“All four victims were found on the second floor. They were pulled out by firefighters,” Division Commander Dan MacIsaac said.
Firefighters were called to the apartment, located above a store at 1068 Dovercourt Rd., around 3:10 a.m. on Friday. The fire began in the living room and kitchen area, MacIsaac said.
According to firefighters, there were no working smoke detectors on the second floor where the victims were found.
Smoke detectors were working on the main floor.
The cause of the fire and the cost of the damage are not yet known. However, early estimates put the cost of the fire at around $100,000. There were no signs of hoarding and no evidence of criminality.
The Ontario Fire Marshal’s office is investigating.
Putting aside one of the explanations for this stream of selfies—a substantial pro-Moscow, ethnic Russian population on the peninsula—it's actually quite fitting that amateur and professional photographers are experimenting with new technology this week to document Russia's occupation of the Ukrainian peninsula. A century and a half ago, Crimea served as the breeding ground for modern war photography.
The Crimean War left many legacies: Florence Nightingale, "The Charge of the Light Brigade," ski masks. But arguably its most consequential one was modern war journalism. The conflict, which pit Russia against Britain, France, Sardinia, and the Ottoman Empire over territorial and religious disputes in the Middle East, raged from 1853 to 1856, not long after the invention of photography and the electric telegraph. These technologies enabled William Howard Russell, an intrepid correspondent for The Times of London, to file on-the-ground dispatches about the British government's bumbling deployment of troops, and Roger Fenton, a young London lawyer with little photography experience, to snap the first images of war for a private publisher rather than a government (Fenton actually had two benefactors; British officials chipped in). "It was the first 'armchair war,' which a distant public could experience as a kind of spectacle," Smithsonian magazine once observed.
Now, photographers are once again mediating our experience of a conflict in Crimea. And they're choosing Instagram, which launched in 2010, for specific reasons.
"Sometimes it's a personal space just to show life as it is," Ed Ou, a Canadian photojournalist in Ukraine, told National Geographic on Thursday. "A photograph doesn't have to be front-page news.... What's cool about Instagram is that you can show things that you know won't be used otherwise and might never be seen."
In this version of surveillance — a transparent coveillance where everyone sees each other — a sense of entitlement can emerge: Every person has a human right to access, and benefit from, the data about themselves. The commercial giants running the networks have to spread the economic benefits of tracing people’s behavior to the people themselves, simply to keep going. They will pay you to track yourself. Citizens film the cops, while the cops film the citizens. The business of monitoring (including those who monitor other monitors) will be a big business. The flow of money, too, is made more visible even as it gets more complex.
[. . .]
Every large system of governance — especially a digital society — is racked by an inherent tension between rigid fairness and flexible personalization. The cloud sees all: The cold justice of every tiny infraction by a citizen, whether knowingly or inadvertent, would be as inescapable as the logic of a software program. Yet we need the humanity of motive and context. One solution is to personalize justice to the context of that particular infraction. A symmetrically surveilled world needs a robust and flexible government — and transparency — to enforce adaptable fairness.
What does it mean that everything –including the most trivial but especially the non-trivial– has such a great chance of being available worldwide? Starting with the printing press, the threshold for the ability to publish has been getting lower, and the potential reach of publications has been getting bigger. We are now at the level of the person, publishing at the level of the world. The publishing revolution is almost complete.
Does this level of documentation make it more likely that the international community will be compelled to react to atrocities–which will likely come with higher and higher levels of visibility? Or will this, too, become just background noise, similar to famines or disease in Africa have become for most of the world (except the victims, of course)? Does the level of documentation and surveillance –and thus, evidence– make it harder to establish processes like the Truth and Reconciliation efforts in places ranging from South Africa to Guatemala? Will this amount of documentation of atrocities make divisions even more likely and pernicious–as the ability to forgive often needs some level of forgetting? And the Internet, it seems, does not forget. Will this all make regime bureaucrats more likely to defect—as “I was just pushing paper and had no idea all this was going on” has become an even weaker defense? Or will they cling to power to the very end as much as they can, knowing their victims and survivors have much evidence as well as awful reminders of their crimes?
