HellsBelle

A brand-new water bomber sat unused and idle at the La Ronge airport as wildfires raged nearby, destroying homes and businesses, according to Saskatchewan's Opposition NDP.

NDP public safety critic Nicole Sarauer said the province took delivery of the multi-million dollar Conair Dash 8-Q400AT airtanker on May 30, according to flight records.

"Since landing, the aircraft hasn't logged a single flight. It's been sitting there unused," Sarauer said.

Sarauer said the plane sat idle and unused, with Premier Scott Moe seemingly unaware it had even arrived.

She pointed to June 6, a week after the plane arrived, when Moe said during a daily Saskatchewan Public Safety Agency (SPSA) briefing that the plane was on its way and would be put to use as soon as it arrived and was ready.

"It appears that Premier Scott Moe and the Sask Party government either weren't straight about the bomber or were completely asleep at the wheel during a crisis," Sarauer said.

The NAACP announced Monday the group will not invite President Donald Trump to its national convention next month in Charlotte, North Carolina, the first time the prominent civil rights organization has opted to exclude a sitting president in its 116-year history.

NAACP President Derrick Johnson announced the move at an afternoon press conference, accusing Trump of working against its mission.

“This has nothing to do with political party,” Johnson said in a statement. “Our mission is to advance civil rights, and the current president has made clear that his mission is to eliminate civil rights.”

Nine days after he helped defend the U.S. Capitol from a mob of Trump supporters, Metropolitan Police Officer Jeffrey Smith shot and killed himself while driving to work. Over four years later, Smith’s widow is trying to prove to a jury that one of the thousands of rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, is responsible for her husband’s suicide.

The trial for Erin Smith’s wrongful death lawsuit against David Walls-Kaufman started nearly six months after President Donald Trump torpedoed the largest investigation in FBI history. Trump pardoned, commuted prison sentences or ordered the dismissal of cases for all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in the attack.

But his sweeping act of clemency didn’t erase Smith’s lawsuit against Walls-Kaufman, a 69-year-old chiropractor who pleaded guilty to Capitol riot-related misdemeanor in January 2023. A federal jury in Washington, D.C., began hearing testimony Monday for a civil trial expected to last roughly one week.

A Canadian Indigenous leader who greeted world heads of state arriving for the Group of Seven summit says he was “filled with rage” and considered leaving before Donald Trump arrived — saying the U.S. president has “caused much pain and suffering in the world.”

Instead, Steven Crowchild prayed, consulted with his peoples’ leaders and ultimately opted to stay on the tarmac for a long conversation with Trump that he hopes will call more attention to promoting peace, protecting clean water and other issues key to Canada’s First Nation peoples.

“It was really intense, to say the least,” Crowchild told The Associated Press on Monday, recalling his lengthy encounter with Trump on Sunday night in Calgary for the G7 in nearby Kananaskis. “When I woke up on Father’s Day, I didn’t anticipate I would be seeing world leaders, and one certain individual that has caused much pain and suffering in the world.”

Former U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez is set to report to federal prison on Tuesday to begin serving an 11-year sentence for accepting bribes of gold and cash and acting as an agent of Egypt. The New Jersey Democrat has been mocked for the crimes as “Gold Bar Bob,” according to his own lawyer.

Menendez’s lawyers revealed in court papers last month that he is expected to be housed at a facility in eastern Pennsylvania that has both a medium-security prison and a minimum-security prison camp. Given the white-collar nature of his crimes, it’s likely he’ll end up in the camp.

Pleading for leniency, Menendez told a judge at his sentencing in January: “I am far from a perfect man. I have made more than my share of mistakes and bad decisions. I’ve done far more good than bad.”

Menendez has also appeared to be angling for a pardon from President Donald Trump, aligning himself with the Republican’s criticisms of the judicial system, particularly in New York City.

From a distance they look almost like ordinary sailboats, their sails emblazoned with the red-and-white flag of Denmark.

But these 10-meter (30-foot) -long vessels carry no crew and are designed for surveillance.

Four uncrewed robotic sailboats, known as “Voyagers,” have been put into service by Denmark’s armed forces for a three-month operational trial.

Built by Alameda, California-based company Saildrone, the vessels will patrol Danish and NATO waters in the Baltic and North Seas, where maritime tensions and suspected sabotage have escalated sharply since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.

Link to study

Climate change has tripled the frequency of atmospheric wave events linked to extreme summer weather in the last 75 years and that may explain why long-range computer forecasts keep underestimating the surge in killer heat waves, droughts and floods, a new study says.

