HellsBelle

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Last Notes

2026-04-21 15:47:20 GMT

Renewable energy met all new demand for electricity in 2025, according to a new review of global power generation, halting the growth of fossil fuel-powered generation and highlighting the promise of clean sources like wind and solar.
The authoritative Global Electricity Review released annually by Ember, an international energy research organization, says clean sources — especially solar — are growing fast enough and are cheap enough that they are stopping new fossil fuel-powered electricity generation. Electricity from solar and wind increased while there was no change to the amount of electricity produced from burning fossil fuels.
“We're really talking about a large-scale change in how the energy system works. And solar is among the most scalable technologies that can deliver fast change,” said Nicolas Fulghum, senior data analyst at Ember.

2026-03-22 12:41:25 GMT

Deep underground, plunging 1604ft (489m) beneath the Chihuahuan Desert in southern New Mexico, lies the Lechuguilla Cave, a cavern which stretches on for 149 miles (240km). There is no light, and little to eat either. Any living thing must eke out an existence under conditions of near starvation.
"You can go in an entrance and travel for 16 hours in one direction before you get to the end of it," says Hazel Barton, professor of geological sciences at the University of Alabama.
"So you're a very, very, very long way from the entrance. You're isolated, and there are places in that cave where more people have walked on the moon than have been in that area."
The bacteria also have an even more surprising trick up their sleeve – they are resistant to most antibiotics, despite the fact that they have been trapped in a cave that formed six million years ago, most of which was completely sealed off from humans until 1986. Not only is this resistance a remarkable natural phenomenon, it is now helping guide researchers to drugs that can withstand the onslaught of antimicrobial resistance in modern medicine.

2026-02-25 23:12:36 GMT

Police arrested a man for a burglary in a city he had never visited after face scanning software deployed across the UK confused him with another person of south Asian heritage.
Alvi Choudhury, 26, a software engineer, was working at the home he shares with his parents in Southampton in January when police knocked on his door, handcuffed him and held him in custody for nearly 10 hours before releasing him at 2am.
Thames Valley police had used automated facial recognition software which matched him with footage of a suspect of a £3,000 burglary 100 miles away in Milton Keynes, according to documents shared with the Guardian by Liberty Investigates.
But the CCTV footage showed a noticeably younger man with different features apart from similar curly hair, said Choudhury, who was left confused about why he had been arrested.

2026-02-17 21:55:34 GMT

[Archive link](https://archive.is/4rG7V)
The EU on Tuesday, February 17, opened an investigation into the online retail giant Shein over the sale of childlike sex dolls and what it called the platform's "addictive design." Shein came under greater scrutiny in November after French authorities condemned the giant for featuring sex dolls resembling children.
The probe is the European Commission's first into Shein under the Digital Services Act (DSA), the EU's mammoth law that aims to counter the spread of illegal content and goods online. The European Commission said it was investigating the sale of illegal products "including child sexual abuse material" and would look at the "lack of transparency" of Shein's recommender systems.
Shein, founded in China in 2012 but now based in Singapore, said it would continue to cooperate with the commission. "We share the commission's objective of ensuring a safe and trusted online environment and will continue to engage constructively on this procedure," Shein said in a statement. Following the uproar in France, Shein said it immediately removed the products and banned sex dolls from its site globally, regardless of appearance.

2026-02-15 23:31:58 GMT

The US Department of Justice (DoJ) has said it has released all of the files required by the Epstein Files Transparency Act, but lawmakers have argued the release is insufficient.
The letter sent to members of the US Congress on Saturday from Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche said all documents in the possession of the DoJ had been released and provided a list of names contained in the files.
Kentucky Republican Representative Thomas Massie, who co-wrote the law, called for the DoJ to also release internal memos outlining past decisions on whether to charge Epstein and his associates.
Millions of new files relating to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein were released by the DoJ earlier this month.

2026-02-12 08:34:56 GMT

Marc Benioff, the Salesforce CEO and co-founder, is facing growing criticism over a joke he made about US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) monitoring international employees during an event for the company.
Employees publicly expressed outrage about Benioff’s comments in his keynote address at an internal conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday, and leaders at Slack, which Salesforce owns, have said he should apologize.
Benioff reportedly asked international employees to stand, before joking that ICE agents were present and monitoring them, drawing boos from the crowd, several employees told media outlets including Wired and 404Media. A recording of his speech published on an internal Salesforce site was edited to cut his remarks about ICE, Business Insider reported.
The incident comes as hundreds of Salesforce workers reportedly plan to urge Benioff to denounce ICE and cancel future business with the agency, Wired and CNBC reported.

2026-02-09 04:27:56 GMT

Read a bit lower, and there are promises of perks galore: competitive compensation, free meals, free gym membership, free health and dental care and so on. But then comes the catch.
Each job ad contains a warning: "Please don't join if you're not excited about… working ~70 hrs/week in person with some of the most ambitious people in NYC."
The website belongs to Rilla, a New York-based tech business which sells AI-based systems that allow employers to monitor sales representatives when they are out and about, interacting with clients.
The company has become something of a poster child for a fast-paced workplace culture known as 996, also sometimes referred to as hustle culture or grindcore.
In simple terms, it puts a premium on long working hours, typically 9am to 9pm, six days a week (hence "996").

