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Boston City Council approves firefighters contract with 10.6% pay raise

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:21:50 GMT

The City Council voted to fund a $27.35 million collective bargaining agreement with the Boston firefighters union that includes a roughly 10.6% bump in pay over a three-year period.The two 12-0 votes taken by the body on Wednesday, to both fund the contract in the fiscal year 2024 budget and reduce the city’s collective bargaining coffers by that amount, represent the final step in a lengthy bargaining process.Boston Firefighters Local 718 had been working with an expired contract for two and a half years prior to the new agreement, which was tentatively reached with the city on Sept. 3 and ratified by the union’s roughly 1,600 members on Sept. 15.“Boston firefighters and their families deserve this contract,” Local 718 President Sam Dillon told the Herald Wednesday. “Boston firefighters go to work every single day and they put themselves on the line for this city. To see that recognized at the bargaining table is what we like to see.”Dillon said he was “very satisfied with the res...

Bank records show accused was in the same city on day a B.C. girl was killed

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:21:50 GMT

VANCOUVER — A bank account registered toIbrahim Ali shows transactions in Burnaby, B.C., on July 18, 2017, the same day a 13-year-old was murdered in a city park, a senior investigator at Vancouver City Savings Credit Union testified Wednesday.Rick Mihic told Ali’s first-degree murder trial in B.C. Supreme Court that there were three purchases made from the man’s account that day, including one from a Freshslice Pizza and two others from a Chevron.He testified he wasn’t able to tell the address of the businesses or the time of the purchases from the records.However, under cross-examination, Mihic told the court he believes there is a way, through a third-party platform, to obtain timing information of Interact transactions. Ali has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder in the death of the teen, whose body was found in Burnaby’s Central Park early on July 19, 2017, just hours after her mother reported her missing.Crown attorney Isobel Keeley said in her op...

What ever happened to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s most important relationship?

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:21:50 GMT

OTTAWA — The first mandate letters Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gave his cabinet ministers in 2015 said no relationship was more important to him, and to the country, than the one with Indigenous Peoples. He called for a new nation-to-nation relationship — one based on the recognition of rights, respect, co-operation and partnership.He promised to end boil-water advisories in First Nations communities within five years. He said constitutionally guaranteed rights of First Nations are a sacred obligation.“I know that renewing our relationship is an ambitious goal. But I am equally certain that it is one we can, and will, achieve if we work together,” Trudeau told the Assembly of First Nations in December 2015.“This is a responsibility I take seriously, and I have instructed my government to do the same.”Eight years later, the shiny election-style promises about advancing reconciliation and forging a new path forward seem to have dulled for First Nations, Métis...

Witness of B.C. Sikh leader’s shooting says the gunshots sounded like fireworks

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:21:50 GMT

VANCOUVER — The B.C. gurdwara where a Sikh separatist leader was gunned down has launched an investigation into how an American newspaper was able to view security camera footage of the June killing. Gurkeerat Singh, who said he is a spokesman for the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara in Surrey, said it’s unclear how The Washington Post was able to see the video of Hardeep Singh Nijjar’s death. “We’ve been told by the temple that the video is not for the media, the public, because it’s an ongoing investigation. That video won’t be released to anyone.”It’s an “ongoing investigation,” he said in an interview on Wednesday. While Singh said The Canadian Press could not review video captured at the temple of the shooting, he confirmed the reporting of The Washington Post. He has seen the 90-second video several times, he said. Singh said the video shows Nijjar leaving the temple’s parking lot in his grey pickup truck. A white car d...

University of Nevada basketball could have a new home in 3 years under a major casino expansion plan

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:21:50 GMT

RENO, Nev. (AP) — The University of Nevada’s basketball team could have a new off-campus home by 2026 under an ambitious 10-year expansion plan that Reno’s largest hotel-casino announced Wednesday. The estimated $1 billion private capital investment will be the biggest in the city’s history, according to officials of the Grand Sierra Resort and Reno Mayor Hillary Schieve.In addition to the new 10,000-seat sports, concert and special events arena, the expansion plans for the 140-acre (57-hectare) property include a new 800-room hotel tower, 300 riverfront residential units to help address workforce housing shortages and Las Vegas-like water shows, the company said. “The vision is to transform GSR into a destination where community, sports and entertainment come together,” resort owner Alex Mereulo said during a news conference at the property on Wednesday. Mereulo and University of Nevada President Brian Sandoval confirmed they’ve entered into “the exploration of a partne...

