HellsBelle

An Israeli military unit that has been accused of human rights abuses against Palestinian detainees is reportedly under investigation by the US state department in a move that could lead to it being barred from receiving assistance.

The inquiry into the activities of Force 100 was instigated following a spate of allegations that Palestinians held under its guard at a detention centre have been subject to torture and brutal mistreatment, including sexual assault, Axios reported on Monday.

Nine members of Force 100, a unit inside the Israeli Defence Forces, are the subject of criminal investigation over allegations that they sexually assaulted a prisoner at the Sde Teiman detention camp in the Negev desert, which human rights groups have dubbed “the Israeli Guantanamo”.

Canada’s military decided not to apologize to an employee after she was sexually assaulted while working with Nato allies, over fears that any apology would be reported by an Ottawa newspaper.

Kristen Adams, who was working at a canteen for troops in Latvia, was sexually assaulted by a Nato soldier on 3 December 2022. After filing a formal complaint about the assault, she was warned by the army’s morale and welfare services that she should have better understood the risks of the job.

People are dying left and right,” Meno Ya Win Hospital staff told Sol Mamakwa as the Kiiwetinoong MPP toured the Sioux Lookout area’s largest health care facility.

Sioux Lookout’s 76-bed long-term care facility was a promise the Liberals made in 2018 that has yet to transpire over six years of Progressive Conservative governance.

“After question period, I talked to Doug Ford. He came to me and this is what he said: ‘You know how we’re going to pay for that long-term care facility in Sioux Lookout? We’re going to need to open up the mines in the north.’

“So I told her that. She said, ‘really? Does that mean we have to give up our lands to get those [beds]?’

“‘Yep. That’s what that means.’

Humanity is “on the precipice” of shattering Earth’s limits, and will suffer huge costs if we fail to act on biodiversity loss, experts warn. This week, world leaders meet in Cali, Colombia, for the Cop16 UN biodiversity conference to discuss action on the global crisis. As they prepare for negotiations, scientists and experts around the world have warned that the stakes are high, and there is “no time to waste”.

“We are already locked in for significant damage, and we’re heading in a direction that will see more,” says Tom Oliver, professor of applied ecology at the University of Reading. “I really worry that negative changes could be very rapid.”

Since 1970, some studies estimate wildlife populations have declined on average by 73%, with huge numbers lost in the decades and centuries before. Passenger pigeons, the Carolina parakeets and Floreana giant tortoises are among the many species humans have obliterated. “It’s shameful that our single species is driving the extinction of thousands of others,” says Oliver.

The biodiversity crisis is not just about other species – humans also rely on the natural world for food, clean water and air to breathe. Oliver says: “I think we will, certainly, in the next 15 to 20 years, see continued food crises, and the real risk of multiple breadbasket failures … that’s in addition to a lot of the other risks that might impact us through fresh-water pollution, ocean acidification, wildfire and algal blooms, and so on.”

Mel Nichols, a 37-year-old bartender in Phoenix, Arizona, takes home anywhere from $30 to $50 an hour with tips included. But the uncertainty of how much she’s going to make on a daily basis is a constant source of stress.

“For every good day, there’s three bad days,” said Nichols, who has been in the service industry since she was a teenager. “You have no security when it comes to knowing how much you’re going to make.”

The amount tipped workers make varies by state. Fourteen states pay the federal minimum, or just above $2 an hour for tipped workers and $7 an hour for non-tipped workers.

A headline in the Wisconsin Catholic Tribune, and repurposed in other states’ versions, provocatively asks, “How many ‘sex change’ mutilation surgeries occurred on Wisconsin kids?” Another: “Haitian illegal aliens in America: What are Harris supporters saying?”

At the same time, they undermine Vice President Kamala Harris and prop up former President Donald Trump by, for instance, reminding readers on the front page that anti-vaccine activist and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — whose father and uncle were among the most prominent Catholics in the country — has endorsed Trump.

Dioceses and parishes in Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin have issued warnings about the publications. “It gives the impression that the Diocese of Grand Rapids or the Catholic Church is behind this newspaper,” diocese spokesperson Annalise Laumeyer said of the Michigan Catholic Tribune.

