Tuesday, 18 October 2022 01:51 Written by VANGUARD
The police officers have captured a 14-year-old boy who jumped off of a 25-to-30-foot bridge after running out of gas during a pursuit in Detroit, Michigan, the United States.
According to Fox 2 Detroit reports, the teenager on Wednesday night, was suspected to be a thief who had stolen one of three Mustang Shelby GT500s sports cars from the Flat Rock Assembly Plant lot in Metro Detroit.
It said when one of the cars was spotted, the officers with the Brownstown Police Department (BPD) called and tried to stop the driver, but he refused and this led to giving him a chase.
However, authorities eventually succeeded in pursuing the teenage thief who was driving fast until he ran out of gas near a flyover.
The reports revealed that in an attempt to keep himself from being taken into custody, the driver decided to jump off the bridge over 20 feet in height.
“It was a tall bridge. We didn’t expect that. I don’t think the gentlemen expected it to be a far drop either,” BPD Lieutenant Andrew Starzec said.
A group of officers, firefighters and paramedics proceeded to recover the suspect, who was identified and transport him to a nearby hospital, where he was treated for minor injuries.
The reports said his mother was notified, and further details, including the legal ramifications the minor will face, are presently unknown.
This situation was not the only recent incident of cars being stolen from the Flat Rock Assembly Plant lot, as four other vehicles were stolen earlier this week.
“I know that there were four stolen Mustangs out of the same lot the night before. That will be part of our investigation to see if it was that crew or a different one,” Starzec observed.
A month earlier, 12 Mustangs were also stolen from the lot, and there’s reportedly been a spike in carjackings all around the Detroit area. With some thieves being as young as 11 years old, authorities suspect that a ring of older adults may be pulling the strings and getting local kids to do their dirty work.
“The older offenders know, ‘I can do this and not really have my hands on it because I didn’t really steal the car,” Clive Stewart, lieutenant of the Detroit Police Department, said, Fox 2 Detroit reports
Meanwhile, the attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021 solidified what Democrats have feared since Trump announced his presidential campaign: that Trump and the MAGA Republican Party he’s birthed are a grave threat to American democracy.
Scoundrel, saviour
Understood from a cultural sociological perspective, Trump is the ultimate symbol of American polarization: he is a scoundrel to those on the left, and a saviour to those on the right.
Cultural sociology examines the role of symbols, narratives and meaning in social and political life. It begins from the assumption that everything is a matter of interpretation. People say and do things on the basis of what those things mean to them, and meanings vary from one person or group to the next.
So cultural sociologists like me are interested in the stories and scripts people have in their heads because they affect how they act.
As sociologists William Isaac Thomas and Dorothy Swaine Thomas famously put it: “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”
Canadians and Trump
As Trump fuelled polarization in the U.S., he was having a much different impact on Canada. A cultural sociological perspective helps explain why.
Two things need to be noted to make sense of this:
Canadian nationalism often takes the form of pride over not being American.
Second, since the launch of his presidential campaign in 2015, Trump has been almost unanimously disliked and disavowed by Canadians on both the left and right.
This helps explain why, between 2016 and 2020, Canadians were united in their contempt for Trump, who served as a bipartisan symbol of evil they rallied against regardless of their political leanings.
This is evident in Canadian media coverage during this period. Upon analyzing mainstream print media articles published between 2016-2020 for an ongoing research project, I identified common themes: Canadian media increasingly associated “America” with “Trump,” and both of these with authoritarianism, selfishness, racism, bigotry, xenophobia, ignorance, irrationality, dishonesty and a lack of concern for the least advantaged.
Friendship on the rocks?
These attitudes were also reflected in public opinion surveys.
The Pew Research Center found that the number of Canadians who favourably viewed the U.S. fell from 68 per cent in 2015 to 43 per cent in 2017, and then again to 39 per cent in 2018 – the lowest percentage ever recorded.
In 2020, polls found that the number of Canadians who said they consider the U.S. “a friend” declined 29 percentage points since 2013, when pollsters first began asking the question.
These shifts suggest that Trump really did change how Canadians regard the U.S. But he also changed how Canadians regard themselves.
I would argue that Trump led Canadians to be more receptive to progressive policy orientations — if only as a means of distinguishing themselves from Trump’s America.
The ‘Trump’ problem for Conservatives
Consider that nearly all attempts by conservative politicians to brand themselves as the Canadian Trump between 2016 and 2020 led to failure.
