HellsBelle

Communities in rural parts of Vermont on Friday woke up once again to damaged homes and washed-out roads due to heavy rainfall and flash flooding, making it the third consecutive summer that severe floods have inundated parts of the state.

Up to 5 inches (13 centimeters) of rain fell in just a few hours on Thursday, prompting rapid flooding as local waterways began to swell, said Robert Haynes, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Burlington office.

Nearly 20 homes were cut off in the small town of Sutton as a local brook quickly rose from its banks and surrounded buildings, Fire Chief Kyle Seymour said. His crews were called out to help rescue people from two homes, which required help from swift-water rescue teams called in from neighboring communities.

Federal immigration agents seeking to detain a Honduran landscaper chased him into a Southern California surgical center and quickly found themselves in a tense standoff as clinic staff demanded to see identification and a warrant.

In a video clip of the Tuesday altercation that has spread on social media, Ontario Advanced Surgery Center staff in blue scrubs are heard telling an armed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent wearing a mask and bulletproof vest to let go of the man, who is crying and gasping for breath.

“Get your hands off of him. You don’t even have a warrant,” says one staff member, shielding the man from an immigration agent. “Let him go. You need to get out.”

Manitoba has declared another provincewide state of emergency as wildfires continue to threaten communities.

Garden Hill Anisininew Nation is being evacuated Thursday after a wildfire entered the First Nation, leadership said Thursday morning. Snow Lake, about 590 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg, issued a mandatory evacuation order on Wednesday, with people ordered out by noon Thursday.

More than 4,000 people are expected to leave Garden Hill alone, the premier said. Snow Lake has a population of more than 1,000 people.

The Canadian Armed Forces has been assisting with the evacuation from that community. Hercules and commercial flights are slated to help bring residents out on Thursday, Kinew said.

The joke was already making the rounds among diplomats during his first term: Negotiating with the president of the United States, Donald Trump, is like playing chess with a pigeon. The bird furiously flaps its wings, knocks over all the pieces while cooing with delight, then defecates on the board and says, "I won!" In reality, Trump has lost a lot at this game.

When facing down China, which Trump threatened with a tariff apocalypse, or the head of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, whom he tried to destabilize, Trump merely flapped his wings wildly, but it made no difference. And when he "wins" – which does happen – it is at the cost of indescribable chaos that affects everyone. That is how, at the end of June, Trump shattered a jewel of multilateralism: the global minimum tax on multinational profits, the result of the broadest international tax agreement ever reached.

In October 2021, for the first time, this agreement put a stop to the global race to the bottom in corporate taxation, which for decades had undermined state revenues and exacerbated inequality. More than 130 countries agreed to a minimum tax of 15% on large corporate profits. Admittedly, the rate remained modest; admittedly, exemptions weakened the measure. But at least, under the leadership of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the G20, an agreement finally made it possible to stand up to large corporations.

Ubisoft has updated its End User License Agreement, and it’s instructing its users to remove and destroy their games completely should the title be taken offline.

Essentially, the EULA has given Ubisoft free rein on its ability to stop supporting a game, writing: “You and Ubisoft may terminate this EULA at any time, for any reason. Termination by Ubisoft will be effective upon notice to you or termination of your Ubisoft account, or at the time of Ubisoft’s decision to discontinue offering and/or supporting the Product.”

Interestingly, this isn’t the only company that has the same terms in its EULA. The likes of Capcom, Sega, and even the Oblivion Remaster have the same clause in their terms and conditions, meaning the stipulation isn’t unique to Ubisoft.

Barnard College has settled a lawsuit that accused the college of not doing enough to combat antisemitism on campus, agreeing to a litany of demands that include banning masks at protests and refusing to meet or negotiate with a coalition of pro-Palestinian student groups, according to a statement released Monday.

The Manhattan college, an all-women’s affiliate of Columbia University, will also establish a new Title VI coordinator to enforce against claims of discrimination. Beginning next semester, all students and staff will receive a message conveying a “zero tolerance” policy for harassment of Jewish and Israeli students.

