"I HAVE CHOSEN TO PAINT THE LIFE OF MY PEOPLE AS I KNOW AND FEEL IT--PASSIONATELY AND DISPASSIONATELY. IT IS IMPORTANT THAT THE ARTIST IDENTIFY WITH THE SELF-RELIANCE,HOPE AND COURAGE OF THE PEOPLE ABOUT HIM,FOR ART MUST ALWAYS GO WHERE ENERGY IS."
--ROMARE BEARDON

Suspect in teen girl's murder dies 

TORONTO - The 16-year-old boy who plunged from a highway overpass on Friday, just hours before police discovered the body of a teenage girl in a wooded ravine nearby, has died, Peel police said Sunday night.
On Saturday police said that charges were pending against the Mississauga student in the death of 17-year-old Kiranjit Nijjar, who attended Mississauga Secondary School with the suspect.
Nijjar’s body was discovered in a wooded area of a parkette on Spinnaker Circle in the Courtneypark Dr. W. and Mavis Rd. area around 12:30 p.m. on Friday as police were looking for clues into why the boy plunged onto Hwy. 401 from the Mavis Rd. overpass earlier that morning.
He was struck by at least one car.
Schoolmates on scene Friday described Nijjar and the boy as close friends but that the boy had issues with depression. Some also said it may have been a case of the suspect wanting a relationship with Nijjar – a feeling friends said was not reciprocated.
“It was an ongoing thing,” said Alex Marinez, who said Nijjar had been stabbed. “She didn’t want to (have a romantic relationship) with him, and he had some depression issues.”
Marinez and other schoolmates also said the boy had been writing about suicide on his Facebook page for the week leading up to Friday’s double tragedy, and went as far as hinting he would take Nijjar’s life along with his own.

Teen girl shot in North York 

By Kevin Connor

 

TORONTO - A 15-year-old girl is in hospital with a gunshot wound to her abdomen that witnesses said was fired by another young girl Sunday afternoon.
Police were called at 1:40 p.m. to the Baycrest Arena, in the Bathurst St. and Wilson Ave. area, after reports of two shots being fired.
Mike, who didn’t want his last name used, said he was driving to the arena with his daughter Lauren, 15, when the incident happened.
He said he saw two girls beating up another girl.
“I thought they were play fighting. Then I realized it was much more serious. I’m shocked that my daughter would see this on a Sunday afternoon in broad daylight,” Mike said after being interviewed by police.
Lauren said she has never been so scared in her life.
“The victim was on the ground getting kicked and beaten and then one of the girls stepped back and took out a gun and fired twice,” Lauren said.
Steven Okolea was coming home from church when the shooting happened.
“I couldn’t believe it was girls involved,” he said.
Toronto Police Insp. Sonia Thomas said at the scene that there were no descriptions of the two girls.
The injured teen was taken to Sunnybrook hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, Staff-Sgt. Mike Ervick said.

Man shot dead in east-end plaza 

By Terry Davidson

Toronto Police forensics investigators, Consts. Sandy Komarniski and Bob Arnott, collect evidence at Claredon Wild Flowers Restaurant and Bar at Danforth Ave. and Birmount Rd., where a fatal shooting took place early Saturday morning. (TERRY DAVIDSON/Toronto Sun)