Not long after announcing he was seeking the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada, business mogul Kevin O’Leary’s campaign was dead in the water — in part owing to the obvious similarities between him and Trump.
In 2018, the leader of the Parti Québécois at the time, Jean-François Lisée, channelled his inner Trump by floating the idea of building a fence at a Québec-U.S. border point to prevent asylum-seekers from crossing.
The Trump card was so potent that when Andrew Scheer’s replacement, Erin O’Toole, took over the party in 2020, he made a point of emphasizing that he was not a Canadian version of Trump.
O’Toole’s starkest departure from Scheer, his predecessor, revolved around social issues. Scheer identified as a “pro-life” social conservative whereas O’Toole publicly identified as “socially progressive.” And these words weren’t just rhetoric.
Canadian politicians were more willing to follow the directions of public health experts, and Canadians were more supportive of vaccine mandates. Canada’s death rate is significantly lower, while its vaccination rate is higher than that of the U.S. Some have argued that’s because America’s response got snared in partisan politics, unlike Canada’s.
So, not only did public recognition and respect of members of the LGBTQ+ community increase in the wake of Trump’s election, but lives were saved as a result of the leftward shift among Canadian conservatives.
And in all cases, the Trump effect was at play.
Trump in 2024?
This isn’t to suggest Trump’s continuing influence over the Republican Party is good for Canada. If America descends into civil war, Canadians will suffer with them.
The ascent of Pierre Poilievre to the Conservative Party leadership suggests there’s a Canadian audience for Trump’s brand of toxic partisanship and crude populism.
If Trump runs again in 2024, his pugnacious style and anti-democratic ambitions could continue to appeal to some Canadians.
But it’s likely he’ll motivate Canadians to continue to work towards a more inclusive and egalitarian society.
Andy would rather remain as anonymous as possible because, “it’s kind of embarrassing people knowing how little you have.” He has been living in his home for 21 years. It is a postwar house in the Greater Hamilton, Ont. area with a covered front porch, postage stamp lawn and plaster that has begun to crack. His cat, who “isn’t as friendly as she looks,” likes to sleep in his TV chair in the front room. Andy is single and on a fixed income. And his landlord is selling the house.
I spoke to Andy when I went to view the property with my husband. We recently qualified for a small mortgage and are looking for a fixer-upper. I’m a PhD candidate at the University of Guelph studying non-profit housing advocacy and he is an architectural technologist.
That’s how I ended up meeting the elderly gentleman with the neatly combed white hair. Andy is only one example of an under-discussed but very real problem within Canada’s housing crisis.
As property values hit historic highs in cities across Canada, long-term renters find themselves in an increasingly precarious position.
Skyrocketing rents
As real estate prices rise, the temptation for landlords to sell is high. Even the market correction we are currently experiencing pales in comparison with the rise over the last few years. The average price of a home in Canada this August (heavily influenced by the Toronto and Vancouver markets) was $637,673. That is down 3.9 per cent from the same month last year, but still much higher than the average of $504,409 five years ago.
The average monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Hamilton, the closest city to where Andy lives, is $1,362. Twenty-one years ago, it was $740. Because Andy has been in his apartment for so long, he pays $525 in rent. That is around 25 per cent of his income, which is below $2000 a month.
Renters in Ontario are grandfathered in at their original rent, plus the yearly legally allowed increase, which since 2000, has ranged from 1.5 to 2.9 per cent of the rent. However, landlords can still raise rent at their discretion between tenants — a result of Mike Harris’ government scrapping vacancy rent control in 1997, the same year the federal government disinvested from social housing. Vacancy rent control is when there are limits on how much a landlord can raise rents in between tenants and when a property changes hands.
Real risks of homelessness
But selling property out from under long-time renters, some of them elderly and on fixed incomes, can have devastating consequences. Waitlists for rent-geared-to-income housing in Ontario are long — in Toronto, a staggering 80,532 people are on the active waitlist.
Waitlists for subsidized housing can be up to 10 years long. Andy says that where he lives, “I’m on a list to be on the list — a year, maybe?” So a person cannot be guaranteed a rent-geared-to-income placement before they are expected to vacate their home. There are also the more intangible things that make a home one’s own.
Andy owns his own kitchen appliances and likes to cook. “If they stuff me in a little apartment, I’ll have to give up my dream stove. I call it my dream stove cause it has gas and a grill and everything… It’s the little things, you know, that bother you the most.”