The settlement was announced in a joint statement by Barnard and lawyers for two Jewish advocacy groups, Students Against Antisemitism and StandWithUs Center for Legal Justice, who brought the lawsuit last February on behalf of some Jewish and Israeli students.

The U.S. government would initiate deportation proceedings against Kilmar Abrego Garcia if he’s released from jail before he stands trial on human smuggling charges in Tennessee, a Justice Department attorney told a federal judge in Maryland on Monday.

The disclosure by U.S. lawyer Jonathan Guynn contradicts statements by spokespeople for the Justice Department and the White House, who said last month that Abrego Garcia would stand trial and possibly spend time in an American prison before the government moves to deport him.

Guynn made the revelation during a federal court hearing in Maryland, where Abrego Garcia’s American wife is suing the Trump administration over his mistaken deportation in March and trying to prevent him from being expelled again.

Federal officers and National Guard troops fanned out around a mostly empty Los Angeles park in a largely immigrant neighborhood on foot, horseback and military vehicles on Monday for about an hour before abruptly leaving, an operation that local officials said seemed designed to sow fear.

The Department of Homeland Security wouldn’t say whether anyone had been arrested during the brief operation at MacArthur Park. Federal officials did not respond to requests for comment about why the park was targeted or why the raid ended abruptly.

“What I saw in the park today looked like a city under siege, under armed occupation,” said Mayor Karen Bass, who showed up at the park alongside activists.

She said there were children attending a day camp in the park who were quickly ushered inside to avoid seeing the troops. Still, Bass said an 8-year-old boy told her that “he was fearful of ICE.”

The police officer who killed Indigenous teenager Kumanjayi Walker in 2019 was "racist" and had an "attraction" to adrenaline-style policing, a coroner's inquest has found.

Walker, 19, died shortly after he was shot three times at close range by Constable Zachary Rolfe during a home arrest in Yuendumu, a remote Indigenous community in the Northern Territory (NT).

Rolfe - no longer a policeman - was charged with Walker's murder and acquitted in 2022, sparking protests about Indigenous deaths in custody.

In delivering her findings, Judge Elisabeth Armitage said Walker's death was "avoidable" and there was "clear evidence of entrenched, systemic and structural racism" within NT's police force.

It’s official: Premier Danielle Smith can now call herself Queen of Measles.

And not just in Alberta. Try North America.

That’s right. Alberta now leads the continent in a preventable childhood disease that leaves at least two of every 1,000 infections with severe intellectual disabilities, pneumonia or hearing loss. Or dead.

Stunningly, Alberta has already recorded nearly half a dozen cases of measles present at birth in the province.

And every measles infection leaves a child with a disabled immune system, stripped of memory about how to fight other routine infections. As a result, any unvaccinated child who battles measles will probably be sicklier, possibly for years afterwards. Brazilian researchers recently found a high correlation between having measles and later dying of another infectious disease.

For a decade, Vancouver city managers knew an employee in the building inspection department was part owner of a private company that did work frequently checked by city inspectors.

That employee and the city staff he managed often inspected the company’s work, and a conflict-of-interest investigation found the employee, “in their capacity as a city inspector, personally made decisions about the private sector business they owned in four instances.” None of those decisions were “unfavourable” to the business, the report said.

The employee also said he’d been offered, but refused, a bribe from another contractor. An analysis by the city’s Office of the Auditor General, or OAG, found the contractor had appeared to receive preferential treatment from the employee.

On the day a month-long trial for a man accused of "significant" human trafficking was set to begin, the Crown's case fell apart over a technicality.

Christian Vitela, 37, and his defence lawyer had not received all disclosure or evidence related to the case in the years leading up to the criminal trial, assistant Crown attorney Heather Palin said on April 23.

Vitela hadn't accessed all phone records of the migrant workers he was charged with trafficking — the phones had been seized by the RCMP and were "typically core disclosure in human trafficking prosecutions," said Vitela's lawyer, Tobias Okada-Phillips.

The RCMP, which initially laid nine human trafficking charges against Vitela in 2019, have a different version of events. It includes that they notified Vitela on several occasions that the information was available, and set up a room and computer for him to view the materials, but he never showed up.