HellsBelle

A Minnesota senator wants to strengthen state laws meant to hold adults entrusted with children’s safety accountable for failing to report suspected child abuse, after an investigation by the Minnesota Star Tribune and ProPublica found that the leadership of a church in Duluth for years protected a child sex predator.

Sen. Erin Maye Quade, a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party from suburban Minneapolis, said she’s focused on situations where such an adult has concrete knowledge that a specific person is abusing children and nonetheless stays silent, allowing the abuse to continue.

"If you know an adult who is committing child sexual abuse, you need to report that,” she said. “For that, the penalties could be a lot higher.”

The Star Tribune-ProPublica report found that preachers in Duluth’s Old Apostolic Lutheran Church knew for years about allegations that a member, Clint Massie, had been sexually abusing young girls in the congregation. Instead of reporting it to police, church leaders encouraged some of the victims to take part in sessions where they were pressured to forgive Massie. They were then told never to speak of the abuse.

Vince Zampella, who co-created the popular video game series Call of Duty, has died in a car crash in California, aged 55.

Zampella's death was confirmed by Electronic Arts, which owns Respawn Entertainment, a game studio he co-founded.

The influential video game developer was travelling in a Ferrari with another person, when it crashed and caught fire on a highway in Los Angeles on Sunday.

At least five people have been killed after a Mexican Navy plane crashed in foggy conditions near Galveston, Texas on Monday while transporting a child burn victim.

According to flight tracking website Flight Radar, the plane was last recorded at 15:01 local time (21:01 GMT) over Galveston Bay, near Scholes International Airport.

The aircraft was taking part in a medical mission on behalf of the Michou y Mau Foundation, which provides care to Mexican children with severe burns.

Mexico's Secretariat of the Navy said one person remains missing and two others were rescued alive.

There are people who argue that Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine is not motivated by fears or imperial ambitions, but by other countries’ disrespect. Russia once commanded authority as one of the world’s two superpowers, but it has since forfeited that status. It knows it has lost the respect of other countries (Barack Obama famously dismissed Russia as just a “regional power”), and the Ukraine war is its way of winning it back.

What is perhaps surprising is that Donald Trump’s turn against Europe has similar motivations. Putin knows his aggressive revanchism won’t win Russia any love among countries whose respect he craves. But if he can’t be loved, he hopes at least to be feared. If you are in a social order that regards you as inferior, you have every incentive to turn spoiler.

So, too, Trump wants to disrupt a social order that regards him and his worldview with contempt. The US president and his officials get respect from dictators and kings (although perhaps not from the ones whose respect they most want – Putin and Xi Jinping), but they know that the leaders of many other democratic countries look down their noses at them.

Now it is America that wants to act as spoiler, smashing the existing hierarchy of respect to replace it with a world where Trump will get unqualified obeisance. Europe, with its emphasis on the rule of law and multilateralism, is the strongest remaining example of an entire system of prestige and values that the Trump administration wants to destroy.

While all eyes are on the four-month-long US military campaign against Venezuela, the White House has been quietly striking security agreements with other countries to deploy US troops across Latin America and the Caribbean.

As Donald Trump announced a blockade on oil tankers under sanctions and ordered the seizure of vessels amid airstrikes that have killed more than 100 people in the Caribbean and the Pacific, the US secured military deals with Paraguay, Ecuador, Peru and Trinidad and Tobago in the past week alone.

The agreements – ranging from airport access, as in Trinidad and Tobago, to the temporary deployment of US troops for joint operations against “narco-terrorists” in Paraguay – are being signed under the banner of a so-called “war on drugs”, the same rationale Washington has used to justify its offensive against Venezuela, although White House officials and Trump himself has said that the goals also include seizing the country’s vast energy reserves and bringing down the dictator Nicolás Maduro.

Although Washington has long maintained similar agreements in the region, the scale and timing of the new deals are seen by analysts as a further escalation amid what would be an unprecedented US invasion of a South American country.

A former Tory councillor has appeared in court charged with drugging and raping his former wife over a period of 13 years.

Philip Young, 49, and five other men have been accused of more than 60 rapes and sexual offences against Joanne Young, 48. She can be named as the alleged victim because she has waived her right to anonymity, which would otherwise apply in such cases.

Young, who was described by police as white British, appeared at Swindon magistrates court on Tuesday charged with 56 offences, including multiple counts of rape and administering a substance with intent to stupefy his former spouse.

He is also accused of voyeurism, possession of indecent images of children and possession of extreme images.

Another file released on Tuesday is a letter that appears to have been sent by Jeffrey Epstein to Larry Nassar, the US gymnastics team doctor convicted of sexually abusing scores of young gymnasts, while he was in jail.