TORONTO - A man is dead following a shooting in a rough Scarborough plaza.
Police were called to the Clarendon Wild Flowers Jamaican restaurant in the Birchmount and Danforth Rds. area around 4 a.m. Saturday after shots were fired inside.
Officers from Toronto Police’s forensics unit were by early afternoon dusting the small eatery’s front door for finger prints.
A man, reportedly in his late 40s, suffered a single gunshot wound and was rushed to St. Michael’s Hospital but was pronounced dead.
Police had not yet released the victim’s name, or say if an arrest had been made.
The shooting is indicative of an area that is becoming increasingly worse when it comes to crime and mayhem, says George Papas, a manager of a bar in the plaza.
“I’ve been here a long time, and it’s really changed,” said Papas, from the Birmount Tavern. “You have to be cautious when you come around here...It makes me nervous. My kids come here sometimes — to eat, to hang out.”
Sometimes, the “Jamaican place” would be open all hours, with pounding music emanating from inside throughout the night and into early morning, said John Zagarella, a barista at an espresso bar across the way.
At the Tivoli salon next door, Mike said he is nervous the escalating villainy in the area will hurt business.
“It’ll make a bad reputation,” said Mike, declining to give his last name. “We’ve never seen that place open in the daytime. They used to have billiards inside...and there was drinking before.”
Mike said he hadn’t seen activity in the restaurant the last two months.
The shooting marks Toronto’s 34th homicide of 2011.

Competing rally turns into shouting match

By Tom Godfrey 

Competing rally turns into shouting match | Toronto & GTA | News | Toronto Sun

TORONTO - Tension was running high as two vocal groups, both for and against Muslim prayer service in schools, tried to out-shout each other.
Toronto Police officers kept the groups apart and from protesting on the sidewalk outside the Toronto District School Board’s Yonge St. headquarters on Saturday because they didn’t have permits.
“I am here to support the board for letting us pray in school,” said Aayman Karin, 13, one of about 100 Muslim students who pray on certain Fridays in the cafeteria of Valley Park Middle School, on Overlea Blvd. “It is a good thing for us because we don’t have to leave the school.”
Karin said students feel more comfortable praying in school with their classmates.
“There is too much fuss being made about this issue,” Karin said. “We have the freedom to do this and we are not doing anything wrong.”
Organizer Chris Andrewsen said the event was in support of the TDSB and brought together students from a number of Toronto schools.
About three metres away, a coalition of protestors demonstrated against religion in schools using a bullhorn to drown out the TDSB supporters.
They used the bullhorn to yell about Allah and suicide bombers as the Canadian anthem was played.
“We are here because religion has no place in our schools,” said Ron Banerjee, of Canadian Hindu Advocacy. “We want religion out of all our schools.”
His group was joined by the Jewish Defence League Canada, Costas Christian Mission, Evangelical Asian Church, International Christian Voice, and Canadian Egyptian Congress.
Rev. Tony Costa, of Costa Christ Mission, accused the TDSB of showing “preferential treatment to Muslims.”
“There has to be equality for all religions,” Costa said. “The policy is unfair and unjust and it has to be consistent.”
An uproar erupted earlier in the summer when it surfaced that board officials were allowing Valley Park students to hold prayer sessions with an imam in the cafeteria during school hours.
School board officials have said they plan to continue the practice despite opposition.
Competing rally turns into shouting match | Toronto & GTA | News | Toronto Sun

Teen who fell from overpass will be charged in Mississauga death 

By Terry Davidson

TORONTO - Charges are pending against a 16-year-old Mississauga student who plunged from a highway overpass on Friday, just hours before police discovered the lifeless body of a teenage girl in a wooded ravine nearby.
The charges against the youth are related to the death of 17-year-old Kiranjit Nijjar, who attended Mississauga Secondary School along with the 16-year-old boy, who can’t be named under provisions of the Youth Criminal Justice Act.
Nijjar’s body was discovered in a wooded area of a parkette on Spinnaker Circle in the Courtneypark Dr. W. and Mavis Rd. area around 12:30 p.m. on Friday as police were looking for clues into why the suspect plunged onto Hwy. 401 from the Mavis Rd. overpass earlier that morning.
The suspect was struck by at least one car and remains in hospital with serious injuries. He has not yet been formally charged.
Schoolmates on scene Friday described Nijjar and the suspect as close friends but that the boy had issues with depression. Some also said it may have been a case of the suspect wanting a relationship with Nijjar – a feeling friends said was not reciprocated.
“It was an ongoing thing,” said Alex Marinez, who said Nijjar had been stabbed. “She didn’t want to (have a romantic relationship) with him, and he had some depression issues.”
Marinez and other schoolmates also said the suspect had been writing about suicide on his Facebook page for the week leading up to Friday’s double tragedy, and went as far as hinting he would take Nijjar’s life along with his own.

