HellsBelle

Donald Trump took his frequent habit of describing himself as a “protector” of women further on Wednesday night in Wisconsin, when he declared he would protect them “whether the women like it or not” if he wins a second term in the White House.

“I said, ‘Well, I’m going to do it, whether the women like it or not,’” Trump said. “I’m going to protect them.”

There have been dozens of claims of sexual misconduct levelled at the Republican candidate over the years, including a fresh allegation last week. Trump denies them all. Last year a judge ruled that a rape accusation against Trump was substantially true.

The Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt responded: “Harris may be the first woman Vice President but she has implemented dangerously liberal policies that have left women worse off financially and far less safe than we were four years ago under President Trump.”

The concept of “elite overproduction” was developed by social scientist Peter Turchin around the turn of this century to describe something specific: too many rich people for not enough rich-person jobs. It’s a byproduct of inequality: a ton of poor people, sure, but also a superfluity of the wealthy, without enough positions to house them in the influence and status to which they think themselves entitled. In a modern context, that would mean senior positions in the government and civil service, along with the top tier of finance and law, but Turchin tested the hypothesis from ancient Rome to 19th-century Britain. The names and nature of the contested jobs and titles changed; the pattern remained. Turchin predicted in 2010 that by the 2020s it would be destabilising US politics.

Turchin didn’t specify exactly how much wealth puts you in a situation with an overproduced elite, but he didn’t mean debt-laden students; he didn’t mean MPs; he meant, for brevity, billionaires or the top 1%. When a lot of your media are billionaire-owned, those media sources become endlessly inventive in taking the heat off billionaires, nipping criticism in the bud by pilfering its vocabulary and throwing it back at everyone.

Elon Musk could never have got himself elected into office in the US. But as the cost-cutting tsar, a made-up role Trump has promised him, he would exert extraordinary power to cause pain, with the only choice left to citizens being whether or not to hug it. Another billionaire donor, John Paulson, has been floated for the treasury secretary job, and Trump has a track record of rewarding big-ticket donors with a seat at the table – the billionaire Stephen Schwarzman boasted in print about his role in the new North America Free Trade Agreement negotiations in 2018, and as part of Trump’s “strategic and policy forum” during the 2017 administration.

IN THE NEARLY four years since supporters of former President Donald Trump attacked the U.S. Capitol building, federal prosecutors have indicted at least 35 current or former law enforcement officers for their role in the insurrection, according to an Intercept analysis.

Among their targets was Alan Hostetter, a former California police chief who entered the Capitol grounds with a hatchet in his backpack on January 6, 2021. He was sentenced to more than 11 years in federal prison late last year, among the longest sentences so far out of more than 1,500 prosecutions stemming from the events of that day.

Before his journey from police chief in La Habra, California, to insurrectionist, Hostetter spent 22 years at the Fontana Police Department, a small agency in the mostly working-class region southeast of Los Angeles known as the Inland Empire. The area has a history as a hotbed for white supremacist views most commonly associated with the deep South, which have earned it the nickname “Invisible Empire”— a reference to the Ku Klux Klan.

A personal care home in Winkler, Man., has been forced to close 26 desperately needed beds after its elevator became unstable, and petitioned the provincial government for months before Shared Health finally committed to fund the repair.

Karin Oliveira, CEO of Salem Home, had to make the difficult decision last month to move 26 people off the facility's second floor after she lost confidence in the elevator that kept breaking down.

Four years ago, the P.E.I. government said it had ordered a corporation owned by a member of the Irving family, Red Fox Acres, to get rid of some of its land because of a contravention of P.E.I.'s Lands Protection Act.

It was only the second time the province had ordered a divestiture of land under the act, which came into effect in 1982. The first time, it was also the Irving family that was ordered to give up land.

Two years ago, the government said the Irvings were now in compliance with the act, even though land title records show the same corporation still owns the land in question today.

No information was shared with the public to explain what changed, or just how the Irving family had come into compliance with the act. In the legislature, the Green Party suggested the company had leased the land to another Irving-controlled corporation.

The daughters of a woman who was killed in Nova Scotia twelve days ago by her husband before he killed himself are calling on the RCMP for more transparency around domestic violence, alleging the force is covering up what happened because their mother's husband was a retired Mountie.

Tara Graham, 41, and Ashley Whitten, 38, say their mother, Brenda Tatlock-Burke, 59, was in a toxic and controlling relationship with their stepfather, Mike Burke, for more than 30 years and had told them she was planning to leave him just two days before she was killed.