2026-01-26 20:40:57 GMT

United States President Donald Trump has suggested that the Department of Justice (DOJ) is investigating the wealth of Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar as his administration grapples with the fallout from the killing of demonstrator Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
The Republican president also said on Monday that he is sending his border czar, Tom Homan, to the state of Minnesota, which has been witnessing protests since federal immigration officers fatally shot Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse, there on Saturday morning.
“Additionally, the DOJ and Congress are looking at ‘Congresswoman’ Illhan Omar, who left Somalia with NOTHING, and is now reportedly worth more than 44 Million Dollars. Time will tell all.”
Omar’s net worth has increased into the millions of dollars in recent years due to her husband’s wealth. Omar serves in the US House of Representatives, representing Minnesota.

2026-01-23 17:49:52 GMT

The state of New Mexico is accusing three Texas oil executives of orchestrating “a fraudulent scheme” to pocket revenue from hundreds of oil and gas wells in New Mexico and offload the cost of plugging and cleaning up the wells onto the state’s taxpayers. The suit, filed in late December by the New Mexico attorney general’s office, is the latest salvo in the state’s fight against oil and gas executives accused of foisting old wells onto the public.
The [72-page complaint](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/26465481-oil-well-complaint-final-122325-filed/) alleges a yearslong pattern of fraud and self-dealing in which the oil executives — Everett Willard Gray II, Robert Stitzel and Marquis Reed Gilmore Jr., all of Midland, Texas — repeatedly transferred wells among “a series of shell corporations, LLCs, and partnerships they created.” On multiple occasions, the men placed companies into bankruptcy protection, only to move their profitable wells to other companies they owned or managed outside the bankruptcy proceedings, the suit said.
New Mexico faces millions of dollars in costs to plug wells the companies shed through the bankruptcies. Unplugged oil and gas wells can emit climate-warming methane and carcinogenic gases and often leak briny, radioactive wastewater, as ProPublica and Capital & Main detailed in a 2024 investigation. The newsrooms uncovered Gray, Stitzel and Gilmore’s early business dealings and use of bankruptcy proceedings.
“I will not stand by while bad actors take advantage of the system — avoiding responsibility, burdening the state with costly remediation, and recklessly endangering the health of New Mexicans,” Raúl Torrez, the state’s attorney general, said in a statement.

2026-01-20 08:39:15 GMT

[Archive link](https://archive.is/koRLe)
Donald Trump on Monday, January 19 threatened 200% tariffs on French wine and champagne over France's intentions to decline the US leader's invitation to join his "board of peace." The board was originally conceived to oversee the rebuilding of war-torn Gaza, but the charter does not appear to limit its role to the occupied Palestinian territory.
"I'll put a 200% tariff on his wines and champagnes. And he'll join. But he doesn't have to join," Trump said, referring to French President Emmanuel Macron. A source close to Macron told AFP on Monday that France "does not intend to answer favorably" to the invitation.
The board's charter "goes beyond the sole framework of Gaza," the source close to the French president said.

2026-01-19 20:30:21 GMT

The law was clear: Donald Trump’s Department of Justice was required to disclose all investigative files on Jeffrey Epstein by 19 December 2025, with rare exceptions.
One month after this deadline mandated by Congress’s Epstein Files Transparency Act, however, Trump’s justice department has not complied with this law, prompting questions about when – and whether – authorities will ever release investigative documents about the late sex offender.
Justice department attorneys said in a 5 January Manhattan court filing that they had posted approximately 12,285 to DoJ’s website, equating to some 125,575 pages, under this legislation’s requirements. They said in this same letter that justice department staff had identified “more than 2 million documents potentially responsive to the Act that are in various phases of review”.
That these DoJ’s disclosures apparently comprise a drop in the bucket – and have done little to shed light on how Epstein operated with apparent impunity for years – has roiled survivors’ advocates and lawmakers. They include attorney Spencer Kuvin, who has represented dozens of Epstein’s survivors.
They note that the Department of Justice has also flouted another requirement of this act, which requires that the attorney general provide a report identifying “categories of records released and withheld and summarizing all redactions and their legal bases” within 15 days of their disclosure deadline.
“To date, no such report has been provided. Without it, there is no authoritative accounting of what records exist, what has been withheld, or why, making effective oversight and judicial review far more difficult,” they wrote. “Put simply, the DOJ cannot be trusted with making mandatory disclosures under the Act.”

2026-01-01 16:21:53 GMT

The voluntary grocery code of conduct for grocers, suppliers, wholesalers and primary producers in Canada is set to fully roll out on Thursday.
The grocery code is intended to promote fair dealings between grocers and their suppliers, including in the application of penalties and fees. It was set up in an effort to bring more transparency, fairness and predictability to the industry as a whole.
The code, governed by the Office of the Grocery Sector Code of Conduct, includes trade rule provisions, a governance model and an adjudication and dispute resolution process.
Canada's five largest grocers — Empire, Loblaw, Metro, Walmart Canada and Costco Canada — have now formally registered.