Morning shooting in Scarborough 

By Irene Thomaidis,Toronto Sun

Toronto Police are on the hunt for a gunman after a man was shot inside a Scarborough home Friday morning.
The victim — in his late 20s or early 30s — was shot just before 6:30 a.m. in a house on Cavalry Trail, near Morningside Ave. and Ellemere Rd. He was rushed to Sunnybrook hospital in serious condition.
It is believed the suspect, a while male, fled on foot. Police dogs are being used in the search for the man.

The 'browning' phenomenon and Jamaican self-worth

RAULSTON NEMBHARD

Saturday, September 17, 2011

Jamaicans are understandably outraged at the report that 

Jamaican firms are discriminating or have the intention to discriminate against employing Jamaicans on the basis of skin colour. One would have thought that on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the country's independence we would have attained a certain maturity that would reflect the time-honoured statement from that great icon of the Civil Rights movement in America, Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, that a person should not be judged on the basis of the colour of his skin but by the content of his character. What is clear to me is that this pathetic and unfortunate attitude says more about the character of those so inclined to discriminate than those they would discriminate against. It is self-disparagement at its lowest level and must be rooted out wherever it raises its ugly head.

We cannot make light of this browning phenomenon which might be more deeply resident in the psyche of our people than we would care to admit. The desire to employ people with a light or brown skin is one part of the problem. Another problem with which we have had to contend is the bleaching of the skin partly because this guarantees a certain upward mobility in society or makes one more attractive to the opposite sex. All of this suggests to me that something has gone amiss in our society. It is very easy and convenient to lay the blame for this kind of behaviour on our colonial or slave past. The extent to which the plantocracy still inheres in our psyche as an impediment to social mobility, physical attractiveness and the attitude of the society toward political and economic power, is still a matter of debate. I would admit that elements of the colonial and slave past are still with us, but I find that these become too easy scapegoats, too easy escape valves which prevent us from accepting personal responsibility for our own actions.

KARTEL... said to have bleached his skin. 1/1

I can accept what slavery can do to a person's self-worth and self-esteem. But we must remember that even in the worst days of slavery, many on the plantation did not lose their self-respect. The yearning to be free was ever present in their minds. The suggestion has been made that many lost their dignity or self-esteem due to what their masters did to them and while this might have been so in some cases, it cannot be assumed that their denigration by the white man is something that was accepted, believed in and lived out, by many a slave. The slave protests in the West Indies, especially the celebrated Sam Sharpe revolt, underscore the strength of black dignity in the face of great oppression. The idea being perpetuated today in textbooks and academia about the denigration of black dignity in the slave period as an explanation for black-on-black denigration today is questionable. Certainly not to the extent to which it is being suggested. I know that I am swimming against the stream here, but to accept in a wholesale fashion that collectively the black man lost his dignity during the slave period or the colonial period flies in the face of the valiant struggle that was waged by many slaves of which the Haitian Revolution is the enduring symbol.

I find that we too easily find escape for our discontents by riding on the duppy of the slave past. We bleach our skins so it has to do with slavery. Uppity firms prefer to employ brownings than blacks so it has to do with the plantation mentality. Did we ever stop to consider that this too could be a function of sexual attractiveness; that many of the bosses in those firms who want to employ "brownings" do so because they will have a certain "attractiveness" around the office? An attractiveness that they too may be inclined to exploit? Why do such phenomena have to come down to one common denominator -- the slave past?

