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The Supreme Court will hear a case with a lot of ‘buts’ & ‘ifs’ over the meaning of ‘and’

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:24:04 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) — It’s hard to imagine a less contentious or more innocent word than “and.” But how to interpret that simple conjunction has prompted a complicated legal fight that lands in the Supreme Court on Oct. 2, the first day of its new term. What the justices decide could affect thousands of prison sentences each year.Federal courts across the country disagree about whether the word, as it is used in a bipartisan 2018 criminal justice overhaul, indeed means “and” or whether it means “or.” Even an appellate panel that upheld a longer sentence called the structure of the provision “perplexing.”The Supreme Court has stepped in to settle the dispute.It’s the kind of task the justices — and maybe their English teachers — love. The case requires the close parsing of a part of a federal statute, the First Step Act, which aimed in part to reduce mandatory minimum sentences and give judges more discretion.In particular, the justices will be examining a so-called safety va...

India had been riding a geopolitical high. But it comes to the UN with a mess on its hands

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:24:04 GMT

NEW DELHI (AP) — The Group of 20 Summit, hosted by India earlier this month, couldn’t have gone better for Prime Minister Narendra Modi. His pledge to make the African Union a permanent member became reality. And under his leadership, the fractured grouping signed off on a final statement. It was seen as a foreign policy triumph for Modi and set the tone for India as a great emerging power.Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar was expected to seize on India’s geopolitical high in his speech at the United Nations on Tuesday. But circumstances have changed — quite abruptly — and India comes to the General Assembly podium with a diplomatic mess on its hands.On Monday, Canadian leader Justin Trudeau made a shocking claim: India may have been involved in the killing of a Sikh Canadian citizen in a Vancouver suburb in June.Trudeau said there were “credible allegations” of links to New Delhi, which India angrily rejected as absurd. It has been a free fall since: Each expelled a diplomat...

A fire in a commercial building south of Benin’s capital killed at least 35 people

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:24:04 GMT

A fire in a commercial building south of Benin’s capital has killed at least 35 people, authorities said, as they started an investigation. The gutted and burned ruins of a building in Seme-Podji, 10 kilometers (6 miles) south of the capital Porto-Novo, and the charred remains of cars and motorcycles was all that could be seen in the aftermath of the fire in footage by Benin’s public broadcaster. A fire official told broadcaster ORTB that the accident happened at a site known for the storage and handling of gasoline. Passersby rescued three people before firefighters arrived, the official, Dallys Ahouangbegnon, added.The fire broke out on Saturday morning and was “probably started during the unloading of bags of gasoline,” Beninese prosecutor Adam-Bongle Abdoubaki said in a statement published on local outlet benin-news.com.The dead included one child while more than a dozen people were injured, he said. Abdoubaki added that a crisis unit was set up to keep the victims’ famili...

The US is set to open embassies in the Cook Islands and Niue as Biden hosts a Pacific leaders summit

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:24:04 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is set to announce the opening of new U.S. embassies on Cook Islands and Niue on Monday as the Democratic administration aims to demonstrate to Pacific Island leaders that it remains committed to increasing American presence in the region.The announcement about the new diplomatic missions in the South Pacific comes as Biden prepares to welcome leaders to Washington for the two-day U.S.-Pacific Island Forum Summit. Talks are expected to heavily focus on the impact of climate change in the region.Biden has put a premium on improving relations in the Pacific amid rising U.S. concern about China’s growing military and economic influence. Plans about the embassies were confirmed by two senior administration officials who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity before the formal announcement.White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden would use the summit to strengthen “ties with the Pacific Islands and discuss how we address com...

Canada to get rare asteroid sample after NASA-led mission drops cargo to Earth on Sunday

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:24:04 GMT

Seven years after it blasted into space to snag a sample of an asteroid, a spacecraft is set to deliver its rare cargo on Sunday — and Canada is getting a piece of the interstellar bounty.The NASA-led mission launched OSIRIS-REx into space in 2016 to collect from the surface of an asteroid material that scientists hope will offer them insight into the formation of the solar system. The spacecraft began orbiting the asteroid — called Bennu — in 2018 and grabbed a sample in 2020. It started its return trip to Earth in 2021, and a capsule with the rocks and space dust is expected to land in the Utah desert on Sunday, before the spacecraft continues on a mission to another asteroid.Canada contributed a laser altimeter to the mission — a device that measures altitude and distance — that has allowed Bennu to become the “most precisely surveyed body in our solar system,” says Cameron Dickinson, a staff engineer at Canadian space company MDA Ltd., which designed the Canadian com...