The government should not assume that family and friends can pick up the slack of a flagging social housing system. If their landlord decides to sell and they’re a single, long-term renter from a working-class family, whose friends are also working class, everyone they know might be in a similar situation. If the house sells and people are not at the top of the rent-geared-to-income waitlist, a person could face homelessness.
What is to be done?
My first suggestion would be to modify the affordability standards in the Rental Construction Financing Initiative, which forms a large part of the National Housing Strategy investment. Currently, a large portion of these funds go to for-profit developers who promise to abide by the NHS’s affordability standards.
However, the standards define affordability as up to 30 per cent of the median income of all families in the area (including homeowners and wealthy families). In some areas, by the NHS’s standard, affordability can be counted as high as $1500 a month. Furthermore, units must be kept at this “affordable” level for only 10 years.
Affordability should be calculated in a way that focuses on the median of lower-income households only. If funds allocated to build affordable housing are based on that metric, it might help build up a more affordable stock.
Robust investment in permanent housing that is affordable for lower-income households would help curb the immediate crisis affecting Andy and so many others. This would go a long way towards stabilizing the rental market so that if people need to change residences, they won’t be left out in the cold.
To address the housing affordability crisis, the Canadian government launched the National Housing Strategy in 2017, which sought to invest $72 billion to increase housing supply.
For this policy to be successful, the government must accurately assess which groups have the most barriers to affordable housing and why they are vulnerable.
Our new study on Canada’s affordability crisis partially closes this knowledge gap. We used data from the 2016 Canadian Census to document ethno-racial variations in access to affordable housing. Once these patterns were established, we identified why certain ethno-racial groups have less access to affordable housing.
We found that visible minorities have less access to affordable housing than white people in Canada. Unaffordable housing rates were especially high among Middle Easterns, North Africans, East Asians and South Asians.
Not surprisingly, there are different reasons why specific ethno-racial groups struggle with housing affordability. Middle Eastern and North Africans have limited access to affordable housing primarily due to their high unemployment rates. In contrast, rates of unaffordable housing are high for East and South Asians largely because they tend to reside in large urban cities, where housing prices are high.
Housing vulnerability across immigrant generations
Our study also showed that immigrants were generally more likely than Canadian-born members of their own ethno-racial group to live in unaffordable housing.
Black Canadians, however, were the exception. The unaffordable housing rates of Canadian-born Black people differed little from those of foreign-born Black people. Among the Canadian-born, Black people had the highest unaffordable housing rates, along with Middle Eastern and North Africans.
These findings suggest that most immigrant groups in Canada are able to achieve the socioeconomic mobility necessary to meet their housing needs over time. Black Canadians, however, encounter persistent barriers in access to affordable housing, including racial discrimination in the rental market and in financial institutions.
Policy implications
Four lessons emerge from our study. First, policymakers should increase the housing supply in large cities — like Toronto and Vancouver — where housing prices have increased the most in recent years. These cities are also home to many visible minorities, immigrants and young families, who are struggling with housing affordability.
Second, we need to increase the wages of Canadian workers. Increasing wages offers an alternate solution to the unaffordable housing crisis. This would be a solution for many groups in Canada, including Middle Eastern and North Africans.
Third, greater efforts must be made to remove barriers to accessing affordable housing among Black Canadians.
Lastly, Canadian immigration policies should aim to increase recent immigrants’ access to affordable housing, since they are more likely to live in unaffordable housing. If the federal government plans to welcome 430,000 permanent residents per year over the next three years, it must ensure these residents can afford housing, if they are able to become productive and thriving members of Canadian society.
The National Housing Strategy’s goal is to make affordable housing available to all Canadians. Ensuring that visible minorities have greater and equitable access to affordable housing is an important step in fulfilling that goal.
Some Nigerians approached them during the visit to deliver a protest message to President Muhammadu Buhari, a request which made the speakers to lose their cool and throw caution to the wind.
According to a report by SaharaReporters, some Nigerians who are living in Canada have been physically attacked by Nigerian Speakers of State Houses of Assembly who were led by their Chairman, Rt Hon Abubakar Suleiman, while on a study visit.
SaharaReporters learnt that the Speakers of state legislative houses travelled to Canada on a seven-day study of legislative processes in government and capacity-building programmes to further enhance and strengthen their capacity as lawmakers.
However, some Nigerians approached them during the visit to deliver a protest message to President Muhammadu Buhari, a request which made the speakers to lose their cool and throw caution to the wind.
SaharaReporters was told that the Speakers reportedly manhandled some of the Nigerians and it took the intervention of the police in Canada to restore normalcy.
