So is he dangerous or what?

Twenty-year-old Seyed Amir Hossein Raisolsadat of Stratford has not been charged with any offences.

Police allege Raisolsadat had beans needed to produce the deadly toxin, ricin.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/terrorism-related-peace-bond-for-seyed-amir-hossein-raisolsadat-extended-1.3083226

In Ontario, not a single worker is protected from wrongful dismissal under the Employment Standards Act.

http://metronews.ca/news/canada/1371468/ontario-allowing-employers-to-fire-workers-without-cause/

On Friday, York Regional Police and Peel Regional Police and the Canadian Bankers Association plan to hold a news conference in Aurora to publicize the $100,000 reward.

The robber is known at the Vaulter Bandit for the way in which he jumps over the counter during robberies, and he has been linked to about 20 bank heists over a five-year period across Canada.

…

He appears to work alone and may use rental cars.

“He’s probably pretty hush hush about it,” [Det.-Sgt. Mike] Fleischaker said.

He has used a silver Jetta and a Chevy Cruz for his escapes, and police are investigating whether they were rental cars.

“These are cars that are frequently rented out as economy cars,” Fleischaker said.

His method of robbery has changed over the course of his career.

Originally, he went into banks during regular hours and jumped the counter, taking whatever he could quickly from tellers.

Since May 2011, he has started to show up in the morning as employees prepare to open branches for business.

Last June, the Canadian Bankers Association raised the reward to $50,000 from $20,000.

http://www.thestar.com/news/crime/2015/05/15/vaulter-bandit-bank-robber-reward-jumps-to-100000.html

The Harper government is signalling its intention to use hate crime laws against Canadian advocacy groups that encourage boycotts of Israel.

…

The government’s intention was made clear in a response to inquiries from CBC News about statements by federal ministers of a “zero tolerance” approach to groups participating in a loose coalition called Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS), which was begun in 2006 at the request of Palestinian non-governmental organizations.

Asked to explain what zero tolerance means, and what is being done to enforce it, a spokesperson for Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney replied, four days later, with a detailed list of Canada’s updated hate laws, noting that Canada has one of the most comprehensive sets of such laws “anywhere in the world.”

…

In January, Canada’s then foreign affairs minister, John Baird, signed a “memorandum of understanding” with Israeli authorities in Jerusalem, pledging to combat BDS.

It described the movement as “the new face of anti-Semitism.”

A few days later, at the UN, Canadian Public Security Minister Steven Blaney went much further.

He conflated boycotts of Israel with anti-Semitic hate speech and violence, including the deadly attacks that had just taken place in Paris on the Charlie Hebdo magazine and a kosher supermarket.

Blaney then said the government is taking a “zero tolerance” approach to BDS.

…

“We’ve asked our lawyers. What does that mean?” says CUPE president Paul Moist. “Is it now a criminal offence to walk around with a sign saying close all the settlements, Israel out of occupied territories?”

In France, the law has for years criminalized hate speech based on national origin, and authorities there have in recent years been using it to prosecute BDS advocates. To date, more than 20 have been convicted.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ottawa-cites-hate-crime-laws-when-asked-about-its-zero-tolerance-for-israel-boycotters-1.3067497

Although he was 15 when his crimes occurred in Afghanistan in July 2002, the U.S. military commission made no distinction between juveniles and adults in sentencing him in 2010 to a further eight years behind bars.

While the government concedes the sentence for the most serious charge — the murder of an American special forces soldier — can only be considered a youth sentence, it argues the other four — including attempted murder — must be viewed as adult sentences.

No provisions exist for an inmate to serve both youth and adult sentences at the same time, so Ottawa classified him as an adult offender when he transferred to Canada from Guantanamo Bay in September 2012 under an international treaty to serve out his punishment.

The Supreme Court has twice before taken up Khadr’s case, both times siding with him.

In 2008, the court ruled Canadian officials had acted illegally by sharing intelligence information about him with his U.S. captors.

