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Gaza war’s staggering toll reaches a grim milestone: 20,000 dead

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 19:25:51 GMT

By NAJIB JOBAIN and SAM MAGDY (Associated Press)RAFAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Israel’s war to destroy Hamas has killed more than 20,000 Palestinians, health officials in Gaza said Friday, as Israel expanded its offensive and ordered tens of thousands more people to leave their homes.The deaths in Gaza amount to nearly 1% of the territory’s prewar population — the latest indication of the 11-week-old conflict’s staggering human toll.Israel’s aerial and ground offensive has been one of the most devastating military campaigns in modern history, displacing nearly 85% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people and leveling wide swaths of the tiny coastal enclave. More than half a million people in Gaza — a quarter of the population — are starving, according to a report Thursday from the United Nations and other agencies.Israel declared war after Hamas terrorists stormed across the border on Oct. 7, killing some 1,200 people and taking some 240 hostages. Israel has vowed to keep up the fight unt...

Supreme Court won't fast-track ruling on whether Trump can be prosecuted in election subversion case

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 19:25:51 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court said Friday it will not immediately take up a plea by special counsel Jack Smith to rule on whether former President Donald Trump can be prosecuted for his actions to overturn the 2020 election results.The ruling is a win for Trump and his lawyers, who have sought repeatedly to delay this and other criminal cases against him as he seeks to reclaim the White House in 2024. It averts a swift ruling from the nation's highest court that could have definitively turned aside his claims of immunity and pushed the case toward a trial scheduled to start on March 4.The issue will now be decided by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which has signaled it will act quickly to decide the case. Special counsel Jack Smith had cautioned that even a rapid appellate decision might not get to the Supreme Court in time for review and final word before the court’s traditional summer break.Smith had pressed the Supreme Court to intervene, ci...

Second suspect in Scarborough carjacking arrested

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 19:25:51 GMT

Police have arrested a second man in connection with an early-morning carjacking and robbery in Scarborough earlier this month.Investigators say a man was driving his car in the area of Victoria Park Avenue and Consumers Road on Dec. 15 when around 3 a.m. he was bumped from behind by another vehicle. When the man pulled over, four masked suspects emerged and approached his vehicle. One of the suspects forced open the car’s door and demanded his car while assaulting the driver. He was then physically removed from the vehicle and robbed of personal items. Two of the suspects then drove off in the man’s car while the other two fled in another vehicle.Later that same day the Provincial Car Jacking Task Force (PCJTF) was able to track down both vehicles in Brampton and officers conducted a high-risk takedown around 3:30 p.m. The driver of the stolen vehicle managed to escape while the other suspect was arrested following a foot chase. The stolen vehicle was later recovered in...

Column: Florida State always seemed out of place in the ACC. Now the Seminoles want out

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 19:25:51 GMT

Florida State always seemed out of place in the Atlantic Coast Conference.A football school in a league long renowned for its basketball prowess.Now, the Seminoles want out. Divorce is inevitable, but the split figures to be anything but amicable.The salvos fired Friday, when the Florida State board of trustees voted to begin legal proceedings to escape the ACC without having to pay a staggering departure fee, showed just how nasty this fight is likely to be.Not surprising, since the stakes are enormous for both sides.The ACC is vowing to hold Florida State to its end of the bargain over television rights, which would force the Seminoles to come up with a staggering pile of cash — the school’s legal counsel put the figure at $572 million — just to head for the exit ramp.But if the Seminoles do find a more realistic pathway, perhaps through a sympathetic court ruling, it could send the ACC tumbling into the same death spiral that quickly erased the storied Pac-12 from the major...

1 still missing a week after St. Louis’ largest nursing home closed abrubtly

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 19:25:51 GMT

COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) — One person is still missing a week after the abrupt closure of St. Louis’ largest nursing home left roughly 170 residents scattered at new facilities throughout the city, a state health department spokeswoman confirmed Friday. Many patients left with nothing but the clothes they were wearing when Northview Village Nursing Home shuttered without warning last week, creating confusion and spurring outrage among residents and their families. St. Louis police have been alerted about the final resident who remains unaccounted for, Health and Senior Services Department spokesperson Lisa Cox said in a Friday email. Cox said Northview Village also has surrendered its license to operate, which will end the company’s contracts with Medicare and Medicaid.A person answering the phone said staff of Healthcare Accounting Services, which owns Northview Village and several other St. Louis residential homes, are gone for the holidays and declined to provide email addr...