Narrating the incident, one of those assaulted said, “The visitation of the Nigerian government officials had been published in the newspapers and spread around Nigerian community forums in Canada. Pictures and videos of their meetings were also published on social media.
“I had expected a meet-and-greet with the Nigerian community but there was none planned, according to their published itinerary.
“I found out that they were leaving for Niagara falls on the morning of Friday, 23rd September, 2022. So I called out to a couple of our comrades to join me in delivering a protest message to the Nigerian government through the visiting officials.
“Unfortunately because of the impromptu nature of the information about the departure point of the officials and the timing, most could not make it. I was however accompanied by Mr Jerry Okoro.
“On reaching the lobby of the hotel venue, we greeted the officials and requested to speak with the leader of the team. I told them we were here on behalf of Nigerians living in Canada to deliver a protest message to the Nigerian President Mohammadu Buhari.
“They pointed to someone as the leader of the group and I proceeded to introduce myself and address him with the message we came to deliver, which bordered on our displeasure with the happenings in our country Nigeria and especially the fact that students were out of school for seven months.
“The man representing Cross River State Rt Hon Joseph Bassey listened to me calmly but another colleague of his kept insisting that he should not listen nor respond to us.”
The Nigerian narrated that the Speakers of the state assemblies also manhandled the citizens until the police in Canada intervened.
The victim said, “Another Speaker started pushing him (Joseph Bassey) away and blocking the camera. It was at this point that everything escalated quickly and the hotel manager pleaded with us to leave because of the scene that was being created. I told him we were done and were leaving.
“We started to leave and I felt someone grab my hands. I turned and it was the leader of the team Speaker Abubakar Y Suleiman. Other colleagues of his gathered around me and were threatening to beat me up. I requested that he leave my hand and reminded them that they were in Canada.
“When I broke free of his grip, we left the scene and called the police. They too had called the police. The police dispatch operator asked us to please go back to the hotel where a team had been dispatched to meet us, but to stay away from the point of the altercation.
“When the police arrived, we approached them and they took a report of what happened. The organiser of the event Abi Goodman came out and was using profanity on me and was threatening to deal with me. She also said we will meet me in court.
“Jim Karyjianis who was also a co organiser of the event tried to attack me but was prevented by the police after he had pocked his finger at my face. All these happenings were captured live and can be previewed on social media.”
Friday, 16 September 2022 22:36 Written by oasesnews
A U.S. judge on Thursday September 15, sided with former US president Donald Trump, by refusing to let the Justice Department immediately resume reviewing classified records seized by the FBI from Trump's Florida estate in an ongoing criminal investigation.
Federal Judge Aileen Cannon also appointed Senior District Judge Raymond Dearie as a third party to review records seized by the FBI for materials that could be privileged and kept from federal investigators.
The Justice Department also sought to block the independent arbiter, Dearie, from vetting the roughly 100 classified documents included among the 11,000 records gathered in the court-approved Aug. 8 search.
"The court does not find it appropriate to accept the government’s conclusions on these important and disputed issues without further review by a neutral third party in an expedited and orderly fashion," Cannon wrote Thursday, September 15.
Cannon's ruling further complicates the Justice Department's investigation into Trump's alleged handling of classified records. The special master's review could bar prosecutor from viewing documents seized as they weigh the possibility of criminal charges against the former president who is planning on coming out for president in 2024.
Cannon on Thursday said she would instruct Dearie to prioritize reviewing the classified records first. She also directed him to complete his review of all the seized materials by Nov. 30.
Trump's lawyers in Monday's filing disputed the department's claim that the roughly 100 documents at issue are in fact classified, and they reminded Cannon that a president generally has broad powers to declassify records. They stopped short of suggesting that Trump had declassified the documents, a claim he has made on social media but not in court filings.
About two weeks after the search, Trump's attorneys sought the appointment of a special master to review the seized records for materials that could be covered by attorney-client privilege or executive privilege - a legal doctrine that can shield some presidential records from disclosure.
The Justice Department is investigating Trump for retaining government records - some marked as highly classified, including "top secret" - at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach after leaving office in January 2021.
The department is also looking into possible obstruction of the probe after it found evidence that records may have been removed or concealed from the FBI when it sent agents to Mar-a-Lago in June to try to recover all classified documents through a grand jury subpoena. The Justice department says it will take the case to the appeal court after losing to Trump on Thursday.
Cannon was appointed to the bench by Trump in 2020.