10-year-old girl struck and killed in Vaughan

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:21:50 GMT

A 10-year-old girl is dead after being struck by a vehicle in Vaughan.Police say the incident occurred on Mullen Drive in the area of Clark Avenue and Bathurst Street just after 5:30 p.m. Wednesday. Photos from the scene show a delivery van on the residential street surrounded by police tape. Police say the driver remained on the scene for the investigation.Police are expected to provide an update later this evening. More to come

Mayor Chow looking to extend deadline for new housing waitlist system

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:21:50 GMT

With the City facing backlash, Toronto’s mayor is making last-minute moves to ensure people already waiting years for subsidized housing aren’t booted off the waitlist.They were required to move their applications online by this coming Saturday — a deadline that is fast approaching and had advocates sounding the alarm about the possibility of thousands losing their spot in the queue.Although two years have passed since the launch of the new online system, outreach worker Lorraine Lam said this weekend’s cut-off date was announced out of the blue.“This is a community that has no access to phones or emails,” said Lam, who has been trying to help notify applicants and transfer them. “My sense is that this is [the City’s] attempt to try and remove inactive applications but this was a very ablest and classicist way of going about it.”There are still about 33,600 households on the rent-geared-to-income housing waiting list who have not registered online...

After sending busloads of migrants to NYC, Texas governor visits city to fault Biden for crisis

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:21:50 GMT

NEW YORK (AP) — For more than a year, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has been busing migrants from the southern U.S. border to places like New York, Washington and Chicago, prompting angry complaints from Democratic officials in those cities.The local authorities have said the influx of homeless, jobless newcomers is unsustainable.Speaking in New York Wednesday, the Republican Abbott agreed it was “unsustainable,” but said he’s not the person most to blame.“The lead importer of migrants to New York is not Texas, it’s Joe Biden,” he said at a breakfast event held by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. Abbot said he began the busing program in response to the plight of the small border towns in his state who do not have the resources to deal with border crossers.“It’s a crisis. It’s chaotic and it must stop,” he said, urging the president to enforce laws he said gives the White House authority to “repel” migrants at the border.“Until that time comes,” Abbott said, “Texas...

Books on science, state secrets and religion shortlisted for Cundill History Prize

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:21:50 GMT

NEW YORK — Eight urgent books about the past have been shortlisted for the US$75,000 Cundill History Prize. The short list includes books about countries’ forgotten — or buried — histories, such as “The Madman in the White House” by Patrick Weil, which resurrects a psychobiography Sigmund Freud helped create about Woodrow Wilson, and “The Declassification Engine” by Matthew Connelly, about America’s secrecy industrial complex. In a similar vein, “Red Memory” by Tania Branigan explores the Cultural Revolution and cultural amnesia in China. Several science books also made the short list, including Alison Bashford’s “The Huxleys,” a history of evolution; “The Perfection of Nature” by Mackenzie Cooley, which explores how theories of race developed through man’s attempts to control nature; and “Charged” by James Morton Turner, which examines “the battery problem” by looking to the ...

New Mexico trial begins over allegations that Democrats tried to dilute votes with redistricting map

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:21:50 GMT

SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — Accusations that New Mexico’s Democratic-led Legislature unfairly diluted the vote of a politically conservative oil-producing region with its redistricting map went to trial on Wednesday.The trial’s outcome is likely to have a big influence on which party represents a congressional swing district along the U.S. border with Mexico where partisan control has flipped back and forth three times in three elections. New Mexico’s 2nd District is one of about a dozen that are in the spotlight nationally as Republicans campaign to hold onto their slim majority in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2024.In its court challenge, the Republican Party alleges that the new congressional map flouts traditional standards of redistricting that held sway over the past three decades by dividing communities of common interest for political gain by Democrats.Democratic lawmakers say the boundaries were vetted appropriately to ensure more competitive districts that reflect p...