2025-12-11 13:17:08 GMT

A child bride who was due to be executed this month in Iran over the death of her husband has had her life spared by his parents, who were paid the equivalent of £70,000 in exchange for their forgiveness.
Goli Kouhkan, 25, has been on death row in Gorgan central prison in northern Iran for the past seven years. At the age of 18 she was arrested over allegedly participating in the killing of her abusive husband, Alireza Abil, in May 2018, and sentenced to qisas – retribution-in-kind.
Forced to marry her cousin at 12, Kouhkan became pregnant at 13 and gave birth to a son. She suffered physical and emotional abuse for years. On the day her husband was killed, Kouhkan found him beating their son, then aged five. She called her husband’s cousin, Mohammad Abil, for help. When he arrived a fight broke out which resulted in the death of her husband. According to Iran Human Rights, Abil remains on death row.
Kouhkan’s lawyer confirmed in a post on Instagram on 9 December that the original sum of 10bn tomans had been reduced to 8bn tomans and that amount had been raised through donations. In a video published by Mizan News Agency, Kouhkan’s parents-in-law are seen signing documents.

2025-12-06 11:55:03 GMT

When Jumaa and Fadi Abu Assi went to look for firewood their parents thought they would be safe. They were just young boys, aged nine and 10 and, after all, a ceasefire had been declared in Gaza.
Their mother, Hala Abu Assi, was making tea in the family’s tent in Khan Younis when she heard an explosion, a missile fired by an Israeli drone. She ran to the scene – but it was too late.
Since the US-brokered ceasefire was announced on 10 October, Israeli forces have killed more than 360 Palestinians in Gaza; according to a UN official, at least 70 are children – like Jumaa and Fadi.
They were killed, their mother said, at “a time when bloodshed was supposed to stop”.

2025-11-06 15:34:09 GMT

After New York City’s race for mayor catapulted Zohran Mamdani from state assembly member into one of the world’s most prominent progressive voices, intense debate swirled over the ideas at the heart of his campaign.
His critics and opponents painted pledges such as free bus service, universal child care and rent freezes as unworkable, unrealistic and exorbitantly expensive.
But some have hit back, highlighting the quirk of geography that underpins some of this view. “He promised things that Europeans take for granted, but Americans are told are impossible,” said Dutch environmentalist and former government advisor Alexander Verbeek in the wake of Tuesday’s election.
Verbeek backed this with a comment he had overheard in an Oslo café, in which Mamdani was described as an American politician who “finally” sounded normal.

2025-10-22 21:04:21 GMT

President Donald Trump said Tuesday he's probably owed "a lot of money," responding to a newspaper report that he was seeking $230 million US in damages related to two investigations into his conduct.
The New York Times reported Trump had filed administrative claims before he was re-elected last November, concerning both the FBI's 2022 search of his Mar-a-Lago property for classified documents and for a separate investigation years earlier into potential ties between Russia and his 2016 presidential campaign.
The status of the claims and any negotiations over them within the Justice Department was not immediately clear. A Justice Department spokesperson told The Associated Press that "in any circumstance, all officials at the Department of Justice follow the guidance of career ethics officials."
But Trump, in his response to reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday, said any decision would "have to go across my desk."

2025-08-12 22:04:53 GMT

>The White House is set to a host an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event next year as part of 4 July celebrations in the US to mark the 250th anniversary of the country's founding.
>The octagon cage fight event was announced by UFC boss Dana White, whose friendship with the president dates back to the early 2000s when Trump hosted some of the first ever UFC events at his business properties.
>"It is definitely going to happen," White told CBS Mornings.
>White said he planned to meet with the president and his daughter Ivanka at the end of the month to finalise the plans. A White House official confirmed the event to the BBC.

2025-05-16 15:01:35 GMT

Midway while sailing across the Pacific with just his cat named Phoenix, Oliver Widger reflected on why he thinks his many followers — more than a million on TikTok and Instagram — are drawn to his story of quitting his 9-to-5 job and embarking on a journey from Oregon to Hawaii.
“The world kind of sucks and, like, I don’t think I’m alone in how I felt with my work,” Widger, 29, told The Associated Press on Wednesday via Zoom. “You can be making $150,000 a year and you still feel like you’re just making ends meet, you know what I mean? And I think people are just tired of that and working really hard for nothing and want a way out.”
He abruptly quit his job with “no money, no plan” and $10,000 of debt.
He liquidated his retirement savings, taught himself to sail mostly via YouTube and moved from Portland to the Oregon coast, where he spent months refitting the $50,000 boat he bought.

2025-05-14 02:22:04 GMT

Mexico’s security chief confirmed Tuesday that 17 family members of cartel leaders crossed into the U.S. last week as part of a deal between a son of the former head of the Sinaloa Cartel and the Trump administration.
Mexican Security Secretary Omar García Harfuch confirmed a report by independent journalist Luis Chaparro that family members of Ovidio Guzman Lopez, who was extradited to the United States in 2023, had entered the U.S.
Guzmán Lopez is one of the brothers left running a faction of the Sinaloa Cartel after notorious capo Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán was imprisoned in the U.S. Video showed the family members walking across the border from Tijuana with their suitcases to waiting U.S. agents.

