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Hebron Republicans, Democrats endorse their slate of candidates
HEBRON — Hebron Democrats and Republicans have endorsed their chosen candidates to run for municipal offices this fall. The town has a town manager style of government, overseen by a five-member Board of Selectmen. Three of the seats on that board are up for re-election. Democrat Tiffany Thiele has been endorsed to run again, and Jan Lawrence was also nominated by the Democratic Town Committee to run for the seat that is currently held by Democrat Claudia Riley. The Republicans nominated Rob McLaughlin to serve on the board. There are currently three Republicans on the Board: Keith Petit, who is the current chair, Daniel Larson, the current vice chair, and Sean Fitzgerald, who was just appointed in June to succeed Peter Kaspar, who had to resign mid-term due to a relocation out of town. Fitzgerald's term, as is Petit's, runs to November of 2027. McLaughlin is running for Larson's seat. Larson was first elected to the Board of Selectmen in 2009, and served a stint as Board Chair, but has been involved in different town roles for decades. 'I've been serving the town and putting my life on the line since 1980,' said Larson, an electrician who has been in the Hebron Fire Company and is a former fire chief. He's also been a fire maintainer, emergency medical technician, burning official, deputy fire marshal and fish and game warden, to name a few roles. He said he's seen a lot of change, arriving in town when the population was approximately 3,500 people and 'there were more cows than people' and watching the town grow to almost 10,000 residents. 'There comes a point in time when you have to bow out gracefully,' Larson said. 'It's time I take care of myself and my family a little bit. It was a hard decision. I've met a lot of fantastic people. It's just time.' However, he will never stop working to make the town better, even if unofficially, saying that one of his goals is to improve cell service in town. 'Service is markedly worse, with more dead zones and more dropped calls,' Larson said, noting he planned to gain aid from state legislators for this problem. 'There are less land lines to fall back on as everyone switched to cell phones. The cell phone companies need to be making upgrades that benefit everyone. If people can't make emergency calls, that's a problem.' Thiele, a public relations manager and former journalist, was first elected as Selectman in 2021. Democratic Town Committee Chair Chris Lawrence said there was a mix of returning Democrats and new faces among the candidates this year. 'It's a good slate,' she said. For the Town Clerk, incumbent Francesca Villani was cross-endorsed by both the Democratic and the Republican caucuses and will return for another term. For the Board of Finance, Democrats endorsed Ryan Herrick and Adam Ockman, while Republicans selected Brian O'Reilly and Michael Beaulieu. For the Board of Assessment Appeals, Maura Curran Baker was nominated by the Republican caucus. For the Planning and Zoning Commission, the Republican Party selected Chad Livernois, Christopher Cyr and Brenda Nicolo; Democrats picked David Sousa. Cyr currently sits on the commission. For Planning and Zoning Commission alternate, Democrats nominated Davis Howell, an incumbent. For the Zoning Board of Appeals, Adam Thiele is the Democratic candidate, while Jason Guidone, Martin Halloran and Brian Tyler are the Republican nominees. Catherine McSweeney, a Democrat, and June Danaher, a Republican, are the candidates for Zoning Board of Appeals alternate; Danaher is an incumbent. For the local Board of Education seats overseeing Hebron and Gilead Hill Elementary Schools, the Republican candidates are Toni Livernois and Alyson Nadeau-Schmeizl; Nadeau-Schmeizl is the incumbent. The Democrats endorsed Elizabeth Fitzgerald, Nicole Matthews and Heather Petit. Matthews and Petit are current incumbents and Petit is now the board chair. For the regional Board of Education, which oversees RHAM Middle/High School, Hebron residents who were endorsed included Republicans Amy D'Amaddio, who previously served on the Board, including a stint as chair; Rudy Dellafiore Jr. and Jessica Hall. Hebron Democrats Michele May, Brandie O'Reilly and Keith Petit were also nominated for seats on the regional school board. Lawrence, the Democratic Town Committee chair, did note some of the candidates were endorsed as place-holders and may not be on the ballot in November. The Democratic party will host a fundraiser on September 13, staff an informational booth at the town's Harvest Moon Festival in October, and is planning an candidate forum ahead of the elections. The Republican Town Committee meets on the fourth Monday of every month.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
This Mexican city had one of the world's highest homicide rates — so it fired most of its police
