Here’s what we know about the Canadian who died in ICE custody, Johnny Noviello’s former lawyer describes the 49-year-old, who died while in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Monday, as quiet, polite and respectful.

“Just always appreciative, respectful, excellent with communication, not the type of guy you would see wrapped up in the mess as Johnny did,” said Dan Leising, a defence lawyer who represented Noviello. “Johnny was a very quiet, polite, unassuming guy.”

Leising said his only known family member is his father, Angelo, who was “distraught” to hear about his son’s death.

“Just complete disbelief. Devastation, just complete devastation,” added Leising. “Angelo is 80 years old. To be 80 and to have your kid die when he’s 49, it’s unimaginable.”

According to ICE, Noviello was “found unresponsive” on June 23 just before 1 p.m. at a federal detention centre in Miami. The government agency said medical staff tried to resuscitate him and used a defibrillator -- but was pronounced dead by the Miami Fire Rescue Department.

“This is the first time I’ve ever had a client die in any sort of custody,” said Leising.

Noviello became a permanent resident in 1991, but, according to ICE, in October of 2023, he was convicted of racketeering and drug trafficking and sentenced to 12 months in prison.

“He did around four months of jail from October of 2023 to February of 2024,” said Leising, adding that Noviello did another year after that of “community control,” which is a form of intensive supervision of offenders within the community.

Leising said Noviello worked as a cashier at a store and worked in janitorial services.

According to ICE, agents arrested Noviello on May 15 because of his previous conviction, which violated the conditions of his permanent residency.

The press release says Noviello was detained pending removal proceedings, which means a person has been notified they are subject to a process that could lead to their deportation from the country.

“We were also in touch with him from a consular standpoint as soon as he was detained,” said Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand during a Zoom interview with CTV News, adding that Canada has also reached out to seek additional information.

ICE says the cause of death is still under investigation and that they notified the Consulate of Canada of Noviello’s death.

Anand says there are approximately 55 Canadians who are still detained by #ICE. According to ICE data, seven other people have died in 2025 while in ICE’s custody.

Global cocaine boom keeps setting new records, #UN report says. The global cocaine trade keeps setting new records, with cocaine the world’s fastest-growing illicit drug market as Colombia production surges along with users in Europe and North and South America, a United Nations report published on Thursday said.

The annual UN Office on Drugs and Crime’s (UNODC) World Drug Report showed that in 2023, the latest year for which comprehensive data was available, the cocaine trade went from strength to strength.

“Production, seizures, and use of cocaine all hit new highs in 2023, making cocaine the world’s fastest-growing illicit drug market,” the Vienna-based UNODC said in a statement.

On the supply side, global estimated illegal production of cocaine rose by around a third to a record of more than 3,708 tons, mainly because of an increase in the area devoted to illicit coca bush cultivation in Colombia and updated data that showed the yield there was roughly 50% higher than in 2022.

The estimated number of cocaine users globally also kept growing, reaching 25 million people in 2023, up from 17 million 10 years earlier, the UNODC said.

“North America, Western and Central Europe and South America continue to constitute the largest markets for cocaine, on the basis of the number of people who used drugs in the past year and on data derived from wastewater analysis,” it said.

The synthetic drug market also continues to expand, helped by low operational costs and reduced risk of detection for those making or smuggling the drugs, the UNODC said.

The leading drugs there were amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS) like methamphetamine and amphetamine.

“Seizures of ATS reached a record high in 2023 and accounted for almost half of all global seizures of synthetic drugs, followed by synthetic opioids, including fentanyl,” the UNODC said.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Israel’s ambassador to France said the killings will make it “almost” impossible for Iran to build weapons from whatever nuclear infrastructure and material may have survived nearly two weeks of Israeli airstrikes and massive bunker-busting bombs dropped by U.S. stealth bombers.

“The fact that the whole group disappeared is basically throwing back the program by a number of years, by quite a number of years,” Ambassador Joshua Zarka said.

But nuclear analysts say Iran has other scientists who can take their place. European governments say that military force alone cannot eradicate Iran’s nuclear know-how, which is why they want a negotiated solution to put concerns about the Iranian program to rest.

“Strikes cannot destroy the knowledge Iran has acquired over several decades, nor any regime ambition to deploy that knowledge to build a nuclear weapon,” U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy told lawmakers in the House of Commons.

Iran has long maintained that its nuclear program was peaceful, and U.S. intelligence agencies have assessed that Tehran is not actively pursuing a bomb. However, Israeli leaders have argued that Iran could quickly assemble a nuclear weapon.

Here’s a closer look at the killings:
Chemists, physicists, engineers among those killed

Zarka told AP that Israeli strikes killed at least 14 physicists and nuclear engineers, top Iranian scientific leaders who “basically had everything in their mind.”