2025-05-14 02:14:15 GMT

A rock climber who fell hundreds of feet descending a steep gully in Washington’s North Cascades mountains survived the fall that killed his three companions, hiked to his car in the dark and then drove to a pay phone to call for help, authorities said Tuesday.
The surviving climber, Anton Tselykh, 38, extricated himself from a tangle of ropes, helmets and other equipment after the fall Saturday evening. Despite suffering internal bleeding and head trauma, Tselykh eventually, over at least a dozen hours, made the trek to the pay phone, Okanogan County Undersheriff Dave Yarnell said.
The climbers who were killed were Vishnu Irigireddy, 48, Tim Nguyen, 63, Oleksander Martynenko, 36, Okanogan County Coroner Dave Rodriguez said.

2025-05-10 19:10:52 GMT

In a week in which former allies in a redividing globe separately commemorated the 80th anniversary of the end of the second world war, the sense of a runaway descent towards a third world war draws ever closer.
The implosion of Pax Americana, the interconnectedness of conflicts, the new willingness to resort to unbridled state-sponsored violence and the irrelevance of the institutions of the rules-based order have all been on brutal display this week. From Kashmir to Khan Younis, Hodeidah, Port Sudan and Kursk, the only sound is of explosions, and the only lesson is that the old rules no longer apply.
Indeed Fiona Hill, the policy analyst and adviser to the UK government on its imminent strategic defence review, argues the third world war has already started, if only we would recognise it.

2025-05-09 15:48:13 GMT

Chemicals in everyday plastics may disrupt the body’s natural 24-hour sleep-wake cycle and circadian rhythm in a way similar to coffee, which increases the risk of sleep disorders, diabetes, immune problems and cancer, new in vitro research shows.
The study looked at chemicals extracted from a PVC medical feeding tube and a polyurethane hydration pouch, like those used by long-distance runners. PVC and polyurethanes are also used in everything from kids toys to food packaging to furniture.
The findings showed for the first time how plastic chemicals probably wreak havoc on cell signals that regulate the body’s internal clock, throwing it off by up to 17 minutes.
“We don’t know the significance of it and you could say, ‘Oh it’s just 15 minutes so it’s not a big deal’, but it’s such a tightly controlled clock that it’s a significant shift,” he (Martin Wagner, a study co-author and plastic chemical researcher with the Norwegian Institute of Science and Technology) added.

2025-05-04 11:44:50 GMT

Katheryn Speck said she used to be a Canadian nationalist, travelled the world with a maple leaf on her backpack and once lived in Quebec so she could become fluently bilingual.
But on Saturday she was among hundreds of people who rallied at the Alberta Legislature to support separation from Canada, with many in the crowd waving Alberta flags and a few even displaying the U.S. Stars and Stripes.
"I thought it was a beautiful, fantastic country. But now I'm so disappointed. I'm literally crushed that we'll never be represented in this country and there's never a chance of changing the government," Speck said.
Earlier this week, Premier Danielle Smith's government proposed legislation that would lower the bar for holding a referendum.

2025-04-21 06:32:30 GMT

An Associated Press analysis of an aviation safety database reveals that drones last year accounted for nearly two-thirds of reported near midair collisions involving commercial passenger planes taking off and landing at the country’s top 30 busiest airports. That was the highest percentage of such near misses since 2020, when air traffic dropped during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The first reports of near misses involving drones were logged in 2014, the AP found. The number of such encounters spiked the following year. Over the last decade, drones accounted for 51% — 122 of 240 — of reported near misses, according to AP’s analysis.
The threat from drones has become more acute in the last decade as the use of quadcopters and remote-controlled planes has exploded in popularity. The FAA estimates that Americans are operating more than a million drones for recreational and commercial purposes.

2025-04-19 21:42:36 GMT

IF DONALD TRUMP’S sweeping global tariffs send household good prices soaring and drive the economy into recession, at least one industry could profit.
The Trump administration is considering using tariff revenues to buy Bitcoin for a “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve,” a top administration crypto official said in an interview last week.
The White House’s proposal is driving interest from crypto industry figures who have made building the reserve one of their top priorities.
It is uniting critics on the right and left, however, who have cast the reserve as a pointless industry giveaway that will come at the expense of ordinary taxpayers. Using tariff money would add insult to injury, they say.

2025-04-17 02:57:36 GMT

YouTuber MrBeast has issued an apology after his 'MrBeast Experience' at a Las Vegas resort did not live up to the billing.
The event at Resorts World Las Vegas was advertised as an "immersive" and "unforgettable" experience that included exclusive games, a MrBeast-themed menu and mystery bags thought to contain limited edition merch, including one with a $10,000 (£7,550) gift voucher.
Instead, the guests camped out in their hotel rooms waiting days for their bags to arrive. And when they did, the guests were underwhelmed.
"I was told to wait in my room for two days for a package to come, so I legit spent two days in my room for a package to come, and it was a box of chocolates," Ms Metta said.
Several users said on social media that they received T-shirts in different sizes, which could be purchased for $9 (£7) online.

