A Russian vessel is suspected of a territorial violation of Finland’s marine area in the Gulf of Finland, an arm of the Baltic Sea, the Finnish defense ministry said on Friday.

The suspected violation, which the Finnish Border Guard is currently investigating, took place in the eastern part of the Gulf of Finland Friday afternoon, a brief government statement said.

The ministry didn’t disclose further details of the incident but the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat said, citing information from border officials, that the suspected vessel is the Russian Navy’s hydrographic survey ship, the Mikhail Kazansky.

The Russian vessel, used among other things for underwater topography and repair work, entered into Finnish territorial waters south of the town of Hamina without authorization just after noon Friday, and the violation lasted about seven minutes, the newspaper said.

The Philippine Coast Guard has deployed floating barriers and started to clean up an oil spill to prevent it from reaching the capital, Manila.

Authorities are racing to stop the oil spill from the 65-metre-long (213 feet) MT Terra Nova, which capsized on Thursday as monsoon rains battered large swathes of the country.

The leak appeared to be coming from the ship's engine, not its cargo tank, which was carrying close to 1.5 million litres of industrial fuel, officials said.

There are fears that the spill, which stretches out over several kilometres, could be the worst in the country's history if it is not contained.

A man in Nevada has been charged with making a death threat against the prosecutor who secured Donald Trump’s criminal conviction in New York and the judge who oversaw the trial, according to court records and a person familiar with the case.

Spencer Gear, 32, was charged in Nevada federal court on 16 July with 22 counts of making threats to kill or injure federal and state officials, including making a call threatening to kill two individuals in New York referred to as “AB” and “JM”.

The indictment, handed down by a grand jury, does not name the targets, but a person familiar with the case told Reuters that the initials referred to the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, and Justice Juan Merchan.

The justice department has alleged that Gear intended to “impede, intimidate and interfere with the officials while engaged in the performance of official duties” and that he intended to “retaliate against the officials on account of the performance of official duties”.

The Israeli government took extraordinary measures to frustrate a high-stakes US lawsuit that threatened to reveal closely guarded secrets about one of the world’s most notorious hacking tools, leaked files suggest.

Israeli officials seized documents about Pegasus spyware from its manufacturer, NSO Group, in an effort to prevent the company from being able to comply with demands made by WhatsApp in a US court to hand over information about the invasive technology.

Documents suggest the seizures were part of an unusual legal manoeuvre created by Israel to block the disclosure of information about Pegasus, which the government believed would cause “serious diplomatic and security damage” to the country.

The removal of files and computers from NSO’s offices in July 2020 – until now hidden from the public by a strict gag order issued by an Israeli court – casts new light on the close ties between Israel and NSO and the overlapping interests of the privately owned surveillance company and the country’s security establishment.

The Georgia sun scorched the slab of concrete beneath Juan Carlos Ramirez Bibiano’s body when nurses found him in a puddle of his own excrement, vomiting, according to a complaint.

Officers left Ramirez in an outdoor cell at Telfair State Prison on July 20, 2023, for five hours without water, shade or ice, even as the outside temperature climbed to 96 degrees by the afternoon, according to a lawsuit brought by his family. That evening, the complaint says, Ramirez died of heart and lung failure caused by heat exposure. He was 27.

Ramirez’s family, including his mother, Norma Bibiano, announced a lawsuit against the Georgia Department of Corrections on Thursday, alleging that officers’ negligent performance of their duties caused his death. The warden directed officers to check on inmates, bring them water and ice and limit their time outside, the complaint says.

The Department of Corrections reported that Ramirez died of natural causes, Jeff Filipovits, one of Norma Bibiano’s attorneys, said at a news conference in Decatur, a suburb of Atlanta.

The 2-year-old toddler lay on a foil blanket, her face covered with salve for her burns and her little body riddled with scars from shrapnel. She squirmed, her breath heaving, as doctors examined her and the tube in her chest.

Siwar Abdel-Hadi is now an orphan. She’s the lone survivor of an Israeli strike that hit their family home in central Gaza, killing her parents, her two sisters and her brother, along with a brother of her mother.

“The whole family was gathered around a table for lunch” when the missile struck Tuesday in the Bureij refugee camp, said Nour Abdel-Hadi, one of Siwar’s paternal aunts. She spoke at nearby Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, where the overwhelmed staff rushed around her dealing with influxes of wounded.

Israel’s campaign of bombardment and offensives in Gaza has left thousands of orphans. Cases like Siwar’s have become so common, doctors created an acronym for it: WCNSF, “wounded child, no surviving family.” The United Nations estimated in February that some 17,000 children in the territory are now unaccompanied, and the number is likely to have grown since.

During his first two months as a volunteer chaplain with Windsor, Ont., police, Hassan Rkie was accused of trying to get a victim to drop domestic violence charges in an ongoing case and has since been charged with obstruction, CBC News has learned.

The 47-year-old was quietly charged in February. The Windsor Police Service didn't release the information publicly, though it often does when arrests are made.