They were killed “not because of the fact that they knew physics, but because of the fight that they were personally involved in, the creation and the fabrication and the production of (a) nuclear weapon,” he said.

Nine of them were killed in Israel’s opening wave of attacks on June 13, the Israeli military said. It said they “possessed decades of accumulated experience in the development of nuclear weapons” and included specialists in chemistry, materials and explosives as well as physicists.

Zarka spoke Monday to the AP. On Tuesday, Iran state TV reported the death of another Iranian nuclear scientist, Mohammad Reza Sedighi Saber, in an Israeli strike, after he’d survived an earlier attack that killed his 17-year-old son on June 13.
Targeted killings meant to discourage would-be successors

Experts say that decades of Iranian work on nuclear energy — and, Western powers allege, nuclear weapons — has given the country reserves of know-how and scientists who could continue any work toward building warheads to fit on Iran’s ballistic missiles.

“Blueprints will be around and, you know, the next generation of Ph.D. students will be able to figure it out,” said Mark Fitzpatrick, who specialized in nuclear non-proliferation as a former U.S. diplomat. Bombing nuclear facilities ”or killing the people will set it back some period of time. Doing both will set it back further, but it will be reconstituted.”

“They have substitutes in maybe the next league down, and they’re not as highly qualified, but they will get the job done eventually,” said Fitzpatrick, now an analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London think tank.

How quickly nuclear work could resume will in part depend on whether Israeli and U.S. strikes destroyed Iran’s stock of enriched uranium and equipment needed to make it sufficiently potent for possible weapons use.

“The key element is the material. So once you have the material, then the rest is reasonably well-known,” said Pavel Podvig, a Geneva-based analyst who specializes in Russia’s nuclear arsenal. He said killing scientists may have been intended “to scare people so they don’t go work on these programs.”

“Then the questions are, ‘Where do you stop?’ I mean you start killing, like, students who study physics?” he asked. “This is a very slippery slope.”

The Israeli ambassador said: “I do think that people that will be asked to be part of a future nuclear weapon program in Iran will think twice about it.”

Israel is widely believed to be the only Middle Eastern country with nuclear weapons, which it has never acknowledged.
Previous attacks on scientists

Israel has long been suspected of killing Iranian nuclear scientists but previously didn’t claim responsibility as it did this time.

In 2020, Iran blamed Israel for killing its top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, with a remote-controlled machine gun.

“It delayed the program but they still have a program. So it doesn’t work,” said Paris-based analyst Lova Rinel, with the Foundation for Strategic Research think tank. “It’s more symbolic than strategic.”

Without saying that Israel killed Fakhrizadeh, the Israeli ambassador said “Iran would have had a bomb a long time ago” were it not for repeated setbacks to its nuclear program — some of which Iran attributed to Israeli sabotage.

“They have not reached the bomb yet,” Zarka said. “Every one of these accidents has postponed a little bit the program.”
A legally grey area

International humanitarian law bans the intentional killing of civilians and non-combatants. But legal scholars say those restrictions might not apply to nuclear scientists if they were part of the Iranian armed forces or directly participating in hostilities.

“My own take: These scientists were working for a rogue regime that has consistently called for the elimination of Israel, helping it to develop weapons that will allow that threat to take place. As such, they are legitimate targets,” said Steven R. David, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University.

He said Nazi German and Japanese leaders who fought Allied nations during World War II “would not have hesitated to kill the scientists working on the Manhattan Project” that fathered the world’s first atomic weapons.

Laurie Blank, a specialist in humanitarian law at Emory Law School, said it’s too early to say whether Israel’s decapitation campaign was legal.

“As external observers, we don’t have all the relevant facts about the nature of the scientists’ role and activities or the intelligence that Israel has,” she said by email to AP. “As a result, it is not possible to make any definitive conclusions.”

Zarka, the ambassador, distinguished between civilian nuclear research and the scientists targeted by Israel.

“It’s one thing to learn physics and to know exactly how a nucleus of an atom works and what is uranium,” he said.

But turning uranium into warheads that fit onto missiles is “not that simple,” he said. ”These people had the know-how of doing it, and were developing the know-how of doing it further. And this is why they were eliminated.”

Japan conducts first missile test on its own territory as part of military buildup to deter China

#BREAKING U.S. strikes only set back Iran’s nuclear program by months: AP sources.

The intelligence report issued by the Defense Intelligence Agency on Monday contradicts statements from Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the status of Iran’s nuclear facilities. The people were not authorized to address the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

According to the people, the report found that while the Saturday strikes at the Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan nuclear sites did significant damage, they were not totally destroyed.

The assessment found that at least some of Iran’s highly enriched uranium was moved out of multiple sites before the U.S. strikes and survived, according to the people, and it also found that Iran’s centrifuges are largely intact.