2025-04-08 19:16:56 GMT

The state Office of Lawyer Regulation filed a 10-count complaint in November against Michael Gableman, accusing him of misconduct during the probe. The state Supreme Court ultimately could revoke Gableman’s law license, although the court rarely administers such a harsh punishment against wayward attorneys.
The OLR and Gableman filed a stipulation with the Supreme Court on Monday in which they agreed an appropriate sanction would be suspending Gableman’s license for three years. A referee overseeing the case and the Supreme Court must approve the agreement before it can take effect.
The complaint stems from Gableman’s investigation into allegations of fraud related to the 2020 election that Trump narrowly lost in Wisconsin. Under pressure from Trump, Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos hired Gableman to lead the probe.
The investigation failed to uncover any widespread fraud, but drew bipartisan derision and cost taxpayers more than $2.3 million. Throughout the seven-month inquiry, Gableman was sued over his response to open records requests and subpoenas and countersued. He was ridiculed for scant expense records, criticized for sending confusing emails and making rudimentary errors in his filings and called out for meeting with conspiracy theorists.

2025-04-07 22:07:55 GMT

Bayer’s new request to the nation’s highest court comes as it is simultaneously pursing legislation in several states seeking to erect a legal shield against lawsuits targeting Roundup, a commonly used weedkiller for both farms and homes. Bayer disputes the cancer claims but has set aside $16 billion to settle cases and asserted Monday that the future of American agriculture is at stake.
In a court filing Friday, Bayer urged the Supreme Court to take up a Missouri case that awarded $1.25 million to a man who developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma after spraying Roundup on a community garden in St. Louis. The federally approved label for Roundup includes no warning of cancer. Bayer contends federal pesticide laws preempt states from adopting additional labeling for products and thus prohibits failure-to-warn lawsuits brought under state laws.
In a court filing Friday, Bayer urged the Supreme Court to take up a Missouri case that awarded $1.25 million to a man who developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma after spraying Roundup on a community garden in St. Louis. The federally approved label for Roundup includes no warning of cancer. Bayer contends federal pesticide laws preempt states from adopting additional labeling for products and thus prohibits failure-to-warn lawsuits brought under state laws.

2025-03-22 03:57:52 GMT

The approval from Ontario Superior Court Judge Peter Osborne allows the retailer, which dates back to 1670, to begin selling off inventory at most of its 80 Hudson’s Bay stores, three Saks Fifth Avenue locations and 13 Saks Off 5th shops in Canada.
“This is the art of the possible and we are where we are today. In my view, there is no other alternative,” Judge Osborne said.
The six stores being saved from the liquidation sale include the flagship on Yonge Street in Toronto, as well as a store in the city’s Yorkdale mall and another farther north in Hillcrest Mall in Richmond Hill, Ontario The remaining three span Montreal, the Carrefour Laval mall and Point-Claire, Quebec.

2025-02-20 01:11:14 GMT

It was when British archaeologist Dr Piers Litherland saw that the ceiling of the burial chamber was painted blue with yellow stars that he realised he had just discovered the first tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh to be found in more than a century.
Litherland had been exploring the Valley of the Kings in Egypt for more than a decade when he discovered a staircase that led to the tomb, now known to have belonged to Thutmose II, who reigned from 1493 to 1479BC.
It took months to clear flood debris from the descending corridor and during this time, he and his team assumed the tomb belonged to a royal wife.
But as soon as he saw the ceiling of the burial chamber had been decorated with scenes from the Amduat, a religious text reserved for kings, he knew he had made what has since been hailed as the most significant discovery since Tutankhamun.

2025-02-20 01:03:59 GMT

The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth has ordered senior leaders at the Pentagon and throughout the US military to develop plans for cutting 8% from the defense budget in each of the next five years, according to a memo obtained by the Washington Post.
Hegseth ordered the proposed cuts to be drawn up by 24 February, according to the memo, which includes a list of 17 categories that the Trump administration wants exempted. Among them: operations at the southern US border, modernization of nuclear weapons and missile defense and acquisition of one-way attack drones and other munitions. If adopted in full, the proposed cuts would include tens of billions of dollars in each of the next five years.
According to the Post, the memo calls for continued “support agency” funding for several major regional headquarters, including Indo-Pacific command, northern command and space command. Notably absent from that list is European command, which has had a leading role in executing US strategy during the war in Ukraine; central command, which oversees operations in the Middle East; and Africa command, which manages the several thousand troops the Pentagon has spread across that continent.

2025-02-19 16:18:46 GMT

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday he intends to impose auto tariffs “in the neighborhood of 25 per cent” and similar duties on semiconductors and pharmaceutical imports, the latest in a series of measures threatening to upend international trade.
On Friday, Trump said levies on automobiles would come as soon as April 2, the day after members of his cabinet are due to deliver reports to him outlining options for a range of import duties as he seeks to reshape global trade.
Trump told reporters on Tuesday that sectoral tariffs on pharmaceuticals and semiconductor chips would also start at “25 per cent or higher, and it will go very substantially higher over the course of a year.”

