HellsBelle

On Oct. 7, 2019, a 30-year-old beautician named Temptress Peebles called the Nashville probation office begging for help. Days earlier, her ex-boyfriend Brandon Horton had come up behind her, choked her and kicked her in the face, according to a court document.

Records show that was just the most recent attack. She had been living in a constant state of fear, her family said, since Horton had broken down her door and pointed a gun at her three months earlier, court records show. He had open warrants for his arrest, so she and her 8-year-old daughter, Khloe, were avoiding the apartment, always taking different roads to get to work or to stay at her family’s house.

Peebles asked the probation manager if Horton could be arrested when he came in for a court date the next day. Horton’s probation file shows the manager said she would try to help.

But Horton never showed up to court, according to his probation file, and Nashville police didn’t arrest him until it was too late.

Ten days after that call, probation and police records show, Horton waited for Peebles outside her apartment. Khloe told WPLN she remembers seeing Horton pointing a gun at her mom. She remembers throwing her arms around his legs and pleading with him, “no, no, no.” She remembers trying to call 911 while her mom, shot in both legs, lay in the street bleeding to death.

The Senate has passed a critical funding bill that could end the longest government shutdown in US history within days.

The breakthrough came after Senate Democrats broke with their party to strike a deal with Republicans, in a move that has enraged many in their caucus.

Some Democrats are now calling for the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, to resign, even though he voted against the deal, as many in the party are furious that the agreement does not include any extensions on healthcare subsidies.

Some municipalities in Manitoba are renewing calls for the province to make legislative changes to reduce the role police play in responding to crises as rural and northern communities deal with staffing challenges with law enforcement and an increase in mental health calls.

This comes more than a year after the NDP government committed to an extensive review of the Mental Health Act after families and advocates pressed for system changes. Winnipeg police have also voiced support for an approach that would see mental health groups take the lead on non-violent calls.

Right now, the legislation dictates that peace officers are the only people able to detain someone experiencing a mental health crisis and often the only ones able to transport individuals to a facility.

"The current model is unsustainable and is a grossly ineffective use of resources," said Lisa Gaudet, deputy city manager in Dauphin, Man.

Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand will open Canada’s new consulate in Greenland's capital this week, as both allies seek to deepen ties amid turbulent relations with the U.S.

The pledge to open the diplomatic office — along with another consulate in Anchorage, Alaska — was initially laid out in the federal government’s Arctic foreign policy, unveiled late last year. Greenland’s government encouraged the move in its own policy document in early 2024, and hopes to reciprocate with an office in Ottawa.

Over 250 Quebec doctors are applying to be able to work in Ontario, according to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario. The surge of applications is happening in the wake of a controversial bill reforming doctors’ pay, which was passed on Oct. 25 in Quebec.

In just over two weeks, the CPSO saw over 13 times more applicants than the 19 total received from June 1 to Oct. 22 this year, according to data provided in a statement to CBC Toronto.

Quebec’s Bill 2, which is set to take effect in the new year, links doctors' compensation to performance targets relating to the number of patients they care for. It also imposes fines of up to $500,000 per day on doctors who take "concerted action" to challenge the government's policies.

An Ontario judge has dismissed billionaire businessman Frank Stronach's bid to quash his committal to stand trial on one of the dozen charges he faces in his Toronto sexual assault case.

Stronach, 93, was committed to stand trial on 12 charges following a preliminary hearing in April. The charges stem from alleged incidents dating back decades.

His lawyers challenged the decision regarding one charge, but the motion was rejected Monday after submissions by the defence and the Crown.

More pre-trial motions are scheduled to be heard this month, with the judge-alone trial expected to begin in February.

Is the United States about to start testing nuclear weapons again? Recent comments by United States President Trump suggested that he is strongly considering testing nuclear warheads in response to real and perceived tests by other nuclear powers.

These comments left many confused about the future of US policy and the state of intelligence on adversary nuclear programs.

So what’s going on? As is often the case, President Trump seems to prize unpredictability.

We don’t know what’s going to happen, but it wouldn’t hurt to review where we’ve been.

