HellsBelle

On the morning of Thursday, July 31, James B. Milliken was enjoying a round of golf at the remote Sand Hills club in Western Nebraska when his cellphone buzzed.

Milliken was still days away from taking the helm of the sprawling University of California system, but his new office was on the line with disturbing news: The Trump administration was freezing hundreds of millions of dollars of research funding at the University of California, Los Angeles, UC’s biggest campus. Milliken quickly packed up and made the five-hour drive to Denver to catch the next flight to California.

The grant freeze was the latest salvo in the administration’s broader campaign against elite universities, which it has pilloried as purveyors of antisemitism and “woke” indoctrination. Over the next four months, the Justice Department targeted UCLA with its full playbook for bringing colleges to heel, threatening it with multiple discrimination lawsuits, demanding more than $1 billion in fines and pressing for a raft of changes on the conservative wish list for overhauling higher education.

“MALE DETAINEE NEEDS to go out due to head trauma,” an employee at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention center in Georgia tells a 911 operator.

The operator tells the employee at Stewart Detention Center that there are no ambulances available.

“It’s already out — on the last patient y’all called us with,” the operator says.

“Is there any way you can get one from another county?” the caller asks.

“I can try,” the operator says. “I can’t make any promises, but I can try.”

The burden on rural Stewart County’s health care system is “unsustainable,” said Dr. Amy Zeidan, a professor of emergency medicine at Atlanta’s Emory University who researches health care in immigration detention.

A brief mention of an abusive relationship between a Vancouver police officer and a teen he met at school in a recent police watchdog report shows a need for more transparency around the identities of officers who commit misconduct, says a civil liberties advocate.

Without knowing the officer’s name, the public has no way of knowing if he went on to work with another police department or to work with young adults, said Meghan McDermott, policy director with the BC Civil Liberties Association.

“Where is he now? He might be working as a member of the RCMP somewhere and he might be in a school in the Okanagan. We don’t know,” McDermott said.

Floodwaters reached Highway 1 in Abbotsford, located approximately 70 kilometres southeast of Vancouver on Thursday night, prompting new evacuation orders for seven properties close to the highway as water began spilling onto the roadway.

Those orders come on top of evacuations already affecting the region. Nearly 460 properties have so far been ordered to leave and another 1,069 properties remain on evacuation alert in Abbotsford.

The city says the flooding has forced the closure of Highway 1 in both directions between Sumas Road and No.3 Rd. Drivers are being asked to avoid the area and check DriveBC for updates as conditions continue to change.

An ongoing FBI investigation into a Belarusian woman accused of smuggling US aviation parts and electronics to Russia is teetering on the brink of collapse after being caught in what one judge called a “Kafkaesque” case brought on by the Trump administration’s attempts to deport her before she faces trial.

Federal prosecutors had worked for over a year to secure the extradition of Yana Leonova, who faces multiple charges including fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering. But their efforts unraveled when immigration officials abruptly issued an order to detain and deport her soon after she was flown into the US last month, a move that plunged the case into legal chaos.

“Indeed, it is both preposterous and offensive for the government to bring someone into the United States against their will and then turn around and seek ICE detention because that person is here ‘illegally,’” magistrate judge Zia M Faruqui said in a written order.

“The government needs to decide what its priorities are: ginning up deportation stats or prosecuting alleged criminals,” he added. He also described the situation “Kafkaesque” at a hearing in Washington DC on Monday according to the Washington Post, who first reported the case.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia has been released from immigration detention, his attorney Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg told ABC News.

His release came after a federal judge on Thursday ordered Abrego Garcia released from detention.

U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis said in her order that "since Abrego Garcia's wrongful detention in El Salvador, he has been re-detained, again without lawful authority."

The United States is preparing to intercept more ships transporting Venezuelan oil following the seizure of a tanker this week, as it increases pressure on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, six sources familiar with the matter said on Thursday.