If there is to be a common denominator then it has to do with our self-worth as a people. It cannot be that we continue to view ourselves in a negative way because of slavery, because of what happened in the West Indies over 150 years ago. I understand the Collective Unconscious theory of Carl Jung, but I cannot vouch for its veracity in explaining slavery as the reason why we have such a poor estimate of ourselves; why our self-respect as a people has been so horribly degraded almost 50 years after we took over control of our own affairs. We need to change the narrative and begin to help people to understand that they can achieve significantly if they put their minds to it. Perhaps a place to start is to get the teaching of Marcus Garvey into the curriculum: Up you mighty race, you can accomplish what you will!

While we must decry the instances of discrimination and those who suggest that people are not comfortable in their own skins, we must understand that unless we are rendered incapable each one of us who have come of age must be responsible for his or her own destiny. We are not owed a free lunch and so we must fight at every stage of our lives to achieve the things we want, despite the obstacles that are placed in our way. I have been in American classrooms both as a teacher and as a student. I have taught classes in which people were much older than myself and in which I was the only black man standing. I have been in classes where I was the only male and black person present. Did I feel age, gender or racial oppression? A resounding no, because I had earlier resolved that I am not going to accept that anyone was brighter than I am, and what others could achieve I too could achieve and achieve better. I had a strong sense of my personal worth or value and an indomitable belief in my capacities which I found at times were intimidating to those from whom I should feel intimidation. Sydney Poitier, the great Bahamian actor, never accepted a role that would demean himself as a black man. Yes, the narrative must change and those who are perpetuating this self-hate, wittingly or unwittingly, are doing our people a great disservice.

 

Blackface stunt backfires at Montreal university

MONTREAL — Students at an elite Montreal business school painted themselves in blackface and chanted in mock Jamaican accents at a back-to-school event that had the university expressing regret Thursday.

The frosh-week stunt was organized by a student sports committee at the Hautes Etudes Commerciales, the Universite de Montreal's business school.

Participants were encouraged to dress in Olympic-themed costumes, with one group choosing to portray Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt.

Along with donning the colours of the Jamaican flag, several students also covered their face, arms and legs in black paint. The colourful attire included at least one Rastafarian hat, one green underwear patterned with monkey faces, and a stuffed animal that students carried around.

One witness, who is of Jamaican descent, said he felt uncomfortable and was shocked to hear some students chanting, "Smoke more weed." At one point the students also repeatedly chanted, "Ya man!"

"It was terrible and I felt awful seeing it," said Anthony Morgan, a 25-year-old law student at McGill University.

"Students at that level can't have the idea in their head that this is OK."

Morgan happened to be on the Universite de Montreal's campus on Wednesday afternoon as the event was taking place at the school's football stadium. He recorded the mock sprinters with his Blackberry camera.

He said he found the display deeply offensive because of the troubling historical connotations of blackface.

"It is connected to a longer tradition of minstrel shows, reducing black people to pretty much jokes," he said. "They're put on as a spectacle, to almost look grotesque."

A spokesman for the business school said the stunt was unacceptable — but he said there were no ill intentions. He said the students should simply have chosen another way to get into the Olympic-themed spirit.

"They interpreted the theme poorly," said Michael Lartigau.

"We spoke to the students and they found the reaction regrettable and are sorry."

Lartigau would not comment on whether the students involved would face disciplinary actions.

The director of the sports committee that organized the event said a "great deal of misunderstanding has surrounded" Morgan's video, which has since been posted on YouTube.

In an email forwarded to The Canadian Press, Frank Sciortino said the event was part of the committee's efforts to encourage physical activity and team spirit.

"Group A01, which is seen in the video, is a dynamic and intense group that has displayed great initiative in the schools (sic) student life in the recent years," the email said.

"Track and field was the groups' (sic) choice as athletic discipline... Consequently, group A01 decided to costume themselves as Usain Bolt, emphasizing on the Jamaican colors (sic), his native country.

"My wish was simply to...  assure you that in no way were they a racist act."

