Latest news with #PublicSafetyDepartment
Global News
3 days ago
- Politics
- Global News
Halting CSIS operation put team in unnecessary danger: report
A new spy watchdog report says an overseas Canadian Security Intelligence Service operation was suddenly halted by government officials, 'creating unnecessary danger for the CSIS team' and raising questions about ministerial accountability. The National Security and Intelligence Review Agency found no written records indicating the decision to suspend the operation had been made by the CSIS director or the minister of public safety. The review agency says that unlike typical operational matters, the case involved senior political-level actors from across the federal government. The heavily redacted review agency report provides few clues about the actors in question or the nature of the overseas CSIS operation. However, it says the decision to halt the activities abroad in mid-operation caused harm to Canada's reputation, needlessly placed spies in danger and 'raises serious concerns regarding CSIS's accountability mechanisms.' Story continues below advertisement In September 2022, the episode prompted Marco Mendicino, the public safety minister at the time, to ask the review agency to look at whether CSIS and the Public Safety Department were effectively supporting ministerial responsibility. 2:11 CSIS watchdog flags 'gaps' in flow of information Ultimately the sensitive operation in question was allowed to proceed after a delay. But the review reveals that senior CSIS officials had difficulty grappling with its temporary suspension. Get breaking National news For news impacting Canada and around the world, sign up for breaking news alerts delivered directly to you when they happen. Sign up for breaking National newsletter Sign Up By providing your email address, you have read and agree to Global News' Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy At one point the CSIS director sent an email to senior officials within key security and intelligence portfolios stating, 'time is quickly running out and the situation is getting much more tense on the ground. We need a decision tomorrow.' The report indicates there was also uncertainty over who had authority to resume the operation. The review agency found that CSIS and the Public Safety Department failed in their responsibilities to 'provide timely and accurate information' to the public safety minister about elements of the operation. Story continues below advertisement The report concludes the system of ministerial accountability for CSIS 'is in need of serious attention.' Building a stronger system now will help prepare for future operations and reduce the likelihood of a repeat of past confusion and risk, the report adds. It recommends that when a decision affecting an active CSIS operation is not made by the spy service's director or delegates, it must come as a direction from the public safety minister and should be accompanied by a written record. It also urges the public safety minister to ensure the deputy minister obtains any information required to fulfil their responsibility to provide independent advice to the minister about CSIS activities and operations.
New York Times
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Jill Sobule, Singer of ‘Supermodel' and ‘I Kissed a Girl,' Dies in a House Fire
Jill Sobule, the singer and songwriter whose hit 'Supermodel' and gay anthem 'I Kissed a Girl' were followed by three decades of touring, advocacy and a one-woman musical, died on Thursday morning in a house fire in Woodbury, Minn., according to her publicist. She was 66. The Public Safety Department in Woodbury, a Minneapolis suburb, said that firefighters had responded at 5:30 a.m. to a house that was engulfed in flames. The homeowners said one person was possibly still inside. Firefighters found the body of a woman in her 60s inside the house, the department said. The cause of the fire was not immediately clear. Ms. Sobule was scheduled to perform songs from her one-woman musical, 'F*ck7thGrade,' on Friday at the Swallow Hill Music venue in her hometown, Denver, according to her publicist. She was staying with friends in Minnesota while she rehearsed for the musical, the publicist said. A free, informal gathering will be held in Ms. Sobule's honor instead. On her 1995 self-titled album, Ms. Sobule, who was bisexual, featured 'I Kissed a Girl,' which tells the story of a woman kissing her female friend. The song came out when it was 'dicey' to be a queer musician, Ms. Sobule recalled. But it broke into the mainstream, making its way onto the Billboard charts. 'Supermodel,' a rebellious rock song from the same album, was included on the soundtrack of the romantic comedy 'Clueless' and further cemented Ms. Sobule's popularity. 'People call me a one-hit wonder,' Ms. Sobule said in a 2022 interview with The New York Times. 'And I say, 'Wait a second, I'm a two-hit wonder!'' Her next albums — genreless and creative — did not reach the same level of mainstream success, but they received positive reviews from critics and fans. 'Now she sings about dumb boyfriends, weight-obsessed women, Alzheimer's disease and the failings of a long list of celebrated people,' The Times wrote in 2000. 