At the deeply buried Fordo uranium enrichment plant, the entrance collapsed and infrastructure was damaged, so that will take time to fix, but the underground infrastructure was not destroyed, according to one of the people. The person also said that previous assessments had warned of this outcome at Fordo.

The White House strongly pushed back on the assessment, calling it “flat-out wrong.”

“The leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear attempt to demean President Trump, and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000 pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration.”

Trump has said in comments and posts on social media in recent days, including Tuesday, that the strikes left the sites in Iran “totally destroyed” and that Iran will never rebuild its nuclear facilities.

Netanyahu said in a televised statement on Tuesday that, “For dozens of years I promised you that Iran would not have nuclear weapons and indeed ... we brought to ruin Iran’s nuclear program.”

He said the U.S. joining Israel was “historic” and thanked Trump.

The CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment on the DIA assessment. ODNI coordinates the work of the nation’s 18 intelligence agencies, including the DIA, which is the intelligence arm of the Defense Department, responsible for producing intelligence on foreign militaries and the capabilities of adversaries.

Michelle L. Price And Mary Clare Jalonick, The Associated Press

#Alberta Next panel announced with legislature members, academics and business leaders, She says Ottawa is to blame for decades of lost investment and resource revenue and that Alberta can’t be held back any longer.

The premier is to lead the Alberta Next panel, which also includes three United Conservative Party legislature members, Environment Minister Rebecca Schulz, a retired judge and a physician.

Smith says following a summer of town halls across the province, the panel is to recommend ideas and policy proposals that would be put to Albertans in a referendum next year.

Smith has said a referendum on Alberta separation could happen, though she wouldn’t initiate one herself.

Opposition NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi says the premier is wasting time and money by rehashing former premier Jason Kenney’s Fair Deal panel, which toured the province six years ago in search of ways Alberta could gain leverage over Ottawa.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 24, 2025.

— With files from Jack Farrell in Edmonton

TEL AVIV, June 24. At least three people were killed when a missile launched from Iranian territory struck a seven-story building in the Israeli city of Be’er Sheva, according to a report by Israel’s N12 television channel.

The broadcaster also noted that several other individuals sustained injuries in the attack.

According to N12, rescue operations are currently underway at the site, as authorities search for people possibly trapped beneath the rubble. There are also concerns regarding a potential gas leak in the aftermath of the strike.

Iran could ‘target’ U.S. officials if Tehran believes regime’s survival at risk, DHS says.

Other scenarios for potential Iranian targeting of U.S. officials include if Tehran considers them to be involved in the deaths of senior Iranian leaders or believes U.S. airstrikes will continue, according to the bulletin from DHS’ Office of Intelligence and Analysis, which was sent to state and local law enforcement and is dated June 22.

CNN has requested comment from the Iranian government’s mission to the United Nations.

On Monday, Iran fired missiles towards a U.S. military base in Qatar in retaliation for the U.S. strikes on Iran, according to two officials familiar with the matter.

But the DHS bulletin is one of the clearest connections yet drawn by U.S. intelligence and law enforcement analysis about the potential violent backlash against civilian government officials for President Donald Trump’s decision to bomb Iranian nuclear sites.

“It is our duty to keep the nation safe and informed, especially during times of conflict,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement to CNN when CNN asked DHS for comment on the bulletin. “The ongoing Israel-Iran conflict brings the possibility of increased threat to the homeland in the form of possible cyberattacks, acts of violence, and antisemitic hate crimes.”

The bulletin does not specify what the “targeting” of U.S. officials might look like but the Justice Department has previously alleged that Iran has tried to kill Trump and his former national security adviser, John Bolton, in retaliation for a 2020 U.S. military strike that killed senior Iranian general Qasem Soleimani.

“We have not yet observed Tehran threaten this kind of retaliatory action in response to the U.S. airstrikes, and recent law enforcement action could challenge Iran’s ability to execute a plot against U.S. officials in the short-term,” the bulletin said.

Trump raised the topic of regime change in Iran in a social media post on Sunday evening.

“It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!” Trump wrote.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Monday said that Trump was “simply raising a question” when he brought up the topic.

CNN reported last year that intelligence about a threat from Iran to Trump led the Secret Service to step up security around the then-presidential candidate. Ultimately, those protections did not prevent a security lapse that allowed a 20-year-old lone gunman unaffiliated with Iran to nearly kill Trump at a July 2024 rally in Pennsylvania.

Several top former Trump aides who continued to have security details due to the threat from Iran have since faced retribution from their former boss and had those details pulled. In the years since the U.S. killing of Soleimani, multiple former Trump administration officials have beefed up their personal security details.

The new DHS bulletin, labeled “For Official Use Only,” adds more context to the department’s public warning on Sunday of a “heightened threat environment” in the U.S., citing the possibility of “low-level cyberattacks” and continued potential of lone-wolf attacks.

