Accused # 2 Dillon William ROPER 32 years of Midland was arrested and charged criminally with Theft Under $5000- SHOPLIFTING and further with Fail to Comply with Probation Order
(WASAGA BEACH, SPRINGWATER AND CLEARVIEW TOWNSHIP, ON) – On February 18, 2025, the Huronia West OPP and emergency services have launched a series of collaborative training sessions designed to enhance inter-agency cooperation and improve first responder capabilities in assisting injured officers. These sessions will focus on officer safety and equipment familiarization, vehicle extrication, hazardous material awareness, and additional resources.
The training will cover several key areas:
Officer Safety and Equipment Familiarization: This training will equip first responders with the knowledge and skills necessary to safely and effectively assist injured officers.
Sessions will cover:
· Proper procedures for removing officer equipment such as vests, helmets, and other personal protective gear, addressing vest design, fastener types, and potential entanglement hazards.
· In-depth understanding of the types and locations of equipment carried by officers, including duty belts, holsters, and other gear that may impede medical access or pose hazards during rescue operations.
Vehicle Extrication: Working alongside Fire and EMS personnel, participants will develop and implement best practices for extricating injured officers from police vehicles. This will involve:
· Joint training exercises to practice vehicle extrication techniques, including the use of specialized equipment such as hydraulic cutters and spreaders, while considering the specific design and safety features of OPP vehicles.
Hazardous Material Awareness: This module will address potential hazards encountered by first responders in OPP vehicles, such as flares, firearms, and ammunition. Training will include:
· Navigating a police vehicle, recognizing potential hazards and their secure storage locations.
· Identifying and mitigating potential hazards posed by other materials carried by officers.
Additional Resources: First responders will be familiarized with the OPP Mobile Crisis Response Team (MCRT) program for individuals in crisis, enhancing inter-agency collaboration and improving mental health support within the community.
These collaborative training sessions are expected to significantly enhance inter-agency cooperation, improving officer safety by empowering first responders to effectively assist injured officers. The goal is to create a more effective and efficient emergency response system within the Huronia West region.
The Huronia West OPP is committed to serving our province, including the Town of Wasaga Beach and the Townships of Springwater and Clearview. If you have any information about crime in our community, please contact the OPP at 1-888-310-1122. Should you wish to remain anonymous, call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477 (TIPS) or submit your information online at www.crimestopperssdm.com. Crime Stoppers does not subscribe to call display, and you will remain anonymous. You will not testify in court and your information may lead to a cash reward of up to $2,000.
The Ontario Provincial Police is committed to public safety, delivering proactive and innovative policing in partnership with our communities.
Collingwood, ON [19 February 2025] — The Town of Collingwood is excited to honour International Women’s Day 2025 with a series of initiatives dedicated to recognizing the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women. This day also serves as a powerful call to action to accelerate women’s equality.
Flag Raising & Proclamation Ceremony
Date: Thursday, March 6, 2025 Time: 12:00 p.m. Location: Community Flagpole, Collingwood Public Library, 55 Ste Marie Street
Join us for the ceremonial Flag Raising and Proclamation. In partnership with My Friend’s House, a safe haven for abused women and their children, we reflect on the ongoing challenges women face, including gender-based violence.
5×5 Panel Discussion: Voices of Change
Date: Thursday, March 6, 2025 Time: 7:00 p.m. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. Location: Simcoe Street Theatre, 65 Simcoe Street Tickets: $15.00 available at Ticketscene
Celebrate International Women’s Day with an engaging panel discussion featuring six remarkable local changemakers who are leading the charge in creating supportive communities for women. They will share their personal journeys, insights, and actionable steps to advance gender equity and #AccelerateAction.
Panelists:
Kim Turley-Smith: Women’s Wellness Leader & Educator
Amanda Jerome: Wedding Industry Leader & Mindset Mentor
Pike Krpan: Firefighter & Advocate for Women in the Fire Service
Janene Johnson: Content Creator & Social Media Strategist
Michele Smeh: Women’s Health & Fitness Advocate (Panel Moderator)
The evening will also feature readings by Collingwood Poet Laureate, Jillian Morris, and a performance by local musical duo Motes & Oats. Gather with friends and community following the event with good conversation and food from Low Down.
Celebrate Women-Led Businesses
The Collingwood Downtown Business Improvement Area will showcase the incredible women-led businesses that contribute to the vibrancy of our downtown core. Look for “Woman Behind the Business” posters throughout downtown, highlighting the inspiring stories of our female entrepreneurs.
Since 2019, the Town of Collingwood has been recognizing International Women’s Day annually, taking action locally and globally to build a more equitable world and seek to improve the lives of all women and girls (trans and cis), two spirit, and gender diverse peoples through cultural, legal, economic, and social change.
