HellsBelle

A police officer in Victoria took "reckless and unnecessary" action when he fired plastic bullets into a smokey room, killing a woman, according to a decision by the Office of the Police Complaints Commissioner (OPCC).

The finding, comes from retired judge Wally Oppal, who presided over the OPCC's public hearing into the death of Lisa Rauch, 43.

The hearing was ordered by the OPCC after previous investigations by both B.C.'s Internal Investigations Office and an investigation by Vancouver Police found no wrongdoing.

The lawsuit filed in Washington, D.C., on Thursday says the U.S. Department of Agriculture violated federal privacy laws when it ordered states and vendors to turn over five years of data about food assistance program applicants and enrollees, including their names, birth dates, personal addresses and social security numbers.

The lawsuit “seeks to ensure that the government is not exploiting our most vulnerable citizens by disregarding longstanding privacy protections,” National Student Legal Defense Network attorney Daniel Zibel wrote in the complaint. The Electronic Privacy Information Center and Mazon Inc.: A Jewish Response to Hunger joined the four food assistance recipients in bringing the lawsuit.

Some states have already turned over the data, including Alaska, which shared the personal info of more than 70,000 residents, according to the lawsuit. Other states like Iowa plan to turn over the information, the plaintiffs say.

Janet Lynn Stumbo leaned on her cane and surveyed the two dozen or so voters who had convened in a small Appalachian town to meet with the chair of the Kentucky Democratic Party.

A former Kentucky Supreme Court justice, the 70-year-old Stumbo said the event was “the biggest Democratic gathering I have ever seen in Johnson County,” an enclave where Republican Donald Trump got 85% of the presidential vote last November.

Paintsville, the county seat, was the latest stop on the state party’s “Rural Listening Tour,” a periodic effort to visit overwhelmingly white, culturally conservative towns of the kind where Democrats once competed and Republicans now dominate nationally.

“The gut check is we’d stopped having these conversations” in white rural America, said Colmon Elridge, the Kentucky Democratic chair. “Folks didn’t give up on the Democratic Party. We stopped doing the things that we knew we needed to do.”

It’s not that Democrats must carry most white rural precincts outright to win more elections. More realistically, it’s a matter of consistently chipping away at Republican margins in the way Trump narrowed Democrats’ usual advantages among Black and Latino men in 2024 and not unlike what Kentucky’s Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, did in two statewide victories.

One week before the last provincial election was called, the Progressive Conservative government quietly gave JohnQ Public an $18 million grant.

There was no public announcement about the one-time funding that was paid in full to JohnQ — a company owned by 12 rural municipalities — on Aug. 29, 2023.

The grant is for a land purchase in the Rural Municipality of Ritchot to develop a proposed "Winnipeg Regional Rail Port," NDP government principal secretary Emily Coutts said in an email.

JohnQ has come under scrutiny in the past month after the government requested Manitoba's auditor general to review a $100-million daycare construction program initiated by the previous government that JohnQ project managed with the help of Boom Done Next — a company co-owned by Marni Larkin, the director of the PCs' 2023 re-election campaign.

A former Kelowna, B.C., RCMP officer, who admitted to sending sexually explicit messages to a victim of domestic assault, has been granted a conditional discharge and placed on probation for 12 months.

Sean Eckland, who served with the national police force from 2006 to 2024, pleaded guilty to one count of attempting to obstruct justice, after the messages were used by the victim's assailant to benefit his case.

Eckland, 50, was the lead investigator on a domestic assault case in 2018 when he began exchanging sexually explicit messages with the victim over several months and sent her a photo of his penis, according to an agreed statement of facts included in his sentencing decision.

A Calgary drug dealer who instigated an attack that led to a beating, fatal fentanyl shot and dismemberment of a young man was handed an eight-year prison sentence Friday.

Originally charged with second-degree murder in the April 2022 death of Keanan Crane, Darren Bulldog pleaded guilty to manslaughter last month after negotiations between defence lawyer Anna Konye and prosecutors Aaron Rankin and Britta Kristensen.

Crane was fatally attacked on April 7, 2022. Parts of his dismembered body were found a month later on the Mînî Thnî First Nation, formerly known as Morley.

"It's senseless and incomprehensible to understand how somebody, even with the prospects of wanting to enforce a drug debt ... would resort to employing individuals … to administer a beating and a lethal injection of fentanyl," said (Court of King's Bench Justice David) Labrenz.

