A Russian court has convicted four journalists of extremism for working for an anti-corruption group founded by the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny and sentenced them to five and a half years in prison each.

Antonina Favorskaya, Konstantin Gabov, Sergey Karelin and Artyom Kriger were found guilty of involvement with a group that had been labeled as extremist. All four had maintained their innocence, arguing they were being prosecuted for doing their jobs as journalists.

The closed-door trial was part of a crackdown on dissent that has reached an unprecedented scale since Moscow sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022.

X’s revenues and profits collapsed in the UK in the year after Elon Musk took over the social media platform, the company has admitted.

A decline in advertising spending amid concerns about “brand safety and/or content moderation” were cited as the reason for the fall, according to accounts filed this week to Companies House.

Twitter UK Ltd also narrowly averted being struck off last month for failing to file the accounts on time, according to other recent filings to Companies House. It only filed full accounts on Monday for 2023, the year in which it was rebranded as X after Musk’s takeover.

IN THE WEEKS after the twin towers in New York City fell, the Canadian government made it clear that Muslim citizens were not to be blamed for the carnage meted out on Canada’s southern neighbour. In this regard, it followed the Bush administration, which called Islam a religion of sound teachings.

The government’s actions were meant to allay national anxieties about the enemy within. In the days after 9/11, suspicion of the Muslim had intensified. Fears of divided loyalties and fifth columns emerged, compounded by a legacy of orientalist stereotypes and images of brown-skinned terrorists that became fodder for countless 1980s and ’90s action movies.

But upon closer examination, it would be more accurate to say that the state sought a monopoly over the representation of the nation and the right to defend it. The government resorted to a dual strategy of publicly positioning Muslims as allies to Western civilization while privately sanctioning pervasive state surveillance of Muslim co

EVEN BEFORE he took office, United States president Donald Trump was talking about annexing Canada, posting on Truth Social in mid-December, “I think it’s a great idea. 51st state!!!” Trump is funny, but only unintentionally, and as his statements have grown more threatening and frequent, even the most optimistic pundits have stopped dismissing them as jokes. The issue of sovereignty has become a unifying cause for Canadians—and the most urgent existential issue of the election.

For Indigenous nations, these threats have a familiar ring. For generations, they have been told that assimilation is in their best interests—by a nation with its hungry gaze fixed on their abundant natural resources, a capricious ally who has shown it will break treaties and agreements when convenient. There is unique potential in this moment for empathy: Canadians might finally be in a position to truly understand why Indigenous people are unwilling to give up their distinct histories, cultures, and identiti

THE PENTAGON HAD been slowly dedicating more resources to killing fewer civilians in recent years, following a long drumbeat of damning investigations of civilian casualties by the press, nongovernmental organizations, government-supported think tanks, and even the U.S. military itself.

But now, under the control of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the Department of Defense is reversing course.

The Intercept spoke with five current and former Defense Department officials familiar with its Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response, or CHMR, efforts, who say that the Pentagon is in the process of eliminating or downsizing offices, programs, and positions focused on preventing civilian casualties during U.S. combat operations.

The CorruptCare scandal is a direct product of the Alberta Surgical Initiative, which sought to double the share of procedures conducted at the private centres to 30 per cent. Former premier Jason Kenney, who promoted the scheme, later said this was intended, at least in part, to ensure surgeries wouldn’t be done in “union-run hospitals.”

Three months after the initiative was announced in December 2019, a group of anesthesiologists at the University of Alberta established the Alberta Surgical Group, which operates a chartered surgical facility in Edmonton that opened in November 2022.

While AHS typically pays $4,044 per hip, $4,036 per knee and $4,833 per shoulder surgery, Alberta Surgical Group charged $8,303 per hip, $8,510 per knee and $11,243 per shoulder surgery prior to contract renewal negotiations, according to documents obtained by the Globe and Mail.

This trend, a recent Parkland Institute report suggests, isn’t confined

Nick Gioia was terminated from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in February as part of President Donald Trump and tech mogul Elon Musk's effort to slash the size and cost of the federal government.

Gioia was then reinstated and placed on paid leave after a court ruling. Now, after a second round of buyout offers were emailed in recent days to government workers in at least half a dozen federal agencies, the U.S. Army veteran decided to take it.

"For some of us, the time has come to step away before this experience completely erodes what remains of our well-being," Gioia told Reuters.

Several other federal employees told Reuters they are taking this second buyout offer, saying that many civil servants are suffering from nervous exhaustion after three months of chaos and cuts driven by Musk's Department of Government Efficiency.