Morgan said he doesn't hold any hard feelings against the students, but questioned what institutional safeguards were in place to prevent such incidents from happening.

"As problematic as it was for the students to be doing this, I thought it spoke more about the university," he said.

"Is there any oversight in terms of the costumes students pick, the events that they select for first-year students. This is the first engagement these students have with the university."

While HEC is affiliated with the Universite de Montreal, the schools have separate administrations. The HEC student group had to rent the football stadium from the university.

"It is just a shame that at the time this was happening the person didn't call security or somebody at the university so we could have addressed it there and then," said university spokesperson William Raillant-Clark.

Morgan described making eye contact with other visible minorities watching Wednesday's frosh event. He said he felt a shared unease about the proceedings, but wanted to avoid making a scene.

"You don't want to create a situation that is confrontational," he said. "All and all it was just a very uncomfortable, very offensive situation. And so I definitely felt it need to be addressed."

Morgan is considering filing a complaint with the Quebec Human Rights Commission.

HEC is considered among the oldest and most prestigious business schools in Canada.

The higher education company QS ranked it 22nd among 200 North American business schools in 2010, ahead of McGill, the University of British Columbia and Cornell. 

Randall Hopley’s mysterious motives

Brothers Arnold (left) and Randall Hopley, seen when Randall was about 12.