2025-02-18 17:54:52 GMT

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said his country won't accept peacekeeping forces from Nato countries in Ukraine under any peace deal, following high-level talks with the US in Saudi Arabia.
"Any appearance by armed forces under some other flag does not change anything. It is of course completely unacceptable," he said.
Russia and the US said they had agreed to appoint teams to start negotiating the end of the war.
"Today is the first step of a long and difficult journey, but an important one", US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said following the meeting.

2025-02-17 19:28:55 GMT

Palestinian medic and ambulance worker Tarek Rabie Safi, freed from an Israeli jail as part of a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas, said he was underfed and abused during almost a year in captivity.
Safi, a 39-year-old father of two, was released along with 368 other Palestinian detainees on Saturday, after Hamas freed three Israeli hostages from Gaza.
"I was held by the Israeli army in the Gaza 'envelop', which is Sde Teiman where I stayed for four months (and I was subjected to) torture of our bodies (physical torture) and hunger," a gaunt-looking Safi said.
"(There was) no (decent) food, or drinks, or (medical) treatment. My arm was broken, and they did not treat me, and they did not get me checked by a doctor."

2025-02-16 19:32:22 GMT

A lone figure [takes to the stage](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WMxGVfk09lU), a giant maple leaf flag rippling on a screen behind him as he gingerly approaches the microphone.
“I’m not a lumberjack, or a fur trader,” he tells the crowd. “I have a prime minister, not a president. I speak English and French, not American. And I pronounce it ‘about’ – not ‘a boot’.”
The crowd, indifferent at first, grows increasingly enthusiastic as the man works his way through a catalogue of Canadian stereotypes, passing from diffidence to defiance before the climactic cry: “Canada is the second largest landmass! The first nation of hockey! And the best part of North America! My name is Joe! And I am Canadian!”
In response, Canadians have taken to acts of patriotism, small and large: one pilot flew his small plane in the shape of a maple leaf; sports fans have booed US teams; hats insisting “Canada is not for sale” have gone viral; consumers have pledged to buy only Canadian-made products – a pledge skewered in a viral sketch in which one shopper berates another for buying American ketchup.

2025-02-16 18:32:33 GMT

Rachael Clarke remembers life before buffer zones. Almost every day, the head of staff at the UK’s biggest abortion provider would get emails from staff worried about protesters outside clinics – and women crying in the waiting room.
Since buffer zones were rolled out nationally late last year – building on public space protection orders that were already in place outside some clinics – she says things have drastically improved.
Reports of alleged harassment outside British Pregnancy Advisory Service clinics have stopped almost completely. So when she heard JD Vance, the US vice-president, decrying buffer zone laws as an attack on the “liberties of religious Britons” in a speech on Friday at the Munich Security Conference – and condemning the conviction of a man, Adam Smith-Connor, who he said had been targeted for “just silently praying on his own” – she wasn’t impressed. “You can’t see these things in isolation,” she says.
Rather than being a one-off, Clarke sees the Smith-Connor case as part of a wider effort by anti-abortion campaigners to test the new law to the limits – and shift the focus away from the true reason for buffer zones to a debate about freedom of speech.

2025-02-15 04:20:37 GMT

Last Saturday, Adrián Simancas was kayaking with his father, Dell, in Bahía El Águila near the San Isidro Lighthouse in the Strait of Magellan when a humpback whale surfaced, engulfing Adrián and his yellow kayak for a few seconds before letting him go.
Dell, just meters (yards) away, captured the moment on video while encouraging his son to stay calm.
“Stay calm, stay calm,” he can be heard saying after his son was released from the whale’s mouth.
“I thought I was dead,” Adrián told The Associated Press. “I thought it had eaten me, that it had swallowed me.”

2025-02-14 15:59:18 GMT

By the time Joe Biden became president in January 2021, guns were the top killer of children and teens in America, overtaking car crashes and cancer as the leading cause of death. As that trend continued, the Biden White House responded with gun safety policies to enforce existing laws and bolster gun-violence prevention programs. In June 2022, following mass shootings at a grocery store in Buffalo, NY, and an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, Congress passed gun legislation for the first time in three decades. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act strengthened background checks for some gun buyers and prohibitions for domestic abusers, and it dedicated about $15 billion for states to build mental health and violence intervention programs. The Biden White House later established the Office of Gun Violence Prevention and an initiative to help states implement “red flag” laws that allow for removing guns from troubled people who pose a danger to themselves or others.
These policies at a broad level have coincided with a reduction in gun violence nationally: By 2024, shooting homicides overall were in steady decline throughout the country. Mass shootings also declined, both by conservative and broader measures of the problem.
Now, President Donald Trump has moved quickly to undo the progress made with gun safety policies. He shut down the Office of Gun Violence Prevention immediately after taking office. And on Feb. 7, he signed an executive order directing US Attorney General Pam Bondi to “examine all orders, regulations, guidance, plans, international agreements, and other actions of executive departments and agencies” from Biden’s term, to assess whether those “infringe on the Second Amendment rights” of Americans. Within 30 days, Bondi is to give Trump “a plan of action.”