Days before the U.S. strikes on Iran, law enforcement officials told CNN that they were reexamining known or suspected Hezbollah associates in the US, looking for possible threats that could arise as tensions with Iran increase. There’s no indication of credible threats at this time, the sources said.

Iran’s security services often use hacking to gather intelligence on targets of assassination or surveillance, Iran-focused cybersecurity experts have told CNN. A former Trump official and onetime confidant of Bolton was hacked in 2022, in a possible effort to track Bolton’s movements as part of the assassination plot, CNN previously reported, not naming the ex-official.

“In the short-term, we are most concerned that Iran-aligned hacktivists will conduct low-level cyberattacks against U.S. networks, including distributed denial-of-service attacks,” the new DHS bulletin obtained by CNN said. “We are also concerned about cyber or physical attacks against critical infrastructure in the Homeland.”

As it attacks Iran’s nuclear program, Israel maintains ambiguity about its own.

What’s not-so-secret is that for decades Israel has been believed to be the Middle East’s only nation with nuclear weapons, even though its leaders have refused to confirm or deny their existence.

Israel’s ambiguity has enabled it to bolster its deterrence against Iran and other enemies, experts say, without triggering a regional nuclear arms race or inviting preemptive attacks.

Israel is one of just five countries that aren’t party to a global nuclear nonproliferation treaty. That relieves it of international pressure to disarm, or even to allow inspectors to scrutinize its facilities.

Critics in Iran and elsewhere have accused Western countries of hypocrisy for keeping strict tabs on Iran’s nuclear program — which its leaders insist is only for peaceful purposes — while effectively giving Israel’s suspected arsenal a free pass.

On Sunday, the U.S. military struck three nuclear sites in Iran, inserting itself into Israel’s effort to destroy Iran’s program.

Here’s a closer look at Israel’s nuclear program:
A history of nuclear ambiguity

Israel opened its Negev Nuclear Research Center in the remote desert city of Dimona in 1958, under the country’s first leader, Prime Minister David Ben Gurion. He believed the tiny fledgling country surrounded by hostile neighbors needed nuclear deterrence as an extra measure of security. Some historians say they were meant to be used only in case of emergency, as a last resort.

After it opened, Israel kept the work at Dimona hidden for a decade, telling United States’ officials it was a textile factory, according to a 2022 article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, an academic journal.

Relying on plutonium produced at Dimona, Israel has had the ability to fire nuclear warheads since the early 1970s, according to that article, co-authored by Hans M. Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project with the Federation of American Scientists, and Matt Korda, a researcher at the same organization.

Israel’s policy of ambiguity suffered a major setback in 1986, when Dimona’s activities were exposed by a former technician at the site, Mordechai Vanunu. He provided photographs and descriptions of the reactor to The Sunday Times of London.

Vanunu served 18 years in prison for treason, and is not allowed to meet with foreigners or leave the country.
Israel possesses dozens of nuclear warheads, experts say

Experts estimate Israel has between 80 and 200 nuclear warheads, although they say the lower end of that range is more likely.

Israel also has stockpiled as much as 1,110 kilograms (2,425 pounds) of plutonium, potentially enough to make 277 nuclear weapons, according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a global security organization. It has six submarines believed to be capable of launching nuclear cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles believed to be capable of launching a nuclear warhead up to 6,500 kilometers (4,000 miles), the organization says.

Germany has supplied all of the submarines to Israel, which are docked in the northern city of Haifa, according to the article by Kristensen and Korda.
Nuclear weapons in the Middle East pose risks

In the Middle East, where conflicts abound, governments are often unstable, and regional alliances are often shifting, nuclear proliferation is particularly dangerous, said Or Rabinowitz, a scholar at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University and a visiting associate professor at Stanford University.

“When nuclear armed states are at war, the world always takes notice because we don’t like it when nuclear arsenals ... are available for decision makers,” she said.

Rabinowitz says Israel’s military leaders could consider deploying a nuclear weapon if they found themselves facing an extreme threat, such as a weapon of mass destruction being used against them.

Three countries other than Israel have refused to sign the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons: India, Pakistan and South Sudan. North Korea has withdrawn. Iran has signed the treaty, but it was censured earlier this month, shortly before Israel launched its operation, by the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog — a day before Israel attacked — for violating its obligations.

Israel’s policy of ambiguity has helped it evade greater scrutiny, said Susie Snyder at the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, a group that works to promote adherence to the U.N. treaty.

Its policy has also shined a light on the failure of Western countries to rein in nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, she said.

They “prefer not to be reminded of their own complicity,” she said.

Sam Mednick, The Associated Press

U.K. government says it will ban pro-Palestinian group after activists broke into military base