5 Mind-Blowing Things That Happened This Week (12/15/17)

5 British Columbia Discovered The 13th Severed Foot On Its Shoreline
Photo credit: abc.net.au
On Wednesday, British Columbia residents might have been startled if they took a walk to a certain part of the coastline. A severed human foot was lying on the beach, still clad in a sneaker. But it wouldn’t just have been walking into the opening scene of a new bleak crime drama that would have shocked locals. It’s the fact that this foot is the 13th human foot to wash ashore in BC in the past decade.As far as stories go, they don’t come much creepier than this. Starting in summer 2007, severed feet have regularly turned up on BC’s beaches in varying states of decay. At first, they were suspected to be remains from an airplane crash. Then people began to wonder if organized crime was to blame for a sudden, gruesome killing spree.[6]Today, our best guess is that all the feet are the results of accidental drownings and suicides and the currents just happen to be washing them all onto a single stretch of BC coastline.While the official version is generally accepted, it seems likely that this new foot washing ashore will fan the flames of conspiracy theories. If nothing else, it’ll spark plenty of ghoulish conversations over the holidays.4 Burundi’s Government Played With Fire
Photo credit: nation.co.ke
Nestled just under Rwanda, Burundi is a tiny African nation that emerged just over a decade ago from the shadow of a bruising civil war. Between 1993 and 2005, 300,000 Burundians were killed in an ethnic conflict between Tutsis and Hutus. The war finally ended when President Pierre Nkurunziza came to power and a new constitution was ratified. One of the strict provisions of that constitution was a two-term limit on the presidency. In 2015, President Nkurunziza removed those limits and won a third term. Burundi instantly plunged back into unrest, with up to 2,000 dying in election violence. This week, President Nkurunziza followed up a government pledge to rewrite the constitution entirely, allowing him to stay in power until 2034.While the changes will be put to a referendum in 2018, Nkurunziza has already made his first move. A new national tax will be levied on everyone to support his 2020 reelection campaign. It’s feared that this enforced taxation will spark yet more violence.[7]Burundi has been teetering on the brink for two years now. Hundreds of thousands have fled into neighboring Tanzania, and government militias are still carrying out ethnic murders in rural areas. Onto this tinderbox, Nkurunziza has just cast a lit match. 3 The FCC Voted On Net Neutrality
Photo credit: mashable.com
Net neutrality is a cornerstone of the modern Internet. It forces service providers like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T to—to use a technical term—not act like total jerks. At the moment, these companies can’t choose to block certain websites, can’t offer faster loading speeds for extra money, and basically have to act as impartial custodians of the data flowing into your house. It’s the concept that has underpinned the entire Internet. And now, all that may be about to change.On Thursday, the FCC voted on removing net neutrality rules brought in under President Obama. President Trump supported removing the rules. As the committee is split 3-2 in favor of Republicans, no one started the day expecting anything but a total repeal.[8] Activists have said that ending net neutrality could allow your provider to charge you an extra $10 a month to ensure you have enough bandwidth for, say, Netflix to play movies properly. It could also allow big players like Google and Facebook to create monopolies. In effect, it could end the Internet as we know it.2 New York City Got Lucky
Photo credit: NBC News
On Halloween this year, an ISIS-inspired killer rammed a truck into cyclists near New York City’s Hudson River, killing eight. It was the first successful Islamist attack on the city since 9/11. On Monday, we nearly saw a second. Twenty-seven-year-old Akayed Ullah strapped a pipe bomb to his chest and wandered into a crowded underground passageway between the Times Square subway and the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Surrounded by people, he detonated the device.The potential was there for another Manchester Arena bombing, at least in terms of casualties. Luckily, Ullah turned out to be an incompetent terrorist. Like the Parsons Green tube bomb in London this September, his device failed to fully explode. Instead, it partly detonated, badly injuring Ullah and hurting four other people. For a bombing of a busy transit point in one of the busiest cities on Earth, this was a minor miracle.The failed attack confirms that one of the best weapons we have against terrorism is the terrorists’ incompetence. Like the Chelsea and New Jersey bombings in 2016, what could have been a massacre wound up killing no one.[9]1 We Discovered Burma’s Rohingya Crisis Was Worse Than We Thought
Photo credit: CBS News
Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) is one of the most respected aid agencies on Earth. Also known as Doctors Without Borders, it won the Nobel Peace Prize for its lifesaving work in countries like Bosnia, Rwanda, and Liberia. When they call something a humanitarian crisis, they know what they’re talking about. Which is what makes their new report this week on the Rohingya crisis in Burma (aka Myanmar) so disturbing. In August, the Buddhist army began an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Muslim minority Rohingya. Hundreds of thousands have fled over the border into Bangladesh, but lack of access means we’ve had to rely on Burmese estimates of only 400 killed.The MSF report suggests that this tally is not even close. The organization estimates a minimum of 6,700 Rohingya died in the first month of the crisis alone.[10.
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