HellsBelle

A federal judge has sided with two First Nations in Manitoba and one in Ontario that sued the Canadian government over its duty to provide them with safe housing and clean drinking water, in separate rulings delivered Friday.

The federal government has had a duty to ensure Shamattawa First Nation, and other First Nations who opt into the northern Manitoba First Nation's class-action, were provided access to drinking water safe for human use over the claim period, Justice Paul Favel said in a decision.

Shamattawa launched the class-action, which was certified in 2023, on behalf of all First Nations members countrywide whose communities were subject to a drinking water advisory in effect on or after June 20, 2020.

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”.

The Swedish navy encounters Russian submarines in the Baltic Sea on an “almost weekly” basis, its chief of operations has said, and is preparing for a further increase in the event of ceasefire or armistice in the Ukraine war.

Capt Marko Petkovic said Moscow was “continuously reinforcing” its presence in the region, and sightings of its vessels were a regular part of life for the Swedish navy. Its “very common”, he said, adding that the number of sightings had increased in recent years.

Sweden recently hosted a major Nato anti-submarine warfare exercise, Playbook Merlin 25, featuring nine countries, including Sweden, Germany, France and the US, in which hundreds of personnel practised their submarine-hunting skills in the unique conditions of the Baltic to prepare for possible underwater attack.

An Alberta judge says a referendum proposal on Alberta separating from Canada goes against Charter and Treaty rights, in a decision given less than 24 hours after the provincial government introduced legislation that would have ended the court proceeding.

The province's Bill 14, which was introduced Thursday, would end court action on the issue once it came into effect. The proposed bill would allow citizen initiatives to go ahead even if they might violate the Constitution.

Court of King's Bench Justice Colin Feasby, who has listened to several days of arguments about the independence proposal, had sharp words for the government move to change the law.

"Legislating to pre-emptively end this court proceeding disrespects the administration of justice," he said in the Calgary Court of King's Bench on Friday.

It’s been hard to keep track of how many legal challenges and active court proceedings the United Conservative government has tried to quash or pre-emptively block in the last six weeks, but let’s try to tally:

• The notwithstanding clause to thwart separate constitutional challenges by the Canadian Medical Association (1) and 2SLGBTQ+ advocacy groups (2) against Alberta’s ban on some transgender youth health care.
• Notwithstanding clause against those advocacy groups’ challenge against the school pronouns law (3).
• Notwithstanding clause against any potential challenges against the ban on transgender women in women’s sports (4).
• Notwithstanding clause against teachers’ potential challenge to the strike-ending and imposed contract (5).
• Bill 12’s provision to block public sector pensions from suing over the Alberta wealth management fund’s past trading losses (6). And then the measure in this week’s Bill 14 designed to discontinue the court hearing about the constitutionality of a citizen’s initiative petition for Alberta separation from Canada (7).

One could argue there’s an eighth case the UCP government’s legislation would nullify if passed — one filed by the United Conservative Party itself. That would be the governing party’s lawsuit against two of its former MLAs who had applied with Elections Alberta to rebrand the Alberta Party as the Progressive Conservative Party.

Jin Kang, the CEO of a telecom and IT company, was talking to stock analysts this past spring, when he was asked about the company’s prospects for winning government contracts.

“So we’ve been trying to get access to Tom Homan and the folks over at DHS at the secretary level,” Kang said. “I think we’ve gotten some…traction, but it’s too early to tell, but we are knocking on the doors of the various political operatives so that they could get us in the door to talk about the potential savings that we could provide.”

Kang’s statement stands out because Homan, prior to joining the second Trump administration as its “border czar,” ran a consulting firm that helped companies pursue government contracts. It does not appear that WidePoint was a Homan client, but other current contractors were. Homan has vowed, as federal ethics guidance advises, to stay out of federal procurement decisions.

Kang’s claim is even more striking in light of news reports that Homan was recorded last year accepting $50,000 in a Cava bag from undercover FBI agents posing as businessmen paying for help winning government contracts in a second Trump administration. Homan has said he did nothing illegal and has stated that he “didn’t take $50,000 from anybody.” Trump’s Justice Department ultimately dropped the matter after investigators, according to Attorney General Pam Bondi, “found no credible evidence of any wrongdoing.” The White House has called the FBI probe “a blatantly political investigation” by the Biden administration.

In the 15 years from 2010 through 2024, 375 people in Texas were exonerated after being imprisoned for crimes they did not commit. Of those, 97 received some form of compensation or settlement from the state. Collectively, those 97 people spent more than 1,200 years in prison. The state paid them just under $156 million, or an average of about $130,000 per person per year behind bars.

Last year, New York City paid out $205 million to settle 956 lawsuits alleging police abuse. That figure includes about $16 million each to two men who served three decades in prison for a murder they didn’t commit. It also includes people who were wrongly raided and beaten by police, and people who were outright framed by law enforcement.

I bring up these figures because, according to multiple reports, Donald Trump is about to order the government to pay him “damages” for the FBI raid on his Mar-a-Lago mansion and for special prosecutor Jack Smith’s two investigations of him—one for stealing, hoarding, and improperly sharing classified documents, and the other for Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. He’s going to pay himself $230 million.

So Trump—who didn’t spend a minute behind bars—about to swindle about 50 percent more than the total amount of money paid to the 97 innocent people who were incarcerated for more than 1,200 years in Texas. Or about 12 percent more than the total paid last year to 957 victims of police brutality in New York City.

