HellsBelle

The Gates Foundation Trust holds hundreds of millions of dollars in fossil fuel extractors despite Bill Gates’ claims of divestment made in 2019.

End-of-year filings reveal that in 2024 the trust invested $254m in companies that extract fossil fuels such as Chevron, BP and Shell. This was a nine-year record and up 21% from 2016, Guardian analysis found. Adjusting for inflation, it was the highest amount since 2019.

Bill Gates, the tech billionaire and founder of Microsoft, was ranked by Forbes as the world’s wealthiest man for most of the years between 1995 and 2017. In 2000, he and his then wife, Melinda, set up the Gates Foundation, which is now the third largest charitable foundation in the world. It uses its resources for a range of causes including public health, poverty reduction, education and climate adaptation.

Divestment first became an issue for Gates in 2015. At the time, a global campaign by religious figures, climate activists, students and other charities called for large foundations to divest from fossil fuels.

The law was clear: Donald Trump’s Department of Justice was required to disclose all investigative files on Jeffrey Epstein by 19 December 2025, with rare exceptions.

One month after this deadline mandated by Congress’s Epstein Files Transparency Act, however, Trump’s justice department has not complied with this law, prompting questions about when – and whether – authorities will ever release investigative documents about the late sex offender.

Justice department attorneys said in a 5 January Manhattan court filing that they had posted approximately 12,285 to DoJ’s website, equating to some 125,575 pages, under this legislation’s requirements. They said in this same letter that justice department staff had identified “more than 2 million documents potentially responsive to the Act that are in various phases of review”.

That these DoJ’s disclosures apparently comprise a drop in the bucket – and have done little to shed light on how Epstein operated with apparent impunity for years – has roiled survivors’ advocates and lawmakers. They include attorney Spencer Kuvin, who has represented dozens of Epstein’s survivors.

They note that the Department of Justice has also flouted another requirement of this act, which requires that the attorney general provide a report identifying “categories of records released and withheld and summarizing all redactions and their legal bases” within 15 days of their disclosure deadline.

“To date, no such report has been provided. Without it, there is no authoritative accounting of what records exist, what has been withheld, or why, making effective oversight and judicial review far more difficult,” they wrote. “Put simply, the DOJ cannot be trusted with making mandatory disclosures under the Act.”

What began as a joke on social media has snowballed into one of the most talked-about political satire campaigns in Europe this year. More than 200,000 Danish citizens have now signed a viral petition proposing that Denmark buy the U.S. state of California, a tongue-in-cheek response to former U.S. President Donald Trump’s past interest in acquiring Greenland.

Under the fictional proposal, Californians would be welcomed into the Kingdom of Denmark with a package of benefits that reads like a parody of Nordic governance. The petition promises “rule of law, universal health care, and fact-based politics” as immediate perks of Danish administration.

To underscore the absurdity, the organizers also pledge a lifetime supply of Danish pastries for all 39 million residents of the state. The petition’s website jokingly notes that while Denmark cannot solve every problem, “we are very confident about pastries.”

The satirical plan goes further, outlining a full cultural “Denmarkification” of the West Coast. Los Angeles would be rechristened “Løs Ångeles,” while Danish-style cycling infrastructure would spread across cities more famous for traffic jams than bicycles.

Even California’s most iconic institutions are not spared. Disneyland would be rebranded as “Hans Christian Andersenland,” a nod to Denmark’s most famous storyteller, Hans Christian Andersen. The petition cheerfully asks readers to imagine fairy tales replacing cartoon mascots, and even suggests that Viking helmets might become standard park attire.

Premier Doug Ford says Prime Minister Mark Carney's deal with China on electric vehicles has hurt Ontarians and the two have not spoken since.

Ford says he was disappointed Carney did not give him a heads-up about a potential deal before the prime minister's trip to China last week.

Carney struck a deal with China last week to allow up to 49,000 electric vehicles to receive a vastly reduced tariff rate of 6.1 per cent as they come into Canada in exchange for dropping tariffs on Canadian canola and some seafood.

Ford and Carney became fast friends after the latter's win to become prime minister in the spring.

The Supreme Court of Canada is hearing arguments today on a Quebec case that could have far-reaching implications on policing across Canada.