According to documents filed in the Ontario Court of Justice, it's alleged Rkie "did intentionally attempt to dissuade a person ... by bribes from giving evidence in a judicial proceeding."

Two sources within the police service told CBC News that Rkie knew a man in the community being accused of domestic violence. They said he then proceeded to contact the complainant in what they claim was an attempt to get them to drop the charges.

Years after two Ontario police officers got into a violent altercation in broad daylight that ended in one shooting the other 10 times, both have walked away with no convictions.

On Nov. 29, 2018, Donovan and Parker were investigating a car crash at a rural intersection near Niagara Falls, Ont.

Parker was directing traffic, but left to use the bathroom. When he returned to his post, Donovan confronted him and a fight ensued.

Donovan later testified that Parker pushed and hit him and pulled his baton. When Parker reached for his gun, Donovan drew his own and began firing in self-defence.

Parker was shot in the cheek, nose, shoulder, thigh, calf, hip, abdomen and foot but survived.

During the company's second quarter earnings call on Thursday morning, Loblaw executives fielded questions from analysts about the grocery giant's soft food retail sales — and whether a boycott organized online had impacted the company's profits at all.

Some Canadians have been boycotting Loblaw since May, after the moderators of an online Reddit group called r/loblawsisoutofcontrol began encouraging its then-45,000 members to stop shopping at the store and its subsidiary brands.

During the company call, neither CEO Per Bank nor chief financial officer Richard Dufresne used the word boycott. But they didn't deny that it was a factor in food retail sales that "came in a little soft" compared to the same time last year.

The company's earnings results note that food retail same-stores sales increased by 0.2 per cent in the second quarter of this year, compared to a 6.1 per cent increase during the same quarter last year.

A wildfire that roared into the community of Jasper, Alta., late Wednesday has left vast stretches of the townsite incinerated.

Video shared to social media on Thursday shows blocks upon blocks of buildings have been levelled by fire.

The video, taken from inside a truck, shows a view of a community forever changed.

Where buildings once stood, charred rubble remains. Many homes in the historic townsite have been destroyed, leaving only the foundations.

"We are seeing potentially 30 to 50 per cent structural damage," (Premier Danielle) Smith said.

The super-rich are being advised how to use a loophole in pensions investments to shelter their wealth from Labour’s clampdown on large-scale tax dodging, the Guardian can reveal.

Undercover filming by the Guardian suggests multimillionaire UK residents are being pitched offshore products said to legally protect their fortunes from inheritance tax (IHT) and capital gains tax (CGT).

At a private event held a week before the general election, the international accounting brand Baker Tilly told advisers to the ultra-wealthy how they could use offshore pension schemes to shield their clients’ fortunes from tens of millions of pounds of inheritance taxes.

One promoter told how his client had placed £30m into a pension scheme to protect it from inheritance taxes.

A wildfire reached the Canadian town of Jasper, Alberta on Wednesday, one of hundreds ravaging the western provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, as firefighters battled to save key facilities such as the Trans Mountain Pipeline, authorities said.

Wildfires burning uncontrolled across the region include 433 in British Columbia and 176 in Alberta, more than a dozen of them in the area of Fort McMurray, an oil sands hub.

The pipeline, which can carry 890,000 barrels per day (bpd) of oil from Edmonton to Vancouver, runs through a national park in the Canadian Rockies near the picturesque tourist town, from which about 25,000 people were forced to evacuate on Tuesday.

"Firefighters ... are working to save as many structures as possible and protect critical infrastructure, including the wastewater treatment plant, communications facilities, the Trans Mountain Pipeline," Parks Canada said in a post on Facebook.

An Australian judge on Thursday dismissed a class action lawsuit claiming Bayer's Roundup weedkiller can cause a type of blood cancer, a boost for the company which is grappling with a slew of similar cases in the United States.

Justice Michael Lee of Australia's Federal Court ruled that on the balance of probabilities, there was insufficient evidence to conclude that Roundup can cause non-Hodgkins lymphoma (NHL).

The Australian class action against Bayer subsidiaries united more than 1,000 claimants and is one of some 40 cases filed outside the United States, all in either Canada or Australia.

In the United States, Bayer has prevailed in 14 of the last 20 Roundup trials, but it also racked up a string of losses in late 2023 and early 2024, resulting in more than $4 billion in damages awarded in verdicts.

A police officer has been filmed kicking and stamping on the head of a man lying on the ground at Manchester Airport.

The uniformed male officer is seen holding a Taser over the man, who is lying face down, before striking him twice while other officers shout at onlookers to stay back in a video shared widely online.

Greater Manchester Police (GMP) said firearms officers had been attacked while attempting to arrest someone following a fight in the airport's Terminal 2 on Tuesday. It said it had referred itself to the police watchdog.

Anger has grown over the video and a crowd of what appeared to be several hundred people protested outside the police station in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, on Wednesday evening.

Years into a drug overdose crisis, Canada is facing backlash against government-sanctioned programs such as legal injection sites designed to keep users alive without curtailing drug use.

The British Columbia government has walked back a pilot project to decriminalize small quantities of illicit drugs in public places in the province. Police there also are prosecuting activists seeking to make safe drugs available.

