Vancouver Canucks goalie Silovs confident, calm heading into new season

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) — Jonathan Aranda homered, six Tampa Bay pitchers combined on a five-hitter, and the Rays beat the Toronto Blue Jays 1-0 on Friday night.

Aranda went deep against José Berríos (14-10) with one out in the sixth inning.

The loss ended Berríos’ seven start winning streak, during which he had a 1.51 ERA. The right-hander allowed one run, six hits, one walk and had six strikeouts in six innings.

After Rays starter Tyler Alexander gave up two hits over 4 1/3 innings, Kevin Kelly (4-2) extended his scoreless streak to 22 innings after going 1 2/3 innings. Manuel Rodríguez worked out of a second-and-third jam in the seventh. Edwin Uceta and Colin Poche combined to get through the eighth before Hunter Bigge worked the ninth to get his first save.

The Rays limited Boston to one hit in a 2-0 victory on Thursday night.

Tampa Bay had a runner reach third in each of the first three innings against Berríos but went 0 for 7 with runners in scoring position.

Toronto’s Alejandro Kirk extended his career-best hitting streak to 13 games with a sixth-inning single.

Ernie Clement, filling in for injured Toronto shortstop Bo Bichette, made a couple of strong defensive plays. He made a lunging play on Jonny DeLuca’s two-out grounder during the third and started a nifty inning-ending double play in the fifth.

Clement walked leading off the eighth and stole second, but was tagged out trying to advance on Kirk’s grounder to third.

TRAINER’S ROOM

Blue Jays: Bichette (broken right middle finger) will see a hand specialist on Tuesday. … RHP Kevin Gausman, who left his start after throwing five no-hit innings Thursday against Texas with back tightness, is feeling better and could make his next scheduled start. … INF Will Wagner had his left knee scoped on Friday. … OF Daulton Varsho will have right rotator cuff surgery on Monday and there is a chance he won’t be ready for spring training next year.

UP NEXT

Blue Jays RHP Yariel Rodríguez (1-6, 4.29 ERA) and Rays RHP Taj Bradley (6-11, 4.39 ERA) are Saturday’s scheduled starters.

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The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

OTTAWA – Canada is setting aside $151 million for the fight to eradicate polio worldwide.

International Development Minister Ahmed Hussen announced the news at a Rotary International conference in Toronto.

The funding comes a month after Palestinian officials announced the first cases of polio in 25 years in the Gaza Strip.

The funding will support the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, which provides vaccines to children worldwide, including more than a half-million kids in Gaza.

Hussen’s office says the cash should help “the most vulnerable populations” such as girls in conflict situations where there is limited health-care access.

The World Health Organization says the world is on the verge of eradicating polio, with a 99 per cent drop in cases since 1988.

Over the last 24 years, various Canadian governments have spent $1 billion on the effort.

“Together, we will end polio and build a healthier future for children everywhere,” Hussen wrote in a statement.

There is no cure for polio, which can cause paralysis that tends to be permanent, including to the muscles used to breathe.

Still, vaccination campaigns have come under strain as humanitarian crises and the COVID-19 pandemic divert resources and make it harder to inoculate children.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 20, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

VANCOUVER – Three RCMP members from a Metro Vancouver detachment could be fired over alleged “atrocious,” “racist” and “horrible” behaviour detailed by a fellow officer, including text chats that bragged about “Tasering unarmed black people,” court documents say.

A schedule from the RCMP shows Constables Philip Dick, Ian Solven and Mersad Mesbah are slated to appear next February for code of conduct hearings over allegations including discrimination, harassment and discrediting the police force.

None of the allegations have been proven.

In court filings to obtain a search warrant, an officer in the RCMP’s Professional Standards Unit in Coquitlam, B.C., says another member in the detachment trained by Dick complained about being harassed by the accused officers.

Among the key complaints, according to the filings, is that officers allegedly engaged in comments on a mobile chat group that were abusive, racist, homophobic and misogynistic that matched a “climate of harassment” created by the three officers.

“Members of the (chat) group never talk about their own lives,” the filings said “They use the group to say ‘negative stuff about work or horrible things about people they work with.’

“He (the complainant) described the behaviour in the chat group as ‘atrocious.’ He believed it was racist and horrible, so he used to just ‘skim’ it rather than reading all of it,” the documents say.

The filings also said the complainant tried to leave the chat group but was told it was “used for operational purposes and that he needed to be a part of it,” and was accused of “not being a team member” if he did not rejoin.

(Note Graphic Content)

The documents say that among the list of alleged comments made on the chat are instances where an officer “goes off about … brown people” making the Lower Mainland “unsafe,” using the N-word and the racial stereotype of eating chicken when describing blacks, dismissing a woman reporting a sex assault based on her ethnicity and calling her “dumb,” and making fun of a female RCMP employee’s weight by “insinuating that the shape of her vagina was visible through her clothing.”

The complaint also outlined a number of actions by the three officers outside of the group chat, including belittling Indigenous community members as having fetal alcohol syndrome and saying they are “not going to the reserve … because we’re not going to help those people,” the court document says.

In another instance described by the complainant, one of the members, who was “typically dismissive” of shoplifting files, was going “out of his way to attend” a case and try “to provoke the suspect into a fight” when he found out the suspect was black.

The court document says the complainant said the officer “later lamented that he hadn’t been able to ‘rile up’ the suspect sufficiently to justify Tasering him.”

The document also describes other alleged instances where members justified domestic violence by saying “women deserve it,” swearing in front of a four-year-old child while attending a tenancy dispute, and bragging about concluding police files by making up “whatever” when asked to followup on a case without any filings.

The Coquitlam RCMP standards officer also said in the document that a review of other chat logs from the accused officers from January 2019 to May 2021 “identified a variety of comments that were ‘chauvinist in nature, with a strong air of superiority and include flippant or insulting remarks about clients, supervisors, colleagues, policy and the RCMP as a whole.”

“In the messages, Constables Dick, Solven and Mesbah are frequently offensive,” the court filing said. “Constable Dick and Mesbah use racial and homophobic slurs, and all three frequently deride their co-workers.”

The BC RCMP referred The Canadian Press’s request for comment to National RCMP communications, who have not responded to the allegations or the conduct review.

A legal document released on Sept. 12 says the RCMP intend “to seek termination of the members’ employment at the hearing, and the three members have been suspended since June 2021 when the allegations emerged.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 20, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.