A Canadian can Dream

TORONTO – Lirim Hajrullahu gave the Montreal Alouettes the boot Saturday night.

Hajrullahu kicked a CFL record-tying eight field goals to lift the Toronto Argonauts to a 37-31 win over the Montreal Alouettes.

“I did not know eight was the record,” Hajrullahu said. “We knew this was a tough opponent and we wanted to come out and get that (win).

“The East is heating up and so are we.”

Hajrullahu’s 27-yard field goal — his club record-tying seventh — at 12:43 of the fourth put Toronto ahead 34-31. Montreal took over at its 34-yard line with 2:10 remaining but turned the ball over on downs at its 39-yard line with 1:24 to play before an announced BMO Field gathering of 14,856.

That set up Hajrullahu’s 37-yard kick at 14:11 that put Toronto up 37-31. It tied the CFL record set in 1984 by Dave Ridgway and later tied by Mark McLoughlin and Paul Osbaldiston (both in 1996).

Montreal began its final possession at midfield but Tyshon Blackburn’s interception with 22 seconds remaining ended the threat and cementing the win for Toronto.

Toronto (8-7) earned its second win in three contests this season against Montreal (11-3-1). The Alouettes clinched first in the East — and home field for the division final — with the Ottawa Redblacks’ 29-16 road loss to the Saskatchewan Roughriders earlier Saturday.

But Montreal linebacker Darnell Sankey said that was the furthest thing from the Alouettes’ mind on Saturday.

“We were going out there to win a football game,” said Sankey, who had six tackles and a sack. “We’re not going to use that as an excuse, we didn’t come out and play our best game, for whatever reason.

“Props to Toronto … they came out and executed their game plan better than we did. They were the better team tonight.”

Toronto moved to within a point of second-place Ottawa (8-6-1) in the East Division and four points ahead of fourth-place Hamilton (6-9). The Argos host the Redblacks on Oct. 19.

“Lirim was huge, you’ve got to make those kicks,” said Toronto head coach Ryan Dinwiddie. “(But) we’ve got to finish in the red zone.

“We can’t have eight field goals. I know it tied a record but I’d settle for one to score some touchdowns.”

Toronto’s offence rolled up 517 net yards, including 234 yards rushing. Ka’Deem Carey led the way with 90 yards and a touchdown on 13 carries while adding three catches for 49 yards.

“This (win) is huge,” Carey said. “This could turn our season around and I’m going to make sure it turns our season around.”

Makai Polk had five receptions for a game-high 103 yards for Toronto. Starter Chad Kelly was 19-of-30 passing for 287 yards and an interception.

“Disappointing we didn’t run the ball well enough on second down,” Dinwiddie said. “We knew Montreal would let us run on first down, they wanted to get us in that second-and-five, do you pass it or do you run it?

“We didn’t move the chains as much as I wanted on second down but I have to go look at it. We didn’t play a great football game, we played good enough to win but we’ve got to continue to get better.”

Montreal came in allowing a CFL-low 19.6 offensive points per game but was ranked eighth against the run (112.1 yards per game). Toronto had the CFL’s second-ranked ground attack (118.4 yards per game).

Alouettes’ quarterback Cody Fajardo completed 20-of-29 passes for 225 yards with two touchdowns and an interception. Cole Spieker recorded three catches for 99 yards and a TD.

Montreal made it 31-31 on Dominque Davis’s one-yard TD run at 8:45 of the fourth, then Fajardo’s pass to Tyler Snead for the two-point convert. Hajrullahu’s 35-yard field goal at 3:15 had put Toronto ahead 31-23.

Deonta McMahon scored Toronto’s other touchdown. Hajrullahu also had a convert.

James Letcher Jr. and Walter Fletcher had Montreal’s other touchdowns. Jose Maltos added three converts and two singles.