A federal judge ordered Bank of America to pay $540.3 million in a long-running Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation lawsuit accusing the second-largest U.S. bank of underpaying what it owed for deposit insurance.

The FDIC sued Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America for $1.12 billion in 2017, accusing it of reducing its deposit insurance contributions by failing to honor a 2011 rule that changed how banks report risk exposure to counterparties.

That rule was one of many federal reforms designed to ensure the stability of the banking system, and avert a repeat of the 2008 global financial crisis.

In a 59-page decision, AliKhan rejected Bank of America's claims that there was no reasonable basis for the rule, and that the FDIC acted arbitrarily and capriciously.

AliKhan said the FDIC was not required to develop a "perfect measure" of predicting banks' potential exposure to losses, and Bank of America could claim it "lacked fair notice of what was required of it."

Ferguson said in a news release on Monday that the state’s January application for assistance was denied in a letter he received on Friday. The state’s application had met all of the criteria necessary to qualify, he said.

“This is another troubling example of the federal government withholding funding,” Ferguson, a Democrat, said. “Washington communities have been waiting for months for the resources they need to fully recover from last winter’s devastating storms, and this decision will cause further delay. We will appeal.”

Kyle Fellers and Anthony Foote were banned from school grounds in Bow after wearing the wristbands to a soccer game in September that included a transgender girl on the opposing team. They later sued the school district, and while the no-trespass orders have since expired, they asked the judge to allow them to carry signs and wear the wristbands featuring the symbol for female chromosomes at school events while the case proceeds.

Both men testified at a hearing in November that they didn’t intend to harass or otherwise target transgender athlete Parker Tirrell, and their attorneys argued they did nothing more than silently express their support for reserving girls’ sports for those assigned female at birth.

But in denying their motion Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Steven McAuliffe said the parents’ “narrow, plausibly inoffensive” intentions weren’t as important as the wider context, and that adults attending a high school athletic event do not enjoy a First Amendment protected ri

According to the defense, the Gaudreaus had blood-alcohol levels of .129 or above, higher than the .08 legal limit in New Jersey and the .087 that police recorded for Sean Higgins. They hope to have the manslaughter and vehicular homicide charges reduced or dismissed.

However, Salem County prosecutors note that there is no law banning cycling while intoxicated in New Jersey, and that witnesses said the brothers were riding single-file on the edge of the rural road, not weaving into traffic. Prosecutors have accused Higgins of being impaired by alcohol and fueled by road rage when he ran into them.

“There are four witnesses that witnessed the defendant speeding and illegally passing the Bronco on the right when he struck the brothers. The witnesses also saw the brothers riding single file, with the flow of traffic, on the fog line just prior to being struck by the defendant,” Assistant Prosecutor Michael Mestern wrote this month in asking the judge to exclude the defense’s “contributo

Sedona Prince has gotten a lot of attention for her social media posts, drawing attention to gender equity questions at the NCAA Tournament in 2021, and her status as a lead plaintiff in a landmark antitrust lawsuit standing up for college athletes.

On Monday night, her name wasn’t mentioned as the WNBA rolled through 38 selections in its 29th draft.

The only place her name was mentioned? As a potential draft pick during the draft by analysts.

The big American tech firms known as the “Silicon Six” have been accused of paying almost $278bn (£211bn) less corporate income tax in the past decade compared with the statutory rate for US companies making the same profits.

Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, Netflix, Apple and Microsoft generated $11tn of revenue and $2.5tn of profits over the past 10 years.

Yet they paid an average 18.8% in combined national and federal corporation taxes, compared with an average 29.7% in the US, according to the Fair Tax Foundation (FTF), which said the Silicon Six had “hardwired” tax avoidance into their business models.

Analysis by the not-for-profit organisation found that if one-off repatriation tax payments in the US connected to historical tax avoidance were excluded, the average corporate income tax contribution of the six firms fell to 16.1% over the past decade.

At least 85 sperm donors in the Netherlands have fathered 25 or more children, the national gynaecology and obstetrics organisation has said, after a new registration system showed fertility clinics have been breaking existing rules on sperm donation for decades.

The NVOG said on Monday that some clinics had deliberately used sperm batches more than 25 times, exchanged sperm without the necessary paperwork or donors’ knowledge, and allowed the same donors to donate sperm at multiple clinics.