Junction Residents Association focused on combatting hate, building community

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 19:25:51 GMT

As Toronto has seen a recent surge in hate-motivated incidents, the Junction Residents Association (JRA) has been working on a grassroots campaign aimed at combatting hatred.“One of the values that we have as an organization is inclusiveness,” Helen Vassilakos, the organization’s co-chair, said.“We wanted to make sure that that message was clear in our neighbourhood.”Two-and-a-half years ago, the JRA developed the “Hate has no home here” campaign, which is based on a similar initiative in Oakville. The campaign involves lawn signs and window decals. The organization has sold around 25 window decals and 75 lawn signs to date. The proceeds of sales were set to go toward funding educational workshops for Junction residents.“If anything, this brings people to a conversation about the issue,” Vassilakos said, referencing the campaign. “There’s one person that had mentioned that they had someone who came to do work at their...

Mentally disabled Indiana man wrongfully convicted in slaying reaches $11.7 million settlement

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 19:25:51 GMT

ELKHART, Ind. (AP) — A mentally disabled man who was wrongfully convicted in the slaying of a 94-year-old woman has reached an $11.7 million settlement with a northern Indiana city and former police officers, his attorneys said Friday.The settlement for Andrew Royer, who spent 16 years in prison after confessing to Helen Sailor’s killing, is the largest known Indiana settlement reached in a wrongful conviction case, said Elliot Slosar, one of Royer’s attorneys.“It is no coincidence that Andy received the largest wrongful conviction settlement in Indiana history,” Slosar said in a statement. “Andy was among the most vulnerable in our society when he was coerced into a false confession and framed for a crime he did not commit.”A jury convicted Royer of murder in 2005 and he was sentenced to 55 years in prison for the November 2002 slaying of Sailor, who was found strangled in her Elkhart apartment.Royer’s attorneys argued on appeal that his confession to Sailor’...

New trial ordered for New Brunswick men convicted of murder in 1984

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 19:25:51 GMT

OTTAWA — The federal justice minister has ordered a new trial for two New Brunswick men convicted of a 1984 murder.Arif Virani says in a news release today that after a review, he has determined there’s a reasonable basis to conclude a miscarriage of justice occurred in the convictions of Robert Mailman and Walter Gillespie.The two men were convicted of second-degree murder in the slaying of George Gilman Leaman in Saint John, N.B., and an appeal of their convictions was dismissed by the New Brunswick Court of Appeal in 1988.They were sentenced to life imprisonment with no eligibility for parole for 18 years.Virani says his decision is the result of new information that was not submitted to the courts at the time of the men’s initial trials and appeals and that calls into question “the overall fairness of the process.”Mailman and Gillespie submitted their application for criminal conviction review in December 2019, and both are now on parole and out of custod...

‘Iron Claw’ director Sean Durkin was ‘haunted’ by film’s real-life wrestling tragedy

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 19:25:51 GMT

When pro wrestler Kerry Von Erich died by suicide in 1993, it left a mark on Sean Durkin. The Ontario-born writer-director was 12 at the time, but he’s been thinking about it ever since. The death resonated with the filmmaker on an even deeper level when he began to look into the late brawler’s family. The Von Erichs were a close-knit wrestling tribe of five Texas brothers raised by their ring veteran father to achieve triumphant highs in the ’70s and ’80s, only to be overshadowed by tragic lows. All but one of the siblings would die before the age of 35.Their story is back in the spotlight with Durkin’s new A24 biopic “The Iron Claw,” which stars Zac Efron and Jeremy Allen White as Kevin and Kerry Von Erich.“Kerry’s death definitely hit me as a kid,” says Durkin. “My dad’s brother had died previously a few months before. My dad had six brothers, too. And so there was some connection I made there. I just felt connected to them and that loss haunted me. It just stay...

More Brazilians declared themselves as being biracial, country’s statistics agency says

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 19:25:51 GMT

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — More Brazilians declared they are biracial than white last year, the country’s statistics agency said on Friday, citing data from its most recent census. Agency IBGE said in a statement that about 92.1 million people — which is about 45.3% of the country’s population — consider themselves biracial. Another 88.2 million Brazilians, or 43.5% of the population, said they are white. In 2010, when the previous census was made in Brazil, 47.7% of the population declared as white while 43.1% identified as biracial.IBGE said it was the first time since 1991 that these demographics appear in the South American nation, where millions of Blacks and Indigenous peoples have endured racism since their ancestors were enslaved. Brazil’s official statistics agency describes the country’s racial demographics split into groups named as white, black, brown, yellow and Indigenous. Brown refers to biracial and yellow to Asian descendants. The agency made its first ...