https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/ice-canada-offices-9.7073273

Alberta MP calls on Canada to shut down U.S. immigration and customs operations north of border

As U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) continues to draw widespread criticism for its deportation crackdown in the States, there’s concern brewing about the agency's presence north of the border.

The U.S. government’s website lists ICE offices in five Canadian cities: Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal and Ottawa.

In an emailed statement to CBC News, an ICE spokesperson confirmed its criminal investigative law enforcement component — Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) — conducts work at the U.S. embassy in the country’s capital, and at consulates in the other four cities.

HSI personnel are separate from the ICE arm at the forefront of the immigration crackdowns making headlines in cities like Minneapolis, known as Enforcement and Removal Operations.

According to the government website, HSI has over 93 offices in more than 50 countries, with a mandate to identify and stop crime “before it reaches the United States.”

Local politician says armed men rounded up residents, bound their hands behind their backs and shot them

More than 160 people have been killed in two villages in western Nigeria in the country’s deadliest armed assaults this year, as communities reel from repeated and widespread acts of violence perpetrated by jihadists and other armed groups.

The death toll from Tuesday’s attacks in Woro and Nuku in Kwara state stood at 162 on Wednesday afternoon, according to Mohammed Omar Bio, a member of parliament representing the area.

He told the Associated Press that the Lakurawa, an armed group affiliated with Islamic State, had carried out the attacks. No one has claimed responsibility.

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Moscow launched ‘terrorising’ attack on energy grid as temperatures reached -20C, Ukrainian president says

Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia on Tuesday of violating an agreement with Donald Trump to hold off from attacking Ukraine’s energy systems in the depths of a freezing winter, as its forces carried out large-scale airstrikes on Kyiv on the eve of three-way talks in Abu Dhabi.

Ukraine’s president said Moscow carried out a massive and “deliberate” attack overnight as temperatures in Kyiv plunged to -20C. It involved a record number of 71 ballistic missiles as well as 450 drones, he said, sent to destroy energy infrastructure.

More than 1,000 residential buildings in Kyiv were without heating on Tuesday.

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The U.S. Department of Justice on Jan. 31 published over 3 million documents in accordance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

Some of them had a direct connection to Ukraine.

The files linked to late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein include email conversations with at least two modeling agencies in Ukraine, travel arrangements for women from Kyiv and Odesa, booking arrangements in the Hyatt hotel in downtown Kyiv allegedly involving the hotel's owner, a plan to purchase real estate in Lviv and the discussion of Ukraine's political scene during the 2019 presidential elections.

The Kyiv Independent continues to review the documents published by the Department of Justice. The first findings are provided below.

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Wiarton Willie, along with most of his Canadian counterparts, has predicted an early spring after he did not see his shadow on Monday morning on Groundhog Day.

Groundhog Day is a long-held tradition of watching animals coming out of hibernation to predict whether there'll be an early spring or six more weeks of winter.

Every Feb. 2, groundhogs and even a crustacean emerge from their shelters to see if they see their shadows.

Trump supporter Júnior Pena falsely claimed migrants being rounded up, including Brazilians, were ‘all crooks’

A rightwing Brazilian influencer who claimed Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown targeted only “crooks” has been arrested by ICE agents in New Jersey.

Júnior Pena, whose full name is Eustáquio da Silva Pena Júnior, declared his support for the US president in a recent video message to his hundreds of thousands of social media followers.

“I [support] Donald Trump – I like the guy,” announced the South American TikToker and Instagrammer whose account purports to show “the reality of the United States” from a migrant’s perspective.

In a previous video, Pena reportedly urged Brazilians to stay calm and not “despair” after reports that ICE agents were rounding up migrants, including Brazilians. “But they’re all crooks. The lot of them,” he falsely claimed of the migrants being seized.

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Galyna Lutsenko, a crisis psychologist, is moving busily among a small group of children seated around a table in a basement in Kherson, unique in being Ukraine’s only leading city almost directly on the frontline with Russian forces – and one where people live with the daily threat of attack.

She dangles a plasticine butterfly on a thread over a playhouse on the table. Her own house in the city, she says, was hit by Russian shelling in 2024, injuring her in the leg and stomach.

This basement is a safe space in a dangerous city. Used as a shelter by local people, other rooms in the complex are hosting yoga, a dance rehearsal and a craft session for a group of older women screen-printing T-shirts bearing the city’s name.

The streets above ground explain this subterranean activity. Supermarket and shop windows in this city on the right bank of the Dnipro River are boarded against shrapnel, while other buildings show damage caused by artillery and glide bombs.

Long stretches of the city’s streets are being draped in anti-drone nets, including the main approach from the coast – a 20-minute drive away – that is now a net tunnel on three sides.

With Russian forces just across the river, daily life is lived under cover for the 60,000 residents – including 5,000 children – who remain, out of its original 300,000 inhabitants.

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A Russian drone attack on a bus carrying mine workers in Ukraine’s central-eastern Dnipropetrovsk region has killed at least 12 people, officials said.

The bus was driving about 40 miles (65km) from the frontline, according to police. Images published by Ukraine’s state emergency service showed what appeared to be an empty bus, its side windows shattered and windscreen hanging from the front.

DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company, said those killed were travelling from one of its mining facilities after they had finished their shift.

“The enemy drone hit near a company shuttle bus in the Pavlograd district. Preliminarily, 12 people were killed and seven more were wounded,” the head of the regional military administration, Oleksandr Ganzha, said on Telegram.

An earlier drone attack in the region overnight killed a man and a woman in the central city of Dnipro, Ganzha said in an earlier post. A drone also struck a maternity hospital in the southern Zaporizhzhia region on Sunday, wounding at least seven people including two women receiving a medical examination.

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Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal reported "a cascade shutdown" in Ukraine's power grid in the morning on Jan. 31, following disruptions to transmission lines between Romania and Moldova, as well as between western and central Ukraine.

Shmyhal said that the nuclear power plants are operating at reduced capacity following the outage.

Ukraine's state-owned grid operator, Ukrenergo, said at around 2 p.m. local time that emergency blackouts were in place in Kyiv and the surrounding region, as well as Cherkasy, Chernivtsi, Zhytomyr, and Kharkiv oblasts.

DTEK also reported emergency power cuts in southern Odesa Oblast and central-eastern Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.

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