2025-02-14 15:43:12 GMT

Three federal judges will consider on Friday whether Elon Musk's government cost-cutting team known as DOGE will have access to Treasury Department payment systems and potentially sensitive data at U.S. health, consumer protection, labor and education agencies.
The Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency has swept through federal agencies since Republican Donald Trump became president last month and put the chief executive of carmaker Tesla in charge of rooting out wasteful spending as part of Trump's dramatic overhaul of government.
In Manhattan, U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas will consider a request by Democratic state attorneys general to extend a temporary block on DOGE that was put in place on Saturday, which prevented Musk's team from accessing Treasury systems responsible for trillions of dollars of payments.

2025-02-13 12:24:59 GMT

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And Canada. And Mexico.

2025-02-13 10:10:12 GMT

Robert Charles Albon claims to have fathered more than 180 children in several countries after advertising his sperm donation services under the name Joe Donor.
Jonathan Furness KC, sitting as a deputy high court judge, took the rare step of naming him as a parent in the family court as a warning to other women considering buying sperm from him.
In a written judgment he said it was in the public interest for Albon to be named, so “vulnerable women who are interested in such services should fully understand the risks of becoming involved with him”.
Albon, an American who lives in the north-east of England, took a same-sex couple to court demanding parental rights, including being named on the birth certificate of the child he had fathered with one of the women.

2025-02-13 09:39:27 GMT

Elon Musk called Thursday to “delete entire agencies” from the U.S. government as part of his push under President Donald Trump to radically cut spending and restructure its priorities.
“A lot of attention has been on USAID for example,” Musk said, referring to Trump’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development. “There’s like the National Endowment for Democracy. But I’m like, ‘Okay, well, how much democracy have they achieved lately?’”
He added that the U.S. under Trump is “less interested in interfering with the affairs of other countries.”
There are “times the United States has been kind of pushy in international affairs, which may resonate with some members of the audience,” Musk said, speaking to the crowd in the UAE, an autocratically ruled nation of seven sheikhdoms.

2025-02-12 15:52:53 GMT

A truck cabin that was swallowed by a sinkhole in Japan two weeks ago has been located in a nearby sewer pipe, authorities say.
Drone images suggest that a human body is inside the cabin, but it is unclear if it is that of the truck's missing 74-year-old driver.
The sinkhole, which now measures 40m (131ft) in diameter, opened at a road intersection in Yashio city near Tokyo. It is believed to be caused by a sewer rupture.
Search teams are unable to enter the 5m-wide pipe due to continuous water flow and high levels of hydrogen sulfide or sewer gas, officials said.

2025-02-12 15:01:21 GMT

In a letter to Trump seen by the Guardian, Democrats noted that the US imports key construction materials worth billions of dollars – from lumber to cement products – from Canada and Mexico each year.
“Given the severe housing shortage, compounded by rising construction costs, persistent supply chain disruptions, and an estimated shortfall of 6m homes, these looming tariffs, while intended to protect domestic industries, risk further exacerbating the housing supply and affordability crisis while stifling the development of new housing,” they wrote.
In a statement, the White House claimed Trump would use tariffs to “usher in a new era of growth and prosperity” for the US.

2025-02-12 14:51:06 GMT

Returning to pre-2014 Ukraine borders ‘unrealistic’ and ‘illusory’ goal, US defence secretary says.
Continuing his speech, US defence secretary Peter Hegseth calls for “realistic assessment of the battlefield.”
"We want a sovereign and prosperous Ukraine. But we must start by recognising that returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective."
"Chasing this illusionary goal will only prolong the war and cause more suffering."

2025-02-12 03:19:30 GMT

The FBI on Tuesday said it discovered 2,400 new records related to the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy as federal agencies work to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order last month to release thousands of files.
The FBI said it’s working to transfer the records to the National Archives and Records Administration to be included in the declassification process.
The federal government in the early 1990s mandated that all documents related to the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination be housed in a single collection at the National Archives. And while the vast majority of the collection — which includes over 5 million pages of records — has been made public, researchers estimate that 3,000 files haven’t been released, either in whole or in part.

2025-02-11 16:39:08 GMT

Mace said she was speaking out because her home state’s top prosecutor didn’t take action even after she alerted investigators. That same prosecutor is likely to be Mace’s opponent if she runs for governor of South Carolina in 2026, which she is considering.
Saying she was going “scorched earth,” Mace detailed how, in November 2023, she says she “accidentally uncovered some of the most heinous crimes against women imaginable. We’re talking about rape, non-consensual photos, non-consensual videos of women and underage girls, and the premeditated, calculated exploitation of women and girls in my district.”
Mace mentioned four men as being involved, including Charleston-area businessman Patrick Bryant, who was her fiancé until 2023 and went door-to-door stumping for her during her 2022 reelection campaign.

2025-02-11 13:05:03 GMT

The Justice Department on Monday ordered federal prosecutors to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, arguing in a remarkable departure from long-standing norms that the case was interfering with the mayor’s ability to aid the president’s crackdown on illegal immigration.
In a two-page memo obtained by The Associated Press, acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove told prosecutors in New York that they were “directed to dismiss” the bribery charges against Adams immediately.
Bove said the order was not based on the strength of evidence in the case, but rather because it had been brought too close to Adams reelection campaign and was distracting from the mayor’s efforts to assist in the Trump administration’s law-and-order priorities.