I don’t have the answers but I’m quite convinced that we’ve entered an irreversible point in terms of documentation of our lives, including death and destruction—not just baby pictures and trips, parties and graduations but also shelling of towns and killing of children. There is no going back. And tools matter. Just as wars with nuclear weapons are different than wars with bows and arrows, a world with cell-phone cameras in every other hand is different than a world which depended on traditional journalists and mass media gate-keepers for its news.
On the anniversary of the massacre, Peter and Shelley finally went through “the stuff,” reading letters of support they previously hadn’t felt able to face. Peter wanted the writers to know how much their words helped him. “There was a woman whose brother shot up a church,” Peter said. “Killed a bunch of people and himself. Saying how sorry she is. There was a woman whose husband stabbed and killed a child. People having Masses said for Adam.” Some included phone numbers and said to call if he needed anything. Other letters were peculiar: one suggested that Adam had been drugged by the C.I.A. and forced to his acts in order to foment support for gun-control legislation. The anniversary itself felt insignificant. “It’s not like I ever go an hour when it doesn’t cross my mind,” Peter said when we met that day.
Peter has offered to meet with the victims’ families, and two have taken up his offer. “It’s gut-wrenching,” he said. “A victim’s family member told me that they forgave Adam after we spent three hours talking. I didn’t even know how to respond. A person that lost their son, their only son.” The only reason Peter was talking to anyone, including me, was to share information that might help the families or prevent another such event. “I need to get some good from this. And there’s no place else to find any good. If I could generate something to help them, it doesn’t replace, it doesn’t—” He struggled to find the words. “But I would trade places with them in a heartbeat if that could help.”
[. . .]
The last time I saw Peter, he had taken out a picture of himself at the beach with his two sons. “One thing that struck me about that picture is that it’s clear that he’s loved,” he said. Peter has dreamed about Adam every night since the event, dreams of pervasive sadness rather than fear; he had told me that he could not be afraid of his fate as Adam’s father, even of being murdered by his son. Recently, though, he had had the worst nightmare of his life. He was walking past a door; a figure in the door began shaking it violently. Peter could sense hatred, anger, “the worst possible evilness,” and he could see upraised hands. He realized it was Adam. “What surprised me is that I was scared as shit,” he recounted. “I couldn’t understand what was happening to me. And then I realized that I was experiencing it from the perspective of his victims.”
I wondered how Peter would feel if he could see his son again. “Quite honestly, I think that I wouldn’t recognize the person I saw,” he said. “All I could picture is there’d be nothing there, there’d be nothing. Almost, like, ‘Who are you, stranger?’ ” Peter declared that he wished Adam had never been born, that there could be no remembering who he was outside of who he became. “That didn’t come right away. That’s not a natural thing, when you’re thinking about your kid. But, God, there’s no question. There can only be one conclusion, when you finally get there. That’s fairly recent, too, but that’s totally where I am.”
As the body responsible for monitoring state parties’ compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the Human Rights Committee has an important role to play in promoting and protecting the rights of LGBTI persons.
There are three ways in which it can do this, namely, in its Concluding Observations, in its General Comments and in its Views on individual communications. The degree to which it has succeeded in raising LGBTI rights through these different avenues is variable.
The Human Rights Committee’s approach to raising violations of the rights of LGBTI persons in its Concluding Observations has been patchy. Although it has improved in recent times, there have still been instances where the Human Rights Committee has failed to explicitly address the fact that a state continues to criminalise homosexuality in clear breach of the ICCPR.
In 2014, the Committee will review 18 states. Of those, Sierra Leone, Malawi, Sudan, Burundi and Sri Lanka still criminalise homosexuality.
Of course, many of the states where homosexual conduct is legal also have significant LGBTI rights violations, because, for example, there is no anti-discrimination legislation that protects sexual minorities.
