Crime

More youth under 18 in Canada were charged with homicide in 2024 than the previous year, according to new figures from Statistics Canada — an unexpected rise that comes even as national homicide rates edged downward.

The 2024 homicide report shows 72 youths were charged with homicide last year, up from 65 in 2023. That pushes the youth accused of murder to 0.94 per 100,000 youths.

Among those cases, police recorded 13 incidents involving multiple youth accused, including five homicides with three or more youth charged.

OTTAWA — In less than half a year, a Canadian criminal intelligence report shows, police and partner agencies across the country seized 386 kilograms of fentanyl and analogues in a coordinated national enforcement blitz — with Ontario and British Columbia together accounting for more than 90 per cent of the total.

Border officials stressed they believe the vast majority of the fentanyl seizures were for domestic consumption and not for export to other nations.

There’s an old joke that in the 1970s and 1980s, James Q. Wilson waged a one-man battle against a thousand sociologists, criminologists, and other academics. The punchline: “A thousand to one against Wilson—that’s almost a fair fight.” The quip captures both Wilson’s towering intellect—recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, author of dozens of books, and arguably the most important conservative social scientist of the late twentieth century—and the impact of one major strand of his work, launched in high-profile magazine articles and expressed most powerfully in 1975’s Thinking About Crime.

Venezuela has become a major launchpad for huge volumes of cocaine shipped to West Africa, where jihadists are helping traffic it to Europe in record quantities.

Corrupt military officers and drug gangs smuggle shipments by light aircraft, fishing boats, semi-submersible vessels and freighters heading east, international law-enforcement officials have said publicly. The cocaine flows to West Africa, where an informal network of jihadist-linked smugglers and their allies then move the drug north to feed high and rising demand in Europe.

“Cocaine in the 1980s is not the same as the one we see today,” said Jesus Romero, a retired U.S. military intelligence officer. “There are direct linkages to terrorist organizations to support their cause.”

It was like a ghost sighting. And the FBI agents had to be sure they weren’t mistaken.

The investigators, conducting surveillance near a Starbucks in Mexico City on Jan. 22, 2024, had just seen two men walk in.

One of them, a hulking six-foot-three-inch figure, may just have been the ghost they’d been hunting.

VANCOUVER — In an extraordinary civil forfeiture action, the B.C. government is seeking to permanently seize a late-model Mercedes from a prominent Vancouver real estate agent, alleging the luxury sedan was used as an instrument in a predatory sex crime — including luring and assaulting a vulnerable 15-year-old girl living in a provincial care home — according to court filings.

Rolan Sokolovski was spiralling.

At 11:27 a.m. on Aug. 15, 2024, the Toronto diamond dealer messaged customer service for the popular cryptocurrency exchange KuCoin.

“I can’t use my account that has millions of dollars in it,” he wrote. He demanded a response.

As the search continues for Ryan Wedding, the Canadian former Olympian accused of running an international drug empire, new details are revealing how prosecutors believe he has been keeping his profits off the books.

In a 54-page indictment unsealed last week, the U.S. Department of Justice alleges that Wedding is still conducting his alleged criminal enterprise while on the run from authorities and using cryptocurrency to launder the profits—which total more than US$1 billion a year.