The seizure was the first interdiction of an oil cargo or tanker from Venezuela, which has been under U.S. sanctions since 2019. The action came as the U.S. executes a large-scale military buildup in the southern Caribbean and as U.S. President Donald Trump campaigns for Maduro's ouster.

The latest U.S. action has put shipowners, operators and maritime agencies involved in transporting Venezuelan crude on alert, with many reconsidering whether to sail from Venezuelan waters in the coming days as planned, shipping sources said.

A non-commissioned member of the Canadian military intelligence branch has been charged with passing classified information to a "foreign entity," the Department of National Defence revealed late Thursday.

Master Warrant Officer Matthew Robar was arrested by military police and faces eight charges under the National Defence Act.

He’s accused of — among other things — communicating "special operational information" and breach of trust, according to a statement issued by the Defence Department.

The statement does not name the foreign entity.

Ontario MP Michael Ma announced Thursday that he is leaving the Conservative caucus and joining the Liberals.

The MP said in a statement that he made the decision after listening to his constituents in the riding of Markham-Unionville in the Greater Toronto Area.

"This is a time for unity and decisive action for Canada's future," he wrote.

"In that spirit, I have concluded that Prime Minister Mark Carney is offering the steady, practical approach we need to deliver on the priorities I hear every day while door-knocking in Markham-Unionville."

An Afghanistan war veteran arrested on felony “conspiracy” charges a month after he participated in a protest against US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) maintains his innocence and is preparing for a jury trial, even as others arrested the same day strike plea agreements to avoid long prison terms, his father said.

Bajun Mavalwalla II – a former army sergeant who survived a roadside bomb blast on a special operations mission in Afghanistan – was charged in July with “conspiracy to impede or injure officers” after joining an anti-ICE protest in Spokane, Washington.

Legal experts have said the case marks an escalation in the Trump administration’s attacks on first amendment rights. Veterans’ groups have decried the charges as “un-American”.

“My son is innocent,” said his father, Bajun Ray Mavalwalla, a retired US army intelligence officer with three Bronze stars earned during tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A program intended to replace the entire stock of the Canadian military’s aging assault rifles is being sped up, CBC News has learned.

An internal Department of National Defence presentation references a move to quickly order the first tranche of weapons under the Canadian Modular Assault Rifle program.

A Defence Department equipment briefing, dated July 2025, says the plan is to order up to 65,401 modern rifles with the possibility being left open to increase the delivery up to 300,000 should the government proceed with a plan to drastically scale up the size of the military supplementary reserve.

The Canadian Modular Assault Rifle is intended to replace the current stock of C7 and C8 rifles, which date from the Afghan war almost two decades ago.

Early last year, the hydropower company Nature and People First set its sights on Black Mesa, a mountainous region on the Navajo Nation in northern Arizona. The mesa’s steep drop offered ideal terrain for gravity-based energy storage, and the company was interested in building pumped-storage projects that leveraged the elevation difference. Environmental groups and tribal community organizations, however, largely opposed the plan. Pumped-storage operations involve moving water in and out of reservoirs, which could affect the habitats of endangered fish and require massive groundwater withdrawals from an already-depleted aquifer.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which has authority over non-federal hydropower projects on the Colorado River and its tributaries, ultimately denied the project’s permit. The decision was among the first under a new policy: FERC would not approve projects on tribal land without the support of the affected tribe. Since the project was on Navajo land and the Navajo Nation opposed the project, FERC denied the permits. The Commission also denied similar permit requests from Rye Development, a Florida-based company, that also proposed pumped-water projects.

Now, Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright wants to reverse this policy. In October, Wright wrote to FERC, requesting that the commission return to its previous policy and that giving tribes veto power was hindering the development of hydropower projects. The commission’s policy has created an “untenable regime,” he noted, and “For America to continue dominating global energy markets, we must remove unnecessary burdens to the development of critical infrastructure, including hydropower projects.”