On a sunny spring day last year, a young attorney named Gisela Gaytán kicked off her campaign for mayor in this gritty Mexican city. Under her blouse she wore a ballistic vest. Celaya had become the epicenter of a bloody cartel war, with one of the highest homicide rates in the world, and a local police force that appeared powerless to stop it. 'We must recover the security that we so long for,' Gaytán, 38, wrote on social media before setting out that day. As she shook hands at an event on the outskirts of town, a man approached, raised a gun and shot her in the head. After her funeral, where a priest lamented 'a death caused by murderers who believe they control society,' local Morena party leaders picked a new candidate: Juan Miguel Ramírez Sánchez, a bespectacled former university rector who had worked on Gaytán's campaign. Ramírez believed that one of Celaya's most urgent problems was its police, who instead of fighting organized crime appeared to be involved in it. His son-in-law had been killed in a case that was still unsolved, and officers had demanded bribes and obstructed the investigation. Police misconduct was well documented: Local cops were prosecuted for abusing detainees and participating in kidnappings and even homicides. Ramírez won the election. And in his first act as mayor, he fired 340 of the roughly 600 officers on the force. Then — as officials across Mexico have been doing for nearly two decades now — he called in federal troops. Mexican President Felipe Calderón first deployed soldiers into the streets to fight drug traffickers in 2006, promising then that the military would stay only until police could be reformed. In the years since, leaders across the political spectrum have repeatedly vowed to better train and root out corruption among the country's cops — a step that security experts agree is essential to reducing crime and violence. But with the exception of Mexico's capital and a few other major cities, those efforts have lost steam. Officials have slashed funding for state and local police forces, and disbanded the federal police altogether. Cops continue to be near-universally reviled, with federal surveys showing that 9 out of 10 Mexicans don't trust the police. At the same time, Mexico has vastly expanded the military's role in public security. There are now more soldiers, marines and members of the national guard deployed nationally than state and local police officers, according to an analysis by the Citizen Security Program at the Universidad Iberoamericana. In most parts of the country, there are fewer state and local police today than there were when the drug war began in 2006. "The police have been abandoned in favor of militarization," said Ernesto López Portillo, a researcher who leads the Iberoamericana program. There is little evidence that the strategy has worked. Homicides remain persistently high, although they have dipped slightly in recent years. And cartels have only expanded their reach, with a U.S. military analysis finding that criminal groups control more than one-third of Mexico. Yet officials continue to embrace militarization as the country's primary security strategy. That even includes leftists who once fiercely warned of the dangers of ceding public security to soldiers, including President Claudia Sheinbaum and her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The mayor's abrupt decision to summarily replace most of the police force in Celaya, a patchwork of farmland and factories in central Guanajuato state, is a case study in why Mexicans have lost faith in local law enforcement — and what happens when soldiers take over. Celaya used to be a tranquil city. Its location along a highway and railroad that stretch 600 miles to the United States drew Honda and other automakers to build plants here. For years, a local criminal group called the Santa Rosa de Lima cartel quietly stole fuel from the major oil pipelines that cross the region. It wasn't until the notorious Jalisco New Generation Cartel edged in several years ago that violence exploded. The groups battled for control of pipelines but also drug trafficking, extortion rackets and theft of cargo trucks. Celaya became synonymous with violence as criminals gunned down shopkeepers who refused to pay extortion fees, drug users who couldn't pay their dealers and everyday citizens who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. They carried out massacres at hotels, bars and even funerals. By 2024, Celaya had a homicide rate of 87 killings per 100,000 people — 17 times the rate in the United States. It had long been clear that the city's police force was, at best, not up to the challenge — and, at worst, deeply corrupt. The 600 cops on the force in Celaya, which has a population of around half a million, were half of the 1,200 that the United Nations recommends for a city of its size. Officers were poorly trained and badly paid. That made them easy targets for criminals who offered cash in exchange for intelligence, muscle or simply looking the other way when a crime was committed. When police didn't cooperate — or didn't cooperate correctly — they were often killed. In 2024, a cop here was 400 times more likely to be killed than one in the United States. Fanny Ramírez, the daughter of a street vendor and a maid, was 21 when she enrolled in Celaya's police academy. After eight years with the force, she earned just $900 a month, little more than a worker on an assembly line. Her boyfriend was also a police officer in Celaya. Fanny warned her family to steer clear of the cops, said her sister, Elisabeth. After Elisabeth's husband witnessed a triple homicide several years ago, Fanny instructed him: 'Go inside and say you don't know anything.' 'The police are supposed to take care of you,' Elisabeth said. 