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Judge denies initial request to temporarily block North Dakota’s ban on kids’ gender-affirming care

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 19:24:12 GMT

BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — A North Dakota judge has ruled that he won’t immediately block the state’s ban on gender-affirming health care for minors, delivering an early setback to families who want the new law found unconstitutional.District Judge Jackson Lofgren on Monday denied a temporary restraining order the plaintiffs had requested. They’ve also asked for a preliminary injunction that would temporarily block enforcement of the law as their case proceeds. A hearing is set for January for that request.“We’re disappointed in this ruling, but we are confident that when all the evidence has been presented, the court will ultimately find that ending the health care ban permanently is the only just, equitable, and constitutional resolution,” said Brittany Stewart of Gender Justice, the lead attorney for the three families and pediatrician who are suing.Lofgren cited the plaintiffs’ “nearly five-month delay” in filing their complaint, and their argument hinging “up...

S&P/TSX composite up more than 300 points, U.S. stock markets also rally

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 19:24:12 GMT

TORONTO — Canada’s main stock index was up more than 300 points in late-morning trading as strength in base metal, financial and utility stocks helped lead a broad-based rally and U.S. stock markets also pushed higher.The S&P/TSX composite index was up 346.99 points at 20,056.14.In New York, the Dow Jones industrial average was up 556.52 points at 34,894.39. The S&P 500 index was up 90.33 points at 4,501.88, while the Nasdaq composite was up 313.92 points at 14,081.66.The Canadian dollar traded for 72.89 cents US compared with 72.36 cents US on Friday.The December crude contract was up US$1.21 at US$79.47 per barrel and the December natural gas contract was down five cents at $3.15 per mmBTU.The December gold contract was up US$18.70 at US$1,968.90 an ounce and the December copper contract was up four cents at US$3.70 a pound.This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 14, 2023.Companies in this story: (TSX:GSPTSE, TSX:CADUSD) The Canadian Press

Suspect leaves Ajax dollar store empty-handed after failed robbery attempt: police

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 19:24:12 GMT

Durham Regional Police investigators say a would-be thief didn’t find any dollars during a dollar store break-in and left empty-handed after failing to get into the cash register.It happened on Sunday, Oct. 8, at Your Dollarstore at 105 Bayly St. in Ajax.Officers were called to the store at around 10 a.m. for reports of a break-and-enter.“A male had broken into the store overnight and attempted to steal cash from the register,” a police release states.“The male was unsuccessful and caused property damage in the process.”The suspect is described as a white male, 40 to 50 years old, around five feet 10 inches tall with a medium build and a dark beard.He was wearing a light-coloured Under Armour hoodie, black jeans, dark-coloured Adidas running shoes, and a baby blue coloured Puma backpack.

Social-media creators, podcasts won’t be regulated under Liberal online streaming law

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 19:24:12 GMT

OTTAWA — Canadian Heritage has released its final policy direction for the Liberals’ controversial Online Streaming Act, which aims to modernize the country’s broadcasting laws. The final direction for the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission to implement the legislation was issued today.This marks the end of the government’s direct role with the law formerly known as Bill C-11, the Liberal government’s second attempt to bring major online streaming services into Canada’s broadcasting system alongside traditional media such as TV and radio. The final policy direction explicitly instructs the CRTC to not impose regulations on social-media content creators or podcasters. The law will require online broadcasters to contribute to the creation, production and distribution of Canadian content.It also seeks to support Indigenous content and original French-language programing.This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 14,...

A woman killed in Belgium decades ago has been identified when a relative saw her distinctive tattoo

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 19:24:12 GMT

LONDON (AP) — A woman killed 31 years ago in Belgium has been identified after a family member recognized details of her tattoo, Interpol said Tuesday.The police organization said the cold case was known as “the woman with the flower tattoo” because of the distinctive art on her left arm. Her body was found in a river in Antwerp in June 1992.She was finally identified recently as Rita Roberts, a 31-year-old British woman, following a joint appeal for help in more than 20 cold cases by Interpol and police in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany.A family member in the U.K. recognized details of her tattoo — a black flower with green leaves — on the news and contacted police, officials said.The appeal for information in May covered 22 cases across the three countries. Most of them involved women who were killed.Roberts had moved to Antwerp from Cardiff in Wales. She last had contact with relatives with a postcard she sent in May 1992.Her family said that although the news was difficult...