During her long reign, Canada became dramatically less anglophone and anglophile. Nearly half of Canadians were of British ancestry when she assumed the throne in 1952, but that decreased to one-third in 2016 and continues to decline.
In the 1950s, high-school students across English Canada waved the Union Jack, sang the royal anthem (God Save the Queen), said the Lord’s Prayer and cheered cadet corps dressed in British khaki. Elizabeth saw the replacement of the Union Flag by the Maple Leaf in 1965, and the royal anthem by O Canada in 1980.
Over seven decades, Elizabeth successfully transitioned from embodying the key traditions and beliefs of many, to a warmly regarded, but not particularly significant, figure in the lives of Canadians. She remained personally popular in Canada, although she spent relatively little time (about 200 days) in the country over visits that averaged one every three years.
Her dedication to the job as monarch was viewed favourably, as was the absence of scandal in her personal life. She harnessed goodwill from Canadians mostly as an individual, rather than as the hereditary head of an institution while acting as a living link to Canada’s days as a colony in the British Empire.
Elizabeth’s successors — Charles, whose time as king given his age (73) will be relatively short, and William, who will follow — assume the job at a different time in Canada’s history.
Charles takes on the job as head of state for a Canada almost unrecognizable from what the country was in 1952 in terms of the role of religion in the lives of its citizens, the diversity of its inhabitants and its geo-political relations.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been carefully non-committal on the future of the monarchy. In March 2021, he said:
“If people want to later talk about constitutional change and shifting our system of government, that’s fine. They can have those conversations.”
With a minority government, he may be hesitant to spend political capital on constitutional reform.
Gauging the mood
On the other hand, prime ministers are opportunists. The transition to a new monarch — an event that has not occurred in the lifetime of the vast majority of Canadians – is an occasion to gauge the mood of the populace and review existing arrangements.
The constitutional file has a special appeal for politicians looking to create or cement a legacy. Pierre Trudeau’s defining triumph was repatriating the Constitution, a few years after his iconic pirouette behind the Queen’s back in 1977 during a G7 summit.
Elizabeth’s great accomplishment, aided by genes that allowed an extraordinarily long and healthy life, was to keep at bay discussions of the future of the monarchy in Australia, New Zealand and the other former British colonies of which she was the head of state. Her death will permit debate and deliberation to start.
As Canadians mourn the passing of the Queen, they should also reflect on the continued relevance and meaning of the monarchy in a nation reconciling with its colonial past and seeking its place on a complex global stage.
At the height of what’s been called by experts “Africa’s World War” at the turn of the 21st century, the conflict pitted Congolese government forces supported by Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe against several opposition armed groups backed by Rwanda and Uganda.
Numbers were difficult to verify, ranging from 2.5 million to 5.4 million, but this period is often cited as the largest loss of life since the Second World War.
The UN has temporarily withdrawn from Butembo, a major city in eastern Congo. The Congolese government has also expelled the UN mission’s spokesperson.
Given Canada’s investments in peacekeeping operations in the DRC, Canadians should demand accountability for alleged human rights violations by UN officials.
Canadian multilateral diplomacy also has a vested interest in ensuring the credibility of UN peacekeeping to maintain and promote peace. The DRC is central to regional stability as the second-largest country in Africa bordering nine neighbours.
Congolese refugees are resettled to Canada through private sponsorship or government assistance streams, and Canada is a destination for Congolese international students. At a time of declining French-language speakers in Canada, Congolese-Canadians make up an important percentage of francophones.
These human connections can be leveraged by the Canadian government for expertise on the situation in the DRC, and Canada’s response.
How should Canadians respond?
Canada is connected to the DRC through the global economy, international peacekeeping efforts and migration. We must not ignore violence because it’s far away.
As consumers, we need to hold companies accountable for ethical sourcing of materials in our cellular telephones and electric vehicles.
We need accurate and timely information on events unfolding in the DRC. If Canadian media do not have resources for dedicated reporting, they should amplify stories from credible local, regional and international news organizations.
As constituents, we need to call on our MPs and the ministers of Foreign Affairs, Defence and International Cooperation for accountability for Canadian and UN peacekeeping in the DRC.
While Canadian officials have said no Canadian personnel were injured in the recent anti-UN violence, they have not publicly commented on the underlying reasons for the protests.
The Canadian government should convene a group of experts, including Congolese-Canadians, to review Canada’s role in the DRC and propose a strategy for current and future peace support operations in the country.
As a long-standing contributor to peacekeeping in the DRC, Canada has a responsibility to ensure that our interventions respect human rights and contribute to lasting peace.
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