girlfreddy

Residents, chemists and firefighters are raising concerns about prevention and emergency preparedness after 15,000 kilograms of lithium batteries inside a shipping container caught fire at the Port of Montreal on Monday.

"Around 6 p.m., I started smelling something chemical in my place," said Lia Chauvel, who lives about two kilometres from the port. "Like at 7 p.m., I get a text from the city. I thought it was spam."

The fire started at 2:40 p.m. About two hours later, the city issued a precautionary lockdown notice through landlines to some nearby residents. A reminder alert was sent at 6:51 p.m.

At 6:53 p.m., the Mercier—Hochelaga-Maisonneuve borough posted a warning on Facebook, and the comment section quickly filled with residents saying they were never notified or didn't see the post until much later.

A Massachusetts woman pleaded guilty on Friday to running a high-end brothel network in the greater Boston area and the suburbs of Washington that served wealthy and well-connected clientele including politicians, corporate executives, lawyers and military officers.

Han Lee appeared in Boston federal court to plead guilty to charges that she conspired to persuade, induce and entice primarily Asian women to travel to Massachusetts and Virginia to engage in prostitution and committed money laundering.

She was the first to admit wrongdoing of the three individuals who prosecutors charged in November in connection with a sex ring run out of apartment complexes in Cambridge and Watertown, Massachusetts and Fairfax and Tysons, Virginia.

Lee, 42, faces up to 25 years in prison when she is sentenced Dec. 20. She stressed when addressing U.S. District Judge Julia Kobick that while she ran an illegal prostitution business, she did not force any women to engage in sex work.

The final three anti-abortion activists convicted of a 2021 Tennessee clinic blockade were sentenced this week, including the person considered to be the main organizer of the action.

Chester Gallagher was sentenced on Thursday to 16 months in prison, by far the longest sentence among 11 people convicted of various offenses. In addition to organizing the March 5, 2021, blockade of a Carafem clinic in Mount Juliet, Tennesse, a town 17 miles (27.36 kilometers) east of Nashville, prosecutors said Gallgher “exploited his specialized knowledge gleaned from his law enforcement experience to prolong the blockade as long as possible.”

Gallagher and a co-defendant stalled police with phony negotiations, prosecutors said. Their actions disrupted not only the Carafem clinic, but other medical offices that shared the same building.

A few dozen New Yorkers boarded a bus in Harlem on Friday with civil rights leader the Rev. Al Sharpton and members of the group formerly known as the Central Park Five, bound for Philadelphia, where they toured the city hoping to energize the youth vote ahead of the 2024 election.

With less than 40 days until Election Day, the choice of a battleground state for a get-out-the-vote bus tour made sense: whichever presidential candidate wins Pennsylvania is likely to do so by a slim margin and with a lion’s share of the Black vote. But it was a strategic choice to recruit speakers who many first knew as Black and Latino teenagers wrongly convicted in a case that former President Donald Trump supported so vociferously, Sharpton said.

“There are polls saying that some Black men are moving toward Trump,” he told The Associated Press on Friday. “I don’t know if that’s true or not. But Black men need to hear some Black men saying, ‘Let me tell you about the Trump I know.’”

Patients and staff at Unicoi County Hospital in Tennessee are trapped on the roof Friday due to flooding caused by Tropical Storm Helene.

WCYB spoke with Erwin Police Chief Regan Tilson, who said more than 50 people are trapped on the roof.

Ballad Health said as of 12:27 p.m., 54 people were on the roof and seven were in rescue boats.

All roads accessing the hospital are impassable due to flooding. Several cruisers and ambulances have been lost.

A SWAT team happened to be training and was able to save medications for the patients. Tilson said all patients and staff are safe at this time.

The Russian judge who convicted the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich has said the trial was short because it did not examine any “material evidence” and the verdict did not take long because he could “type quickly”.

“The case itself was small. I don’t remember how many folders there were – three or five,” said Andrei Mineyev, according to the RIA Novosti news agency.

“Why did it go so quickly? The point is the court did not examine material evidence,” Mineyev said, adding that this was because neither the prosecution nor the defence had requested it.

More than 550 people who attended the P.E.I. International Shellfish Festival last weekend reported getting sick, according to the province's Chief Public Health Officer.

"This is the biggest gastrointestinal illness outbreak we have on record," Dr. Heather Morrison told CBC News on Friday.

Stool samples taken from people who ate food at the festival have tested positive for norovirus, Morrison said.

"That makes sense to us given all the information that we have."

A foreign government tried to get a Liberal candidate defeated and a former parliamentarian is suspected of having worked to influence parliamentary business on behalf of a foreign government, the public inquiry into interference in Canadian politics was told Friday.

Officials from the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) unveiled two new examples of such foreign interference, in addition to four examples that had been released publicly.

Officials did not name the countries suspected in the newest examples of foreign interference, or the parliamentarians involved.

Officials said China is the country most actively trying to interfere in Canada's affairs, followed by India. They also warned that the conflict in the Middle East could lead Iran to interfere in the next federal election.

Brian Smallshaw, a web developer and historian from Salt Spring Island, said he suspected the force was breaking the law and breaching rights when arresting activists during protests against old-growth logging on Vancouver Island.

But now that the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission has upheld his allegations, he knows it.

In a scathing report completed last month, the commission found the Mounties wrongfully arrested Smallshaw while he was hiking three years ago when he wouldn't submit to a search he considered unconstitutional.

Four trustees of a controversy-mired western Manitoba school board met on Monday and voted to ban all but the Canadian, Manitoban and school flags, right after butting heads with a panel the province appointed to help guide them in their roles.

The Mountain View School Division board has nine seats on its board, so the four trustees present at Monday's meeting weren't enough to achieve the quorum required under the Public Schools Act — but they went ahead with a school boarding meeting anyway.

The province ordered a governance review of the school board in April, after trustee Paul Coffey gave a board meeting presentation in which he said residential schools started as a good thing, questioned the extent of abuse at the schools and called the term "white privilege" racist.

NATO says it wants its members to develop national plans to bolster the capacity of their individual defence industry sectors, a concept Canada has struggled with — or avoided outright — for decades.

At the NATO leaders summit in Washington in July, alliance members agreed to come up with strategies to boost their domestic defence materiel sectors, and to share those strategies with each other. Almost entirely overshadowed at the time by debates about members' defence spending and support for Ukraine, the new policy got little attention.

Federal officials are just beginning to wrap their heads around the ramifications of the new policy, and the burden it could place on the government and Canada's defence sector.

With illicit drug use, homelessness and untreated mental illness reaching a crisis in parts of Canada, the governments of at least three provinces want to treat more people against their will, even as some health experts warn involuntary care for drug use can be ineffective and harmful.

This month, British Columbia's premier, whose party is in a tight race for reelection in the province, said his government would expand involuntary treatment for people dealing with mental illness combined with addiction and brain injuries due to overdose. Some would be held in a repurposed jail.

The Alberta government is preparing legislation that would allow a family member, police officer or medical professional to petition to force treatment when a person is deemed an imminent danger to themselves or others because of addiction or drug use.

And New Brunswick has said it wants to allow involuntary treatment of people with substance use disorders, although it, too, has yet to propose legislation. A spokesperson for the governing Progressive Conservative party, which is also running for reelection, called this "compassionate intervention."