About the 2025 International Women’s Day Theme #AccelerateAction:
A challenged world is an alert world. We are each responsible for our thoughts and actions every day. Imagine a gender-equal world—one free of bias, stereotypes, and discrimination. A world that is diverse, equitable, inclusive, and celebrates differences. Together, we can forge women’s equality and collectively #AccelerateAction.
In the polar bear capital of the world, melting sea ice spells transformation and danger.
Click here to subscribe to our channel 👉🏽 https://bbc.in/3VyyriM While scientists in Churchill, Manitoba, race to understand how to protect polar bears that are threatened by climate change, the town works to keep increasingly hungry bears away from its population. A story of human resilience and respect for nature on the edge of the Canadian Arctic.
National Geographic and BAFTA Award-winning cinematographer Bertie Gregory release unprecedented footage of Emperor penguin chicks leaping 50 feet off an Antarctic cliff.
The never-before-filmed behavior was for the 2025 installment of National Geographic’s Emmy award-winning SECRETS OF franchise, SECRETS OF THE PENGUINS, premiering Earth Day 2025 on Nat Geo.
Welcome to The Freethink Interview, an interview series from our sister channel @freethink where we talk to the new generation of builders, leaders and thinkers shaping technological progress.
Join us for thought-provoking conversations with some of the world’s most interesting and ambitious technologists.
What if the world’s most critical technology isn’t software, but the tiny pieces of silicon that power it? In an age where chips are everywhere, from smartphones to coffee makers, their manufacturing complexity might surprise you. It’s harder to make a modern semiconductor than a nuclear weapon. Inside Taiwan’s cutting-edge fabrication plants, machines worth $350 million each orchestrate an atomic ballet. These marvels of engineering use the flattest mirrors ever made and lasers that create temperatures 40 times hotter than the sun’s surface – all to carve transistors smaller than a coronavirus.
From Silicon Valley to Taiwan, from the Netherlands to Japan, making modern chips is a global dance of unprecedented complexity. Each processor requires ultra-purified materials, billion-dollar machines, and a supply chain spanning multiple continents. But this intricate network faces its greatest challenge yet. As artificial intelligence reshapes our world, the demand for advanced chips is skyrocketing. Tech giants are pouring billions into new semiconductor designs, while startups race to create specialized AI chips that could make artificial intelligence as accessible as a Google search. Join us as we explore how these tiny silicon marvels are shaping humanity’s future.
AI will replace millions of jobs, with the biggest risk posed to clerical jobs, which will primarily affect women, says Gilbert Houngbo, Director-General of the International Labour Organization. Speaking to DW’s Paris correspondent, Lisa Louis, he explains how governments must act now to help workers adapt.
Alberta’s government recently announced new regulations for renewable energy development. They include restrictions against wind or solar projects in areas with “pristine viewscapes” and farmland that needs protecting. According to the Globe and Mail, that’s reduced investment in new projects — in a province with abundant solar and wind capability and a once-booming industry.
Meanwhile, the government is about to open the Rocky Mountains’ eastern slopes in southern Alberta to Australian coal billionaires — even though most people in Alberta oppose coal mining there. On January 15, Energy Minister Brian Jean announced that the government would rescind three ministerial orders on coal, including an eastern slopes mining and exploration moratorium.
The proposed open-pit metallurgical coal mines wouldn’t just be a blight on “pristine viewscapes” and important farm and ranch lands, they would also place “numerous watersheds up and down the Rockies at permanent risk of environmental insults, including toxic coal dust, water contamination, strip mining, landscape destruction and toxic selenium pollution,” the Tyee reports.
It’s somewhat understandable, although not excusable, that a government would so staunchly support an industry that brought economic prosperity to its own jurisdiction and the entire country. But the climate-related consequences of burning oil, gas and coal continue to mount. (Metallurgical coal, used for making steel, is still a carbon-emitting fossil fuel.) Wise leaders would look to better opportunities — especially in the growing, increasingly lucrative clean energy transition.
Alberta’s government seems devoted to the extremely wealthy who own or run the “resource” companies — from Australia’s Gina Rinehart, a Trump ally who, like many billionaires, inherited much of her wealth, to Suncor CEO Rich Kruger, who was paid US$36.8 million in 2023, his first year of leading one of Canada’s highest greenhouse gas emitters.
They want to keep fossil fuels burning and profits flowing regardless of the consequences to land, water and air, biodiversity, human health and climate stability — anything that might diminish the power and control of the large corporations that monopolize energy sources and systems is bad!
Alberta’s support for coal in this case could partly be a result of mismanagement and failure to stand up to foreign interests, especially given that a broad, non-partisan coalition of people — from ranchers and musicians to environmentalists and Indigenous people — has banded together to oppose development on the eastern slopes.
