News In Brief: Late September Edition

Well, the past couple of weeks have been pretty slow. Nothing much happened, really. Unless you count the collapse of the Icelandic government. We cover this in depth later in this paper, but the basic rundown is this: Prime Minister Bjarni Benediktsson’s father, Benedikt Sveinsson, signed a letter vouching for the character of a convicted rapist to have his civil standing restored. Bjarni knew about this since last July, but both he and the Ministry of Justice kept this information hidden from the press and the public. Once the truth of the matter came to light, Bright Future announced their departure from the coalition, bringing to a close the shortest-lived government in Icelandic history. We’ll be having elections on October 28—one year to the day from our last elections. Yay democracy!

In related news, a meteor exploded in the sky on the same day parliament reconvened. We jokingly reported that this was a portent of the ruling coalition’s demise, like when Halley’s Comet signalled the end of King Harald II, who was killed at the Battle of Hastings that same year. We don’t like to say we told you so, but, OK, we love to say we told you so. We told you so. You can’t argue with science.

The Daily Stormer, a Neo-Nazi blog that has been been denied an internet home in the US, got itself a .is domain. The site itself is being hosted in Wyoming, but an Icelandic domain means they can stay up and running on the regular internet, for now. Iceland does have hate speech laws, so once we have a functioning government again, it is all but likely that they will be forced to piss off to whatever dark corners of the Deep Web they can find. Good riddance.

Everyone talks about how dangerous dogs are, but recent news reminded us that cats are no better. It came to light that a woman, her daughter and their dog were held hostage by a cat, who behaved in a hostile manner towards them and refused to let them leave a shop. The woman in question has suggested that Reykjavík institute a ban on freely-roaming cats, which would be a bit like banning hot dogs in New York, or pigeons in London. Good luck with that.

“Caveat emptor,” we’re always saying, because we like to use Latin when possible. And it’s especially fitting when it came to light that a lot of “Icelandic” fish sold in North America is actually from China. This has apparently been going on for a while under the purview of High Liner Foods, a Canadian company, which rented the Icelandic Seafood brand in 2011. The practice is due to end next year. Until then, we suggest you buy your Icelandic fish in Iceland.