In 2010, the top court declared that Ottawa had violated his constitutional rights when Canadian agents interrogated him in Guantanamo Bay despite knowing he had been abused beforehand.

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2015/05/14/child-or-adult-supreme-court-hears-omar-khadr-case-today.html

“We have yet to be provided evidence that carding impacts crime in any shape or fashion,” Rinaldo Walcott, an associate professor at U of T said at a press conference Wednesday. “We have yet to be provided evidence that the database developed from carding impacts crime and its resolution in any way or shape.

“We find this totally unacceptable in the age of information,” said Walcott. “We believe that by ignoring available evidence, that the mayor, the Toronto Police Service and its board have clearly declared black communities collectively a public safety threat.

“The only way to think of such a declaration is to call it anti-black racism.”

Walcott was joined by Anthony Morgan of the African Canadian Legal Clinic, Ryerson University professor Akua Benjamin, Pascale Diverlus who is vice-president of United Black Students Ryerson and a co-founder of Black Lives Matter Toronto and academic Chris Williams, a vocal opponent of carding.

The group is asking for meetings with new police chief Mark Saunders, Mayor John Tory and Premier Kathleen Wynne.

Toronto police defend carding — during which people are stopped and documented in mostly non-criminal encounters — as an invaluable intelligence-gathering tool and say they police high crime areas of the city and not by race.

http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2015/05/13/group-questions-why-toronto-police-dont-have-stats-to-defend-carding.html

“I find this provision almost Orwellian,” said Fred Vallance-Jones, an associate professor at the University of King’s College in Halifax and an expert in access to information law.

“It seeks to rewrite history, to say that lawful access to records that existed before didn’t actually exist after all, and that if you exercised your quasi-constitutional right of access to those records, well too bad, you’re out of luck.”

The government is setting a precedent to move retroactively on any record it doesn’t want exposed, Vallance-Jones said.

“That to me is the deeper concern.”

Michel Drapeau, a lawyer, former military colonel and access-to-information author, noted there has never been a charge laid under the Access to Information Act, let alone a conviction.

He said the rationale of moving retroactively to prevent a possible prosecution is “a dangerous and unwelcome precedent” that should be as unwelcome to the RCMP and the administration of justice as to freedom-of-information wonks.

“The optics of it are not good: ‘Oh, so that’s the way it works now?’ If you do something against the law in the RCMP, you’ve got your friends in high places, they change the law,” said Drapeau.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/budget-bill-c-59-rewrites-access-law-to-protect-rcmp-on-gun-registry-cp-1.3072548

It’s not nearly as thorough as I’d wanted but I did manage to slap that open source license on all of the files and cut out a bunch of extraneous stuff in uploading SocialCastr (the personal broadcasting studio software). You can find the source code here: https://github.com/Patrick-Bay/SocialCastr

This is certainly not for the novice, at least not at this time. There’s some advanced code in there and you need to know your way around Adobe Flash to actually compile it. I’ll be going into much greater detail on the project page but, basically, you’ll need to create (or import), a custom application certificate to sign your code, update the SwagCloud class with your own server address (and optional developer key), and work around any minor issues like missing fonts in the IDE (included).

Eventually there will be very clear details that can be followed verbatim (even by the novice), and by that point I hope to have the project ported over to FlashDevelop (the open source version of Adobe Flash), but until then I’m simply going to include these caveats.

However, if you really don’t care to get your hands dirty and just want to start broadcasting, visit http://www.socialcastr.com/ to download the finished product.

Thanks to the keen eyes of the interweb along with a little follow-up research I discovered today that Rob Ford’s nephew Michael Ford (currently running for mayor), recently changed his name from Michael Stirpe To Michael Ford (with the name Douglas A. Ford thrown in there for good measure).

Much like the Fords of yesteryear, it appears young Michael has adopted the Ford name to disassociate from a shady past acquired via his father Ennio (the Heroin addict who shot his mother in the face). Because the name Ford is so much better.