Quebec’s attorney general is set to argue against a lower court decision that invalidated random police traffic stops, finding that they led to racial profiling and violated Quebecers’ rights.

Joseph-Christopher Luamba, the young man at the origin of this case, was pulled over by police nearly a dozen times without reason in the 18 months after he got his driver’s licence.

He told Quebec Superior Court in 2022 that when he sees a police cruiser, he gets ready to pull over.

Luamba, who is Black, said he believes he was racially profiled during the traffic stops — none of which resulted in a ticket.

"I was frustrated," he told the court back then. "Why was I stopped? I followed the rules. I didn't commit any infractions."

An Ontario woman who regularly shared her experiences as a sexual assault survivor at police training courses says she’s ending her relationship with the Ontario Police College and is raising concerns about what she and several experts say are harmful biases among some officers and a lack of accountability from the college.

It comes after she received anonymous comments from two officers last year that she says left her feeling "mortified" and "humiliated."

For several years, she has volunteered her time by speaking at training organized by the college for sexual assault investigators. CBC News is protecting her identity because she is a sexual assault survivor.

Experts say the comments, which include calling her “damaged,” accusing her of being too critical of police and presuming a mental illness diagnosis, are not only hurtful but also show a concerning bias that could affect the integrity of sexual assault investigations.

The woman wants to know if those officers are working as sexual assault investigators, but more than four months after taking her concerns to the college, she still has no answers.

Manitoba RCMP are investigating after a seven-year-old girl was coerced into sending nude photos to a man over Snapchat — an example of what experts and police warn is a growing trend of children under 13 being sexually exploited through social media.

The images and videos being sent through the online messaging app were discovered after the girl's mother went into the child's room. The girl quickly put down a cellphone when her mother came in, according to a production order document obtained by CBC.

When the mother became suspicious and took the phone, she learned the girl had been chatting with an older man.

The mother found pictures of a penis within those chats and contacted RCMP. She gave them the phone for analysis, according to the document.

Police say they found explicit conversations over Snapchat between a man from the United Kingdom and the seven-year-old, as well as images and video shared between the two.

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A carnivorous power is one that struggles to curb its appetite and recognize its own limitations. Since the start of 2026, almost one year after he returned to the White House, Donald Trump has sought to seize Venezuela's oil, launch ground operations against drug cartels, notably in Mexico, decapitate the Iranian regime, and, finally, acquire Greenland, whether through persuasion or by force. He has pursued all these goals, all while more extensively deploying the United States military on the domestic front to help police hunt for undocumented migrants, especially in Minnesota. This dizzying display of power has even alarmed his own base, the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, not for reasons of principle or legality, but because he has dispersed his efforts and shown a lack of focus on Americans' everyday lives.

US public opinion has overwhelmingly rejected the ambitions expressed by the White House regarding Greenland. According to a CBS-YouGov poll, 86% of Americans surveyed, including 70% of Republicans, opposed using force to take control of the autonomous territory, which falls under Danish sovereignty, and 70% also objected to the idea of purchasing it. Nevertheless, Trump opted to escalate tariff measures on Saturday, January 17, in an effort to twist the Europeans' arm.

Europe has, so far, not been the US's primary target in its use of tariffs as a tool for punishment. At the end of August 2025, Trump decided to impose an additional 25% tariff on India, raising the total levy on goods exported to the US to 50%, because India was buying Russian oil. The measure caused lasting damage to the US's bilateral relationship with New Delhi, and while it led India to reduce its Russian oil purchases, it fell far short of completely stopping the flow, the outcome Trump had wanted. Meanwhile, the case of the eight European countries targeted is more serious, given that they are US allies and members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Furthermore, the United Kingdom is, thanks to its supposed "special relationship" with Washington, one of the few countries to have concluded a bilateral trade deal with the Trump administration. Now, that deal is under threat too.

Six years after the US justice department launched an immediate criminal investigation of the video-recorded killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, deputy attorney general Todd Blanche confirmed on Sunday that the department is “not investigating” the fatal 7 January shooting of Renee Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in the same city.

The killing of Good, less than a mile from where Floyd was murdered in May 2020, was recorded on at least five phones, including one held by the ICE agent who shot her, Jonathan Ross.