The women are upset about the information — or lack thereof — that the RCMP have released about the case, saying it has led to a false narrative about what occurred and that they want their mother's story known publicly to raise awareness of domestic violence.

Cynthia Black believes her rent has been rigged.

Since 2022, the Toronto resident says she has twice faced annual rent increases of either seven or 11 per cent — depending on the lease type her household was offered — in two Livmore buildings owned by GWL Realty Advisors, a division of Canada Life.

"The hikes have never made any sense. And when myself and other tenants sat down and asked [GWLRA] to please stop raising rents so high, they told us they use software called YieldStar to help determine our rents," she told CBC's The National.

But in June, she says YieldStar came up again — only this time it was in the news, as the FBI was investigating the company that owns it, RealPage, and landlords who use it for alleged collusion, price-fixing and artificially inflating rents across the U.S.

One electric-vehicle challenge Elon Musk saw coming in his rear-view mirror has just edged past him. On Wednesday, BYD clocked quarterly sales that handily beat Tesla. The next worry is that his Chinese rival will keep pulling further ahead.

BYD's top line was neck and neck with Tesla's in last year's fourth quarter. But it powered ahead in the latest results, with a record 201 billion yuan ($28 billion) in revenue in the three months to the end of September, some $3 billion more than its U.S. rival's.

Providence St. Joseph Hospital and the California Attorney General’s office have reached a temporary agreement in a case alleging the Catholic-owned hospital in Humboldt County violated multiple state laws by denying emergency abortion care to pregnant patients.

Last month, Attorney General Rob Bonta sued Providence St. Joseph Hospital in Eureka, alleging it illegally refused to provide emergency abortion care to a woman who was 15 weeks pregnant and hemorrhaging.

According to the stipulated agreement released Tuesday, St. Joseph agrees to fully comply with the state’s Emergency Services Law, which prohibits hospitals from denying patients emergency care.

The hospital will allow physicians to terminate a patient’s pregnancy if not doing so would seriously risk the patient’s health. The hospital also agreed not to transfer a patient to another facility without first providing emergency stabilizing care, including abortion if that is what a patient needs.

Two humpback whales were found dead and another seriously injured this year in huge nets used to collect krill for fishmeal and omega-3 pills near Antarctica, The Associated Press has learned.

The whale deaths, which have not been previously reported, were discussed during recent negotiations between the U.S., China, Russia and two dozen other countries in which officials failed to make progress on long-debated conservation goals and lifted some fishing limits in the Southern Ocean that have been in place since 2009.

Taken together, the whale deaths and rollback of the catch limits represent a setback for the remote krill fishery, which has boomed in recent years and is set to expand even further following the acquisition of its biggest harvester, Norway’s Aker BioMarine, by a deep-pocketed American private equity firm.

After a shooter killed six people at Nashville’s Covenant School in 2023, Tennessee’s Republican-controlled legislature ignored calls to pass gun control measures. Instead, they passed a series of increasingly punitive laws aimed not only at preventing future violence but dissuading kids from making threats that disrupt school and terrify other students.

Two contradictory laws went into effect before this school year began. One requires school officials to expel a student only if their investigation finds the threat is “valid,” a term that the law does not define. The other mandates that police charge people, including kids, with felonies for making threats of any kind, credible or not. As a result, students across the state can be arrested for statements that wouldn’t even get them expelled.

Tennessee has not yet released statewide data on how many arrests for threats of mass violence have been made since school started in August. But Hamilton County arrested 18 students in the first six weeks of the school year, more than twice as many as Nashville’s Davidson County — despite Hamilton having far fewer students. Data that ProPublica and WPLN obtained through a records request shows that at least 519 students were charged with threats of mass violence last school year, when it was a misdemeanor, an increase from 442 the prior year. Many of them were middle schoolers and most were boys. The youngest child charged last school year was 7 years old.

Virginia does not have to restore the registrations of 1,600 voters, some of whom appear to have been wrongly removed, ahead of next week’s election, the US supreme court said on Wednesday.

The court made the decision on its emergency docket and did not give a rationale for its decision, which is customary for rulings on an expedited basis. All three liberal justices on the court – Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson – said they would not have halted a lower-court ruling earlier in October ordering the state to restore the voter registrations.

The legal dispute centers on a 7 August executive order by the Virginia governor, Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, directing the state to run its voter registration rolls against DMV data on a daily basis to check for non-citizens. The justice department and civil rights groups sued, saying that the state was violating a federal law that prohibits systematic removals of voters within 90 days of a federal election.