Crime

Toronto Mayor John Tory is defending a series of tweets in which he described a judge’s decision to grant bail to the man charged in the death of a plainclothes police constable earlier this year as “questionable,” amid a complaint filed against him at the Ontario Civilian Police Commission.

On Monday, the Law Union of Ontario’s policing committee announced it had filed a complaint with the quasi-judicial oversight agency over Tory’s comments on the decision by Superior Court Justice Jill Copeland to grant bail to Umar Zameer. The union is a voluntary organization of approximately 200 lawyers, legal workers and law students, whose policing committee monitors decisions about policing and oversight, as well as advocates for reforms.

This case keeps getting weirder.

Vice Admiral Haydn Edmundson has been charged with sexual assault and indecent acts, the Department of National Defence announced Tuesday.

… Stéphanie Viau told CBC that Edmundson, who was a lieutenant commander at the time, exposed his genitals to her while on a navy ship during an exercise. Viau, at the time, was a 19-year-old member of the Canadian Navy.

She alleges that several days later Edmundson raped her onboard HMCS Provider while the ship was docked in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

Edmundson has denied the allegations.

CNN host Don Lemon is getting blasted for covering his pal Jussie Smollett’s trial on his late-night show — without mentioning his own central role in tipping off the “Empire” star that he was being investigated by police.

As he took the stand Monday, Smollett, 39, had told the court that he first knew that police doubted his race-hate attack was real after getting a text message from Lemon, saying that was key in his decision not to hand his phone records over to cops.

The second accuser in the New York sex-trafficking trial of Ghislaine Maxwell alleged on Monday the Briton asked her to find young women for sexual encounters with the financier Jeffrey Epstein, because his demands were insatiable.

The accuser, who testified in federal court in Manhattan under the pseudonym Kate, said she was 17 when she met Maxwell in Paris around 1994. She gave Maxwell her phone number, she said.

The Briton struck her as “very sophisticated and very elegant”, she said, adding: “She was very impressive … everything that I wanted to be.”

The graphic testimony presented to jurors in Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal sex abuse trial last week seemed at times to mesh and then detach from broader theories – criminal, conspiratorial or both – about the nature of Jeffrey Epstein’s world.

Whether prosecutors and defense attorneys are successful in separating criminal conspiracy from the conspiracy theories that run through the entire Epstein-Maxwell narrative may determine how the criminal complaint against the 59-year-old former British socialite is ultimately resolved.

The first week of Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex trafficking trial began with media from all over the world camped out in front of the federal courthouse in lower Manhattan waiting to get a glimpse of the British socialite.

Maxwell, the former girlfriend of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein , is accused of recruiting and grooming girls, one as young as 14, to have sex with Epstein and his high-profile roster of friends.

After Proposition 47 effectively legalized stealing anything under $950 in California, shoplifting, porch piracy, and all sorts of thefts took off. San Francisco became the epicenter of what the Wall Street Journal described as a “shoplifter’s paradise” with pharmacy chains and numberless small businesses disappearing from the city at a pace unmatched in the country.

But then the social justice looters went too far.

There’s nothing principled about its rejection of the death penalty

The state of Oklahoma plans to execute Bigler Jobe Stouffer II on December 9, and officials there are hoping for an uneventful procedure. For the past decade, Oklahoma’s lethal injection program has attracted international scrutiny for its botched executions, including one in 2014 that lasted nearly 45 minutes and another this past October in which the prisoner convulsed and vomited over himself.

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — One-time entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes, under questioning by prosecutors, struggled Tuesday to recall key events that led to her facing criminal fraud charges for allegedly fleecing investors and customers of her failed blood-testing startup Theranos.

Her cross-examination began the day after she shared painfully vivid memories of alleged abuse by her ex-lover and business partner, Sunny Balwani.

In between bouts of hazy recollection, Holmes wept on the witness stand after the federal prosecutor interrogating her asked to read aloud some of the amorous texts that she and Balwani exchanged during a five-year period while they were running Theranos and living together in a stealth romantic relationship.

A great con while it lasted. They trusted the science.

One of the highest-profile human trafficking cases ever charged in the United States is underway in federal court in New York. Ghislaine Maxwell, an Oxford graduate and the youngest child of the late media mogul Robert Maxwell, stands accused of six counts of human trafficking and two counts of perjury. Her alleged co-conspirator Jeffrey Epstein died in his jail cell after committing suicide in 2019 following his arrest by the FBI.

Human trafficking is a $150 billion illegal global enterprise, second only to drug trafficking. Though the law has long outlawed sexual slavery, the George W. Bush administration began a vigorous attack on the systemic roots of human trafficking, newly empowered by the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000.

Ghislaine Maxwell accuser returns to witness stand for cross-examination

The first accuser in Ghislaine Maxwell’s child sex trafficking trial has returned to the witness stand on Wednesday morning at Manhattan federal court.

This accuser, who used the pseudonym “Jane” in court, alleged that Maxwell drew her into Jeffrey Epstein’s predatory orbit when she was 14 years old.

The trial of Ghislaine Maxwell began on Monday, more than two years after the death of her alleged associate Jeffrey Epstein, with whom she had been charged with conspiring to sexually abuse minors.

The trial is likely to be a media spectacle. The crimes of Jeffrey Epstein—and his death by suicide in August 2019—have spawned numerous books, documentaries and conspiracy theories. Maxwell’s trial may be the first time since Epstein’s criminal proceedings that the public gets a glimpse of the scope of the government’s evidence against him—and the evidence against her as an alleged accomplice.

Ghislaine Maxwell: trial to enter second day with Epstein’s pilot testifying

Ghislaine Maxwell’s child sex-trafficking trial enters its second day of testimony on Tuesday, with the longtime pilot of her alleged accomplice, the late financier Jeffrey Epstein, returning to the witness stand in federal court in Manhattan.

Maxwell, 59, has pleaded not guilty to six counts arising from allegedly procuring teen girls for Epstein, some as young as 14. Epstein killed himself in August 2019 while jailed awaiting his own trial for his transportation and abuse of minor teens.