Patrick Brown News

TORONTO—One of the biggest gold heists in years was remarkably simple. A shipment of 6,600 gold bars and millions of dollars in foreign cash landed last April at Toronto’s airport, where it was sent to a warehouse. Soon after, a man drove up in a white truck and presented fake documents.

Sikhs, the allegation of potential involvement by Indian agents in the murder of a prominent leader has brought anxiety and fear.On Monday Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said there is “credible” evidence that agents of the India government are potentially linked to the killing of a Sikh man and Canadian citizen, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, outside a temple, last June.The Indian government called the accusation “absurd,” and the fallout has since soured trade and diplomatic relations between the two countries.Nearly 772,000 Sikh people live in Canada, according to government data, making the country home to the second largest Sikh population outside of India. More than half live in just four cities – Brampton, Ont., Surrey, B.C., Calgary and Edmonton.The mayors’ responses to the allegations have ranged from urging the federal government to keep people safe to silence, at least publicly.More than 163,000 Sikh people live in the Brampton, according to 2021 Statistics Canada census data.

Climate change has sharply boosted the risk of fast-spreading wildfires, according to a Californian study published Wednesday that offers lessons for prevention after recent disasters in Canada, Greece and Hawaii. Scientists at the Breakthrough Institute, a non-profit research centre, found that human-caused warming increased the frequency of «extreme» wildfires by 25 percent on average compared to the pre-industrial era, in a study in the journal Nature. Examining a series of blazes from 2003 to 2020, they used machine learning to analyse the link between higher average temperatures, dryer conditions and the fastest-spreading blazes — ones that burn more than 10,000 acres (4,000 hectares) a day. The impact of climate change varied from fire to fire. In certain partly dry conditions, global warming pushed the area beyond key thresholds, making extreme fires much more likely. In very dry conditions, the impact was less. «This means that we should pay the closest attention to the places and times that historically have experienced conditions just on the moist side of these thresholds, but which are being pushed over these thresholds onto the dry side by background warming,» lead author Patrick Brown told AFP. The researchers calculated that the risk could increase on average by 59 percent by the end of the century under a «low-emissions» scenario where global warming is limited to 1.8 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, and up to 172 percent in an unbridled high-emissions scenario. Earth's surface has already warmed 1.2C. Using data from recorded fires, the researchers measured the probability of a given blaze turning into an «extreme» one.

A temple was vandalised on Saturday in Canada's British Columbia with anti-India and pro-Khalistan posters pasted on its front gate and rear wall. The objectionable posters were pasted in front of the Lakshmi Narayan Mandir. The matter had been reported to the Surrey detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police or RCMP, according to the president of the temple Satish Kumar.