Blanche, a former personal lawyer for Donald Trump before he won his second presidency, dismissed the need for any criminal investigation of Ross during an interview with Fox News. He suggested that the officer was cleared by the publicly available video evidence.

“Is the FBI conducting an investigation into that agent, into the shooting?” Blanche was asked, in response to criticism from Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz.

Epstein invited her to come sit down next to him. “He explained that he was a philanthropist, known by so many people, a very generous man, and had sent so many young people to university, often the kids of women he’d been at school with. I completely believed him.”

Oh says Epstein told her she need a bachelor of fine arts degree to make it in the art world and was offering her a scholarship to New York’s School of Visual Arts “with no strings attached”. But, Oh said: “He attached a lot of strings to that scholarship. When I wouldn’t do all that he wanted he took it away.”

Other similar stories aired last week via victim interviews with Democrats on the House judiciary committee. It also comes as a new, perhaps voluminous tranche of Epstein-related documents is expected to be released by the justice department in the coming days.

“Mr Epstein repeatedly lured young women into his network by promising to help them gain admission into colleges and universities,” said the Maryland Democrat congressman Jamie Raskin in letters sent to Columbia University and New York University asking for more information on this aspect of the scandal.

Canada’s federal government is facing fresh scrutiny over its handling of air passenger rights after internal records suggested ministers and senior officials delayed and undermined a plan that would have shifted the cost of processing passenger complaints from taxpayers to airlines.

The proposal, developed by the Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA) following a 2023 directive from Parliament, would have required carriers to pay a fixed fee for each eligible complaint resolved, effectively funding a national reporting and redress system for disgruntled travelers.

Instead, nearly 100,000 passengers remain stuck in a growing backlog and taxpayers continue to shoulder an annual bill of about 30 million Canadian dollars for a system critics say is buckling under its own weight.

At the heart of the uproar is a letter sent by then-transport minister Anita Anand, who assumed the portfolio after the initial design of the cost-recovery plan. In that letter, Anand asked the CTA to delay any decision on imposing the airline fee until she had been formally consulted, arguing that she had not been adequately brought into the loop on the details of the proposal. The agency had previously briefed her predecessor, Pablo Rodriguez, during the plan’s development, but Anand insisted that was not sufficient.

“Notification to the previous minister is insufficient,” Anand wrote, according to excerpts reported by Canadian outlets. She requested that the CTA “refrain from implementing any decision on the fee” until she could review and provide input, effectively putting the brakes on a process that had been advancing in line with Parliament’s instructions. For a regulator already struggling with skyrocketing complaint volumes, the pause added further delay to a reform intended to stabilize its resources and clear the queue.

Additional emails from senior Transport Canada officials amplified the pushback. Officials raised concerns about the potential impact of the 790 dollar fee and its uniform application across all eligible complaints. Industry stakeholders had already warned that such a structure could be punitive and might encourage what airline executives described as frivolous or opportunistic claims. As these concerns filtered through the department, the CTA found itself navigating not only external lobbying but also internal pressure that appeared to conflict with its statutory duty to implement Parliament’s will.

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In the long history of direct and indirect US interventions in Latin America – historians have counted at least 70 – the current president Donald Trump has accomplished something unprecedented. For the first time, the United States launched a military attack against a South American state, Venezuela.

In the past, invasions had targeted the US's immediate neighborhood: Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean; the most recent of which was in Panama in 1989, marked by the abduction of the ruling general, Manuel Noriega. A few troops had also been sent in the 19th century to more distant countries, mainly to protect US citizens.

This time, with the January 3 abduction of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, "a threshold has been crossed, and the consequences are unpredictable," said Jorge Heine, former Chilean minister and diplomat, in Responsible Statecraft, a publication of the Quincy Institute, a think tank based in Washington. According to him, the official justification for the operation – that Venezuela was exporting large quantities of fentanyl to the US – was reminiscent of the pretext of "the non-existent weapons of mass destruction" during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The history of US interventions in Latin America in the 20th century unfolded in four major acts: First, the "Big Stick" ideology of Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909), characterized by an indiscriminate use of power, then the "Good Neighbor policy" of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933-1945), marked by spectacular withdrawals. Then came the Cold War, punctuated by coups orchestrated in the shadows and direct interventions. In the late 1980s, the US shifted its attention away from the continent and toward other areas. But it is now returning to Venezuela in force.