowing a rival unfettered access not merely to its marketplace, but to its media ecosystem — the fourth pillar of our already fragile democracy. And not just access, but the full-blown ability to own, control, and influence the content. You don’t have to imagine it, because it’s happened — and keeps happening. Chinese companies have successfully burrowed into the U.S. media ecosystem with little to no pushback from U.S. regulators, particularly when it comes to radio stations. 

Watchdog Investigating DHS Inspector General Over Retaliation Allegations  (Geneva Sands and Zachary Cohen, CNN)
The Department of Homeland Security Inspector General is being investigated as part of a newly revealed probe looking into allegations of retaliation, according to documents shared with CNN.
Inspector General Joseph Cuffari, who is responsible for oversight of DHS, is under scrutiny by the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, a federal government umbrella group tasked with fielding allegations made against an inspector general. The probe stems from accusations of retaliation related to the authorization of an independent report by law firm WilmerHale that was concluded in late 2020 following complaints of unprofessional behavior by several top Homeland Security officials.

The Dog Catcher, the Terrorist and the Dark History of Sinn Fein  (Ian Acheson, The Spectator)
The dead in the ground and those who put them there in the name of ideology do not rest easily in Ireland. The Glasnevin cemetery in Dublin was recently forced to close its wall of remembrance to those who died in the Easter rising of 1916 because of relentless vandalism. In previous attacks the wall had been smashed with sledgehammers and in 2017 paint was thrown over it.
What drove this constant destruction? It seems it was targeted because the attackers could not tolerate the presence of the names of British soldiers on the wall. These soldiers had died alongside republican rebels and civilians in the five days of insurrection that gave birth to the modern Irish state.
It is worth noting that the wall was designed as a ‘necrology’ – its purpose was to simply name the dead without putting any political spin on their memory. It was designed on the same basis as the Ring of Remembrance at Ablain-Saint-Nazaire in France which remembers 580,000 soldiers, victors and vanquished alike, killed in world war one. In Ireland it seems WB Yeats’s observation of ‘great hatred, little room’ still holds sway beyond the grave.
Was its closure a craven surrender to intolerance or gross insensitivity to a sacred cause? Unionists and not a few constitutional nationalists saw the closure of the memorial as an illustration of the way a future united Ireland would accommodate people’s British identity. And no political party has made unionists worry more than Sinn Fein. After the cemetery was closed, the Sinn Féin politician Violet-Anne Wynne welcomed the decision, saying the wall ‘commemorated a war that wasn’t ours.’
Ireland’s largest north-south party has had a complicated relationship with reconciliation, to put it mildly. But the political descendants of the IRA – who carved out a special place of horror in the minds of the people they terrorized for 30 years – are often much better at trying to weaponize their bloody past.

Earth Could Surpass Ability of Ecosystems to Recover from Warming  (Sara Schonhardt, Scientific American)
Scientists outlined the risks of climate inaction ahead of a major IPCC report later this month