The Ontario FeederWatch cam received one last special visitor—this male Yellow-rumped Warbler returning from migration—before shutting down for the 2017-2018 season.  A first for the cam!  Thanks to our cam hosts Tammie and Ben Hache and our generous sponsors at Perky-Pet for another fun-filled season in Manitouwadge, ON! 

Alex Minassian, 25, is the alleged driver in Toronto’s van attack.  CBC News has been looking into Minassian’s history — the suspect is from Richmond Hill, Ont.,  and attended Seneca College.  Speculation surfaced Monday night around a Facebook post associated with the same name and the same photo as the one that appears on Minassian’s LinkedIn profile.  CBC News has not been able to independently verify whether the Facebook post was, indeed, written by Minassian or created after that fact. 

At the time, the streets of “downtown North York”, an area that is home to large numbers of Chinese, Korean and Iranian immigrants, were full of people enjoying a warm sunny day after a long winter. 

The first casualties were reported just after 1:30 p.m. local time. 

Ultimately the vehicle came to a stop and the driver, on getting out, was challenged by a police officer who ordered him to get down on the ground. 

At first, the driver did not do this.  He shouted back “Kill me” several times, as well as repeatedly saying that he had a gun.  The cop, gun in hand, responded by repeating his order for the suspect to lie on the ground.  Eventually he did so. 

Toronto police have identified the van driver as 25-year-old Alek Minassian of Richmond Hill, a Toronto suburb.  They say Minassian was not previously known to them and have, as yet, filed no charges against him. 

Is he an extreme right white supremacist, because he attacked in an area with many immigrant people?  It might look that way from this tweet

We’ve just obtained this Facebook post from the accused Alek Minassian, suspected in the #yongeandfinch mass casualty.  Posted early this afternoon.  FYI Incel=involuntarily celibate.  Elliot Rodger killed 6 ppl at UCSB in 2014 before killing himself @globalnewstopic.twitter.com/W84xt3D85I

As of 11:00 p.m. Toronto time, police had said nothing about a possible motive, only that they have not definitively ruled anything out. 

Earlier in the evening, federal Public Safety MinisterRalph Goodale said: “The events that happened on the street behind us are horrendous.  But they do not appear to be connected in any way to national security, based on the information available at this time.” 

Goodale and Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland were in downtown Toronto at the time of the pedestrian attack.  They were hosting meetings with their G-7 counterparts in preparation for the annual G-7 summit, which will be held in Charlevoix, Quebec this June. 

Stephen Harper and his Conservative government seized on two “lone wolf” attacks carried out by Islamist terrorist sympathizers in October 2014 to declare Canada “under siege” and push through legislation, Bill C-51, that gives the security-intelligence agencies sweeping new powers.  These include virtually unlimited access to Canadians’ government-held personal information and the right for the country’s premier intelligence agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), to break virtually any law in “disrupting” threats to public security. 

Justin Trudeau and his Liberals voted for Bill C-51, while claiming that it went “too far.”  Predictably, however, their promise to “fix it” when they came to power resulted in few and largely cosmetic changes.  And some of these gave Canada’s signals intelligence agency and “Five Eyes” partner, the Communications Security Establishment, new powers to spy on Canadians and engage in cyber-war. 

Commentators on US networks expressed surprise that the police did not open fire on Minassian when he did not immediately surrender.  In fact, Canadian police have a long record of shooting, tasering, and killing people in obvious mental distress. 

According to a recent CBC investigation, more than 70 percent of the 460 people who have died in encounters with police across Canada since 2000 suffered from mental health problems or substance abuse problems or both. 

This includes 17-year-old Syrian immigrant Sammy Yatim, who was gunned down in 2013 by a Toronto cop on an immobilized streetcar after he had exposed himself and prevailed on all the passengers to disembark by wielding a knife.  Following a public outcry, the cop who shot nine bullets into Yatim’s body was convicted, but only of “attempted murder”, because his lawyer successfully argued the initial volley of bullets that killed Yatim was justified. 

In part one of the process, join Dr. Ryan Norris and graduate students Alex Sutton and Koley Freeman, as they research the decline of Gray Jays in Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada. 

Each year, Norris and his team search the park to locate new Gray Jay nests to closely monitor reproduction success rates and continue to better understand reasoning for the Jay’s decline. 

This research, started by Dan Strickland in the early 1970’s, has shown a 50% decline of this species in Algonquin and has suggested that warmer temperatures, attributed to climate change, are causing Gray Jays‘ critically important cached food to spoil.