Breaking News: Is York University Unsafe Since It Is Close To The Low Income Jane & Finch Neighbourhood?
Published on Monday July 09, 2012
Staff Reporters
A trio of sexual assaults at York University has students questioning their safety and the response of campus officials at the university plagued by high-profile security incidents.
Police are investigating three alleged sexual assaults that took place last Thursday afternoon near Vari Hall at the Keele campus.
One man was arrested Monday night and charged in relation to the assaults. Police said they think there may be more victims.
Sociology student Priya Kant said she only heard about the incidents on Sunday when it was reported on the news.
“It’s not good at all; it’s scary being here by yourself,” said Kant, who attends night classes. “I would think after the first assaults, this wouldn’t happen. It just shows that they’re not doing anything about it.”
York has previously drawn criticism for its reaction to assaults and robberies that have taken place at the university, attended by about 54,000 students.
University officials said an internal security bulletin was posted on York’s security website Thursday night and revised Friday after additional assaults were reported. A mass email was sent to students on Monday, four days after the alleged assaults.
“We take these assaults, which involved unwanted touching, very seriously. The victims have been offered counselling,” said university spokeswoman Janice Walls.
Vanessa Hunt, president of the York Federation of Students, said the university’s news portal, YFile, should have made efforts to notify students online sooner.
“Whether or not a thousand students read it, it should be on there,” Hunt said. “It should be publicized. People need to know what’s going on.”
She added that while the university did post security bulletins across campus, they could have done more.
“We keep pushing. They could really do better for communications with students.”
Summer student Maya Menezes only heard about the assaults on Monday. She said she hadn’t received an email or seen posters.
“I think it’s a safe school overall and these things could happen anywhere,” Menezes said. “Still, they can take steps to protect us.”
York said it was stepping up security patrols in the area where the assaults occurred.
Psychology student Paulina Camino said she heard about the incidents through a friend.
“You become a little bit more hesitant,” Camino said. “I feel safe but I don’t know how safe it is.”
Priya Kant, who is in her final year, said she used to leave her car in a free parking area nearby and hoof it to save on parking fees. She’s not doing that any more.
“It’s more money for your safety,” she said. “It’s ridiculous.”
Last year, York said, it was beefing up security, including hiring more staff, in response to a safety audit.
Oshane Leach, 20, of Toronto, has been charged with three counts of sexual assault, two counts of criminal harassment, and two counts of assault. He will appear in court Tuesday morning.
Explosive Blind Item: Katie Holmes & Tom Cruise Divorce Settled Quickly Because He Was Afraid His Homosexual Relationships With David Beckham, Will Smith, & John Travolta Would Be Revealed!!!
Why She Got Everything She Wanted
[BlindGossip] When the person who appears to have the power in a relationship backs down quickly in a dispute, you know that there have to be some compelling reasons why. Although all the talk up to this point has been about his involvement with a powerful group, there were actually three other reasons he settled so quickly.
Here are the three reasons: 1. His very personal relationship with a professional athlete. 2. His very personal relationship with a musician. 3. His very personal relationship with a famous actor.
She was ready and willing to expose all three relationships to get what she wanted. The scandal of having these three famous people deposed by attorneys about their sexual relationships would have destroyed all four men. So, he gave her the thing she wanted most so that his biggest secret could remain a secret.
My Guess:
Him: Tom Cruise
Her: Katie Holmes
1. Athlete: David Beckham
2. Musician: Will Smith
3. Actor: John Travolta
His biggest secret: Katie wants sole custody of her daughter Suri. Tom Cruise is homosexual and he is terrified that Katie would reveal the explosive information about his homosexual conquests with A list superstars. The three personal relationships Tom Cruise had were with three powerful men!
Remember, no A list male movie star has ever come out of the closet. Female movie fans prefer their A list male stars to be heterosexual because they have the fantasy they can fall in love with the male star.
Also, Blind Gossip already hinted in a previous blind that Katie caught Tom in bed with the bisexual British soccer player David Beckham. Tom is close friends with Will Smith and John Travolta and both are connected to scientology. Will Smith is not just an actor he is also a famous musician.
Rumours swirl that Will Smith and John Travolta are at least bisexual. Travolta’s gay massage sex scandal is still in the news and he has also tried very hard to stay in the closet. The American tabloid Star Magazine published an article stating Will Smith is bisexual and in a sexual relationship with fellow actor Duane Martin. Will Smith is also not straight contrary to popular belief of his fans.
