The World This Hour - The World This Hour for 2025/12/19 at 12:00 EST

Episode Date: December 19, 2025

The World This Hour for 2025/12/19 at 12:00 EST

Okay, so there's this new play about the Rogers family and their battle for control over the gigantic telecom empire, and I cannot stop thinking about it. I'm Alameen Abdul-Mahmoud. I host a pop culture show called Commotion. This week, we're talking about Rogers v. Rogers, and on the show, we'll get into what this corporate story actually tells us about our national mythology and why Canadian theater audiences are craving more and more homegrown stories. Find and follow Commotion on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. From CBC News, the world is sour. I'm Neil Kumar. We begin in Welland, Ontario, where an officer has been shot and sent to hospital. At Niagara Regional Police responded to reports of gunfire. Officers are on the scene where a school is now in lockdown.

Mark Carcassol has the latest. Information has been coming out all morning in little snippets from Niagara Regional Police based in Welland, Ontario, just west of Niagara Falls. We did get confirmation from them just after 10 a.m., essentially. where they issued a tweet saying, quote, A shelter-in-place order remains in effect. As police responded to the area this morning, one officer was shot and struck by gunfire.

The officer has been transported to hospital as a precaution to assess injuries, which are not believed to be life-threatening. A male suspect is contained within a building in the area. That is the last update they've given us so far. We don't have much more information at this point. We're waiting on more. They do say, though, that there is a large-scale perimeter

that they have implemented. within that perimeter is a hospital, the well-end hospital, and the authority overlooking that hospital has told people that patients currently in the hospital will be treated, but we are not taking any new patients at this time and anyone with appointments to come in, check in with us because you might have to delay them. Also, the school that is in their staff and students are being locked down.

They are not allowed to leave the school until the lockdown is lifted. Mark Carcassol, CBC News, Toronto. Turning to the mass shooting investigation in the Brown University case, Now, with the prime suspect dead, the focus has turned to finding a motive. Steve Futterman reports. The suspect in the mass shooting, 48-year-old Claudio Nevis Valenti, a Portuguese national and former Brown University graduate student, was found dead in a storage unit. The break in the case came from a tip that led law enforcement to his vehicle, Rhode Island

Attorney General Peter Nerona. You ran in a car in Boston. We were able to find that car in New Hampshire. After the university, killings authorities say Valente drove to the Boston suburb of Brookline, where he allegedly killed an MIT physics professor, Nuno Larero, also Portuguese. Valente and the professor attended the same school in Portugal in the late 1990s. Last night in Providence, Brown University students were glad the ordeal has ended. I mean, I definitely think there's a sense of relief in the community, having found the person.

Officials say Valente tried various methods to evade police, including. changing license plates. Steve Feuderman, CBC News, Los Angeles. The European Union is lending Ukraine 90 billion euros, the equivalent of $145 billion Canadian. Instead of using frozen Russian assets, the EU is borrowing against its own budget. Ukraine would not have to pay back the money until it gets reparations from Russia. Hungarian President Victor Orban is calling the loan lost money. His country, plus Slovakia and the Czech Republic, have opted out of the plan. On its face, Nationalist Club in Canada is focused on Canadian history, celebrating veterans and encouraging fitness. But that public face obscures the more radical beliefs of its leaders. Christian Paz-Lang,

from our visual investigations team, has more about the group Second Sons Canada. Race war is here. Second Sons Vice President Alex Vrend says racial conflict is underway in Canada. The group pitches itself as a men's nationalist club, revering Canadian history and tradition, but Vren says the group welcomes neo-Nazis in its ranks. We do have national socialist members. CBC's visual investigations team dug through hundreds of hours of audio and video from personal live streams published by the group's leaders, among the hundreds of instances of violent rhetoric, anti-Semitism, and racial slurs,

one key idea they push, remigration. Stephen Ray is an analyst with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. Remigration for Second Sons is a euphemism for ethnic cleansing. He wants that the group pushes narratives about tradition, history, and heritage, to attract recruits. Second Sons was only founded in 2024, but it's grown rapidly since then. They say over 2,000 people have applied,

with chapters across the country. Christian Paws-Lang, CBC News, Toronto. And that is your role this hour. For CBC News, I'm Neil Kumar. Thank you.