HellsBelle

Customers with Canada's three biggest telecom providers — Rogers, Bell and Telus — say they're frustrated by contracts that lock them into agreements but allow the companies to increase prices at the same time.

In hundreds of emails to Go Public, customers say they're fed up with unexpected increases to their monthly internet, TV and home phone bills during their contracts.

They started writing after CBC News reported the story of Cathy Cooper, a Rogers Communications customer in Sidney, B.C., who was caught off guard when the company jacked up the monthly price of renting TV boxes by $7 apiece ($12 each for newer customers).

A powerful US oil and gas industry lobby group has drawn up detailed plans to kill off penalties for emitting methane, a potent planet-heating gas that’s increasing at the fastest rate in decades, with this effort led by a major donor to Donald Trump whose company has just been fined for methane pollution.

Leaked internal documents from the American Exploration & Production Council (AXPC), a group of 30 oil and gas producers, outline a push to repeal a fee levied on methane emissions should the former US president win this week’s election and Republicans gain control of Congress.

The plan, coming as scientists warn that methane emissions are rising at a rate that imperils a livable climate, is being spearheaded by an AXPC board that includes the chief executive of Hilcorp, a Texas-based firm whose founder Jeff Hildebrand has, along with his wife, Melinda, been a leading donor to Trump’s election campaign, holding multiple fundraisers for the former president.

At the time of writing, the death toll has risen to 214. Battered cars and other debris are piled up in the streets, large swaths of Valencia remain underwater, and Spain is in mourning. On Sunday, anger erupted as the king and queen of Spain were pelted with mud and other objects by protesters. Why were so many lives lost in a flood that was well forecasted in a wealthy country?

From the global north’s vantage point, the climate crisis, caused by the burning of coal, oil and gas, has long been seen as a distant threat, affecting poor people in the global south. This misconception has perpetuated a false sense of security.

Scientists have long known that heating the climate with fossil fuel emissions will result in the intensification of floods, storms, heatwaves, drought and wildfires. However, it was not until 2004 that the first attribution study formally linked a weather event – the devastating 2003 European heatwave – to our changing climate. Despite the evidence, people have been hesitant to connect extreme weather with the climate crisis.

While Democratic strategists debate whether or not their attack ads labeling Donald Trump a fascist have been effective, experts and academics told the Guardian his campaign and the Republican party he now heads have clear autocratic sympathies and political qualities that are firmly in line with fascism movements historically.

Put together, that makes any Trump victory this week and his return to the White House for a second presidential term a clear threat to US democracy, they added.

“There couldn’t be a more obvious example of a fascist social and political movement about to take power,” said Jason Stanley, a Yale philosophy professor whose new book, Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, looks at the global playbook of fascists through the lens of America and beyond.

He surely would reject any such comparison but, in a recent interview, Justin Trudeau briefly sounded just a little bit like Richard Nixon.

"The problem is right now that there is a silent majority that is a little bit silent, and maybe wondering whether it's actually a minority. And you got a lot of good, thoughtful people saying, you know, 'I don't have anything personal against the leader, but everyone seems to hate him because I see all these flags and therefore, you know, he must be on his way out or he must be unpopular,'" Trudeau told Village Media.

While Nixon, the 37th president of the United States, didn't coin the phrase, he did popularize the notion of a "silent majority" in a televised address about the war in Vietnam in 1969. Those words conjured up an image of a mass of voters who could not be heard over the din of the protesters and activists clamouring for political and social change.

A 5.48 metre (18 ft) Australian crocodile that held the world record as the largest crocodile in captivity has died, a wildlife sanctuary said on Saturday. He was thought to be more than 110 years old.

Cassius, weighing in at more than one ton, had been in declining health since Oct. 15, Marineland Melanesia Crocodile Habitat said on Facebook.

"He was very old and believed to be living beyond the years of a wild Croc," according to a post by the organisation, based on Green Island near the Queensland tourist town of Cairns.

The FBI is investigating the death of a Black man in Alabama, who was found hanging in an abandoned house, following a request from a local sheriff amid fears among community members who accuse local law enforcement of longstanding, unchecked misconduct.

Sheriff’s deputies found Dennoriss Richardson, 39, in September in a rural part of Colbert County, miles away from his home in Sheffield, a city of approximately 10,000 people near the Tennessee River.

The Colbert County Sheriff’s Office ruled Richardson’s death a suicide. But Richardson’s wife, Leigh Richardson, has said that is not true, explaining her husband did not leave a note and had no connection to the house where he was found.

Instead, the 40-year-old fears her husband’s death was related to a lawsuit he filed against the local police department in February. Dennoriss Richardson, who coached kids in baseball and football, had alleged he was assaulted, denied medical attention, sprayed with tear gas and shocked with a Taser while in jail.

The trailer for Squid Game 2, airing on Dec 26, just dropped.

It looks awesome.

In all 50 states, the AP found cases where staff allegedly used inmate work assignments to lure women to isolated spots, out of view of security cameras. The prisoners said they were attacked while doing jobs like kitchen or laundry duty inside correctional facilities or in work-release programs that placed them at private businesses like national fast-food restaurants and hotel chains.

“The only thing you’re thinking about when you’re coming into intake is, ‘How am I going to stay safe?’” said Johanna Mills of Just Detention International, a nonprofit organization working to end sexual violence behind bars. When she was incarcerated, she said her boss smashed her in the head and raped her after bringing her to an empty gym one night to do electrical work. “It never occurred to me to watch my back from the supervisor,” she said.

As part of a two-year investigation that has exposed everything from multinational companies benefiting from prison labor to incarcerated workers’ lack of rights and protections, AP reporters spoke to more than 100 current and former prisoners nationwide, including women who said they were sexually abused by correctional staff.

White House press officials altered the official transcript of a call in which President Joe Biden appeared to take a swipe at supporters of Donald Trump, drawing objections from the federal workers who document such remarks for posterity, according to two U.S. government officials and an internal email obtained Thursday by The Associated Press.

Biden, according to a transcript prepared by the official White House stenographers, told the Latino group on a Tuesday evening video call, “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters — his — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”

The transcript released by the White House press office, however, rendered the quote with an apostrophe, reading “supporter’s” rather than “supporters,” which aides said pointed to Biden criticizing Hinchcliffe, not the millions of Americans who are supporting Trump for president.

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.