HellsBelle

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.”

At a congressional oversight hearing in 2019, Linda McMahon, then head of the Small Business Administration, lavished praise on a Native Hawaiian defense contractor as a shining example of a federal program designed to uplift Indigenous people.

Christopher Dawson and his companies had won hundreds of millions of dollars in no-bid government contracts through the SBA based on the promise that his profits would primarily be used to help Native Hawaiians by, in part, promoting the culture, building homes and supporting orphaned children.

Two months before the hearing, however, a former employee had met with federal investigators and filed a whistleblower lawsuit accusing Dawson and executives of cheating the SBA’s 8(a) program. That program, which dates to the 1960s, was designed to help business owners from historically disadvantaged groups, including racial and ethnic minorities, to win federal contracts. For Native American tribes, Alaska Native corporations and certain Native Hawaiian nonprofits, such as Dawson’s Hawaiian Native Corp., the opportunity comes with no cap on the size of those no-bid contracts.

Internal company records and other documents in the SBA’s possession would later show just how much Dawson had indulged. There were private jets and Porsches, luxury homes in Hawaii and Florida, memberships to private social clubs, and a nearly $1 million annual salary. Dawson also funneled millions into polo, investing in a beachfront horse farm on Oahu’s famed North Shore and a horse breeding operation in Argentina.

Donald Trump launched a new program that will allow wealthy foreign individuals to buy a US “golden visa” for $1m, and trailed a “platinum” version for $5m.

“A direct path to Citizenship for all qualified and vetted people. SO EXCITING! Our Great American Companies can finally keep their invaluable Talent,” Trump wrote on Wednesday on social media.

A “Trump Platinum Card” is also “coming soon”, according to the official website. This card will allow holders to spend up to 270 days in the US without being subject to US taxes on non-US income. It will cost $5m.

"I’ll be honest, I had no idea that this is what I was going to be doing,” says Piker from his Los Angeles studio. “Like, if someone were to ask me, did you ever think that you’d become a Twitch streamer? I’d be like, what is Twitch? The concept of a YouTube influencer didn’t even exist when I was growing up.” It’s the morning and he’s preparing to start his daily 11am show. He usually broadcasts live for seven or eight hours straight, talking off the cuff about current affairs, lifestyle stories, what he’s up to, playing video games, reacting to memes and media clips, and interacting with the constant stream of messages that scroll by in the top left corner of the screen.

It’s a communal experience; a good hang, you might say. It also sounds exhausting. He has estimated that in 2020 he spent 42% of the entire year livestreaming. “I’ve lowered it to seven hours a day, but sometimes I still do eight. And on top of that, I’ll take Sundays off now.” He’s already running late this morning. As we continue talking, his Twitch chatter begins to fill with “where the hell is he?” posts.

Establishing himself on Twitch, which is primarily a platform for livestreaming video games (and has been owned by Amazon since 2014), was a conscious decision, Piker says. His media career started out with The Young Turks, the progressive online news network co-founded by his maternal uncle, Cenk Uygur. Piker’s parents are Turkish immigrants, and he grew up between New Jersey and Istanbul before studying political science and communication studies at Rutgers University. He graduated to hosting his own show on The Young Turks in 2016 – earning the title “Woke Bae” in the process – but in 2018 he decided to go solo on Twitch, to counterbalance what he saw as the overwhelmingly rightwing, often racist, misogynistic and xenophobic views that infested the space. “There’s a lot of ideological diversity amongst the gamers, amongst the developers, amongst the consumers, but unfortunately, the market for political expression in this hobby is so heavily dominated by the right, and that’s the same for pretty much everything,” he says.

President Donald Trump issued his 2025 National Security Strategy for the United States on Friday. It’s a remarkable document, something like the Rescript of Honorius, when the emperor Honorius in the year 410 told the cities of Roman Britain that he was withdrawing Rome’s legions and they’d have to defend themselves hereafter.

From now on, Trump says, America will look after itself and leave Europe and Asia to their fates. But the countries of the Western Hemisphere are now to be firmly in America’s sphere of influence. And that includes Canada.

The strategy says: “Our goals for the Western Hemisphere can be summarized as ‘Enlist and Expand.’ We will enlist established friends in the Hemisphere to control migration, stop drug flows, and strengthen stability and security on land and sea. We will expand by cultivating and strengthening new partners while bolstering our own nation’s appeal as the Hemisphere’s economic and security partner of choice.”

Canada could expect similar interference with our domestic affairs, including our immigration policy. The United States would explicitly support far-right parties like the Conservatives and the People’s Party of Canada and their provincial equivalents like Alberta’s United Conservative Party. Any party or government endorsing immigration and multiculturalism could expect a barrage of disinformation attacks in social media and U.S. mainstream media (which are increasingly owned by a few tech billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk).