Hajrullahu’s 49-yard field goal to end the half made it 22-22 and capped a wild finish to the second. Letcher’s 100-yard punt-return TD at 14:42 put Montreal ahead 22-19 after Fajardo’s 35-yard TD pass to Spieker at 13:27, and Maltos’ ensuing 84-yard kickoff single cut Toronto’s lead to 19-15.

Toronto dominated the opening half, rushing for 155 yards and holding the ball for more than 20 minutes. However, it managed just one touchdown and five times had to settle for field goals.

Carey had Toronto’s lone TD of the half on a five-yard run at 10:00 that put the Argos ahead 19-7. It capped a solid seven-play, 90-yard march.

Fajardo put Montreal ahead 7-3 with a 10-yard TD strike to Fletcher at 6:30. It was set up by Dionte Ruffin’s 27-yard interception return to Toronto’s 10-yard line in a light drizzle.

UP NEXT

Alouettes: Bye week.

Argonauts: Bye week.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 28, 2024.

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Riding in a black SUV with tinted windows, lawyer Mariel Colón rolls up to the gates of a remote mansion, strolling past a security guard side-by-side with Emma Coronel, the wife of notorious drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.

Sporting suits and sunglasses, the pair stride into a dimly lit room full of slickly dressed men smoking cigars.

All to the roar of trumpets.

The scene is from “La Señora,” the latest music video from Colón, who spent several years working as a defense lawyer for Guzmán while he faced trial in a U.S. court. Now, at a time when regional Mexican music is becoming a global phenomenon, the 31-year-old is leveraging her association with the former leader of the Sinaloa Cartel to launch her music career under the stage name of “Mariel La Abogada” (Mariel, the Lawyer).

“La Señora” features — and pays tribute to — Guzmán’s wife, who was released from prison last year and has struggled to find work. It paved the way for the two to model together last weekend during Milan Fashion Week, raising eyebrows in Italy and beyond.

“(My work) opens doors for me because of the morbid, because of people’s curiosity … They want to understand this,” Colón told The Associated Press. “I’ve always told people that Mariel is a singer who became a lawyer.”

The Puerto Rican daughter of a music director grew up listening to Mexican ballads, loving the brokenhearted passion infused in the music. She always wanted to be a singer, but her family pushed her to pursue a law degree.

She began working for Guzmán’s defense team in 2018 after graduating from law school in the U.S. and stumbling upon a Craigslist ad seeking a part-time paralegal to help prepare a Spanish-speaking client for trial.

It was only later that she learned she would be working with Guzmán, taking him and Coronel as clients full time. She saw it as a “great opportunity professionally” and said she wasn’t easily intimidated.

Once among the most wanted men in the world, Guzmán led his Sinaloa Cartel in a bloody war for control of the international drug trade, gaining a cinematic level of notoriety for his dramatic prison escapes before his extradition to the U.S. in 2017. Now his sons, known as “Los Chapitos,” are locked in a deadly power struggle with another faction of the cartel, leaving mutilated bodies around the state capital.

“(People ask) how I can do this job, that I’m part of the mafia, how can I sleep at night?” Colón said. “I don’t care what they say about me. I sleep very well at night.”

Colón is one of few people who maintain regular contact with Guzmán. She visits him three times a month in the maximum security prison in Colorado where he’s serving a life sentence. She declined to discuss details of Guzmán’s cases, citing attorney-client privilege.

Seeking to build a rapport, Colón sings to Guzmán and other clients, who have included other Mexican drug traffickers and, for a brief time, Jeffrey Epstein, who killed himself in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges.

Colón serenades Guzmán with Mexican classics from bands including Los Alegres del Barranco and Tucanes de Tijuana. To this day, she said, he’s among the first to hear her new music.

“Whatever genre, anything that was coming out that I liked, I would sing it to him because he doesn’t have a radio,” she said.

Her musical career began little more than a year ago, when she released her first video, “La Abogada,” which features Colón dressed in a pink suit, crooning to law enforcement from a courtroom. Like much of the genre, her music is diverse, ranging from percussion-heavy banda to character-focused ballads known as corridos.

