HellsBelle

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.

Before Todd Blanche could be confirmed as the second-highest official at the Justice Department, he had to satisfy the concerns of ethics officials.

Blanche, President Donald Trump’s personal attorney during his New York criminal trial last year, was a cryptocurrency investor with holdings of between $159,000 and $485,000, records show.

To prevent possible violations of the federal conflicts of interest statute, Blanche promised to dump his digital assets no later than 90 days after his Senate confirmation in March, according to his government ethics agreement. He also pledged not to participate in any matter that could have a “direct and predictable effect on my financial interests in the virtual currency” until his Bitcoin and other crypto-related products were sold.

But about a month into the job — before divesting — Blanche issued a memo that ordered an end to investigations into crypto companies, dealers and exchanges launched during President Joe Biden’s term. He also eliminated an enforcement team dedicated to looking for crypto-related fraud and money-laundering schemes. And his memo said the Justice Department would assist Trump’s crypto working group of experts and Cabinet members that went on to issue a list of recommendations aimed at making the United States the global leader in digital coins.

It’s a fundamental tenet of health care in America: Generic drugs are just as safe and effective as brand-name ones. The only difference is the price.

“The same high quality, strength, purity and stability,” the Food and Drug Administration assured the public years ago as factories started to flood the market with their own, cheaper versions of commonly used drugs, from antibiotics to cancer treatments.

But the agency stakes that promise on a risky gamble.

It doesn’t routinely test generics for quality concerns or to see if they’re working as effectively as brand-name medications. Instead, the agency heavily relies on drug companies, often in countries as far away as India and China, to do their own testing and to report any problems.

Yet the FDA largely dismissed the warnings and has only sporadically tested a sampling of generic drugs, which now account for about 90% of prescriptions in the United States. That means the government can’t always say which ones may be compromised or how often that happens. And patients can’t make informed choices about which drugmakers to depend on.

The prime ministers of Denmark and Greenland have demanded respect for their borders after Donald Trump appointed a special envoy to the largely self-governing Danish territory, which he has said repeatedly should be under US control.

“We have said it very clearly before. Now we say it again. National borders and the sovereignty of states are rooted in international law … You cannot annex other countries,” Mette Frederiksen and Jens-Frederik Nielsen said in a joint statement.

The two leaders added that “fundamental principles” were at stake. “Greenland belongs to the Greenlanders, and the US should not take over Greenland,” they said. “We expect respect for our common territorial integrity.”

Eight weeks after adding a GM BrightDrop van to the fleet of his plumbing and heating business, Marty Salliss has no complaints, only praise.

Well, maybe only one complaint: That he may not be able to get another one.

"It's an easy vehicle to drive, and actually it's a really fun vehicle," said Salliss, whose company is about to celebrate 25 years doing business in London. "As a service truck, it's been phenomenal."

Salliss leased a BrightDrop 400 in October, the same month General Motors announced they would no longer produce the electric delivery vehicle at the CAMI Assembly plant in Ingersoll, Ont.

Every year hundreds of seniors pass through the doors of Vancouver’s Union Gospel Mission (UGM) in the Downtown Eastside.

But since the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of seniors accessing the shelter’s services has been steadily increasing.

Pre-pandemic, roughly one-quarter of people staying at the shelter were over the age of 55, according to UGM. Post-pandemic, that’s grown to one-third.

In November, for the first time in the organization's history, home-care aid workers started making weekly visits to the shelter to help seniors with basic tasks like taking a shower.

Nasr Ahmed, staff organizer at Communications Workers of America (CWA) Canada, was part of a small solidarity march outside Rockstar Toronto's offices earlier in December. He called Rockstar's claims of the fired workers leaking confidential information "patently false."

"They have not provided any proof for those claims, either for the Canadian workers or the U.K. workers," he said.

He corroborated an account from the IWGB that all 34 workers were part of an online discussion group on the app Discord, where industry workers interested in unionizing or learning about unions in the U.K. could talk about working conditions.

The fired employee told CBC News that the workers were from different departments and had different seniorities across the company, both in Canada and the U.K., and that "the only common link among us" was they were all part of the Discord group. CBC News has not viewed chat messages from the Discord group and could not verify their contents.

