During an appearance in a Brooklyn, N.Y., courtroom, Ramanan Mylvaganam pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization. He faces up to 15 years imprisonment.

The 35-year-old was arrested by RCMP officers in Toronto and extradited to the United States in 2009. Five others, three of them Canadians, have already pleaded guilty to buying arms for the rebels in a related case.

U.S. prosecutors had alleged that Mylvaganam conspired with another Canadian, Suresh Sriskandarajah, to acquire submarine design software, night vision goggles, computer equipment, electronic components and communications gear for the Tamil rebels, also known as the LTTE.

“The defendant conspired to provide sophisticated technological equipment to the LTTE, a foreign terrorist organization that has carried out brutal acts of violence against numerous civilians and elected officials,” United States Attorney Loretta E. Lynch said in a statement Wednesday.

Mr. Sriskandarajah, also know as Waterloo Suresh, and Pratheepan Nadarajah, are the only remaining Canadian suspects who have not yet plead guilty. Both have appealed their extradition orders to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Mylvaganam’s guilty plea could complicate Mr. Sriskandarajah’s case, since the two are alleged to have conspired together and were both named in the same indictment. Mr. Suresh has also been charged with dealing in the property of a terrorist organization.

A former vice president of the University of Waterloo Tamil Students’ Association, Mylvaganam is a computer engineer from Mississauga. Ont. He was tried in the U.S. because the offences occurred partly while he was working for Microsoft in Washington State.

Prior to his extradition, he wrote a letter asking for donations to pay his legal bills. He said he was already $150,000 in debt and had sold his house. “Without your help, I cannot effectively defend myself in the U.S. courts,” he wrote.

They are asking for witnesses who may have seen something to come forward to help identify the body, and to piece together the details leading up to the woman’s death.

“Right when we saw the videos, we were like: ‘This is definitely plausible, we can pull this off, too, if we really put our minds to it,’” Ho recalled.

Muhammad has been fascinated by aviation since childhood, and more recently by the videos that got Ho thinking about their eventual project.

“That really got me into space things,” Muhammad said.

Once the plan was hatched, the students from Agincourt Collegiate Institute started working out the details for putting their plastic astronaut in space. Over a period of a few months, they came up with a design for a capsule that would carry four cameras and their Lego man mascot above the clouds.

Cameras on the cheap

They combed the online listings on Craigslist and Kijiji to get their cameras on the cheap. Then came the parachute, which they decided to sew themselves.

“We had no experience at all using sewing machines and, as you can see, the stitches they are not really good,” said Muhammad. “But it was a pretty perfect parachute.”

They stuffed the cameras into a capsule made of Styrofoam, along with a GPS-equipped cellphone that would help them find their creation when it fell back to Earth.

They attached the Lego man carrying a Canadian flag to their capsule, which Ho said was to inject “a sense of personality” into their project.

After months of preparations, launch day arrived about two weeks ago.

There were some rocky moments as they tried to launch the helium-filled balloon in freezing rain, which Muhammad called “the worst enemy” for a weather balloon. And Ho admits he and Muhammad were anxious about whether they would ever see their capsule again. But in the end, it all worked out.

Eye-catching images

The eye-catching images captured from the flight show the Lego man gripping a Canadian flag against a backdrop of a fast-shrinking skyline that gives way to the darkness of space.

Then the balloon pops and and it tumbles back to Earth. Ho and Muhammad were able to recover the balloon — with their astronaut intact —more than 120 kilometres from the field where it was launched.

Muhammad said he was confident the Lego man would make it above the clouds, but he was not so sure it would survive its landing.

“I was afraid that when it lands, it might land on the side and the Lego man would come off,” he said. “But it was strong enough that it wouldn’t come off in the air.”

It has been proposed to impose a fixed $150 fine for drivers who stop or park illegally. At the moment, the penalty for no parking offense is $40 and for stopping at a no stopping or no standing zone is $60. Moreover, it has also been proposed to impose the $150 fine for cars that block bike lanes.

“We are moving forward in trying to address congestion,” said Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong chair of the public works committee. “This is a positive step forward.”

Among the supporters of increased fines is Councillor Mike Layton, who suggests a $500 penalty. He said the raised fee would curb traffic offenses.

However, a few on the committee seem uncertain about the impacts of the plan. They argue that increasing penalties would not ease traffic snarls on main streets unless enforcement also is enhanced.

Councillor Gord Perks said: “This is more about the appearance of action than real action.”

Two on the committee voted against the plan. One of them is Councillor John Parker who said increasing fines is unlikely to solve traffic jam.

“If we are really serious about clearing the street the issue is not the fine, it is what policy we put in place to clear the path,” he said.

The prime minister is seeking information about the circumstances surrounding the death on Tuesday of 39-year-old Oscar Bartholomew, a spokesman said.