Canadians tend to think of far-right extremism and white nationalism as a strictly American problem, adopting an “it couldn’t happen here” mindset, or seeing it as a lunatic fringe that should just be ignored. But these movements are gaining a foothold in mainstream culture, and the structure for that to happen has been in this country since its inception.

White supremacy arrived in Canada in the fifteenth century, with the first Europeans. Since then, Canada has waged a cultural and literal genocide against Indigenous peoples, including the horrors perpetrated as early as 1831 at Christian church- and government-sponsored residential schools, which were designed to strip children from their families and their culture, with the last federally run residential school closing in 1996. In 1911, the government passed an order-in-council to ban Black immigrants from entering Canada (it was never invoked). In 1921, the Ku Klux Klan formed its first Canadian chapter. In 1946, Viola Desmond was arrested for refusing to leave the whites-only section of a movie theatre. The last segregated school in Canada didn’t close until 1983.

The late 2010s brought with them the “alt-right” era, a term coined by white nationalist Richard Spencer to differentiate his views from traditional American conservatism. Originally characterized by online trolling, the “alt-right” was a random and reactionary series of chats, pages, memes, and shitposting accounts—mainly from the US—as well as a loose collection of more serious actors like the Proud Boys and Atomwaffen. Over the years, its membership has become increasingly public, participating in rallies and engaging in acts of violence in the real world. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, a new iteration has emerged in Canada: Diagolon.

IT WAS STILL LIGHT OUT when the attacks occurred. In just forty-five minutes, a slim, dark-haired man wearing a Jets jersey sexually assaulted three nurses and a teenager in and around Winnipeg’s largest hospital, the Health Sciences Centre (HSC), on July 2, according to police.

While officers searched for the suspect, hospital workers finished their shifts and walked back to their vehicles, unaware a predator was at large. Later, police would report that a third woman was assaulted that night in the area, by the same man. Staff didn’t learn what happened until the following day.

For HSC employees, these assaults weren’t an aberration. They were a tipping point after years of increasing violence against hospital staff. In a 2024 survey, one-third of physicians at HSC reported experiencing an average of eleven safety episodes in the previous year, almost double the provincial rate. A safety episode can include threats, violence, sexual assault, and harassment. HSC alone accounted for nearly half of all reported assaults on Manitoba doctors. Physicians described being punched, kicked, spat on, and bombarded with verbal abuse. The danger follows them outside the hospital into walkways and parking lots, where some have been chased and attacked coming to and from the job.

GANGSTERS FROM MS-13, a Trump-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, intimidated Hondurans not to vote for the left-leaning presidential candidate, 10 eyewitness sources told The Intercept, in most cases urging them to instead cast their ballots in last Sunday’s election for the right-wing National Party candidate — the same candidate endorsed by U.S. President Donald Trump.

Ten residents from four working-class neighborhoods controlled by MS-13, including volunteer election workers and local journalists, told The Intercept they saw firsthand gang members giving residents an ultimatum to vote for the Trump-endorsed conservative candidate or face consequences. Six other sources with knowledge of the intimidation — including government officials, human rights investigators, and people with direct personal contact with gangs — corroborated their testimony. Gang members drove voters to the polls in MS-13-controlled mototaxi businesses, three sources said, and threatened to kill street-level activists for the left-leaning Liberty and Refoundation, or LIBRE, party if they were seen bringing supporters to the polls. Two witnesses told The Intercept they saw members of MS-13 checking people’s ballots inside polling sites, as did a caller to the national emergency help line.

Jordan Peterson, the popular and polarizing psychologist, is held in high esteem by Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, who has twice appeared on Peterson’s podcast, which draws millions of listeners worldwide.

A Tyee investigation has found that Smith’s admiration for Peterson went well beyond her affinity for him as a fellow conservative culture warrior.

Documents obtained through freedom of information request show that Smith, and her chief of staff, Rob Anderson, directly intervened with Alberta’s Advanced Education Ministry in an attempt to help Peterson’s higher-education business venture.

On Aug. 1, 2024, Smith met with Peterson “to discuss how his organization can work with the province to have their online training platform accredited.”

Darwin knows what cameras look like – and how to avoid them. From inside his enclosure, the monkey of Toronto Ikea parking lot fame spots us out of the corner of his eye and bolts under the table.

The now 13-year-old Japanese macaque has seen enough of the spotlight to last a lifetime.

Darwin was just a baby when he was found in a North York Ikea parking lot in 2012, wearing a diaper and shearling coat, and seized by animal services. He’s been living at Story Book Farm Primate Sanctuary in Sunderland, Ont., ever since.