“La Señora” features a table sprinkled with diamonds, Guzmán’s wife astride a trotting horse and strolling beside a pool.

Colón said the song was based on Coronel’s life, sending a message of redemption and second chances. It was also a way to offer the 35-year-old work, a condition of her probation.

Coronel, a former beauty queen, was released from prison last year after completing her three-year sentence for drug trafficking and money laundering in relation to her husband’s drug empire. Coronel declined to be interviewed.

“A small waist and beautiful eyes. A brain for business and a strong voice for the bad boys. She only shows her affectionate side to El Chaparrito,” Colón belts out in her ballad. “El Chaparrito,” meaning “the little shorty,” plays with Guzmán’s nickname.

Colón’s musical rise coincides with a relative golden age of Mexican music, which grew 400% worldwide over the last five years on Spotify. In 2023, Mexican artist Peso Pluma bested Taylor Swift as the most streamed artist on YouTube.

While corridos have dominated for more than a century, young artists have filled stadiums by twisting the style on its head, mixing classic ballads with trap in corridos tumbados.

But it also cuts to the heart of a larger debate: Does the music capture the realities facing many Mexicans or does it glorify the narco-violence long plaguing the Latin American nation?

Narco culture has long been part of corridos, with many singers idealizing traffickers as “an aspirational figure going against the system,” said Rafael Saldívar, a researcher at the Autonomous University of Baja California.

“They’re cultural expressions speaking to the realities of the country,” Saldívar said. But “in a way they glorify these criminals, or do so in a way where some feel it’s pushing this kind of lifestyle.”

A classic example: king of corridos Chalino Sánchez used the violence around him in Sinaloa to spin lyrics while also calling out the “Sinaloa gang” for torturing and killing innocents. He was shot dead at a performance in the state’s capital in 1992.

Last year, Peso Pluma – who paid homage to Guzmán in songs – was forced to cancel a show in Tijuana after the 25-year-old received threats from a rival of the Sinaloa Cartel that if he came it “would be your last performance.”

Later, Tijuana banned the performance of narco ballads altogether to protect “the eyes and ears” of youths as it tries to contain violence. Local authorities in northern states previously banned musicians singing narcocorridos.

Colón, who hasn’t gone so far as to glorify arms or drugs, is quick to defend narcocorridos.

“There’s a reason why Netflix did the ‘Narcos’ show, it’s because there’s an audience for it. It intrigues people,” she said. “That doesn’t mean they’re applauding or celebrating what this person did, but they do have a sort of admiration for this person or this person’s life. Not everything is violence. These people have hearts, they have families.”

While Colón plans to put out her first record in December, Coronel has leveraged “La Señora” to launch her career as a model and social media influencer.

April Black Diamond, the designer who asked Coronel and Colón to model in a side event during Milan Fashion Week, said her choice was met with “shock.”

“People evolve. My platform isn’t about judgment but about showing different dimensions of women, their strength, and resilience,” she wrote in a statement. The next day, photos of Coronel in one of the designer’s dresses appeared plastered on a billboard in New York’s Times Square.

On Wednesday, Italy’s National Fashion Chamber issued an “urgent” press release saying the show wasn’t affiliated with official fashion week events and that brands need to follow its code of ethics.

Meanwhile, eyes on Colón and Coronel’s video continue to grow, clocking around 750,000 views on YouTube.

VIENNA (AP) — Austria’s far-right Freedom Party could win a national election for the first time on Sunday, tapping into voters’ anxieties about immigration, inflation, Ukraine and other concerns following recent gains for the hard right elsewhere in Europe.

Herbert Kickl, a former interior minister and longtime campaign strategist who has led the Freedom Party since 2021, wants to become Austria’s new chancellor. He has used the term “Volkskanzler,” or chancellor of the people, which was used by the Nazis to describe Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. Kickl has rejected the comparison.

But to become Austria’s new leader, he would need a coalition partner to command a majority in the lower house of parliament.