Former Premier Jason Kenney opened the province to coal mining in 2020 but backed down under public pressure in 2022, reinstating an eastern slopes moratorium that had been in place since 1976. Four coal companies are now suing the government for $13.8 billion.
“Australian billionaire Gina Rinehart has also launched two separate lawsuits against the government, one for rejecting her Grassy Mountain project in 2021 and another for damages due to the coal ban. She is seeking more than $2 billion in compensation,” Andrew Nikiforuk writes in the Tyee.
Rinehart, Australia’s richest citizen, has also contributed generously to climate science–denial organizations.
Some billionaires will never have enough. They live to accumulate wealth, well past the point of personal usefulness. The amounts they’ve hoarded could solve any number of global problems. The top one per cent now holds more wealth than the bottom 95 per cent of the world’s population, and “billionaire wealth grew by $2 trillion in 2024, three times faster than the year before, equivalent to roughly $5.7 billion a day,” Oxfam reports.
They’re fine with accumulating excessive wealth by destroying landscapes and watersheds, tearing up Indigenous territories, polluting air, water and soil and putting all life at risk. Some of them think they can escape to Mars when they’ve plundered the only livable planet we have.
It seems Alberta’s government has bought into the U.S. MAGA concept of government for the billionaires by the billionaires! It’s the playbook of self-serving, unimaginative politicians everywhere: sacrifice the future to convenient, short-term economic gain.
The only “trickle down” is the millions trickling from billionaires to politicians, especially in the U.S., who do their bidding, at the expense of the health and wellbeing of those they were elected to represent.
Lets’ take back power from the billionaires and oligarchs. The Rocky Mountains are worth far more to the people who live in and visit Alberta, and to the world, than they are to Australian billionaires.
David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. Written with David Suzuki Foundation Senior Writer and Editor Ian Hanington.
EXCERPT: Former Premier Jason Kenney opened the province to coal mining in 2020 but backed down under public pressure in 2022, reinstating an eastern slopes moratorium that had been in place since 1976. Four coal companies are now suing the government for $13.8 billion.
(SPRINGWATER TOWNSHIP, ON) – The Huronia West Detachment of the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) is investigating a two-vehicle collision in Springwater Township.
On February 17, 2025, at approximately 3:30 p.m., members of the Huronia West OPP with assistance of Springwater Fire and Simcoe County EMS responded to a report of a serious collision involving two vehicles on County Road 27 at Flos Road 8.
As a result of the collision, the driver in one of the involved vehicles was transported to a local hospital and later transported to a Toronto hospital with life-threatening injuries. The other person in the same vehicle was transported to a local hospital with serious injuries. The driver and occupants in the other involved vehicle were released at the scene after being assessed by EMS with no injuries.
A section of County Road 27 was closed between Train Avenue and Flos Road 7 for several hours while OPP members trained in collision reconstruction measured and documented the scene.
The investigation is ongoing.
The OPP is requesting that if anyone was in the area during the time of the collision and has any information, dash cam or surveillance footage that may assist investigators, to please call Huronia West OPP at 1-888-310-1122 or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS (8477).
Drivers and members of the public are reminded to respect our communities, comply with all laws, and not jeopardize the safety of our citizens or our neighborhoods with risky, illegal, and dangerous actions.
The OPP and Traffic Safety partners remain committed to saving lives on our roads. For safety and crime prevention tips, please visit our website at www.opp.ca.
The Huronia West OPP is committed to serving our province, including the Town of Wasaga Beach and the Townships of Springwater and Clearview. If you have any information about crime in our community, please contact the OPP at 1-888-310-1122. Should you wish to remain anonymous, call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477 (TIPS) or submit your information online at www.crimestopperssdm.com. Crime Stoppers does not subscribe to call display, and you will remain anonymous. You will not testify in court and your information may lead to a cash reward of up to $2,000.
The Ontario Provincial Police is committed to public safety, delivering proactive and innovative policing in partnership with our communities.
Dear Gracelyn: What are the red flags I should watch for in a new relationship?
Cathy B. – Town of The Blue Mountains
Hi Cathy…
Relationship red flags are nuanced behavioral and emotional patterns that signal potential toxicity or fundamental incompatibility. Beyond obvious warning signs like disrespect or aggression, subtle red flags include consistent dismissiveness, emotional manipulation, inability to take personal accountability, and patterns of control disguised as care.
Pay attention to how potential partners treat others, manage stress, and respond to disagreement. Healthy relationships are characterized by mutual respect, emotional safety, and a genuine commitment to each other’s growth. Red flags emerge when one partner consistently prioritizes their needs at the expense of the other’s well-being, demonstrates an inability to communicate vulnerably, or shows patterns of isolating their partner from supportive networks.
Be Happy,
Gracelyn
In my next column, I’ll be addressing “How can we keep romance alive after years together?”