'With a wicked wit and pliant facility for candor, Ms. Sobule is an artist whose talent goes well beyond whom she kisses.' Ms. Sobule was born in Denver. Additional information about her family could not be immediately confirmed. She joked that growing up, her only queer role models had been Miss Jane Hathaway from 'The Beverly Hillbillies' and her gym teacher, 'who looked like Pete Rose.' Decades later, she sang about her frustrations in middle school in her musical. She described being called a homophobic slur, feeling out of place among the other girls and having an unrequited crush on a girl. In eighth grade, her guitar talents began to show, and she eventually dropped out of school to focus on being a musician. Her recording career began in 1990, when she released the album 'Things Here Are Different.' Radios played its single, 'Too Cool to Fall in Love.' In 1995, her self-titled album catapulted her career to greater heights. 'I Kissed a Girl' made its way back into headlines again in 2008, when Katy Perry released a song with the same name. In an interview, Ms. Sobule later recalled being 'jealous' when Ms. Perry used the title. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available. In addition to performing, she was outspoken about a variety of political and cultural topics, including the death penalty, anorexia, reproduction, the French Resistance and L.G.B.T.Q. issues. 'She literally created a path for queer people and women in music,' Sarah Kate Ellis, the president of GLAAD, an L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy group, said in a statement. In her 2022 interview with The New York Times about her musical, Ms. Sobule reinforced that her goal was to reach a broad audience of people who felt like outcasts. 'We wanted to make sure that the show wasn't just for people interested in my career because most people could give a [expletive],' she said. 'I'm not that famous. It's kind of this universal story of a weirdo growing up.'
New York Times
30-04-2025
- Climate
- New York Times
At Least 4 Die in Pennsylvania as Storm Leaves 400,000 Without Power
At least four people were killed in Pennsylvania on Tuesday and hundreds of thousands of customers were without power after severe weather that had torn across the High Plains and Upper Midwest earlier this week pushed into the Northeast and Canada. A man in Pittsburgh was killed after being electrocuted by live wires, according to the city's Public Safety Department. The man, whose name was not immediately released, was pronounced dead at the scene. Another resident, Raymond Gordon, 67, was returning to his home when he was fatally hit by a tree after it blew over, according to the Ross Township Police Department near Pittsburgh. In Centre County, Pa., a 22-year-old man was also killed after being electrocuted while trying to put out a mulch fire during the severe weather, the State College Police Department said in a statement. In Greene County, Pa., a passenger in a car was killed when a tree fell on top of it, the Pennsylvania State Police said in its statement about weather-related calls. The passenger, Andrew Celaschi, was struck by a falling tree that was blown over by high winds, the authorities said. The National Weather Service office in Pittsburgh said on Wednesday that it had crews in Wilkinsburg, a borough in Allegheny County, Pa., looking for potential tornado damage from Tuesday's severe weather. The service reported that 'a large swath of destructive wind damage' was seen across the area as storms rolled through on Tuesday evening, with gusts as high as 90 mile per hour. The service added that the storms were 'stronger than many of the smaller' tornadoes that the meteorologists 'typically see in this region, but for a much, much wider area.' More than 400,000 customers in Pennsylvania were without power as of Wednesday afternoon, according to which tracks outages nationwide. Duquesne Light Company said that it was working to restore power to customers without service and that some customers could be without service for about five to seven days. The company was requesting assistance from utility partners. The company said that the heavy winds had knocked down trees, broken utility poles and prompted more than 20,000 separate reports of hazards. Officials in Allegheny County, home to Pittsburgh, encouraged residents to stay home as crews with chain saws worked to remove down trees and clear debris from roads on Wednesday. The same system also rolled through southern Quebec in Canada on Tuesday evening, where a teenage boy was in critical condition in Montreal after a tree toppled and pinned him, according to In Quebec, about 49,000 customers were without power on Wednesday afternoon, according The outages came amid severe weather with thunderstorms that whipped up winds and unleashed hail as large as Ping Pong balls. As of Wednesday, a total of 14 tornadoes had been confirmed in a handful of states, with most of those occurring in Wisconsin on Monday, and others reported in Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Oklahoma and Utah. 'In terms of the overall coverage of tornadoes, it was certainly not as many as it could have been,' said Nathan Wendt, a meteorologist with the Storm Prediction Center at the Weather Service. By Wednesday afternoon, the storm activity had pushed offshore. 'It should be quiet in the Northeast today,' Mr. Wendt said.
