HellsBelle

Communities in rural parts of Vermont on Friday woke up once again to damaged homes and washed-out roads due to heavy rainfall and flash flooding, making it the third consecutive summer that severe floods have inundated parts of the state.

Up to 5 inches (13 centimeters) of rain fell in just a few hours on Thursday, prompting rapid flooding as local waterways began to swell, said Robert Haynes, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Burlington office.

Nearly 20 homes were cut off in the small town of Sutton as a local brook quickly rose from its banks and surrounded buildings, Fire Chief Kyle Seymour said. His crews were called out to help rescue people from two homes, which required help from swift-water rescue teams called in from neighboring communities.

Federal immigration agents seeking to detain a Honduran landscaper chased him into a Southern California surgical center and quickly found themselves in a tense standoff as clinic staff demanded to see identification and a warrant.

In a video clip of the Tuesday altercation that has spread on social media, Ontario Advanced Surgery Center staff in blue scrubs are heard telling an armed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent wearing a mask and bulletproof vest to let go of the man, who is crying and gasping for breath.

“Get your hands off of him. You don’t even have a warrant,” says one staff member, shielding the man from an immigration agent. “Let him go. You need to get out.”

Manitoba has declared another provincewide state of emergency as wildfires continue to threaten communities.

Garden Hill Anisininew Nation is being evacuated Thursday after a wildfire entered the First Nation, leadership said Thursday morning. Snow Lake, about 590 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg, issued a mandatory evacuation order on Wednesday, with people ordered out by noon Thursday.

More than 4,000 people are expected to leave Garden Hill alone, the premier said. Snow Lake has a population of more than 1,000 people.

The Canadian Armed Forces has been assisting with the evacuation from that community. Hercules and commercial flights are slated to help bring residents out on Thursday, Kinew said.

Barnard College has settled a lawsuit that accused the college of not doing enough to combat antisemitism on campus, agreeing to a litany of demands that include banning masks at protests and refusing to meet or negotiate with a coalition of pro-Palestinian student groups, according to a statement released Monday.

The Manhattan college, an all-women’s affiliate of Columbia University, will also establish a new Title VI coordinator to enforce against claims of discrimination. Beginning next semester, all students and staff will receive a message conveying a “zero tolerance” policy for harassment of Jewish and Israeli students.

The settlement was announced in a joint statement by Barnard and lawyers for two Jewish advocacy groups, Students Against Antisemitism and StandWithUs Center for Legal Justice, who brought the lawsuit last February on behalf of some Jewish and Israeli students.

The U.S. government would initiate deportation proceedings against Kilmar Abrego Garcia if he’s released from jail before he stands trial on human smuggling charges in Tennessee, a Justice Department attorney told a federal judge in Maryland on Monday.

The disclosure by U.S. lawyer Jonathan Guynn contradicts statements by spokespeople for the Justice Department and the White House, who said last month that Abrego Garcia would stand trial and possibly spend time in an American prison before the government moves to deport him.

Guynn made the revelation during a federal court hearing in Maryland, where Abrego Garcia’s American wife is suing the Trump administration over his mistaken deportation in March and trying to prevent him from being expelled again.

Federal officers and National Guard troops fanned out around a mostly empty Los Angeles park in a largely immigrant neighborhood on foot, horseback and military vehicles on Monday for about an hour before abruptly leaving, an operation that local officials said seemed designed to sow fear.

The Department of Homeland Security wouldn’t say whether anyone had been arrested during the brief operation at MacArthur Park. Federal officials did not respond to requests for comment about why the park was targeted or why the raid ended abruptly.

“What I saw in the park today looked like a city under siege, under armed occupation,” said Mayor Karen Bass, who showed up at the park alongside activists.

She said there were children attending a day camp in the park who were quickly ushered inside to avoid seeing the troops. Still, Bass said an 8-year-old boy told her that “he was fearful of ICE.”

It’s official: Premier Danielle Smith can now call herself Queen of Measles.

And not just in Alberta. Try North America.

That’s right. Alberta now leads the continent in a preventable childhood disease that leaves at least two of every 1,000 infections with severe intellectual disabilities, pneumonia or hearing loss. Or dead.

Stunningly, Alberta has already recorded nearly half a dozen cases of measles present at birth in the province.

And every measles infection leaves a child with a disabled immune system, stripped of memory about how to fight other routine infections. As a result, any unvaccinated child who battles measles will probably be sicklier, possibly for years afterwards. Brazilian researchers recently found a high correlation between having measles and later dying of another infectious disease.

For a decade, Vancouver city managers knew an employee in the building inspection department was part owner of a private company that did work frequently checked by city inspectors.

That employee and the city staff he managed often inspected the company’s work, and a conflict-of-interest investigation found the employee, “in their capacity as a city inspector, personally made decisions about the private sector business they owned in four instances.” None of those decisions were “unfavourable” to the business, the report said.

The employee also said he’d been offered, but refused, a bribe from another contractor. An analysis by the city’s Office of the Auditor General, or OAG, found the contractor had appeared to receive preferential treatment from the employee.

On the day a month-long trial for a man accused of "significant" human trafficking was set to begin, the Crown's case fell apart over a technicality.

Christian Vitela, 37, and his defence lawyer had not received all disclosure or evidence related to the case in the years leading up to the criminal trial, assistant Crown attorney Heather Palin said on April 23.

Vitela hadn't accessed all phone records of the migrant workers he was charged with trafficking — the phones had been seized by the RCMP and were "typically core disclosure in human trafficking prosecutions," said Vitela's lawyer, Tobias Okada-Phillips.

The RCMP, which initially laid nine human trafficking charges against Vitela in 2019, have a different version of events. It includes that they notified Vitela on several occasions that the information was available, and set up a room and computer for him to view the materials, but he never showed up.

The day lawyers submitted paperwork to the Supreme Court of Canada, another group quietly set up ladders in the dead of night to change a sign symbolic in a decades-long legal dispute in an Ontario beach town.

The red retro-lettered sign at the end of Main Street in the town of South Bruce Peninsula read "Welcome to Saugeen Beach" when sun seekers woke up on Canada Day this week to look out at Lake Huron.

The sign had previously ushered people to "Sauble Beach," a tourist hotspot since the 1920s. Sporting restaurants and cottages, and town and private land are squeezed between two sections of reserve territory belonging to Chippewas of Saugeen First Nation.

The band declared victory at the end of 2024 when the Ontario Court of Appeal sided with Saugeen First Nation, saying the federal government had breached the treaty it signed in 1854. It ruled that roughly 2.2 kilometres of shoreline land incorrectly surveyed in 1855 should be returned to the First Nation.

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday he is willing to let migrant laborers stay in the United States if the farmers they work for will vouch for them.

At a campaign-style speech at the Iowa state fairgrounds, Trump said he is working with the Homeland Security Department to help farmers who depend on migrant laborers for their seasonal needs. He said he will also work with the hotel industry on the issue.

The U.S. Air Force has suspended plans it had proposed with Elon Musk's SpaceX to test hypersonic rocket cargo deliveries from a remote Pacific atoll, according to a report this week in Stars and Stripes, an independent publication of the U.S. military.

The suspension came after Reuters reported that biologists and experts said the project would harm many seabirds that nest at the wildlife refuge on the Johnston Atoll, an unincorporated U.S. territory nearly 800 miles (1,300 km) southwest of Hawaii.

The Air Force had said it would undertake an environmental assessment of the project, but publication of a draft assessment was delayed after opposition to the plan by environmental groups.