An Edmonton man who used social media to prey on girls as young as 11 has admitted to a raft of sex crimes.
Imesh Ratnayake, 23, was in Edmonton Court of King’s Bench Tuesday to plead guilty to 11 of the 37 counts he faced for luring, sexually abusing and extorting eight girls in a small community near Edmonton.
Romanian police have searched the houses of controversial influencer Andrew Tate as part of an investigation into new allegations against him.
The internet personality was already awaiting trial for rape and human trafficking, but could potentially now face additional charges of sex with, and trafficking in, underage persons, as well as money-laundering and attempting to influence witnesses, prosecutors say.
Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan, who have a massive following on social media, have denied all previous charges against them.
A few thoughts on how Americans thought about the crypto trial of the century.
When I first started chasing around after Sam Bankman-Fried, I had no idea where he might lead me. I certainly had no sense that I’d wind up with a ringside seat to a financial catastrophe. I had no slant or angle, much less a theory of the case. I was just curious about Sam and his bizarre situation. Inside of three years, he’d gone from socially and emotionally isolated 25-year-old with an upper-middle-class bank account to leader of a small army of math nerds and (according to Forbes magazine) not merely the world’s richest person under 30 but maybe the fastest creator of wealth in recorded history. The leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties solicited his money and his thoughts. The heads of big Wall Street banks felt a need to know him, and the leading Silicon Valley venture capitalists felt a need to invest in him. Tom Brady was hanging out with him, Taylor Swift was negotiating to endorse his crypto exchange, Shaquille O’Neal wanted to partner with him to solve the homeless problem in the Bahamas, and Orlando Bloom was asking to play him in a movie. He’d gone from having no friends as a child to having too many as an adult without ever developing a capacity for friendship.
Quebec and Ontario organized crime members are travelling to Western Canada to steal valuable vehicles and ship them to Montreal for illicit export sales, a new federal intelligence report says.
“Once generally regarded as a regional issue affecting mainly Ontario and Quebec, vehicle theft has expanded to Western Canada, with Alberta’s number of vehicle thefts now nearing that of Quebec’s, despite an approximately 45% lower population base,” says a report by the Criminal Intelligence Service Canada (CISC), an RCMP-led national criminal intelligence agency.
Luc Sabourin, a former CBSA officer, chokes back tears as he recalls the day a man from one of Canada’s most violent crime families — a refugee from Palestine linked to Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel — stood outside Sabourin’s home in Gatineau, Que., and uttered brutal and visceral threats against Sabourin’s children.
Sabourin — a whistleblower who has complained of numerous serious incidents inside Canada Border Services Agency that he believes are due to organized crime infiltration — thinks a particular colleague may have leaked his home address to the drug trafficker, whom Sabourin was scheduled to testify against.
I would not be surprised.
The black Mercedes-Benz with dealer plates cuts us off at the lights on the corner of Highways 7 and 27, in the middle of the Greater Toronto Area, nearly clipping our front fender. It’s deliberate. He sees we’re a cop car. He wants a chase.
Sergeant Mark Walton gives him one. The second the siren wails, the Benz is gone, 180 according to the dashboard radar, 180 in a 70 zone, well past the threshold for stunt driving in Ontario. Weaving through traffic, it careens south down the cloverleaf onto the 407, going well over 200 kilometres an hour. We are in pursuit until the Benz rises to 220, 240 and Sgt. Walton eases up. The situation is too dangerous to continue.
Ontario’s top court has upheld the sexual assault conviction of Canadian musician Jacob Hoggard, the former frontman for the band Hedley.
Hoggard was found guilty in June 2022 of sexual assault causing bodily harm against an Ottawa woman and later sentenced to five years behind bars.
He was released on bail hours later, pending his appeal.
The Washington Post’s Fatal Force tool can be useful, but its mistakes reinforce a false narrative.
According to Fatal Force, the Washington Post’s police-shooting database, Virgil J. Wolford, Jr. of Columbus, Ohio, was killed by police on April 30, 2018. Except he wasn’t. Wolford, Jr. was, in fact, non-fatally shot by the Columbus police after stabbing a woman and pointing a shotgun at officers. In 2019, he received a three-year prison sentence (which he appealed, and lost, in 2020). He died in his home in April 2023.
Any police use of force, especially deadly force, is a grave matter. But the reason that videos of police shootings tend to go viral is that they are quite rare—and the unjustified or even questionable use of deadly force is rarer still. Our calculations—based on the annual average of police–public contacts from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Police Public Contact Survey in 2015, 2018, and 2020, and on the annual fatal shooting counts of the Post database—show that police use force of any type in less than one-tenth of 1 percent of all 911 calls. Less than 0.002 percent of police encounters each year result in a fatal shooting by police.
A 32-year-old man has appeared in court charged with attempted murder after an 11-year-old girl was stabbed in London’s Leicester Square on Monday.
Ioan Pintaru, a Romanian national with no fixed address, is also charged with possession of a bladed article.
The prosecutor told the court that Mr Pintaru allegedly placed the girl into a headlock and stabbed her eight times. She was taken to hospital with serious injuries.
The first of two trials connected to the headline-grabbing multimillion-dollar gold heist at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport last year is scheduled to begin in September in a Pennsylvania court, but two of the accused are still in Canada.
Archit Grover and Prasath Paramalingam, who have been charged in the 2023 theft of gold from an Air Canada cargo facility, are also accused of being part of a firearms smuggling ring with another gold heist suspect.
Victoria police say a man was able to target the same business twice in one day.
Around 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday, police officers were called to Ocean Garden Restaurant on Fisgard Street after a man broke through the front door.
He ran away and was arrested, police said.
However, he didn’t stay behind bars for very long.
h/t DS
Alex Murdaugh’s sins were heartless and vast, cruel and violent. They were often described as shocking, but not by the people of Hampton County, S.C., who lived under the control of the Murdaugh family for a century. To them, Alex’s behavior was all too familiar.
Every crime that disgraced lawyer Alex Murdaugh has been convicted of has some precedent in the past, from the theft of $10 million from his most vulnerable clients over the course of a decade, to the coverup of a deadly boat crash in 2019 and even the murders of his wife and younger son in 2021. Alex had been raised to believe that he could get away with all manner of wrongdoing because his forebears had done so for generations.
A palpable tension hangs over Encino as news of the latest burglary spreads through the San Fernando Valley neighborhood after months of reported break-ins.
It’s all people seem to talk about while walking their dogs or in group text chats with neighbors. Some residents want to form a neighborhood watch, while others are taking quotes from private security companies to patrol the streets outside their multimillion-dollar homes.
At least 10 burglaries were reported in Encino in the last month, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. Residents say there have probably been more in this Valley neighborhood, which is home to roughly 60,000 people.
Venezuela’s democratic forces are a pretty observant lot, having spotted evidence of fraud in some background pictures of the regime’s vote-counting houses as employees took selfies.