New York Times
04-04-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Columbia Displays More Aggressive Posture in Dealing With Demonstrators
Columbia University students have long had a basic understanding about their relationship with the school's Public Safety Department. Unlike at most American universities, which employ a full-fledged police force, Columbia's public safety officers rarely, if ever, touch students. No longer. A new, more assertive stance was on display on Wednesday, as the university's officers intervened to stop a daylong demonstration of students, most of whom were Jewish, who had chained themselves to the campus's wrought-iron gates. Their demand: that the school's board of trustees tell them who provided the federal government with information that led to the arrest last month of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and recent Columbia student. Moving to end the protest, public safety officers cut or untangled the students from their chains at about 11:15 p.m., and then physically picked them up before escorting them from campus. The officers carried at least one student off the lawn, according to video posted on social media and student interviews. 'I yelled out in pain that they were cutting off the circulation to my wrist, but they ignored me and proceeded to drag me from under my arms before I had the chance to stand on my own,' said Maryam Alwan, 22, a protesting student whose chain was cut Wednesday night. 'And then they fell on top of me, and I was pushed to the ground.' Even at the height of the pro-Palestinian encampment movement last spring, Columbia public safety officials did not intervene to physically remove students, instead calling in the New York Police Department when force was required. That has changed, reflecting an evolution in how Columbia administrators think about the use of force and a demand by the Trump administration that the university implement 'full law enforcement authority, including arrest and removal of agitators' if it wants the restoration of $400 million in federal research funding that the White House cut. In a statement, Columbia said that protesters at the gate on Wednesday night were warned that the space had been declared closed by the university and that they would face disciplinary consequences if they did not disperse. Three demonstrators remained. 'They were asked for identification, which two provided, informed of rules violations and informed they would be escorted off campus by public safety if they did not disperse,' the statement said. 'Following these repeated warnings, the chains were removed by public safety and the individuals were escorted off campus.' The university said it was investigating what rule violations had taken place. Columbia, which has roughly 300 public safety officers, pledged in a March 21 letter responding to a Trump administration demand to do more to fight antisemitism that it would add 36 'special patrol officers.' The new officers will have additional training and, unlike the existing force, have arrest powers. The new officers will be a mixture of contracted officers employed by Allied Universal, a private security company already on campus, and in-house officers who pass a 162-hour training course, Columbia officials said. Unlike police forces at many other universities, the new officers will not be armed and will bring anyone arrested to a Police Department precinct for processing. The officers will be identifiable by a special badge and patch on their uniforms, officials said. 'One of the overriding goals we have is to handle as many situations on campus as we possibly can on our own,' Cas Holloway, the university's chief operating officer, said. 'Our objective when it comes to things like protest activity and other student-related activity is for our own public safety officers, and ultimately these special patrol officers, to be able to handle it.' Wednesday's protest took place just before the new officers were expected to be deployed. The first 20 officers, who work for Allied and have completed a peace officer certification course and been sworn in, were not yet active. The public safety officers involved on Wednesday were instead operating under a 2019 policy stating that campus officers 'will only use physical force that is reasonably necessary to bring an incident under control.' In practice, however, that has meant that force is rarely used against students. Ms. Alwan, a Palestinian American comparative studies major, was one of the student leaders of last spring's encampment movement and said she could not recall a response last year similar to what unfolded Wednesday. 'The most aggressive they were, that I can remember, was when they injured a few students by forcefully grabbing tents from them,' she said. 'But they have never picked students completely off of the ground and then pushed us onto the ground like that before.' Earlier Wednesday, Israeli American undergraduate Aharon Dardik said that public safety officers had grabbed his shoulder and arm as they cut his chain off a campus gate during an earlier stage of the same protest, surprising him. 