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Nearly two years ago, on December 7, 2023, the war triggered by Hamas's attack on Israel gave Hussam al-Astal a second chance at life. The former noncommissioned officer from the Palestinian Authority in Gaza, sentenced to death by the Islamist movement, was awaiting execution in the Asda prison, a sprawling ochre concrete complex whose highest windows overlook a faded amusement park and the sea to the south of the enclave. Hamas had accused him of having assassinated one of their own, an engineer, acting on orders from Israel. In late fall 2023, Asda's guards fled under Israeli bombardment, taking most of their prisoners with them. Al-Astal said he broke out of his cell three days later. Reached by phone in Gaza – where Israel prohibits foreign press from entering – he relished his luck. At 50, he has regained weight and rediscovered his sense of humor. He has become a warlord.

Al-Astal leads a militia less than one kilometer from an Israeli base that protects him. He rules over the ruins of his hometown, Khan Yunis, behind the "yellow line" that has split Gaza in two since the October 9 ceasefire. He roams the eastern sector, controlled by the Israeli army and entirely depopulated, alongside at least three other Palestinian groups funded and armed by Israel. This is a zone from which the military is supposed to withdraw in the second phase of the deal brokered by the United States.

For two years now, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has sought to use such groups and the clans from which they originate as an alternative to both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, which he no longer wants in the enclave. "Together, we represent that alternative to Hamas. We will rid Gaza of Hamas, which is responsible for all our suffering for so many years," said al-Astal. This militiaman said he protects 25 families, amounting to a few dozen fighters and their relatives. In total, he and his allies command only a few hundred men, a force far too small to rival Hamas. Their own clans have publicly disavowed them. Gazans despise these opportunists, who, via Israel's protection, have established themselves as the main organized looters of food convoys in the enclave since 2024.

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A quarter-century after its publication, one of the most influential research articles on the potential carcinogenicity of glyphosate has been retracted for "several critical issues that are considered to undermine the academic integrity of this article and its conclusions." In a retraction notice dated Friday, November 28, the journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology announced that the study, published in April 2000 and concluding the herbicide was safe, has been removed from its archives. The disavowal comes 25 years after publication and eight years after thousands of internal Monsanto documents were made public during US court proceedings (the "Monsanto Papers"), revealing that the actual authors of the article were not the listed scientists – Gary M. Williams (New York Medical College), Robert Kroes (Ritox, Utrecht University, Netherlands), and Ian C. Munro (Intertek Cantox, Canada) – but rather Monsanto employees.

In cautious terms, Martin van den Berg, co-editor-in-chief of Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, noted that "employees of Monsanto may have contributed to the writing of the article without proper acknowledgment as co-authors. This lack of transparency raises serious ethical concerns regarding the independence and accountability of the authors of this article and the academic integrity of the carcinogenicity studies presented." Other failings are cited, notably the failure to disclose the authors' compensation by Monsanto. "The potential financial compensation raises significant ethical concerns and calls into question the apparent academic objectivity of the authors in this publication," van den Berg added.

The Department of War (DOW) is receiving well-earned praise for reversing the military’s recruitment crisis. In FY2025, all the branches of the military met or exceeded their recruitment goals.

(The problem) is America’s retention crisis. Given the immensely complex tasks we demand of experienced enlisted service members and officers, the time and money it takes to replace the expertise required to perform these tasks, and how central this expertise is to modern warfighting, we cannot afford to keep hemorrhaging essential talent.

Despite spending nearly six billion dollars on recruiting and retention in recent years, including giving over 70,000 people retention bonuses, people are leaving the military at some of the highest rates of the last decade. For instance, 7% of Air Force officers and 11% of Airmen now leave the service each year, 350% and 550% above the national average, respectively.

Unsurprisingly, the more specialized and in-demand an officer’s skill-set is, the more likely the military is to lose them to the private sector. Four thousand troops left cyber jobs in 2024, despite DOW facing a 16% cyber position vacancy rate. While DOW does not publicly track how many AI experts it employs and loses each year, Georgetown University reports an intense shortage of uniformed personnel who understand both the mission and the emerging technology.

High levels of a toxic “forever chemical” have been found in cereal products across Europe because of its presence in pesticides.

The most contaminated food is breakfast cereal, according to a study by Pesticide Action Network Europe (PAN), with average concentrations 100 times higher than in tap water.

The study found trifluoroacetic acid (TFA), a chemical produced when pesticides containing Pfas chemicals break down into the soil, in breakfast cereals, popular sweets, pasta, croissants, wholemeal and refined bread, and flour.

TFA is reprotoxic, which means it has the potential to harm human reproductive function, fertility, and foetal development. It has also been linked to adverse effects on thyroid, liver and immune functions. Campaigners are calling on governments to set a far more protective TFA safety limit and to ban all Pfas pesticides and other sources of TFA. Currently, governments do not monitor TFA in food.

TFA was detected in 81.5% of samples (53 out of 65 samples) across 16 European countries, with high contamination levels. Wheat products are significantly more contaminated than other cereal-based products.

Nearly half of Europeans see Donald Trump as “an enemy of Europe”, rather more rate the risk of war with Russia as high and more than two-thirds believe their country would not be able to defend itself in the event of such a war, a survey has found.

The nine-country poll for the Paris-based European affairs debate platform Le Grand Continent also found that nearly three-quarters of respondents wanted their country to stay in the EU, with almost as many saying leaving the union had harmed the UK.

Jean-Yves Dormagen, a political science professor and founder of the polling agency Cluster17, said: “Europe is not only facing growing risks, it is also undergoing a transformation of its historical, geopolitical and political environment. The overall picture [of the survey] portrays a Europe that is anxious, that is deeply aware of its vulnerabilities and that is struggling to project itself positively into the future.”

The polling found that an average of 48% of people across the nine countries see Trump as an outright foe – ranging from highs of 62% in Belgium and 57% in France to lows of 37% in Croatia and 19% in Poland.