HellsBelle

On the morning of Jan. 22, 2024, Elmer De León Pérez descended deep into the bowels of a ship that he was helping to build in Houma, Louisiana. Pérez was a welder, working to construct one of the U.S. government’s most sophisticated ships, an $89 million vessel for tracking hurricanes and conducting oceanographic research. It was funded by President Joe Biden’s signature climate legislation.

When emergency workers found his body, Pérez was already showing signs of rigor mortis. A coroner’s report would note that he was wearing a red hoodie, plaid pajama pants and brown steel-toed boots, and that a “copious amount of clear fluid was noted to the mouth and nose,” as well as on the sleeve of his shirt. The coroner concluded that Pérez “died as a result of bilateral severe pulmonary consolidation and edema” — fluid in the lungs — and “copper and nickel intoxication.” (The ship, like many, used copper-nickel alloys as a coating because they resist corrosion from salt water.)

But Pérez wasn’t working directly for Thoma-Sea; he was employed by a contractor. So when he died, Thoma-Sea paid nothing. Not to his family, including the partner that survived him. Not to his toddler son. Not even to help send Pérez’s body home to Guatemala. Instead, his family borrowed money and desperately tried to raise the rest online. Family members said they haven’t heard anything from Thoma-Sea since Pérez died.

Rudy Giuliani must give control of his New York City apartment, a 1980s Mercedes-Benz once owned by Lauren Bacall, several luxury watches and many other assets to two Georgia election workers he defamed.

Lewis Liman, a US district judge in New York, appointed Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss as recipients of the property and gave the former New York mayor and Trump confidante seven days to turn over the assets.

A jury ruled that Giuliani owes them around $150m for spreading lies about them after the 2020 election though Giuliani is appealing the ruling. Liman authorized the two women to immediately begin selling the assets.

At some point in 2023, Ontario's Ministry of Natural Resources pushed through updates to its map of provincially protected wetlands, and 55 hectares in Ottawa's rural west end were dropped.

Two sizeable wetlands — one on either side of Highway 7 — used to be classified as part of the Goulbourn complex, a group of marshes and swamps that stretch across an area west of the suburb of Stittsville.

Now they are among the first known examples of wetlands to lose their "provincially significant" status since the Ontario government rolled out controversial changes in January 2023 aimed at getting homes built faster.

Rowell Pailan spends his days applying for jobs in factories, in restaurants, in shops. He's ready to take any kind of work.

Last September, Pailan quit his job with the company he came to Canada to work for over what he says are disputes about his treatment, including hours and wages. Now, he can't find an employer willing to do the paperwork to change his closed work permit — a standard part of Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) program that ties workers to specific companies.

He knows the end date on that work permit means time is ticking on his Canadian dream.

"I'm still asking myself, what I am doing here, what I'm doing here in Canada," he said in a recent interview in his Wolfville, N.S., apartment.

The number of amputations due to frostbite in Edmonton reached 110 last winter, the highest level in more than a decade, according to new data obtained by CBC News.

But Calgary marked its second consecutive winter of declining frostbite amputations, counting roughly one-third of Edmonton's procedures last fiscal year.

The frostbite amputation numbers mark a notable shift after years of Alberta's two major centres following similar trends.

An American Civil Liberties Union lawyer will make history in December as the first openly transgender attorney to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court, opposing Tennessee's Republican-backed law banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors.

The ACLU's Chase Strangio, 41, represents a group of transgender people who pursued a lawsuit challenging the measure that prohibits medical treatments including hormones and surgeries for minors experiencing gender dysphoria.

ACLU Legal Director Cecillia Wang called Strangio the leading U.S. legal expert on transgender rights.

"He brings to the lectern not only brilliant constitutional lawyering, but also the tenacity and heart of a civil rights champion," Wang said.

An Israeli military unit that has been accused of human rights abuses against Palestinian detainees is reportedly under investigation by the US state department in a move that could lead to it being barred from receiving assistance.

The inquiry into the activities of Force 100 was instigated following a spate of allegations that Palestinians held under its guard at a detention centre have been subject to torture and brutal mistreatment, including sexual assault, Axios reported on Monday.