'They didn't inflict bodily harm, but for me at least, it was just a show of like, oh, this is one of the first instances of Columbia changing how it treats students,' he said. 'One of the things you know as a Columbia student is that public safety officers are not allowed to touch you.' Columbia's introduction of officers with arrest powers comes as American universities have dramatically expanded their campus police teams during the past several decades. At four-year U.S. colleges with more than 2,500 students, campus law enforcement departments employed nearly 36,000 full-time personnel in 2021 — a 43 percent increase from 2004, federal data shows. The use of campus police forces can be traced to the late 19th century, when Yale University hired two officers to patrol its grounds. But most schools didn't have campus police officers and relied on local law enforcement until after the 1960s. Violent clashes between student activists and outside police officers during protests in the '60s prompted many administrators to seek legislative permission to create in-house forces, said John J. Sloan III, an emeritus professor of criminal justice at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who has studied campus policing. Schools wanted to make sure that the billions of dollars invested in their campuses were protected. At Columbia, however, the reverberations of protests in 1968, when New York City police officers flooded campus to rout protesters from buildings, had the opposite effect. Shocked by the violence and more than 100 reports of injuries, faculty members took greater control over the rules for student conduct and discipline. During the ensuing decades, the university came to bill itself as a place where political protest was respected and tolerated. Last year, Columbia's pro-Palestinian movement challenged that understanding. With some Jewish students saying they felt threatened and harassed by the protests, which were disruptive and loud, the university found itself under heavy pressure to enforce and tighten its rules on demonstrations. Unable to enforce those rules with its own security force, Nemat Shafik, Columbia's president at the time, called in the Police Department twice, leading to hundreds of arrests and inflaming campus tensions. Some faculty members now support introducing an unarmed campus force that can better enforce rules in the hopes that it will obviate the need to call in the police. 'A lot of things would go a lot more smoothly if in fact we could physically control our campus space in the event of disruptions,' said James Applegate, a professor of astronomy on the executive board of the university's senate, a policymaking body. Other faculty members are concerned that Columbia is signaling a diminished tolerance for protests and political speech. Wednesday night's demonstration, for example, was stopped by public safety officers even though it was peaceful and students said they had received permission to protest in the area until midnight. Columbia administrators said they started planning for a peace officer force last summer and through the fall, and that they had consulted with a campus advisory committee. But it was not publicly announced until the Trump administration demanded that the university adopt further measures to control what it described as the school's failure to protect Jewish students from harassment. The timing left some on campus questioning whether Columbia was caving to White House pressure to rein in pro-Palestinian protests. 'Whether police or public safety, security personnel should only be putting their hands on members of our community if it's absolutely necessary,' said Joseph Howley, a Columbia classics professor who supports the pro-Palestinian demonstrators and visited the protest Wednesday night. 'The real question is: How are we determining the circumstances in which it is necessary to physically touch or move people who are engaged in political protest?' Mr. Howley said. 'Last night, I saw students sitting in an area that was not obstructing or interfering with anything. It didn't seem to me that they presented a danger to anyone.'
Yahoo
16-03-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Tree falling on power line sparks fire in Oakwood
A tree falling on a power line prompted firefighters to respond to an Oakwood home early Sunday. [DOWNLOAD: Free WHIO-TV News app for alerts as news breaks] As News Center 7 previously reported, around 3:00 a.m. crews were dispatched to reports of a structure fire on West Hadley Ave in Oakwood. TRENDING STORIES: Former Ohio sheriff's deputy who had sex with inmate won't be charged Strong winds partially pull roof off area Great Clips, cause damage across Miami Valley Ohio man wins $1M top prize with scratch-off tickes People were inside the home at the time of the fire, but were able to exit safely, according to Chief Alan Hill of Oakwood's Public Safety Department. Firefighters from Kettering and Dayton also responded. No injuries were reported. An estimate of damages was not available at this time. We will continue to follow this story. [SIGN UP: WHIO-TV Daily Headlines Newsletter]
