HellsBelle

Late last year, multiple tenants in small apartment buildings around Halifax got similar letters from their new landlord, stating their leases would soon be terminated. But no reasons were given.

This didn't sit right with Amanda Rose, who has been renting her one-bedroom apartment in the city's north end for almost six years.

Sydnee Blum, a community legal worker with Dalhousie Legal Aid Service in Halifax, said she's representing one of the tenants in the appeal. Blum estimates up to 24 tenants of PreCor Property Management are impacted.

"When it's happening to multiple buildings at a time, this is, to us, part of a systematized effort to evict long-term tenants, do cosmetic upgrades on a building and then rent them for higher rents," Blum said.

Nova Scotia's Registry of Joint Stocks shows the director, president, and secretary of PreCor Property Management is Mitchell Hollohan, whose business address is listed in Halifax.

Chidi Nwagbo says he made a "stupid" decision paying human smugglers to get him into Canada that left him permanently scarred and in the hands of the very U.S. immigration authorities he was trying to flee.

The 57-year-old says he paid $2,000 US in cash to a human smuggling organization in New Jersey to escape the immigration raids sweeping the U.S. He says the smugglers lied to him about the dangers of the journey that almost killed him along the borderlands between New York State and Quebec in February of this year.

"If I had known that this would have been the outcome, I don't think I would have done it," said Nwagbo in a phone interview with CBC News from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centre in Batavia, N.Y.

EU ministers are meeting this morning for urgent talks after the US president, Donald Trump, threatened to impose 30% tariffs on the bloc – despite what they believed were promising talks with the US administration on how to avoid them.

But in a letter issued over the weekend, Trump said:

• "We have had years to discuss our Trading Relationship with The European Union, and we have concluded we must move away from these long-term, large, and persistent, Trade Deficits, engendered by your Tariff, and Non-Tariff, Policies, and Trade Barriers …

• Our relationship has been, unfortunately, far from Reciprocal.”

In Louisiana, natural gas—a planet-heating fossil fuel—is now, by law, considered “green energy” that can compete with solar and wind projects for clean energy funding. The law, signed by Republican Governor Jeff Landry last month, comes on the heels of similar bills passed in Ohio, Tennessee, and Indiana. What the bills have in common—besides an “updated definition” of a fossil fuel as a clean energy source—is language seemingly plucked straight from a right-wing think tank backed by oil and gas billionaire and activist Charles Koch.

Louisiana’s law was based on a template created by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservative organization that brings legislators and corporate lobbyists together to draft bills “dedicated to the principles of limited government, free markets and federalism.” The law maintains that Louisiana, in order to minimize its reliance on “foreign adversary nations” for energy, must ensure that natural gas and nuclear power are eligible for “all state programs that fund ‘green energy’ or ‘clean energy’ initiatives.”

Louisiana state Rep. Jacob Landry first introduced a near-identical bill to the model posted on ALEC’s website and to the other bills that have passed in Ohio, Tennessee, and Indiana. (The Washington Post reported in 2023 that ALEC was involved in Ohio’s bill; ALEC denies involvement.) Landry, who represents a small district in the southern part of the state, is the recipient of significant fossil fuel-industry funding—and he co-owns two oil and gas consulting firms himself. During his campaign for the state Legislature, Landry received donations from at least 15 fossil-fuel-affiliated companies and PACs, including ExxonMobil (which has also funded ALEC) and Phillips 66. Those donations alone totaled over $20,000.

The U.S. Justice Department unit charged with defending against legal challenges to signature Trump administration policies - such as restricting birthright citizenship and slashing funding to Harvard University - has lost nearly two-thirds of its staff, according to a list seen by Reuters.

Sixty-nine of the roughly 110 lawyers in the Federal Programs Branch have voluntarily left the unit since President Donald Trump's election in November or have announced plans to leave, according to the list compiled by former Justice Department lawyers and reviewed by Reuters.

"Many of these people came to work at Federal Programs to defend aspects of our constitutional system," said one lawyer who left the unit during Trump's second term. "How could they participate in the project of tearing it down?"

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.

The joke was already making the rounds among diplomats during his first term: Negotiating with the president of the United States, Donald Trump, is like playing chess with a pigeon. The bird furiously flaps its wings, knocks over all the pieces while cooing with delight, then defecates on the board and says, "I won!" In reality, Trump has lost a lot at this game.

When facing down China, which Trump threatened with a tariff apocalypse, or the head of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, whom he tried to destabilize, Trump merely flapped his wings wildly, but it made no difference. And when he "wins" – which does happen – it is at the cost of indescribable chaos that affects everyone. That is how, at the end of June, Trump shattered a jewel of multilateralism: the global minimum tax on multinational profits, the result of the broadest international tax agreement ever reached.

In October 2021, for the first time, this agreement put a stop to the global race to the bottom in corporate taxation, which for decades had undermined state revenues and exacerbated inequality. More than 130 countries agreed to a minimum tax of 15% on large corporate profits. Admittedly, the rate remained modest; admittedly, exemptions weakened the measure. But at least, under the leadership of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the G20, an agreement finally made it possible to stand up to large corporations.

Ubisoft has updated its End User License Agreement, and it’s instructing its users to remove and destroy their games completely should the title be taken offline.

Essentially, the EULA has given Ubisoft free rein on its ability to stop supporting a game, writing: “You and Ubisoft may terminate this EULA at any time, for any reason. Termination by Ubisoft will be effective upon notice to you or termination of your Ubisoft account, or at the time of Ubisoft’s decision to discontinue offering and/or supporting the Product.”

Interestingly, this isn’t the only company that has the same terms in its EULA. The likes of Capcom, Sega, and even the Oblivion Remaster have the same clause in their terms and conditions, meaning the stipulation isn’t unique to Ubisoft.

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.