In the letter, postmarked 13 August 2019 and sent from jail, the letter reads:

"Dear L.N. as you know by now, I have taken the “short route” home. Good Luck! We share one thing … our love & caring for young ladies at the hope they’d reach their full potential. Our president also shares our love of young, nubile girls. When a young beauty walked by he loved to “grab snatch,” whereas we ended up snatching grub in the mess halls of the system. Life is unfair. Yours, J. Epstein."

In a post on X earlier, the US justice department said that some of the documents it has released “contain untrue and sensationalist claims made against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election. To be clear: the claims are unfounded and false, and if they had a shred of credibility, they certainly would have been weaponized against President Trump already.”

On a sunny afternoon in August, Trans Mountain CEO Mark Maki donned a black jumpsuit to stroll atop a giant loading dock in Burnaby. Below, his company’s new pipeline pumped oil into tankers bound for the open ocean.

“We’re returning money now to the owner,” Maki said in a Global News segment. “Canadian taxpayers who are the shareholders of the system are reaping those benefits.”

What Maki didn’t mention was that the operating pipeline’s profit streak was relatively new, appearing after a sudden change had turned its months-long losses into gains.

Little had changed on the ground. The amount of oil travelling through the pipe had remained mostly stable, as had its fees. Instead, the boon came on the company’s balance sheets, where millions in monthly interest payments vanished overnight.

“The only reason Trans Mountain looks like it’s making a profit is that most of the debt has been moved off their books,” said Thomas Gunton, a professor and director in resource and environmental planning at Simon Fraser University.

“It’s a misrepresentation of finances on this project.”

An internal review of technical outages that caused significant delays at airports and international land borders this fall has exposed critical flaws with the Canada Border Services Agency's IT services.

The review found neither the CBSA nor Shared Services Canada (SSC) is prioritizing solutions to dated technology that should be declared "a top government risk."

The outages happened after two separate, planned IT changes: a database upgrade and a firewall patch.

A person with SSC did not apply the necessary patch to CBSA databases ahead of a routine upgrade Sept. 28 that caused "significant corruption of live traveller and commercial data."

That led to "cascading system failures and service outages" at inspection points inside international airports and land borders, the report says.

One of the documents is an email from an assistant U.S. attorney from the Southern District of New York dated Jan. 8, 2020.

The attorney and recipient's names are redacted, but the contents of the email are not.

It notes that Trump travelled with Epstein "many more times than previously has been reported (or that we were aware), including during the period we would expect to charge in a Maxwell case."

Epstein's former girlfriend and longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell was listed as a passenger alongside Trump and Epstein on at least four flights, the attorney wrote.

Trump's ex-wife Marla Maples, his daughter Tiffany and his son Eric were also listed as passengers on some of the flights, the email says.

In addition to the flight whose records showed Trump travelling with a 20-year-old, two other flights included two passengers "who would be possible witnesses in a Maxwell case," the attorney wrote.

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CBS News remained roiled on Monday by fallout from the decision by its new editor in chief, Bari Weiss, to abruptly postpone a segment of Sunday’s episode of “60 Minutes” that was critical of the Trump administration.

“I held that story because it was not ready,” Ms. Weiss, who joined CBS News in October, told colleagues at the top of a 9 a.m. editorial call with the newsroom, according to a recording of her remarks. She said that while the testimony of the imprisoned men was “very powerful,” other news organizations had already reported their basic story.

That viewpoint found little sympathy within “60 Minutes.” The show’s staff and correspondents convened for a somber Monday afternoon meeting, where the correspondent Scott Pelley expressed frustration at Ms. Weiss’s handling of the situation and raised questions about her management style. He asked why she had weighed in at the last minute after not attending five screenings of the segment as it was being completed. “It’s not a part-time job,” Mr. Pelley said, according to four people familiar with the discussion who requested anonymity to describe a private exchange.

In November 2024, Democrat Josh Stein scored an emphatic victory in the race to become North Carolina’s governor, drubbing his Republican opponent by almost 15 percentage points.

His honeymoon didn’t last long, however.

Two weeks after his win, the North Carolina legislature’s Republican supermajority fast-tracked a bill that would transform the balance of power in the state.

Its authors portrayed the 131-page proposal, released publicly only an hour before debate began, as a disaster relief measure for victims of Hurricane Helene. But much of it stripped powers from the state’s governor, taking away authority over everything from the highway patrol to the utilities commission. Most importantly, the bill eliminated the governor’s control over appointments to the state elections board, which sets voting rules and settles disputes in the swing state’s often close elections.

Ignoring protesters who labeled the bill a “legislative coup,” Republicans in the General Assembly easily outvoted Democrats, then overrode the outgoing Democratic governor’s veto.