And the man who may become Canada's next prime minister, Conservative Pierre Poilievre, has said he wants to shut down some sites where users can legally consume illicit drugs under supervision, calling them "drug dens."

The backlash reflects growing fears in Canada over the use of narcotics in public spaces, encampments where drug use is seen as common, and the specter of needles in playgrounds. Some critics of the so-called harm reduction programs see a rising number of overdose deaths in Canada as evidence that existing measures are not working.

But public health experts worry that dialing back the programs would endanger the health and lives of drug users, contributing to even more deaths.

AHEAD OF ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER Benjamin Netanyahu’s controversial address to congress, a coalition of more than 30 human rights and faith-based advocacy groups sent a letter on Wednesday urging the U.S. government to investigate several media reports that the Israeli government has been operating a social media influence scheme to sway American lawmakers toward pro-Israeli policies.

The letter, addressed to President Joe Biden, references reporting from the New York Times, The Guardian, and Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, which, in separate investigations, uncovered an Israeli influence campaign that used fake accounts to pose as Americans in order to disparage pro-Palestinian groups with “deeply Islamophobic and anti-immigrant content,” target student groups and human rights organizations who were critical of Israel, and post pro-Israel content online. The campaign was designed to persuade lawmakers to continue providing military aid to Israel for its war on Gaza, and focused on Black Democratic members of Congress.

“What this letter asks for is very simple: that President Biden and his administration treat reports of inappropriate Israeli influence operations with the same seriousness that it has allegations of Russian and Iranian influence campaigns.” said Jamal Abdi, head of the National Iranian American Council, referring to separate efforts to interrupt American democracy by Iran and Russia ahead of the 2016 and 2020 elections and earlier this year. “Unfortunately, what has been reported thus far could just be the tip of the iceberg.”

When it came time for the Chicago Blackhawks to decide whether or not sexual assault against one of their own players should even be reported to the authorities just as the team clinched a spot in the 2010 Stanley Cup Final, general manager Stan Bowman was one of seven members of Chicago's front office to turn their heads and look the other way.

When it came time for the Edmonton Oilers to pick themselves back up after a devastating loss in Game 7 of the 2024 Stanley Cup Final, they turned to Bowman.

Make no mistake, someone would've hired him sooner if they could. The NHL reinstated Bowman on July 1 after exiling him for nearly three years following the Brad Aldrich scandal in Chicago. Former Blackhawks head coach Joel Quenneville and executive Al MacIsaac were reinstated, too, and it's hard to imagine they won't find gainful employment in hockey's top circuit soon enough.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's decision to hand-pick a candidate for a riding in an upcoming Montreal byelection isn't being well-received by three aspiring contenders who spent months campaigning only to be shunted aside.

The Liberals announced Montreal city Coun. Laura Palestini last Friday as the party's candidate in a byelection whose date has yet to be announced for the riding of LaSalle--Emard--Verdun. The byelection must be called by July 30.

Three aspiring candidates -- local school commissioner Lori Morrison; entrepreneur Christopher Baenninger; and former Quebec Liberal party organizer Eddy Kara -- denounced the decision, with Morrison calling it "anti-democratic, 100 per cent."

Morrison said she couldn't believe the party let her knock on doors and sign up memberships only to ultimately abandon plans for a nomination meeting.

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Google is now the only search engine that can surface results from Reddit, making one of the web’s most valuable repositories of user generated content exclusive to the internet’s already dominant search engine.

If you use Bing, DuckDuckGo, Mojeek, Qwant or any other alternative search engine that doesn’t rely on Google’s indexing and search Reddit by using “site:reddit.com,” you will not see any results from the last week. DuckDuckGo is currently turning up seven links when searching Reddit, but provides no data on where the links go or why, instead only saying that “We would like to show you a description here but the site won't allow us.” Older results will still show up, but these search engines are no longer able to “crawl” Reddit, meaning that Google is the only search engine that will turn up results from Reddit going forward. Searching for Reddit still works on Kagi, an independent, paid search engine that buys part of its search index from Google.

The news shows how Google’s near monopoly on search is now actively hindering other companies’ ability to compete at a time when Google is facing increasing criticism over the quality of its search results. And while neither Reddit or Google responded to a request for comment, it appears that the exclusion of other search engines is the result of a multi-million dollar deal that gives Google the right to scrape Reddit for data to train its AI products.

Now, an investigation from the Investigative Journalism Foundation and CTV News shines new light on how Canadian shell companies and registries were used to pull off the scheme.

The investigation — based on dozens of corporate filings, interviews with experts and both domestic and international court records — found MTFE was part of a network of dozens of Canadian shell companies peddling similar cryptocurrency investment schemes.

But experts interviewed for this story, including former law enforcement and intelligence officials, say the investigation highlights gaps in Canada’s enforcement that have made the country a waystation for financial crime.

“We’ve become such a weak link in the financial crime arena that we’re attracting all the business,” said Garry Clement, a former RCMP officer who investigated financial crime. “Because they know that virtually nothing is going to happen to them.”