“The number of so-called ‘mass donors’ should be zero,” gynaecologist Marieke Schoonenberg told the TV show Nieuwsuur. “On behalf of the whole profession, we wish to apologise. We didn’t do things as they should have been done.”

Donald Trump has unveiled a new portrait of himself and it’s the most autocratic yet. A painted version of his fist-pumping stance after being shot in July 2024 now greets visitors in the entrance hall of the White House. This “Fight, fight, fight!” canvas is true strongman art.

It is just the latest in a series of artistic moves by Trump that look disturbingly tyrannical. When he complained that a portrait of himself in the Colorado State Capitol building was “purposefully distorted” it was taken down as quickly as if the US were Stalin’s Soviet Union. And he has ordered JD Vance to purge the Smithsonian museums of “improper ideology”. But how seriously should any of this be taken? Is it an urgent threat to democracy and culture or mere muscle-flexing?

A show currently in Paris offers a troubling historical perspective on Trump’s art antics. “Degenerate” Art: The Trial of Modern Art Under Nazism, at the Musée Picasso, takes you back to the age of the dictators when totalitarian regi

Link to the study - https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2413505122

The climate crisis has tripled the length of ocean heatwaves, a study has found, supercharging deadly storms and destroying critical ecosystems such as kelp forests and coral reefs.

Half of the marine heatwaves since 2000 would not have happened without global heating, which is caused by burning fossil fuels. The heatwaves have not only become more frequent but also more intense: 1C warmer on average, but much hotter in some places, the scientists said.

The research is the first comprehensive assessment of the impact of the climate crisis on heatwaves in the world’s oceans, and it reveals profound changes. Hotter oceans also soak up fewer of the carbon dioxide emissions that are driving temperatures up.

“Here in the Mediterranean, we have some marine heatwaves that are 5C hotter,” said Dr Marta Marcos at the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies in Mallorca, Spain, who led the study. “It’s horrible when

Southwark crown court heard on Monday that the former corporal Aaron Stelmach-Purdie, 34, had run the scam for just over a year between November 2014 and January 2016 while he worked in central London as a clerk at the MoD’s administrative headquarters.

Stelmach-Purdie, from Oldham in Lancashire, manipulated the department’s online platform for the management of staff expenses and allowance claims. He defrauded the government out of £911,677, keeping £557,093 for himself, the court was told.

The defendant, who was dismissed from the armed forces in January 2016 after he was convicted and sentenced on four counts of sexual activity with a child, used his joint personal administration (JPA) account, a system the UK armed forces used to pay staff salaries and process expenses, to make fraudulent claims.

At a news conference last month announcing police had determined the woman previously only known as Mashkode Bizhiki'ikwe was 30-year-old Ashlee Christine Shingoose, Deputy Chief Cam Mackid told reporters police drew that conclusion in part because of information gleaned from a second interview they did in December with the serial killer convicted in her murder — more than 2½ years after he first spoke to police.

"Unfortunately the way our legal system works, once we interview someone once, we don't get to ask them any further questions until they go to court, unless there's new charges," (Deputy Chief Cam) Mackid said (on) March 26, adding there were "legal concerns" and police didn't want to "do anything that might jeopardize" his convictions.

Legal expert David Milward said while he found the police explanation for why it took them so long to talk to Skibicki again "baffling," it's easy to second-guess decisions made in something as complicated as a homicide investigation.

"But a

The Federal Trade Commission told a federal judge on Monday that Meta has abused its power and acted as a monopoly by acquiring rivals instead of competing fairly, opening a months-long trial seen as a test of the Trump administration's ability to challenge the power of Silicon Valley.

To make its case, the FTC cited Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's own words. Before acquiring Instagram in 2012, Zuckerberg wrote in an internal email that he sought to "neutralize a potential competitor." And ahead of Meta purchasing WhatsApp, in 2014, Zuckerberg wrote an email saying the messaging service represents "a big risk for us."

Indigenous legal advocates in northwestern Ontario are sounding the alarm over the Ontario government's cancellation of its contract with Starlink, citing concerns with people's access to legal services in remote First Nations.

Last month, Premier Doug Ford announced he'd be ripping up the $100-million deal with Elon Musk's internet provider, as a retaliatory measure in the ongoing Canada-U.S. trade war.

But in northwestern Ontario, this means the end of the Starlink-Navigator Program delivered by Nishnawbe-Aski Legal Services Corporation (NALSC), which "permitted community members, who often do not have access to internet, or reliable internet, an opportunity to participate in virtual courts."