Interesting Article: From Anderson Cooper to Frank Ocean, the Closet Door Opens – But Where are the A List Gay Movie Stars?
By Brent Lang | The Wrap – 51 minutes ago
Are there no gay movie stars?From Anderson Cooper to Jim Parsons, gay celebrities have been gently pushing open the closet door with shockingly little fanfare over the past year.
Their statements have been so understated that a recent piece in Entertainment Weekly on the new politics of being publicly gay noted, “What was impossible 60 years ago and dangerous 40 years ago and difficult 20 years ago is now becoming no big deal.”
That may be true, but there is one big exception.
In the nearly a decade since Tom Cruise won his second of two “I’m not gay” lawsuits in 2003, Hollywood movie stars remain uniformly heterosexual even as American society and public perceptions of sexuality have visibly changed.
Also read: Anderson Cooper: ‘I’m Gay’
Despite the recent matter-of-fact statements from the likes of Cooper, Parsons and Zachary Quinto, no A-list star on the level of a Brad Pitt or Robert Downey Jr. has come out, even though statistically it seems highly improbable that no major actor is gay. Meanwhile, the rumors and lawsuits that have dogged such actors as John Travolta or Cruise may lead the public to their own conclusions.
Even emerging stars like Tom Hardy, who once implied that he had flirted with bisexuality, are quick to quash the rumors if they get out of hand.
“We don’t have a leading man who is out,” notes Howard Bragman, vice chairman of Reputation.com and a publicist who has guided stars through coming-out announcements. “We don’t have anybody in a major professional sport. There is plenty of room to get further along.”
Also read: Obama’s Gay Marriage Support a Hit in Hollywood, But Will It Help Fundraising?
It seems there are still enormous pressures for big-name stars — especially those tied to romantic or action careers — to remain guarded about their sexuality.
And there’s an added element: The international market is not as accepting as America is becoming.
The movie business is a globalized enterprise, one that is increasingly dependent on foreign audiences. The question is less about America’s changing attitudes towards gays and lesbians, than the views of places like China, a country that boasts a big population of moviegoers, but one that is not exactly progressive when it comes to same-sex relationships.
Also read: Dustin Lance Black Mulls Obama Fundraiser After Shift on Gay Marriage
For the film business, not much has changed since “My Best Friend’s Wedding” star Rupert Everett told the Daily Mail in 2009 about his coming out: “It just doesn’t work, and you’re going to hit a brick wall at some point.”
“The fact is that you could not be, and still cannot be, a 25-year-old homosexual trying to make it in the British film business or the American film business or even the Italian film business,” Everett said.
Although Anne Heche made waves when she went public as Ellen DeGeneres’ girlfriend in the mid-’90s, her career faded along with their relationship, and the major movie actors who are openly gay remain supporting actors like Ian McKellen and Quinto.
It is no coincidence that the majority of the household names who have come out publicly have been television stars. After all, from DeGeneres’ ground-breaking declaration that she was a lesbian 15 years ago up to the portrayal of a happily married gay couple on ABC’s “Modern Family,” the small screen has been one of the most open, accepting and barrier-shattering parts of Hollywood.
That may have to do with demographics. Television’s prize age group is viewers between 18 to 34 years old, and a recent Gallup poll shows that 66 percent of people in that age bracket believe gay marriage should be legal.
“Young people set the ad rates,” Bragman told TheWrap. “These were the kids that grew up with ‘Will and Grace’ and ‘Queer Eye.’ Well, you can’t watch ‘Will and Grace’ and ever be threatened by a gay person again.”
The same is not as true for the world of athletics, movies nor music genres like rap and country.
Also read: Hip-Hop Singer Frank Ocean Comes Out in Love Letter
Similarly, despite the public pronouncements of, say, Elton John and Michael Stipe, certain sectors of the music business remain stubbornly resistant to gay artists.
“There are pockets of acceptance that are more robust than others, but [coming out] is not a non-nonchalant thing,” Chely Wright, an openly gay country singer, told TheWrap.
Wright came out in 2010 to an onslaught of media attention, but also softer record sales, demonstrating that, at least in terms of country singers, there is commercial risk to being openly gay.
That makes Frank Ocean’s revelation this week that he is bisexual all the more extraordinary. Ocean is not only African-American, but he is a hip-hop singer — two constituencies that have historically been slower to accept, even openly hostile to gays and lesbians.
That may have been the reason for the unusual way in which Ocean choose to come out. Instead of issuing a statement or sitting for an interview, he wrote a lyrical blog post about his attraction to a male friend when he was 19. Wright argues that Ocean’s decision to provide such a personal look at his own sexual awakening had a lot to do with his audience.
