HellsBelle

Drake is facing another legal battle in 2026.

The Toronto rapper has been named as part of a proposed U.S. class-action lawsuit that alleges he, and other individuals, used proceeds from a gambling website to "obscure transmissions of money," which were then used to artificially inflate his streaming music play counts.

The suit centres around Stake.us, the name of the U.S. website for the Curaçao-based online casino operator Stake, which Drake often promotes on his social media profiles.

Among the claims, the suit says Drake, born Aubrey Graham, was "at the heart of the scheme," working with social media influencer Adin Ross. Both, it says, were paid to promote the platform by gambling with virtual currencies that are "surreptitiously" provided by Stake.

A young girl who was seriously injured in Inukjuak, Que., during a Nunavik Police Service intervention has died, according to the the Kativik Regional Government.

Quebec's police watchdog, the Bureau des enquêtes indépendantes (BEI), said two people were injured during a shootout with police on Dec. 20. In a news release published Tuesday, the BEI confirmed one of the people involved has since died but did not identify the deceased, citing the ongoing investigation.

“No further information can be released,” the BEI said.

According to the community's mayor, the two people injured were a man in his 30s and his six-year-old daughter.

(Richard) Glossip won the victory of a lifetime last February, when the U.S. Supreme Court vacated his conviction, finding that it was rooted in false testimony and prosecutorial misconduct. After almost three decades facing execution for a crime he swore he didn’t commit, Glossip hoped the ruling would mark the end of his ordeal.

But nearly a year later, he was stuck in the county jail with no end in sight. Rather than resolve the case as Glossip’s advocates expected him to do, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who is running for governor, announced that he planned to retry Glossip for first-degree murder — and asked a judge to reject his request for bond in the meantime. Although defense lawyers pointed out that their 62-year-old client was not a flight risk and posed no danger to society, prosecutors convinced Oklahoma County District Court Judge Heather Coyle to keep Glossip at the jail — a notoriously overcrowded and filthy facility known as one of the deadliest in the country.

In the months since, the state has been unable to get its prosecution off the ground. Glossip’s legal team has successfully sought the recusal of every criminal court judge assigned to the case — all of them former prosecutors who once worked for the Oklahoma County District Attorney, the same office that sent Glossip to death row. While the attorney general’s office has accused Glossip’s lawyers of “judge shopping,” an October evidentiary hearing showed the defense attorneys’ concerns over the judges’ impartiality to be well-founded. One judge assigned to the trial, who had originally refused to step down, was revealed to have taken multiple vacations with the original prosecutor in Glossip’s case.

AFTER OPENAI CEO Sam Altman launched ChatGPT in 2022, the race for dominance in the field of artificial intelligence hit warp speed. Silicon Valley has poured billions of dollars into developing AI, building data centers, and promising a future free from the chains of unfulfilling work across the globe.

But in “Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI,” tech reporter Karen Hao pulls back the curtain, unveiling the human and environmental cost of artificial intelligence and the colonial ambitions undergirding Silicon Valley’s efforts to fuel the rise of AI.

“The speed at which they’re constructing the infrastructure for training and deploying their AI models” is what shocks Hao the most, as “this infrastructure is actually not technically necessary, and … somehow the companies have effectively convinced the public and governments that it is. And therefore there’s been a lot of complicity in allowing these companies to continue building these projects.”

“They have effectively been able to use this narrative of [artificial general intelligence] to accrue more capital, land, energy, water, data. They’ve been able to accrue more resources — and critical resources — than pretty much anyone in history,” Hao says, warning of “the complete aggressive and reckless” growth of AI infrastructure, but stresses that none of this is inevitable. “There is a very clear path for how to unlock the benefits of AI without accepting the colossal cost of it.”

A new generation of young political leaders is gaining power in the US by using their personal experience with gun violence to push for reforms they say the US is ready for.

Their ascent is part of a nearly decade-long shift, from gun violence prevention being a third-rail issue in politics that was rarely spoken about on campaign trails, to one that candidates, most of them Democrats, are now running – and winning – on.

This shift is due in part to a collective exhaustion with gun violence, whether mass shootings – like the recent ones at Brown University in Rhode Island and at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia – firearms suicides or community violence, that continues to tear apart the lives of too many Americans, said Justin Pearson, a Tennessee state representative who’s running for US congress.

“It’s been an issue that has impacted my life,” Pearson, 30, said. “There was something about being a state representative and in a position, witnessing the government inactions and remembering the effects it has in my community, that pushed me to say this is an issue we need to prioritize.”

Israel’s foreign ministry has accused the New York mayor, Zohran Mamdani, of pouring “antisemitic gasoline on an open fire” after he reversed a recent order by the outgoing mayor, Eric Adams.

“On his very first day as @NYCMayor, Mamdani shows his true face: he scraps the IHRA definition of antisemitism and lifts restrictions on boycotting Israel. This isn’t leadership. It’s antisemitic gasoline on an open fire,” the foreign ministry said in a post on X.

Mamdani revoked an Adams-era order that adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which the previous administration said included “demonizing Israel and holding it to double standards as forms of contemporary antisemitism”.

Israel’s response came hours after Mamdani issued an order to rescind all executive orders that Adams issued after he was indicted on federal corruption charges in 2024 – charges that were later, controversially, dropped.

