HellsBelle

Since the Los Angeles wildfires broke out on January 7, a strain of online panic has painted the city as functioning a lot like The Purge, the horror movie about a 24-hour period where all crime is legal.

Take a purported conversation that former Tinder executive Brian Norgard relayed in a Twitter/X post that’s been seen over 2.5 million times. “My famous actor neighbor came by today after the looting gangs freaked him out,” he posted, “and whispered in my ear, ‘I guess I am a conservative now.’”

In sharp contrast to the doom and gloom pronouncements, the city has actually been smothered, sometimes even a little overwhelmed, in such acts of goodwill. When I went to drop off other donations at the Snail Farm and Bike Oven—an artists studio and community-run bike workshop, respectively—both were so thoroughly stocked there was hardly room to put anything down. “Please, no more children’s books,” begged a local bookstore, calling off a previous request for donations of reading material for evacuated kids. “Once again having to put a stop to Angelenos bottomless generosity at this time!!!” (As such messages attest, at this point, it is far more useful to send money to affected people; most places have stopped accepting physical donations.)

Donald Trump has tapped three of his longstanding celebrity supporters – Mel Gibson, Jon Voight and Sylvester Stallone – to purportedly make Hollywood “stronger than ever before” as “special ambassadors” to the movie capital.

The president-elect announced the new appointments, whose duties remain unclear, on Truth Social on Thursday, four days before his inauguration. “It is my honor to announce Jon Voight, Mel Gibson, and Sylvester Stallone, to be Special Ambassadors to a great but very troubled place, Hollywood, California,” he wrote.

“They will serve as Special Envoys to me for the purpose of bringing Hollywood, which has lost much business over the last four years to Foreign Countries, BACK—BIGGER, BETTER, AND STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE! These three very talented people will be my eyes and ears, and I will get done what they suggest. It will again be, like The United States of America itself, The Golden Age of Hollywood!”

Canadian political leaders say "nothing is off the table" when it comes to responding to potential 25% tariffs from the US, days before they could come into force.

But strains are showing in "Team Canada" when it comes to whether energy supply should be a tool in a possible tariff war with the US.

Canadian officials argue (tariffs) would undermine the US economy, increase inflation for American consumers - including raising prices at the petrol pump - and hamper investment.

They also warn tariffs could undermine national security, given Canada, a US ally, is a key source of energy and critical minerals.

An Australian influencer has been charged with poisoning her baby girl to elicit donations and boost online followers.

The Queensland woman claimed she was chronicling her child's battle with a terminal illness on social media, but detectives allege she was drugging the one-year-old and then filming her in "immense distress and pain".

Doctors had raised the alarm in October, when the baby was admitted to hospital suffering a serious medical episode.

After months of investigation, the 34-year-old woman was charged with torture, administering poison, making child exploitation material and fraud.

Residents of Jersey have been recommended bloodletting to reduce high concentrations of “forever chemicals” in their blood after tests showed some islanders have levels that can lead to health problems.

Private drinking water supplies in Jersey were polluted by the use of firefighting foams containing PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) at the island’s airport, which were manufactured by the US multinational 3M.

PFAS, a family of more than 10,000 chemicals, can build up in the body and are linked to conditions such as kidney and bladder cancer, thyroid disease and immune deficiency.

Bloodletting draws blood from a vein in measured amounts. It is safe and the body replenishes the blood naturally, but it must be repeated until clean.

Global economic growth could plummet by 50% between 2070 and 2090 from the catastrophic shocks of climate change unless immediate action by political leaders is taken to decarbonise and restore nature, according to a new report.

The stark warning from risk management experts the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) hugely increases the estimate of risk to global economic wellbeing from climate change impacts such as fires, flooding, droughts, temperature rises and nature breakdown. In a report with scientists at the University of Exeter, published on Thursday, the IFoA, which uses maths and statistics to analyse financial risk for businesses and governments, called for accelerated action by political leaders to tackle the climate crisis.

Their report was published after data from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) showed climate breakdown drove the annual global temperature above the internationally agreed 1.5C target for the first time in 2024, supercharging extreme weather.

New York Attorney General Letitia James is investigating about a half dozen guardianship organizations and how they manage the health and financial affairs of hundreds of elderly and infirm New Yorkers deemed incapable of looking after themselves, according to people familiar with the matter.

Judges often rely on guardianship companies to care for the so-called unbefriended, people who don’t have friends or family able to look after them. Oversight of these guardians, however, is scant, with officials rarely visiting wards to check on their care. Meanwhile, the courts that appoint the guardians rely largely on financial paperwork to determine a person’s well-being. That dynamic, the news organization found, has resulted in fraud, abuse and neglect of the state’s most vulnerable.