“His constituents were a lot like mine,” Wright said. “Country and hip-hop are on the same latitudinal line on LGBT issues, so when you give the news to a fan base that might not understand, you have a responsibility to explain yourself and to explain what gay love is about. It’s not just who you have sex with, it’s who you go to a movie with or play Scrabble with.”
In contrast, Cooper, Parsons, Quinto and “White Collar”s’ Matt Bomer seemed to take pains to downplay the drama surrounding their announcements. That may have to do with the fact that being gay and a celebrity is no longer novel, but it may also be that many of them were, to borrow a phrase from Slate’s June Thomas, “openly closeted.”
That is partly attributable to the rise of snarky blogs like Gawker and Perez Hilton that both capture celebrities in private moments with loved ones and feel none of the compunction about speculating about stars’ sexual orientations that once constrained the press.
With the internet, any closet, it seems, is made out of glass.
“We live in a very transparent world,” Bragman said. “It used to be someone would say privately that they saw so-and-so in a gay bar or had sex with them, now we have text messages and emails, and that changes things.”
In turn, more traditional media outlets have abandoned the non-aggression pact when it comes to closeted celebrities. When OutWeek Magazine chronicled Malcolm Forbes’ gay lifestyle in 1990 shortly after the media baron’s death, it set off a wave of hand-wringing. But things have changed dramatically.
Media publications rushed to publish that Jodie Foster had come out of the closet when she thanked a female friend in a 2007 speech at The Hollywood Reporter’s Women in Entertainment breakfast, even though she never said she was gay. Foster continues to keep her sexual orientation private.
Yet the growing ease with which stars of the small screen are opening up about their sexuality may eventually inspire some of their big screen brethren, as well.
“It wasn’t that long ago that playing a gay character was practically the kiss of death for an actor’s career,” Bil Browning, founder and publisher of the gay politics and culture blog The Bilerico Project, told TheWrap.
“[That was] a concern even as recently as ‘Brokeback Mountain’ where Mark Wahlberg turned down the lead because he was ‘a little creeped out’ by the gay theme and worried about his future career. Celebrities like Neil Patrick Harris, Anderson Cooper, Matt Bomer, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson are proving daily that LGBT people are simply a part of the fabric of life.”
Deadline.com Article: Actress Jennifer Lopez Is Developing A Lesbian Drama For ABC Family!!!
By DOMINIC PATTEN | Friday July 6, 2012 @ 12:33pm
EXCLUSIVE: Jennifer Lopez is developing an hour-long drama for ABC Family. The so far untitled series is about a lesbian couple who suddenly have their already child heavy household turned upside down when a wayward teenage girl moves in. One of the mothers is a cop, the other is a private school teacher. They have one biological son and adopted teen twins, one a boy, the other a girl. The American idol judge is said to be planning to guest star in the show. Lopez will executive produce the series, which the network is fast tracking, with Simon Fields, her partner at Nuyorican Productions. Peter Paige and Brad Bredeweg, the creators and writers of the show, will also executive produce. Greg Gugliotta, who has worked with ABC Family before on movies like 2003’s Beautiful Girl, is also on board as an executive producer on the show. Executive Mina Lefevre is shepherding the show at ABC Family. Lopez is repped by UTA and managed by Benny Medina.Disappointing Result: Roger Federer Upsets World Number One Novak Djokovic In Four Sets Advances To Wimbledon Men’s Final.
I think the only reason Roger Federer won this match is because Novak Djokovic was off his game today. I also believe since the the roof was closed on the centre court at Wimbledon this helped Federer serve.
I am stunned at this shocking upset! Federer defeated Novak Djokovic 6-3 3-6 6-4 6-3. I can’t believe Roger beat Novak so easily.
Last month in Paris, Novak destroyed Federer to advance to the French Open final. Maybe, Novak was sick and not feeling well and that’s why he lost? I am shocked that Novak lost I was certain since Rafael Nadal was bounced in the second round that the path was clear for Novak to defend his Wimbledon title.
Maybe, Novak is depressed about the death of his grandfather Vladimir?
Since Novak’s grandfather died in April, the spark is gone from his game he’s losing a lot of important matches. He lacks the intensity and desire he seems deflated and exhausted. Novak lost to Nadal in the finals of Monte Carlo, Rome, and the French Open. Now, Novak loses to Roger Federer a man he has dominated for the past two years! I am speechless here I can’t believe this!
Gayblackcanada 