'But here, we have to protect ourselves from the police.' Mayor Ramírez wasn't the first local politician to try to clean house. Previous leaders had made a show of purging dozens or even hundreds of police officers that they claimed were rotten. But with most mayors serving just a single three-year term and scant public funds, reform efforts gained no traction. Experts say change takes time and requires concrete action to raise salaries, improve recruitment criteria and strengthen oversight. On the national level, the approach to policing was inconsistent. Before he was elected president in 2018, López Obrador criticized his predecessors for replacing police with soldiers. "We can't use the military to make up for the civilian government's shortcomings," López Obrador insisted, vowing to send soldiers "back to their barracks." On taking office, he changed his tune. Facing record high homicide rates, he released a security plan that argued that taking soldiers off the streets would be 'disastrous' because cops were 'controlled by organized crime and moved by self-interest and corruption.' He dismantled the federal police, a famously corrupt force whose longtime leader was convicted in the U.S. of taking bribes from the Sinaloa cartel. And López Obrador steered money once destined for local and state law enforcement to create a 120,000-officer-strong national guard, a force he vowed would be 'incorruptible" and civilian-led, and which was supposed to take over the investigative functions of the federal police. In fact, nearly 90% of the members of the national guard are former soldiers, and few have been trained to carry out investigations. In Celaya, violence continued to spiral. And policing never improved. Last year, about a month before the mayoral candidate was cut down with bullets, Fanny set out to drop her 6-year-old daughter off at child care before starting work. She was driving a sedan that belonged to her boyfriend. Assailants opened fire. She and her daughter died on the spot. A few months later, Fanny's boyfriend was gunned down, too. Neither case has been solved, but Fanny's sister believes the deaths were connected to the boyfriend's ties to organized crime. Shortly after he was elected mayor in June 2024, Ramírez said he was approached by cartel members who asked for positions in his government. He said he rebuffed them, but was shaken. "I've been afraid like all citizens," he said. He met with Mexico's top public security official and told her he had no confidence in Celaya's police. "Not all of them were bad," he said recently, "but most were." She pledged to send him 500 members of the national guard. The mayor's mass firing of police faced criticism from his political opponents. Mauro González Martínez, the top security official in Guanajuato state, a former federal police officer and member of an opposition party, said national guard troops and other members of the armed forces were not equipped to fight crime. "The army is trained for war," he said in an interview. "A police officer investigates. A soldier kills." Nancy Angélica Canjura Luna, an analyst at a think tank called Causa en Comun, said that while soldiers are seen as less corruptible than police because they typically come from other parts of the country, that means they know little about the region they are supposed to be protecting. 'They are always new," she said. "They don't know the criminal dynamics and they don't know the territory itself.' But others in Celaya, exhausted by years of violence, welcomed the troops and two high-ranking military officers loaned to the city to lead its new security force as a show of strength. Army Col. Pablo Muñoz Huitrón and Lt. Col. Bernardo Cajero rode into town in an armed convoy, dressed in camouflage fatigues. As they strode into City Hall, they were flanked by soldiers. Muñoz was quickly sworn in as Celaya's secretary of public security, a role traditionally occupied by civilians, but which in many cities is now filled by current or former soldiers or marines. Cajero was tasked with leading the officers who had survived the purge and the guardsman who now worked alongside them. When Cajero switched from his olive green army fatigues to a blue police uniform, he was startled by how differently people treated him. "My first realization was how much people hate the police," he said. The pair, who had served in cartel hot spots like Tamaulipas and Michoacán, devised a plan. The city's remaining police would patrol alongside members of the military to reduce opportunities for corruption. Security forces would focus on improving response times for 911 calls and increasing the number of checkpoints around the city to make sure drivers weren't carrying guns or drugs. Celaya's leaders say crime rates have fallen. Between January and June, there were 158 homicides in the city, according to the local government, down from 257 during the same time last year. But high-profile acts of violence continue. Cajero was patrolling on a recent night when the radio crackled with a report of a homicide. His convoy raced to an intersection where a taxi lay overturned. The driver had been shot. His 12-year-old daughter, who had been in the passenger seat, survived but was in shock. 'Take me to my father,' she wailed as a paramedic tended to her wounds. Earlier this year, the mayor's bodyguard was shot to death outside his own home. Ramírez, who cries while remembering him, said the perpetrators were likely criminals angry about his new security plan. "Obviously it was to send me a message," Ramírez said. Some locals have bristled at the presence of federal forces in their streets. Alejandro, a 24-year-old Uber driver who did not give his last name because of fear of reprisals, said he had been stopped frequently by national guard members, and treated as roughly as by police while they reviewed his car and identity. "They're all the same," he said. This summer, 11 members of the national guard were charged with theft after they were caught extracting fuel from an illegal tap not far from Celaya. "How can we trust people who are robbing from us?" Alejandro said. "That's not logical." Read more: She's likely to be Mexico's next president. Can she save the country from cartel violence? Sheinbaum won the presidency last year in part on a promise to replicate the security strategy she had embraced as mayor of Mexico City, which focused on improving investigations, professionalizing cops and implementing community policing models developed in U.S. cities such as Oakland. But as president she has taken few steps toward police reform, and she recently pushed a constitutional amendment