And a win isn’t certain, with recent polls pointing to a close race. They have put support for the Freedom Party at 27%, with the conservative Austrian People’s Party of Chancellor Karl Nehammer on 25% and the center-left Social Democrats on 21%.

More than 6.3 million people age 16 and over are eligible to vote for the new parliament in Austria, a European Union member that has a policy of military neutrality.

Kickl has achieved a turnaround since Austria’s last parliamentary election in 2019. In June, the Freedom Party narrowly won a nationwide vote for the first time in the European Parliament election, which also brought gains for other European far-right parties.

In 2019, its support slumped to 16.2% after a scandal brought down a government in which it was the junior coalition partner. Then-vice chancellor and Freedom Party leader Heinz-Christian Strache resigned following the publication of a secretly recorded video in which he appeared to offer favors to a purported Russian investor.

The far right has tapped into voter frustration over high inflation, the war in Ukraine and the Covid pandemic. It also been able to build on worries about migration.

In its election program, the Freedom Party calls for “remigration of uninvited foreigners,” and for achieving a more “homogeneous” nation by tightly controlling borders and suspending the right to asylum via an “emergency law.”

Gernot Bauer, a journalist with Austrian magazine Profil who recently co-published an investigative biography of the far-right leader, said that under Kickl’s leadership, the Freedom Party has moved “even further to the right,” as Kickl refuses to explicitly distance the party from the Identitarian Movement, a pan-European nationalist and far-right group.

Bauer describes Kickl’s rhetoric as “aggressive” and says some of his language is deliberately provocative.

The Freedom Party also calls for an end to sanctions against Russia, is highly critical of western military aid to Ukraine and wants to bow out of the European Sky Shield Initiative, a missile defense project launched by Germany.

The leader of the Social Democrats, a party that led many of Austria’s post-World War II governments, has positioned himself as the polar opposite to Kickl. Andreas Babler has ruled out governing with the far right and labeled Kickl “a threat to democracy.”

While the Freedom Party has recovered, the popularity of Nehammer’s People’s Party, which currently leads a coalition government with the environmentalist Greens as junior partners, has declined since 2019.

During the election campaign, Nehammer portrayed his party, which has taken a tough line on immigration in recent years, as “the strong center” that will guarantee stability amid multiple crises.

But it is precisely these crises, ranging from the COVID-19 pandemic to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and resulting rising energy prices, that have cost the conservatives support, said Peter Filzmaier, one of Austria’s leading political scientists.

Under their leadership, Austria has experienced high inflation averaging 4.2% over the past 12 months, surpassing the EU average.

The government also angered many Austrians in 2022 by becoming the first European country to introduce a coronavirus vaccine mandate, which was scrapped a few months later without ever being put into effect. And Nehammer is the third chancellor since the last election, taking office in 2021 after predecessor Sebastian Kurz — the winner in 2019 — quit politics amid a corruption investigation.

But the recent flooding caused by Storm Boris that hit Austria and other countries in Central Europe brought back the topic of the environment into the election debate and helped Nehammer slightly narrow the gap with the Freedom Party by presenting himself as a “crisis manager,” Filzmaier said.

Nehammer said in a video Thursday that “this is about whether we continue together on this proven path of stability or leave the country to the radicals, who make a lot of promises and don’t keep them.”

The People’s Party is the far right’s only way into government.

Nehammer has repeatedly excluded joining a government led by Kickl, describing him as a “security risk” for the country, but hasn’t ruled out a coalition with the Freedom Party in and of itself, which would imply Kickl renouncing a position in government.

The likelihood of Kickl agreeing to such a deal if he wins the election is very low, Filzmaier said.

But should the People’s Party finish first, then a coalition between the People’s Party and the Freedom Party could happen, Filzmaier said. The most probable alternative would be a three-way alliance between the People’s Party, the Social Democrats and most likely the liberal Neos.

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Associated Press videojournalist Philipp Jenne contributed to this report.