By Oakland Ross Feature Writer

SPARWOOD, B.C.—He doesn’t smoke. He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t do drugs.
But Randall Hopley, 46, now stands accused of a raft of crimes, including breaking and entering and kidnapping.
Currently in jail in Kamloops B.C., Hopley is seen as both the villain and — in some ambiguous sense — the hero of a story that has transfixed much of this country for the past 10 days or so, ever since 3-year-old Kienan Hébert disappeared from his family home in the mountainous B.C. interior in the early hours of Sept. 7.
“This is a good-news story, and I’m very proud,” RCMP Insp. Brendan Fitzpatrick told reporters, shortly after Hopley was captured in the lofty Crowsnest Pass near the B.C.-Alberta border.
For all the relief it brought to the roughly 4,000 residents of this coal-mining town, Hopley’s capture was not the emotional high point of the drama that seized Sparwood at about 8:30 on a Wednesday morning when Paul and Tammy Hébert discovered their boy was gone.
Instead, the emotional zenith came around 3 a.m. this past Sunday, soon after Kienan’s abductor did something that contradicted the vast preponderance of police literature, almost all of which predicts that cases such as this one almost never end in anything but anguish.
But this time, the kidnapper brought the victim safely back, delivering him not just anywhere but to the family home, on a big brown sofa in front of the wide-screen TV.
Then the man phoned 911 to say what he’d done — and vanished.
“This wonderful outcome is extremely rare,” Stephen Porter, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia, wrote in an exchange of emails. “It is rare for a suspect to voluntarily return the abducted child, and I have never heard of a case in which the suspect returned the child to the child’s own home.”
A good place to start asking questions about the mysterious and contradictory Randall Hopley is at a thickly forested junkyard a short drive north along the Elk Valley Highway. It’s not far from the Hébert residence in a geographical sense — only 1.5 kilometres — but a world apart in every other way.
The owner of the junkyard is Orville Sheets, 74, and he doesn’t call it a junkyard. He calls it home.
This is where Hopley had been living off and on for the past two years, renting a room in a trailer home he shared with the older man. It’s parked on a shady pad of earth, surrounded by a near infinity of superannuated hulks of metal that include just about anything that runs on gas. Or used to.
“How you can screw up your life like that is beyond me,” Sheets said of Hopley, who had been released from jail just a few weeks ago after serving a two-month sentence for assault. “Surely to God, he knew the consequences.”
Something of a lost soul, with a troubled childhood and limited education, Hopley had been bunking at Sheets’s place between stints in jail — he has a lengthy but mostly non-violent criminal record — and times when he squatted on his own in abandoned or disused dwellings in the mountains east of here.
“He was here, then he was gone,” said Sheets, a retired mining mechanic, who is now caring for Hopley’s dog, a friendly black-and-brown mutt named Sam. “He wasn’t well educated. His father got killed here in the mine.”
Hopley was just a young boy when his father, Hugh, died in a methane blast, and his life seemed to go off the rails after that.
“He was having a lot of problems,” said his mother, Margaret Fink, who lives in Fernie, a half-hour drive west of Sparwood, with her second husband, Doug. “They took him to Cranbrook. They took him after my first husband was killed.”
“They” were children’s welfare authorities, who seized the troubled child. Hopley was raised in a series of foster care facilities.
But he has been living in and around Sparwood for the past decade or so, most recently at Sheets’s place. He supported himself by working as a handyman or repairing cars.
“He was sharp at electronics and mechanics,” said a local resident who occasionally hired Hopley to do odd jobs. On the weekend before the abduction of Kienan Hébert, Hopley painted his garage.
Most of those who know Hopley say he is not violent.
“There was a fair number of people who thought he wouldn’t hurt (a) child,” said a Sparwood shop-owner. The shop-owner described Hopley as “a 12-year-old in a man’s body.”
Hopley has at least twice been tried for offences involving minors. His most recent conviction, although it had nothing to do with children, did involve violence.
In late April, a discussion with a woman in front of the Sparwood Public Library somehow escalated. “Voices were raised,” remembered chief librarian Jim Bertoia.
Hopley sped off in his car, a brown 1987 Toyota Camry, while the woman was left sobbing and bleeding from her face.
Hopley was convicted of assault. He was released only a few weeks ago and was still on probation.
But he could also be gentle.
“He’s kind,” said Hopley’s sometime employer. “He wouldn’t hurt a baby.”
“He’s good-hearted, a kind-hearted person,” Sheets said. “He would like to have some kids of his own, but he’s short-circuited somehow.”
On the afternoon of Sept. 6, the day before the abduction, Hopley drove to Fernie to visit his mother — something he does regularly, she says.
He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt and seemed normal to her, but he didn’t stay long, turning down her offer of a cup of tea.
Back in Sparwood, he tinkered for a while on a motorized camper he hoped to sell and then went to bed. He turned out his light at 11:30 p.m., said Sheets.
Sometime during the next eight hours or so, someone drove a car toward the Hébert house and, according to a knowledgeable source, parked on the side of Sparwood Heights Dr. just east of the Elk Valley Highway.
From there, it would have taken only five minutes to walk across a field — soon to become the 13th fairway of “a Fred Couples signature” golf course — and to enter the Hébert house by either the front or rear doors. Both were unlocked.
Just like that, a child was gone.
A massive police search ensued, soon with Hopley as its target. Hundreds of local residents joined in.
Three days later, Kienan’s parents issued an emotional televised plea for the abductor to return their boy to some safe place — a gas station, perhaps, or a store parking lot.
Either because of this appeal or for some even more mysterious reason, the abductor repented. .
“He took a huge risk returning Kienan to his home,” said Porter at UBC, “suggesting a powerful motive for doing so.”
The house was empty that night and was not being monitored by police, who deny making any deal with the abductor. Hopley’s mother has listened to the police recording of the 911 call made by the kidnapper and says it contains no reference to a prior arrangement.
“I brought the little boy back,” says the caller. “You can find him at his home.”
He is asked for his name, but simply hangs up.
And Kienan?
“He was asleep on the sofa in front of the TV,” said his father, who rushed over with police.
A medical examination found the boy to be in good health, and he promptly went back to the serious work of being a 3-year-old member of a family of 10.
“The story of the bogeyman came true,” said Hébert, the day after Hopley’s capture.
“But, in the end, the bad guy wasn’t really so bad.”
With files from Mary Vallis