that puts the national guard permanently under military control. The lack of federal help has made it challenging for Celaya's efforts to rebuild its police force. On a recent afternoon at the city's aging police academy, young officers rappelled down walls and simulated hand-to-hand combat. They practiced wielding guns but not actually shooting them because the cost of bullets was too high. One recent graduate, 29-year-old Jose Francisco Hernández Herrera, decided to join the police after his brother, a merchant, was killed by criminals. Hernández said instructors rarely discussed how police should handle bribery offers from organized crime, even if it may be only a matter of time before he is approached. "You're never 100% prepared," he said, adding that he would refuse to cooperate for his brother's memory, and because he wants his son to live in a city where he can trust police. "If you really want to change your society, you have to make the right decision, even if it's the more complicated one." Ramírez has touted young officers like Hernández as the future of Celaya. But the academy is graduating fewer than 20 officers a month, and is struggling to recruit new officers. Pay starts at just $800 a month. Recently, the city put out a call to current and former soldiers, asking them to take jobs on the force. Estefania Vela, a human rights lawyer at a think tank called Intersecta, worries militarization is near-sighted. "Nobody disputes that the police have problems," she said. "But what are you doing to fix those problems?" Officials say the new force is not intended to be permanent. But how long will they stay? And what happens when they leave? 'It's necessary today," said Muñoz, the colonel in charge of the deployment. "Tomorrow, who knows?" Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Yahoo
an hour ago
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Scott Moe speaks out against AI-generated videos of him circulating online
Premier Scott Moe's face is a frequent sight on social media, but recently his likeness has been reported on dubious video ads for cryptocurrency schemes that he's never endorsed. The videos take Moe's voice and likeness, and use AI to produce a convincing video of him speaking. This is not the first time the premier's image has been used to advance fraudulent businesses. In March, Moe acknowledged similar schemes, which were using his face to sell cryptocurrency. On Aug. 1 Moe spoke out forcefully against the videos, and denied any affiliation with the websites mentioned in them. "I want to put it out there without question that when you see myself and quite likely any politician out there endorsing specific cryptocurrencies or things of that nature, that it likely and most certainly is a deepfake," he said. "You should just bypass it and move along. They're only there to hurt you." The Financial and Consumer Affairs Authority of Saskatchewan (FCAA) issued a warning as well, advising people to not send money to entities that are not registered in the province. Under the 1988 Securities Act, individuals and companies need to be registered with the FCAA in order to trade or sell securities and other financial products in Saskatchewan. The FCAA has set up a website, to allow people to easily check the status of someone offering an investment. "Do not deal with any unregistered entities," said FCAA Securities Division Executive Director Dean Murrison. "Do not make investment decisions based on public figure endorsements." According to the FCAA, Scammers are creating fraudulent news and social media articles, commonly using deepfakes and other methods to imitate real media sources, including the CBC. LISTEN | What you should know about deepfake ads on social media: Beyond verifying the investment entity, the FCAA encourages people to always seek a second opinion or seek professional advice about investments they see online. They should also never make an investment decision based on an endorsement from a notable figure. A global effort to fight deepfakes The rapid development of artificial intelligence tools has given fraudsters unprecedented new methods to develop fake videos of celebrities and politicians endorsing their products. Countries around the world are grappling with how to stay ahead of these scams. Denmark is considering a law that will allow people to copyright their digital likeness, allowing them to pursue civil cases if their likeness is used without their consent. Some AI observers are skeptical of that solution. Henry Ajder, an expert on deepfakes, says the copyright classification would compel people to proactively go after AI abusers, and not be able to rely on the government to police. "Copyright is treated as a civil right, not necessarily treated as criminal. So violating copyright is not something that the state is necessarily going to prosecute a perpetrator for," he said. "This is something that you would be expected to bring a civil case to." Nelson Godfrey, an intellectual property lawyer based in Vancouver, says its unlikely that Canada would follow the Danish route. "Trying to characterize someone's likeness as copyright is a bit of an odd fit. So to make it work within existing copyright legislation, certainly you'd need to figure out how ownership works, how authorship works, if there would be joint authorship or co-ownership of works," he said. "There's real complications when it comes to those things." Unlike the European Union, Canada does not have AI-specific laws, though it does have digital safety laws and a new Minister for Artificial Intelligence. The Ministry of Justice says it's working on criminalizing nonconsensual sexual deep fakes, which Prime Minister Mark Carney promised to while he was campaigning before the most recent federal election.