Over the summer, as the Trump administration deployed members of the National Guard and ICE agents to patrol our streets and round up our immigrant neighbors, Dunn went viral for calling the federal law enforcement officers he encountered fascists and for tossing a hoagie—or hero, as the case may be—at one agent’s chest. To locals, the former Department of Justice paralegal’s stunt came across as a slapstick act of resistance in an otherwise unnerving time. To the Trump administration, it was a felony assault.

In the months since Dunn lost his government job and was arrested by a swarm of US marshals armed with guns and riot shields, he’s been idolized by many who oppose the militaristic occupation of DC. But 37-year-old Dunn rejects the hero label, telling HuffPost that the onslaught of praise has made him “uncomfortable.” So I’d like to suggest we salute a different group instead: the grand jurors who declined to indict him.

Grand jury deliberations are secretive and its members are anonymous. It’s unlikely we will ever know, definitively, why the majority of jurors opted against an indictment in Dunn’s case. But given the testimonies about strewn onions and mustard, I find it difficult to believe the group thought Dunn’s actions were completely lawful. Rather, it seems likely that Dunn benefitted from something called jury nullification: a grand jury’s decision to find someone not guilty, not because the jurors don’t believe a crime was committed, but because they felt the law—or the application of it—was unjust.

US Justice Department officials on Sunday, December 21, denied redacting the Epstein files to protect President Donald Trump, as criticism mounted over the partial and heavily-censored release of documents.

Victims of Jeffrey Epstein have expressed anger after a cache of records from cases against the late sex offender were released Friday with many pages blacked out and photos censored.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche on Sunday defended the release by the Justice Department, telling NBC's Meet the Press that "we are not redacting information around President Trump." When asked if any material was redacted to due to political sensitivities – which would be illegal – Blanche replied "absolutely, positively not."

The US military will stop its practice of shooting pigs and goats to help prepare medics for treating wounded troops in a combat zone, ending an exercise made obsolete by simulators that mimic battlefield injuries.

The prohibition on “live fire” training that includes animals is part of this year’s annual defense bill, although other uses of animals for wartime training will continue. The ban was championed by Vern Buchanan, a Republican congressman from Florida who often focuses on animal rights issues.

Buchanan’s office said the defense department will continue to allow training that involves stabbing, burning and using blunt instruments on animals, while also allowing “weapon wounding”, which is when the military tests weapons on animals. Animal rights groups say the animals are supposed to be anesthetized during such training and testing.

The Trump administration continues to insist that Venezuela’s leftist government poses a serious national security threat. United States officials especially assert that Nicolas Maduro’s regime is deeply involved in the illegal drug trade coming into the United States, including the surge in fentanyl in recent years. Indeed, Trump and his associates maintain that Venezuela’s government is little more than a disguised drug cartel. Washington has invoked the argument to justify an escalating series of attacks on small boats, including fishing vessels, in waters near that country.

Contending that illegal drug trafficking constitutes a national security threat sufficiently serious enough to warrant using the US military against a sovereign country is a dubious argument. Moreover, Venezuela is not a major player in the fentanyl trade.

Unfortunately, threat inflation is nothing new. Three pro-war administrations managed to obtain sufficient support from Congress and the public for military action against tiny, distant North Vietnam, based on the absurd notion that it posed a security threat to the United States. Several recent White House occupants have engaged in similar threat inflation, with respect, to justify wars against designated US adversaries.

WHEN OREGON MUSIC teacher Susan Lewis logged onto a Zoom meeting with her boss one afternoon in August 2024, she thought she would be preparing for a sixth year teaching at Valley Catholic School. Instead, she lost her job.

Lewis was shocked, she recalled in an interview with The Intercept, as were her colleagues and students. The school did not give any explanation for why they did not renew her contract. Unbeknownst to Lewis, the pro-Israel blacklist organization StopAntisemitism had recently launched an online campaign against her, framing her social media posts about the genocide in Gaza as “using her platform to spread vile antisemitic hate online.”

She sued StopAntisemitism for defamation in an Oregon state court over the summer, and the case was elevated to federal court last month. Her suit faces long odds, legal experts told The Intercept, but serves as a rare chance to register public dissent in the courts against the group’s targeting.