Montreal immigrants riot over police shooting. Saturday’s shooting death of an unarmed Honduran teen at the hands of police that led to a riot in a Montreal immigrant community, will be investigated quickly, the city’s mayor said Monday. The rioting happened in Montreal North, a mostly Haitian area that police call “The Bronx of Montreal” because of its poverty and crime, reports the AP. At the height of the riots Sunday evening, angry young people set cars on fire, shot an officer in the leg and looted stores. Officers arrested six in connection with the rioting and hundreds of officers, donning riot gear, roamed the area looking for the young suspects who set fire to eight cars outside a fire station. Before Saturday’s shooting of 18-year-old Honduran immigrant Freddy Alberto Villanueva, police say they were trying to make an arrest when they were surrounded by about 20 people in Henri Bourassa Park. When some of them ran toward the police, one officer fired his gun, they say. The officer shot two other unarmed people, but Villanueva was the only one who died from his wounds. No officers were wounded in the incident, reports the news service. The city’s mayor, Gerald Tremblay, says the reasoning behind the shooting will be investigated by Quebec provincial police and that he will reach out to connect with community leaders. About a quarter of the people who live in Montreal North are immigrants. Of that amount, about 15 percent are Black and 3.5 percent are Latino. “One thing is for sure – we have to do better than we’ve been doing,” he said. And some community leaders agree. “What we are seeing are youngster, a community that is in revolt because they don’t like the way they are being treated. They don’t like how authorities interact with them,” an area youth group leader told the AP. Meanwhile, the family of Villanueva, whose family came to Canada in 1998, is still looking for answers. “We only know what we see in the news, in the newspapers, that’s all,” his sister, Julissa, said.

Russian forces advance into Georgia. Russia’s military pushed further into the former Soviet Republic of Georgia Monday sending the country’s forces scrambling to escape. However, early Tuesday the Russian President called a halt to the fighting. After a weekend of several Russian attacks by air in Gori, streets in the major Georgian city were deserted Monday. Russian President Dmitri Medvedev said Tuesday he was halting military operations in Georgia because they had accomplished their end, though explosions continued to rattle the now largely empy city of Gore. In a televised statement in Moscow, Medvedev said that after five days of operations “the aggressor has been punished” and largely driven from the two Russian-allied separatist provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. More than 2,000 people are feared dead as a result of the fighting. As BET.com reported earlier, the fighting started when Georgia asserted its authority in S. Osettia.

TAGS: canada, georgia, Osettia, police, quebec, rioting, Russia, shooting

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