After ProPublica’s first story was published, a judge ordered NYGS to pay back that ward $5,400, representing about a year’s worth of fees, writing that the company had provided “minimal services, if any” during that time.

In another instance, ProPublica reported that the company collected monthly fees from an elderly man even after he’d left the country — and also after he died.

Forecasters have warned of another “particularly dangerous weather situation” across northern Los Angeles where residents are braced for new wildfire evacuation orders.

Los Angeles, and parts of Ventura county to the north, faced “extreme fire risk” warnings through Wednesday, with officials warning of “significant risk of rapid fire spread” due to the Santa Ana winds – which have gusts of up to 75mph.

This is the fourth time in recent months that Los Angeles has faced a “particularly dangerous weather situation”, and the three previous warnings all resulted in major wildfires, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Bird flu poses a threat that is “unique and new in our lifetime” because it has become a “‘panzootic” that can kill huge numbers across multiple species, experts warn. For months, highly pathogenic bird flu, or H5N1, has been circulating in dairy farms, with dozens of human infections reported among farm workers. It has now jumped into more than 48 species of mammals, from bears to dairy cows, causing mass die-offs in sea lions and elephant seal pups. Last week, the first person in the US died of the infection.

This ability to infect, spread between, and kill such a wide range of creatures has prompted some scientists to call H5N1 a “panzootic”: an epidemic that leaps species barriers and can devastate diverse animal populations, posing a threat to humans too. As shrinking habitats, biodiversity loss and intensified farming create perfect incubators for infectious diseases to jump from one species to another, some scientists say panzootics could become one of the era’s defining threats to human health and security.

Ed Hutchinson from the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research says: “It is really hard for infectious diseases to effectively stop being specialists and move over into a new species. So when that happens, it is striking and concerning.”

It turns out Connecticut has a more than 100-year-old law that allows tow truck companies to sell someone’s car 15 days after they haul it away, if they can convince the Department of Motor Vehicles that the vehicle is worth $1,500 or less.

I submitted a request to the DMV under the Connecticut Freedom of Information Act.

In addition to being heavily redacted, many forms were handwritten, and the DMV didn’t seem to have a database or a system for keeping track of them. Agency officials initially told us there were 11,700 documents. Then they told us there were more than 7,000 for 2022 alone. Now they say there are about 4,100 for that year. The DMV hasn’t been able to explain the discrepancies. Officials also said the request has taken time because they have to manually redact thousands of documents.

Under the law, towing companies must notify the local police within two hours of removing a car. So we submitted public records requests to several police departments for their call logs.

Just days after our story was published, at least two bills were introduced in the state legislature to address some of the issues raised in our reporting. The DMV said it would undertake a “comprehensive review” of towing practices, and the speaker of the House promised that fixing the towing laws will be a “priority” this legislative session.

As the journalists ran for cover, they say an Israeli drone hovered above and began to follow them. Wahidi does not remember what happened next but video footage from the day shows him lying face down on the ground, sprawled along a pavement in a blue press vest, as his colleagues – unable to reach him – desperately call his name.

Wahidi was wounded only half a kilometre from Jabaliya’s al-Awda hospital but due to Israel’s siege of the health centre, his colleagues were forced to transport him to a hospital farther away. “There were no ambulances available, so we had to drive him quickly in our broadcast vehicle while he bled,” says Sharif.

Wahidi later awoke in critical condition and learned he had been shot in the neck, causing severe damage to his vertebrae and spinal cord; resulting in serious physical, neurological and respiratory injuries. Doctors at the hospital said they did not have the expertise or equipment to treat him and were only able to stop the bleeding. A few days later, he slipped into a coma for two weeks.

Trump’s rhetoric has been denounced by other world leaders but the rationale for this expansionism is being influenced, experts say, by something affecting both Greenland and Panama – rising global temperatures caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

Even though the incoming US president has called climate change a “giant hoax”, his son Donald Jr acknowledged the value of mining rare minerals in Greenland that are being uncovered as the ice rapidly retreats from the vast Arctic island. Greenland’s enormous ice sheet is losing an average of 30m tonnes of ice an hour due to the climate crisis, raising sea levels and potentially collapsing vital ocean currents.

As sea ice dwindles in the Arctic Ocean, meanwhile, new shipping routes through the far northern latitudes are becoming more viable. Robert O’Brien, Trump’s former national security adviser, said that Greenland, which has had a US military base since 1941, is key to counter the threat of China and Russia but it is also “very important to the Arctic, which is going to be the critical battleground of the future because as the climate gets warmer, the Arctic is going to be a pathway that maybe cuts down on the usage of the Panama canal”.