Airstrike kills renowned doctor in Gaza and relatives who sought shelter together

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 19:24:12 GMT

CAIRO (AP) — It was the call Shaymma Alloh had been dreading, the news from Gaza she hoped would never come: The house where 26 members of her family were sheltering was hit by a missile strike.Among the four confirmed deaths from the strike late Saturday was her 36-year-old brother, Hammam Alloh, a renowned physician who stayed in northern Gaza to help treat patients at Shifa Hospital, which has been encircled by Israeli troops for days.He and many of his relatives were staying at his in-laws’ home near the hospital because they had nowhere else to go. And that’s where surviving family members found their bodies. One was disemboweled by the blast, two more buried in rubble, she said.The dead included Shaymma Alloh’s father and two in-laws, she told The Associated Press by phone Monday as she pieced together the tragedy from her home in the U.S. She declined to disclose her exact location out of concern about possible repercussions.Her brother was a well-known kidn...

‘A noisy rock ‘n’ roll’: How growing interest in Formula One is felt across the music world

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 19:24:12 GMT

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Beyond the engineering, the athleticism, the speed, the luxury — fans love the sound of Formula One.The fierce rhythms of a V6 turbocharged hybrid engine; the sticky staccato of a rushed downshift; sexy, loud zooms. There’s a real musical appreciation for the elite motorsport. Engines are described using RPMs, the same way vinyl records are.It is no wonder that F1 has long been an enthusiasm of musicians and music fans for decades — the Beatles ’ George Harrison wrote “Faster” about the series, what he called “a noisy rock ‘n’ roll”; the same spirit that inspired a Mario Andretti namecheck in A Tribe Called Quest’s “Award Tour.” But in the last few years, an accelerating interest in F1, particularly among young Americans, has made its influence on the music world — and vice versa — impossible to ignore.There’s Bad Bunny ’s “Monaco” and Carín León’s “Por La Familia,” both of which feature Red Bull driver Sergio “Checo” Perez in their videos. The up-and-coming indie...

Biden, Xi early headliners as leaders gather in California for Asia-Pacific summit

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 19:24:12 GMT

SAN FRANCISCO — Its 21 member economies represent nearly three billion people and 62 per cent of the world’s GDP, generating US$30 trillion in global trade last year alone. But as Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders gather in San Francisco, the focus — for now, at least — will be on just two of them.U.S. President Joe Biden sits down Wednesday with Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, hoping to iron out some of the kinks in their fraught bilateral relationship.White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan calls it “intense diplomacy” aimed at ensuring that healthy competition doesn’t devolve into dangerous conflict.Experts say that dynamic will likely make it difficult for Canada to make much of a geopolitical splash in the Bay Area this week. But federal officials say they expect tangible progress from  a busy slate of bilateral meetings during Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s three-day visit. The summit comes one year since the Liberal government unve...

Jesmyn Ward’s ‘Let Us Descend’ is among the finalists for an Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 19:24:12 GMT

NEW YORK (AP) — Jesmyn Ward’s slave narrative “Let Us Descend” and Jake Bittle’s exploration of climate change’s impact “The Great Displacement” are among the finalists for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence. The medals are presented by the American Library Association and given for fiction and nonfiction, with winners in each category receiving $5,000.On Tuesday, the library association announced that Ward’s novel was a fiction nominee, along with Amanda Peters’ “The Berry Pickers” and the mixed media “Denison Avenue,” by author Christina Wong and illustrator Daniel Innes. In nonfiction, the finalists are Bittle’s “The Great Displacement,” Darrin Bell’s memoir “The Talk” and Roxana Robinson’s investigation into the foster system, “We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America.”Finalists will be announced Jan. 20. The awards, made possible by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York, were estab...

Global hacker investigated by federal agents in Puerto Rico pleads guilty in IPStorm case

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 19:24:12 GMT

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — A man with Russian and Moldovan citizenship pleaded guilty to illegally taking control of thousands of electronic devices worldwide to rent them to clients who want to hide their internet activity, U.S. prosecutors in Puerto Rico said Tuesday.The scheme ran from at least June 2019 to December 2022 and generated more than half a million dollars, with unidentified customers paying hundreds of dollars a month for the service, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Puerto Rico said in a statement. Authorities said Sergei Makinin developed and deployed malicious software to gain control of people’s devices via an extensive network known as a “botnet,” which was dubbed IPStorm. He then sold illegal access to the hijacked devices to clients seeking to keep their Internet activities private, advertising that he had more than 23,000 “highly anonymous” proxies available worldwide, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.The case was investigated by the FBI’s San Juan o...