One only has to look at recent events in Russia, where homosexuality was legalised in 1993, to know that decriminalisation is only the start of the journey towards dignity and equality for LGBTI persons, not the end.
The Human Rights Committee should therefore include recommendations not only about decriminalising homosexuality in its Concluding Observations for these 18 states, but also other reform measures necessary to ensure that LGBTI persons can be free and equal.
In 2013, a complete picture of allegations branding Europe as sexually deviant started to emerge from discussions on same-sex marriage in France, on the possibility that Russian children might be adopted by same-sex couples in the US and Europe and, finally, on the law banning the "propagation" to children of non-traditional sexual relations. The allegations were made by politicians, journalists, bloggers and commentators on Internet forums. There is nothing especially original about Russian invective on the sexual deviancy of Europe. The concept of the "decadent West", which can be traced back to the works of the Slavophiles, includes claims about the superiority of the Russian family and of Russian gender norms. Criticism of the bourgeois gender order that featured in Soviet propaganda during the Cold War acts as another ideological source for the rejection of Gayropa today. In fact, allegations about the decadence and effeminacy of western civilization are an important component of anti-Western discourse generally.
Today, the gender dimension has become one of the most important aspects of allegations levelled against the West. The destruction of the "normal" gender order in Europe is associated with the legalization of same-sex marriage, the growing influence of feminism and the destruction of the traditional family unit. It is alleged that these processes are bound to lead to a very real decline in European civilization, primarily because they pervert human nature itself and destroy the foundations of human communities. An article by the pro-Kremlin journalist Maksim Shevchenko is indicative of this line of thought. He writes – perhaps not entirely seriously – that Russians and most westerners belong to different categories of humanoid, which are externally similar but internally radically different. One of contemporary Russia's most prominent conservative thinkers, Alexander Dugin, uses the terms "trans-human" and "post-human" to describe the development of European civilization, as he sees it. According to Dugin, the logic of liberalism presupposes the destruction of all collective identities, from the state and the nation to gender and humanity. Once gender has been dismantled, humanity will take a similar course: "If we do not apply the brakes just a little, we will hurtle on to the bitter end, until we're asked to baptise a chimaera, a bio-robot, a cyborg or to marry a fly to a human being." Chairman of the State Duma foreign affairs committee Alexei Pushkov has assessed changes to the gender order in European countries "as an attempt to alter the very foundation of human civilization". In articles and commentaries, same-sex marriage is often mentioned alongside zoophilism, necrophilia or paedophilia, all of which are also invoked to denote a tendency leading to the decline of human civilization.
Furthermore, it is maintained that European civilization is condemning itself to geopolitical defeat. Europe is failing to compete with its main rival – Islamic civilization – principally in the demographic sense. In the not too distant future, the majority of people living in EU countries will be Muslims.
How do Russian commentators account for these transformations in the gender order within Europe? One explanation draws on the internal dynamics of European development. Alongside the prosaic argument that "Europe is too well off", some commentators refer to tendencies noted by Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West: the idea that "culture" has given way to "civilization" being among them. Another kind of explanation suggests links with conspiracy theories. In an article entitled "The New World class – a challenge to humanity", Vladimir Yakunin, plainly an ally of Putin's, calls the promotion of non-traditional sexual relations "part of the process of transforming the human community into an compliant herd, to be led by the new global financial elite, a class of "global oligarchs". One indispensable component of conspiracy theories is the idea that the "blue lobby" stalks the corridors of power. In connection with this, writers and commentators use phrases such as "the blue plague" or "gay fascism". A programme screened on a major Russian TV channel entitled "The repressive minority" had participants discussing "gay totalitarianism". The influential politician, ideologue and head of the European section of the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation, Natalia Narochnitskaia, said in a radio interview on the Voice of Russia that western European decisions on same-sex marriage totally ignored the views of the majority of the population. And on 12 December 2013, in a widely publicized address to the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, President Vladimir Putin emphasized that the "destruction of traditional values 'from above' not only brings negative consequences for societies, but is essentially anti-democratic, since it is implemented [...] against the will of the majority of people".
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