In the 1950s, Earth averaged about one extreme weather-inducing planetary wave event a summer, but now it is getting about three per summer, according to a study in Monday’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Planetary waves are connected to 2021’s deadly and unprecedented Pacific Northwest heat wave, the 2010 Russian heatwave and Pakistan flooding and the 2003 killer European heatwave, the study said.

Planetary waves flow across Earth all the time, but sometimes they get amplified, becoming stronger, and the jet stream gets wavier with bigger hills and valleys, Mann said. It’s called quasi-resonant amplification or QRA.

For over 30 years, the winner of the National Hockey League's top prize has gone to an American team. It's a sorry legacy for a country where ice hockey is not just a sport, but part of the national identity. About 40% of players in the NHL, across all teams, are Canadian - more than any other country.

Last year, the Oilers flopped during the final game of the seven-game series against the Florida Panthers.

It's a sore point for many Canadians that the league's most die-hard fans have gone so long without a trophy, and yet remain willing to spend big money and travel big distances to support their team.

What Happened: A monitor appointed by a federal court has found that a New York City Police Department unit has been unjustly stopping and searching New Yorkers, almost all of them Black and Hispanic men. The report on the NYPD’s Community Response Team echoes a recent ProPublica investigation that found the unit, championed by Mayor Eric Adams, has been ridden with abuses.

The federal monitor found that while the CRT was initially created in the early days of the Adams’ administration to focus on so-called quality-of-life issues such as illegal motorbikes, its officers have more recently been “stopping, frisking, and searching unconstitutionally.”

What They Said: In a sample of body-worn camera footage, the monitor found that 41% of stops, searches, and frisks by CRT officers were unlawful, a far higher percentage than with other NYPD units. What’s more, while officers are required to document such stops, which the department then releases as public data, the report found that officers often failed to do so, and even when they did there was a “lack of meaningful review” by supervisors.

As ProPublica previously reported, that behavior goes back to at least 2023, when an NYPD audit found officers were wrongfully stopping New Yorkers and failing to log the incidents. Soon after the audit, the mayor took to Instagram. “Turning out with the team,” he wrote, showing a photo of him wearing the CRT’s signature khaki pants.

She finds the whole idea absurd. To Prof Marci Shore, the notion that the Guardian, or anyone else, should want to interview her about the future of the US is ridiculous. She’s an academic specialising in the history and culture of eastern Europe and describes herself as a “Slavicist”, yet here she is, suddenly besieged by international journalists keen to ask about the country in which she insists she has no expertise: her own. “It’s kind of baffling,” she says.

In fact, the explanation is simple enough. Last month, Shore, together with her husband and fellow scholar of European history, Timothy Snyder, and the academic Jason Stanley, made news around the world when they announced that they were moving from Yale University in the US to the University of Toronto in Canada. It was not the move itself so much as their motive that garnered attention. As the headline of a short video op-ed the trio made for the New York Times put it, “We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the US”.

Starkly, Shore invoked the ultimate warning from history. “The lesson of 1933 is: you get out sooner rather than later.” She seemed to be saying that what had happened then, in Germany, could happen now, in Donald Trump’s America – and that anyone tempted to accuse her of hyperbole or alarmism was making a mistake. “My colleagues and friends, they were walking around and saying, ‘We have checks and balances. So let’s inhale, checks and balances, exhale, checks and balances.’ I thought, my God, we’re like people on the Titanic saying, ‘Our ship can’t sink. We’ve got the best ship. We’ve got the strongest ship. We’ve got the biggest ship.’ And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.”

The valedictorian at a west Ottawa high school says she's been told not to come to school Monday after she made pro-Palestinian remarks during a speech at her commencement ceremony.

Elizabeth Yao largely focused on highlights from the past four years at Bell High School during her speech on Thursday, including a memorable waffle fundraiser and the days spent dozing off while reading Shakespeare.

Her comments on the war in Gaza came at the end, after a land acknowledgement.

"As a commitment to truth and reconciliation, I must acknowledge colonial and genocidal atrocities today, including the massacre of more than 17,000 Palestinian children in Gaza," Yao said, breaking off as the crowd cheered.

Doctors and scientists worry Alberta's measles outbreaks could signal the start of a new era when other dangerous infectious diseases of the past could re-emerge and pose new health threats.

The province is battling its worst wave of measles cases in nearly half a century and there is no end in sight.

As of Friday, a total of 879 measles cases had been reported in the province since the outbreaks began in March.

It's one of the first to re-emerge, experts say, because it is so highly contagious and requires very high vaccination rates (about 95 per cent) for population level protection.

Provincial data shows in 2024 just 68.1 per cent of Alberta two-year-olds were up to date with two doses of the measles vaccine.