2025-02-08 11:17:54 GMT

State Rep. Laurie Pohutsky’s account was cheered by the left-leaning protestors and condemned by right-wing social media accounts.
The 36-year-old Democrat said the surgery was a personal decision she had been considering for a few years and was finalized by Trump’s election. She wanted to validate the fears other women might have about access to contraception by sharing it.
She told The Associated Press that she has received threats since speaking this week, referring at least one of them to Michigan authorities. The Associated Press reached out to Michigan State police for comment.
“I don’t fully grasp the level of animosity that people have about this,” Pohutsky said.

2025-02-07 13:14:11 GMT

David Stein called Reptile Relocation Sydney last week after watching around six snakes slither into the mulch. He learned from an internet search that pregnant, known as gravid, red-belly blacks pile on top of each other before they give birth.
Reptile Relocation Sydney owner Cory Kerewaro said two of the captured adults gave birth to a total of 29 snakes in the bag while Cooper was still sifting through mulch catching more.
The final tally was five adults and 97 offspring caught, Kerewaro said.

2025-02-06 14:08:08 GMT

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez rejected the settlement at a hearing in Houston, saying the families were asking him to also divide up the assets of Infowars' parent company Free Speech Systems, despite the fact that the company had been dismissed from bankruptcy last year.
"I can't do that," Lopez said. “That case is closed."
Courts in Connecticut and Texas, where some of the families filed their lawsuits, have ruled Jones defamed the families by making repeated false claims that the school shooting, which killed 20 students and six staff members in Newton, Connecticut, was staged as part of a government plot to take guns away from Americans.

2025-02-06 02:47:10 GMT

Dairy cattle in Nevada have been infected with a new type of bird flu that’s different from the version that has spread in U.S. herds since last year, Agriculture Department officials said Wednesday.
The detection indicates that distinct forms of the virus known as Type A H5N1 have spilled over from wild birds into cattle at least twice. Experts said it raises new questions about wider spread and the difficulty of controlling infections in animals and the people who work closely with them.
“I always thought one bird-to-cow transmission was a very rare event. Seems that may not be the case,” said Richard Webby, an influenza expert at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

2025-01-11 23:00:19 GMT

The last time Donald Trump was president, he travelled to Youngstown, Ohio, among the most depressed of America’s rust belt cities, and promised voters the impossible.
The high-paying steel, railroad and car industry jobs that once made Youngstown a hard-living, hard-drinking blue-collar boom town were coming back, he said. “Don’t move. Don’t sell your house,” he crowed to a rapturous crowd in 2017. “We’re going to fill up those factories – or rip ”em down and build brand new ones”.
None of that happened. Indeed, within 18 months, General Motors (GM) announced that it was suspending operations at its one remaining manufacturing plant outside Youngstown, throwing 5,000 jobs into jeopardy in a community with little else to cling to. Trump’s reaction was to say the closure didn’t matter, because the jobs would be replaced “in, like, two minutes”.
That, too, did not happen. People moved away, marriages broke down, depression soared and, locals say, a handful of people took their own lives.
“The Democrats and the Republicans are all a den of crooks. Only one side lies about being crooks, and one doesn’t. If you’re going to be a crook, I’d rather know it than be lied to.”

2025-01-08 21:49:08 GMT

“END THE MADNESS. Recall the committee. Defund the CBC.” Credit where it’s due to Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives for writing for radio, as I was taught at a CBC skills course many years ago: short and sharp, three beats, implied subject-verb-object.
The Tories are mad for this gimmick: axe the tax, build the homes, bring it home, fix the budget, stop the crime. It’s addictive and direct and Trumpy, apt to “win the vote” for them, and thus presenting, among other things, a direct existential threat to the CBC. It’s a threat that, starting this month, Catherine Tait, the outgoing president, CEO, and poster-person for bloated bureaucracy, gets to pass on to her successor, Marie-Philippe Bouchard, who hasn’t ticked off anyone significant—yet.

2024-12-13 01:49:09 GMT

The incident unfolded on Aug. 2, 2022, after police received several 911 calls saying a man had broken into the municipal building and set several fires inside.
Officers arrived to find the suspect still inside the building, armed with a large machete.
Two officers armed with Anti Riot Weapon Enfield (ARWEN) devices shot the suspect nine times over the course of 35 minutes.
Despite undergoing surgery, the man lost one testicle. The other was injured and only a portion could be saved.

2024-11-25 21:25:21 GMT

The Utah Hockey Club got the full Toronto experience Sunday night ahead of their first-ever matchup against the Maple Leafs—bumper-to-bumper traffic that forced the team to walk to the game.
“I think that’s a first for everyone. Never saw that before,” Utah defenceman Maveric Lamoureux tells the camera that documented the team’s stroll to Scotiabank Arena.
Lamoureux said the team’s bus was “not moving at all” in the Sunday evening traffic, just hours after the Santa Claus Parade and resulting road closures.
“So it’s pretty much the whole team walking the street,” he said, noting that they would probably miss their 5:15 p.m. pre-game meeting.