Nine members of Force 100, a unit inside the Israeli Defence Forces, are the subject of criminal investigation over allegations that they sexually assaulted a prisoner at the Sde Teiman detention camp in the Negev desert, which human rights groups have dubbed “the Israeli Guantanamo”.

Canada’s military decided not to apologize to an employee after she was sexually assaulted while working with Nato allies, over fears that any apology would be reported by an Ottawa newspaper.

Kristen Adams, who was working at a canteen for troops in Latvia, was sexually assaulted by a Nato soldier on 3 December 2022. After filing a formal complaint about the assault, she was warned by the army’s morale and welfare services that she should have better understood the risks of the job.

People are dying left and right,” Meno Ya Win Hospital staff told Sol Mamakwa as the Kiiwetinoong MPP toured the Sioux Lookout area’s largest health care facility.

Sioux Lookout’s 76-bed long-term care facility was a promise the Liberals made in 2018 that has yet to transpire over six years of Progressive Conservative governance.

“After question period, I talked to Doug Ford. He came to me and this is what he said: ‘You know how we’re going to pay for that long-term care facility in Sioux Lookout? We’re going to need to open up the mines in the north.’

“So I told her that. She said, ‘really? Does that mean we have to give up our lands to get those [beds]?’

“‘Yep. That’s what that means.’

Humanity is “on the precipice” of shattering Earth’s limits, and will suffer huge costs if we fail to act on biodiversity loss, experts warn. This week, world leaders meet in Cali, Colombia, for the Cop16 UN biodiversity conference to discuss action on the global crisis. As they prepare for negotiations, scientists and experts around the world have warned that the stakes are high, and there is “no time to waste”.

“We are already locked in for significant damage, and we’re heading in a direction that will see more,” says Tom Oliver, professor of applied ecology at the University of Reading. “I really worry that negative changes could be very rapid.”

Since 1970, some studies estimate wildlife populations have declined on average by 73%, with huge numbers lost in the decades and centuries before. Passenger pigeons, the Carolina parakeets and Floreana giant tortoises are among the many species humans have obliterated. “It’s shameful that our single species is driving the extinction of thousands of others,” says Oliver.

The biodiversity crisis is not just about other species – humans also rely on the natural world for food, clean water and air to breathe. Oliver says: “I think we will, certainly, in the next 15 to 20 years, see continued food crises, and the real risk of multiple breadbasket failures … that’s in addition to a lot of the other risks that might impact us through fresh-water pollution, ocean acidification, wildfire and algal blooms, and so on.”

Mel Nichols, a 37-year-old bartender in Phoenix, Arizona, takes home anywhere from $30 to $50 an hour with tips included. But the uncertainty of how much she’s going to make on a daily basis is a constant source of stress.

“For every good day, there’s three bad days,” said Nichols, who has been in the service industry since she was a teenager. “You have no security when it comes to knowing how much you’re going to make.”

The amount tipped workers make varies by state. Fourteen states pay the federal minimum, or just above $2 an hour for tipped workers and $7 an hour for non-tipped workers.

A headline in the Wisconsin Catholic Tribune, and repurposed in other states’ versions, provocatively asks, “How many ‘sex change’ mutilation surgeries occurred on Wisconsin kids?” Another: “Haitian illegal aliens in America: What are Harris supporters saying?”

At the same time, they undermine Vice President Kamala Harris and prop up former President Donald Trump by, for instance, reminding readers on the front page that anti-vaccine activist and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — whose father and uncle were among the most prominent Catholics in the country — has endorsed Trump.

Dioceses and parishes in Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin have issued warnings about the publications. “It gives the impression that the Diocese of Grand Rapids or the Catholic Church is behind this newspaper,” diocese spokesperson Annalise Laumeyer said of the Michigan Catholic Tribune.

She reached out to local media to flag parishioners so they won’t be misled. And because of the clearly partisan content, non-Catholics might be left with an impression of the Catholic Church that is “worrisome,” she said.