Richard Simon, press secretary to the prime minister, said in a telephone interview with CBC News that “the prime minister certainly wants to ensure that no stone is left unturned in getting to the bottom of this and ensuring that he knows what the facts are before making a public statement.”

Bartholomew, who was originally from Grenada, had returned to the Caribbean island to celebrate the Christmas holidays with family and friends.

According to media reports, Bartholomew had hugged a female police officer whom he mistook for an old friend.

Bartholomew “hugged and lifted her off the ground before recognizing that it was a case of mistaken identity. His actions were viewed as assault on a police officer,” Grenada Broadcast reported on its website.

“He was then apprehended and beaten by police, before succumbing to his injuries at the General Hospital,” the media outlet reported.

Bartholomew, along with his wife Lolette and a cousin, had stopped at the St. David’s police station on Monday afternoon because his wife needed to use the bathroom, his aunt Josephine de Souza said in a telephone interview.

Police said Bartholomew was arrested after assaulting an officer.

Dunbar Belfon, superintendent of the Royal Grenada Police Force, said the female officer was in uniform at the time she came into contact with Bartholomew.

Belfon said Bartholomew was taken into custody after the altercation and eventually transferred to hospital.

De Souza and one of Bartholomew’s cousins, Shem Pierre, accused police of leaving Bartholomew bleeding in his cell for at least three hours before calling an ambulance at the insistence of his wife.

According to doctors, a blood vessel in his brain had burst, causing his death early Tuesday, Pierre said in a separate telephone interview.

Bartholomew and his wife had arrived in Grenada on Friday to visit family for the holidays, Pierre said.

Attorney Derick Sylvester, who is representing the family, said relatives were giving statements to police Wednesday.

“We’re putting things in place,” Sylvester said, adding that the family is trying to hire a pathologist from the nearby island of Trinidad to conduct an independent autopsy.

He said the preliminary results of a government-ordered autopsy were expected late Wednesday.

“It is very unfortunate and senior officers have actually visited the relatives and the next of kin of the deceased to officially inform them of the unfortunate incident. We have also extended our deepest condolences on the behalf of the commissioner and the force. So it is not something that we feel happy about,” Supt. Dunbar Belfon told CBC News.

Like most of the city-run recreation programs and activities, the cost to participate is shockingly low. It’s one of the great advantages of living in Toronto.

A swim in a similar pool in Calgary would cost that family almost $20. In Markham it would be $9.50.

Yet here we are, embroiled in another fight to keep our beloved pools and community centres open as the city seeks significant cuts to the parks and recreation budget. While budget chief Mike Del Grande has started floating the idea of $2 admission for the now-free Riverdale Farm and outdoor swimming, he’s saying nothing about backing off plans to slam the doors closed at seven pools, 12 community centres and 10 arenas across Toronto.

But why would we close city assets?

The reaction people have to higher user fees is unpredictable. A lot of people seem open to exploring some kind of annual fee for library access, for example (it is, of course, possible to donate to the TPL foundation right here) but the idea of fees for DVDs strikes a lot of library defenders as a step too far. Some people argue for higher taxes (or even higher a TTC fare increase) instead of service cuts but a general increase in user fees, as Granatstein notes, gets people’s backs up.

The only thing people seem unanimous about is opposition to service cuts, and Ed Keenan has a concise explanation why:

No service that [the city] delivers, is completely useless… Everything the government does, it does for a reason—at some point a need or a problem or an opportunity was identified that wasn’t being addressed by society and so government stepped up to address it.

From windrows to libraries, every city service has a contituency. Cutting those services, and the blade hits the people who rely on them.

The operator of Canada’s largest stock exchange said it was still investigating the cause of the technical failure, but it ruled out hacking.

The problem, one of the worst trading glitches to hit the TMX in recent years, affected high-volume stocks such as Research In Motion and Sun Life Financial.

Mayor Rob Ford said in a late afternoon news conference that he was proud of city staff and police for the job they did in the park on Wednesday, and warned protesters they would not be able to relocate.

“The protest is over and I’d like to keep it that way,” he said. “And if they do go to another park, we will ask them to leave immediately.”

That could mean another showdown with protesters.

Interviewed by CBC News on Wednesday morning, Misha Saunders said he and fellow Occupy protesters were weighing whether to move their encampment to another public space downtown. He said the presence of a protesters’ “village” is essential to the Occupy movement.

“It’s been a hub of activity for people who have a deep-rooted feeling that something must change,” he said. “That conversation is going to go to the living rooms, the coffee shops and the subways about how we will move forward in a meaningful way.”

On Tuesday, bylaw officers distributed eviction notices to people who have been camping in St. James Park since Oct. 15.

The protesters are part of the global Occupy movement focused on raising issues of economic inequality by staging similar encampments around the world.

It was just the latest in a string of goof-ups, including a campaign appearance the same day where he tried to slag the burgeoning Occupy movement by quoting a Toronto activist mentioned in a Globe and Mail story.