Boeing is set to enter into a non-prosecution agreement in the fatal crashes of two 737 Max aircraft that killed hundreds, the US Department of Justice said.

As part of the deal, Boeing will avoid an upcoming fraud trial that could have resulted in the US aviation giant and defence contractor being labelled a felon. The deal includes the company admitting to obstructing federal aviation officials and paying $1.1 billion in fines.

The two crashes, in 2018 and 2019, left 346 people dead.

The government said it had conferred with families of crash victims, and said many either supported or did not oppose the deal. Some families, however, have expressed outrage at the prospect of such a deal.

Freddie Mercury had a secret daughter with whom he had a close relationship until his death in 1991, according to a new biography of the Queen frontman.

The book, Love, Freddie, claims the child was conceived accidentally during an affair with the wife of a close friend in 1976.

Mercury is said to have visited his daughter regularly and gave her 17 volumes of detailed personal journals which she kept a secret.

(Rock biographer Lesley-Ann) Jones said she was first approached by B three years ago. She told the Daily Mail: “My instinct was to doubt everything, but I am absolutely sure she is not a fantasist.

“No one could have faked all this. Why would she have worked with me for three and a half years, never demanding anything?”

The sperm of a man carrying a rare cancer-causing mutation was used to conceive at least 67 children, 10 of whom have since been diagnosed with cancer, in a case that has highlighted concerns about the lack of internationally agreed limits on the use of donor sperm.

Experts have previously warned of the social and psychological risks of sperm from single donors being used to create large numbers children across multiple countries. The latest case, involving dozens of children born between 2008 and 2015, raises fresh concerns about the complexity of tracing so many families when a serious medical issue is identified.

“We need to have a European limit on the number of births or families for a single donor,” said Dr Edwige Kasper, a biologist at Rouen university hospital in France, who presented the case at the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics in Milan.

Violent Israeli settlers including two under UK sanctions have forced about 150 Palestinians to leave their village in the occupied West Bank, through a five-day intimidation campaign carried out under the watch of the Israeli police and army.

On Sunday morning, settlers established an illegal outpost, consisting of a basic shelter and a sheep pen, 100 metres from a Palestinian home in Mughayyir al-Deir, east of Ramallah. By Friday, dozens of villagers had already moved their flocks away, packed up their belongings and were dismantling the wooden and metal frames of their houses.

Settlers stalked between Palestinian men who worked fast and largely in silence, grappling with the grim reality of leaving the place where most were born and grew up. A child cried as he was driven away on a truck loaded with the family’s red sofas.

A judge has issued a temporary restraining order blocking the Trump administration's plan to strip Harvard University of its ability to enrol foreign students.

The ruling came after Harvard filed a lawsuit - the latest escalation of a dispute between the White House and one of America's most prestigious institutions.

US District Judge Allison Burroughs issued a temporary restraining order in a short ruling issued on Friday.

The order pauses a move that the Department of Homeland Security made on Thursday to revoke Harvard's access to the Student and Exchange Visitor Program - a government database that manages foreign students.

ON MARCH 5, hundreds of Nova Scotians gathered in front of Province House, the provincial legislature, in Halifax. Many held handmade signs, including one featuring Premier Tim Houston transformed into a Donald Trump doppelganger, and slogans like “Nobody voted for Tim Trump,” “Please dump the Trump playbook,” and “We want democracy. Not autocracy.”

The rally had been organized by community groups and labour organizations to push back against far-reaching legislation that Houston’s government introduced in February. The proposed omnibus bills would, among other things, overturn a four-decade moratorium on uranium mining, give the government more control over universities, and allow non-unionized civil servants to be fired without cause.

“No one knew this was coming,” says Lindsay Lee, one of the protesters, who works at the advocacy organization Ecology Action Centre. “This is not something people were consulted on in any way.”

Houston’s power plays follow a disturbing trend among Canadian premiers seeking to quash dissent and centralize executive control over decision-making, often to override the power of municipal governments or the legislative process. Alberta premier Danielle Smith introduced a bill last year that would allow the government to fire mayors and municipal councillors. Ontario’s Doug Ford is obsessed with tearing up Toronto bike lanes and has ranted about getting rid of “bleeding-heart” judges through American-style judicial elections. In British Columbia, David Eby introduced legislation in March that would allow the cabinet to bypass the legislature in order to respond to tariff threats. After public outcry, Eby walked back that portion of the bill.