A home described as the first of its kind now stands in the Nak’azdli Whuten community near Fort St. James, B.C.

The home is a prototype for an Indigenous-led housing system that uses low-grade locally-sourced wood to produce prefabricated housing kits for northern communities.

The concept is to take trees from the local territory, mill them locally, and then have local workers use that lumber to build panels, which are then used to construct a house in a matter of days.

“You can build the panels through the winter months, and then in the summer you can erect the houses a lot quicker. The idea would be instead of producing two or three houses, we could maybe do 10 houses in this area with our construction crew and local contractors.”

Residents of Pimicikamak Cree Nation are celebrating and relieved now that power and electricity are being restored to the community.

Manitoba Hydro has repaired a broken line that caused a widespread outage. On Thursday, it began restoring power to homes in stages, nearly four days after the downed line left community members without heat in freezing winter temperatures and prompted a state of emergency.

On Sunday night, lights went dark and heaters went cold in the northern Manitoba First Nation, located about 530 kilometres north of Winnipeg, when a power line that crosses the Nelson River snapped.

“It was –30 with the wind chill here," Grand Elder Raymond Robinson said of the situation earlier in the week before power was restored. "When I go to these homes, when they're breathing you just see that mist coming out of people's mouths because they didn't have [any] heating system."

In 1987, wildlife veterinarian Mark Pokras was in his office at Tufts University in Massachusetts when a colleague from New Hampshire called. “I’ve got a dead loon here,” she said. “If I bring it down to you, can you tell me how it died?”

Understanding what’s killing wild animals is often the first step to saving them, and over the course of his career, Pokras has necropsied everything from whales to hummingbirds. Yet this was his first loon—in part because common loons (Gavia immer) had only recently begun repopulating New England after being nearly extirpated by 300 years of hunting, pollution, and habitat loss. European settlers so disliked these “ill-shap’d” birds that nature writer Henry David Thoreau described his neighbors on Walden Pond in Massachusetts shooting them just for fun. By the early 1900s, common loons—which winter on the coast and spend summers nesting along inland lakes—had disappeared from their breeding grounds in Massachusetts and much of New Hampshire, and been reduced to a fraction of their former abundance elsewhere in New England. Places with names like Loon Pond didn’t see nesting loons for more than a century.

Cutting into the bird, Pokras discovered that it had suffered from lead toxicosis, more commonly known as lead poisoning. Loons eat pebbles to help digest food in their gizzard, and this one may have mistaken a lead sinker left behind by a fisherman for a pebble, or perhaps eaten a fish with a lead sinker in its body. In Pokras’s X-ray, the sinker showed up as an unnaturally round ball amid a mess of partially digested fish and shellfish. After the bird ate it, the lead would have leached toxicants into the bloodstream, causing impaired vision, gastrointestinal distress, neurologic issues, and ultimately death.

In an era when many species are declining because of multipronged, seemingly intractable problems, the solution to protecting loons is relatively straightforward. Anglers simply need to swap their old lead jigs and sinkers for tackle made from tungsten, steel, tin, or bismuth. Given loons’ immense popularity, you might think that would be an easy sell. But although conservationists have tried educating the public for decades—and although Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts have laws regulating the use and sale of lead fishing tackle—lead is still responsible for around 25 to 30 percent of loon deaths in most states and provinces, and until recently, nearly 40 percent in New Hampshire. Why?

The answer, at least in the United States, is entangled with gun rights.

The firm behind US President Donald Trump's Truth Social platform said it will issue a new cryptocurrency to its shareholders, marking the Trump family's latest foray into digital assets.

The digital token from Trump Media and Technology Group will add to the Trumps' crypto ventures, which have generated hundreds of millions of dollars and have raised questions about conflicts of interest.

Trump Media unveiled the new token on Wednesday and said investors will receive one for each share they hold. Trump, who is himself the largest Trump Media shareholder, has supported looser regulation of the crypto sector.

Trump Media shares rose on Wednesday following the firm's announcement.

Three hikers, including a 19-year-old who fell approximately 500 feet (150m), have been found dead on Mt Baldy, a looming snow-capped mountain known to be one of the most dangerous to climb in Southern California.

Rescue workers found Marcus Alexander Muench Casanova, 19, dead and discovered two other dead hikers during the search, according to the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department.

The other two hikers were not hiking with the teenager, and it is not clear how long they had been deceased on the mountain.

Casanova went hiking on 29 December with a friend who was able to call for help after the teen fell. The friend had to hike away from the fall site near the Devil's Backbone trail to an area with cell reception and provided their GPS location to rescue crews, authorities said. That companion was unharmed.

Due to high winds, emergency crews were unable to complete a recovery operation by helicopter on Monday, but were able to recover the bodies on Tuesday.

The sheriff's office said it had rescued five other hikers from the mountain in the previous five days.

A worker at Walt Disney World is "recovering" after being injured by a 400-lb (180kg) runaway fake boulder prop in an incident that was caught on video, the Florida theme park confirmed.

The incident took place at the Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular! during a live recreation of a famous scene from the film.

Video shows the boulder rolling towards the audience as a staff member jumps into its path, preventing it from reaching the crowd.