In October, a Trump benefactor gave $130 million to stave off what would have been a major political liability and cover the paychecks for service members during the government shutdown. The office space Eleanor Roosevelt once occupied has been unceremoniously bulldozed to make way for a gargantuan ballroom, also being funded by corporate “donations” from the likes of BlackRock, Booz Allen Hamilton, and tech giants like Apple and Amazon. The sticker price of the project has soared from $200 million to $350 million. To add insult to injury, the donors will likely write off their bribes to the latest Trump event venue as charitable contributions, as economist Dean Baker laid out. The president is working to intervene in negotiations around the sale of Warner Brothers–Discovery to ensure that his longtime supporters, the Ellisons, are able to add on to their growing media empire. And that’s just the past couple of weeks!

It’s not for nothing that my colleagues at the Revolving Door Project have had more than enough material for a biweekly rundown in our Corruption Calendar. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington also recently published a timeline tracking national and state corruption since January 20.

While Trumpian corruption is striking in frequency, scale, and just how routine it is starting to feel, this administration was the logical endpoint of the long-standing tradition of elite impunity. The second Trump administration is a striking monument to governmental misconduct, but the ground was broken long ago, with both parties laying the foundation. For the past half century, corporate and white-collar crime have gone largely unenforced. This was the result of both a widespread shift in views of governance (à la the Reagan Revolution) and a coordinated plan orchestrated to enable private wealth to hijack our democracy, as David Sirota and Jared Jacang Maher documented in their new book “Master Plan,” building on a podcast of the same name.

American inspections of foreign food facilities — which produce everything from crawfish to cookies for the U.S. market — have plummeted to historic lows this year, a ProPublica analysis of federal data shows, even as inspections reveal alarming conditions at some manufacturers.

About two dozen current and former Food and Drug Administration officials blame the pullback on deep staffing cuts under the Trump administration. The stark reduction marks a dramatic shift in oversight at a time when the United States has never been more dependent on foreign food, which accounts for the vast majority of the nation’s seafood and more than half its fresh fruit.

The stakes are high: Foreign products have been increasingly linked to outbreaks of foodborne illness. In recent years, FDA investigators have uncovered disturbing lapses in facilities producing food bound for American supermarkets. In Indonesia, cookie factory workers hauled dough in soiled buckets. In China, seafood processors slid crawfish along cracked, stained conveyor belts. Investigators have reported crawling insects, dripping pipes and fake testing data purporting to show food products were pathogen free.

A court document reveals what a criminologist calls a "striking list" of offences by a Winnipeg police officer who used his position to engage in a range of illegal activity for which he's now expected to serve prison time.

Const. Elston Bostock leaked police information to associates involved in illicit activity, shared a photo of a dead topless woman with other officers, used his connections to get contacts out of tickets, and took goods — including whisky and cigars — in exchange for favours and more, a court heard Friday.

"It really was quite a striking list of charges against this officer," said Frank Cormier, a criminologist and instructor in the sociology department at the University of Manitoba.

"The best way to describe it is that it's certainly not common, but it's not nearly as uncommon as it should be."

With flu cases now rising in Canada, medical experts are bracing for a difficult influenza season linked to the global spread of an evolving H3N2 strain that could be a mismatch for this year’s vaccine.

The ongoing flu season abroad has been marked by record case counts in the southern hemisphere, and an early start to the season across parts of Asia and the U.K. As Canada heads into the winter, it could be a bellwether of what’s to come.

There's speculation that a mutating type of H3N2 is behind that early surge. It's a strain of influenza A that's typically known for more severe infections, especially among older people. But what's particularly troubling some experts this year is that those latest mutations are widening the gap between this virus and our available flu shot.

TO JUSTIFY ITS deadly strikes on alleged drug-smugglers at sea, the Trump administration now claims that there are 24 designated terrorist organizations engaging in armed conflict with the United States, three government sources told The Intercept.

The list of groups supposedly engaged in “non-international armed conflict” with the United States includes the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua; Ejército de Liberación Nacional, a Colombian guerrilla insurgency; Cártel de los Soles, a Venezuelan criminal group that the U.S. claims is “headed by Nicolas Maduro and other high-ranking Venezuelan individuals”; and several groups affiliated with the Sinaloa Cartel, according to two of those government sources who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose classified information. The full list has not been disclosed, even to all lawmakers on the House Armed Services Committee.

“The administration has established a factual and legal alternate universe for the executive branch,” said Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who is a specialist in counterterrorism issues and the laws of war. “This is the president, purely by fiat, saying that the U.S. is in conflict with these undisclosed groups without any congressional authorization. So this is not just a secret war, but a secret unauthorized war. Or, in reality, a make-believe war, because most of these groups we probably couldn’t even be in a war with.”