She reached out to local media to flag parishioners so they won’t be misled. And because of the clearly partisan content, non-Catholics might be left with an impression of the Catholic Church that is “worrisome,” she said.

Trump was campaigning in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where Palmer was born in 1929 and learned to golf from his father, who suffered from polio and was head pro and greenskeeper at the local country club.

“Arnold Palmer was all man, and I say that in all due respect to women,” Trump said. “This is a guy that was all man.”

Then he went even further.

“When he took the showers with other pros, they came out of there. They said, ‘Oh my God. That’s unbelievable,’” Trump said with a laugh. “I had to say. We have women that are highly sophisticated here, but they used to look at Arnold as a man.”

RTX CORPORATION, the weapons giant formerly (and better) known as Raytheon, agreed on Wednesday to pay almost $1 billion to resolve allegations that it defrauded the U.S. government and paid bribes to secure business with Qatar.

“Raytheon engaged in criminal schemes to defraud the U.S. government,” said Deputy Assistant Attorney General Kevin Driscoll of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division on Wednesday. “Such corrupt and fraudulent conduct, especially by a publicly traded U.S. defense contractor, erodes public trust and harms the DOD, businesses that play by the rules, and American taxpayers.”

RTX, as part of this agreement that spanned multiple investigations into its business, admitted to engaging in two separate schemes to defraud the Defense Department, which included deals for a radar system and Patriot missile systems. It also agreed to enter a separate deferred prosecution agreement, which requires increased government oversight and transparency for the next three years, in connection with the Qatari kickbacks.

Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance’s appearance at a far-right Christian revival tour last month may have broken tax and election laws, experts say.

On Sept. 28, Vance held an official campaign event in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, in partnership with the Courage Tour, a series of swing-state rallies hosted by a pro-Trump Christian influencer that combine prayer, public speakers, tutorials on how to become a poll worker and get-out-the-vote programming.

Even before the Vance event, ProPublica previously reported that tax experts believed Ziklag’s 2024 election-related efforts could be in violation of tax law. The Vance event, they said, raised even more red flags about whether a tax-exempt charity had improperly benefited the Trump-Vance campaign.

Wesley Wark, a national security expert with the Centre for International Governance Innovation, said Trudeau's testimony wasn't terribly revealing.

Wark pointed to the report the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) released in June, which suggested some parliamentarians had been "'semi-witting or witting participants" in foreign interference activities.

Wark also said it's not clear to what extent the unnamed parliamentarians could be compromised — and suggested many may not even be aware that they are.

In the past, Poilievre has defended his decision not to receive a national security clearance and get briefed by intelligence agencies by arguing that it would prevent him from speaking freely and criticizing the government on foreign interference issues.

(Richard) Fadden said that wouldn't be the case.

"Just because you have a security clearance doesn't mean you have to become a Carthusian monk and never speak," he said. He also said that Poilievre could choose to be briefed only on issues affecting his own party if he wanted to create a buffer ensuring he could criticize the government on foreign interference.

The Texas Supreme Court halted Thursday night’s scheduled execution of a man who would have become the first person in the U.S. put to death for a murder conviction tied to a diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome.

The late-night ruling to spare for now the life of Robert Roberson, who was convicted of killing his 2-year-old daughter in 2002, capped a flurry of last-ditch legal challenges and weeks of public pressure from both Republican and Democratic lawmakers who say he is innocent and was sent to death row based on flawed science.

Israel Katz, the Israeli foreign minister, accused the UN secretary general, António Guterres, of “leading an extreme anti-Israel and anti-Jewish agenda”.

“Guterres did not welcome the elimination of arch-terrorist Yahya Sinwar, just as he refused to declare Hamas a terrorist organisation after the October 7th massacre,” he said in a post on X. “We will continue to designate him as persona non grata and bar his entry to Israel.”

Guterres had issued a brief statement after the missile attack condemning “the broadening of the Middle East conflict, with escalation after escalation”, but Katz said this did not go far enough.