NASA’s first asteroid samples streaking toward Earth after release from spacecraft

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:24:04 GMT

A space capsule carrying NASA’s first asteroid samples streaked toward a touchdown in the Utah desert Sunday to cap a seven-year journey.Flying by Earth, the Osiris-Rex spacecraft released the capsule from 63,000 miles (100,000 kilometers) out. The capsule was expected to parachute down four hours later onto the military’s Utah Test and Training Range.Scientists anticipated getting at least a cup of rubble from the carbon-rich asteroid known as Bennu. About a teaspoon was returned by Japan, the only other country to bring back asteroid samples.The pristine samples are believed to be the leftover building blocks from the dawn of our solar system and will help scientists better understand how Earth and life formed.Osiris-Rex rocketed away on the $1 billion mission in 2016. It reached Bennu two years later and, using a long stick vacuum, grabbed dust and pebbles from the small roundish space rock in 2020. By the time it returned Sunday, the spacecraft had traveled 4 billion miles (6.2 ...

Two dead in late night drive-by shooting in Rexdale

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:24:04 GMT

Toronto police say two people are dead after a late night drive-by shooting in Rexdale. Police say they were called to the area of Kipling Aveune and Mount Olive Drive around 11:45 p.m. Saturday night for reports someone had been shot. Investigators say a group of individuals drove up to another group in the area and gunshots were exchanged. One person, believed to be a man in his 20s, was pronounced dead at the scene. Police say the vehicle involved in the shooting was found nearby in Jamestown and one person from that group was taken to hospital, where they were pronounced dead.It’s not known if any other injuries were sustained in the shootout but Toronto paramedics previously told CityNews a woman was taken from the scene on Mount Olive Drive to hospital with minor injuries.

A year after Fiona, a traumatized Newfoundland town backs away from the sea

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:24:04 GMT

ST. JOHN’S, N.L. — One year after a wave driven by post-tropical storm Fiona slammed into the back of her house and twisted it like a corkscrew, Lori Dicks now lives up on a hill, far from the water.She still has a view of the ocean, but she’s far enough away that there’s no chance it will swell up and swallow her entire life again like it did on the morning of Sept. 24, 2022, in Port aux Basques, N.L.“I still think about it all the time. So much change has happened for us, for everyone. Even the whole town I find is affected, even the landscape has changed,” she said in a recent interview from her new home across the province in Burin Bay Arm, N.L. “On our side of the street where all our homes were, it’s completely gone. All of our homes are torn down now.”Fiona destroyed about 100 homes that morning in southwestern Newfoundland, and a 73-year-old woman died when she was swept out to sea. Houses that had belonged to families for gene...

Wildfires: Town of Clova busy as ever after Quebec premier said it was burning down

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:24:04 GMT

MONTREAL — Dominic Vincent’s inn and restaurant in Clova, Que., is fully booked these days, only months after Premier François Legault announced the town of 36 residents would burn to the ground during the unprecedented summer wildfire season. Far from gone, the hamlet within the city of La Tuque, around 325 kilometres northwest of Montreal, is bustling — filled with out-of-town forestry workers helping to harvest some of the burned wood as quickly as possible before it deteriorates from dryness and insects. “There’s three years’ worth of harvesting, and a year to do it, so it’s a bit of a race,” Vincent said in a phone interview. “We have a lot of forestry workers here that we normally wouldn’t have at this time of the season,” he said, adding that rental properties are “full, full, full.”In early June, however, it was another story. As more than 150 forest fires raged across the province, most of the community’s residents had to evacuate due to the approaching flames.The intensity...

Canada to get rare asteroid sample after OSIRIS-REx drops cargo to Earth on Sunday

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:24:04 GMT

MONTREAL — Seven years after it blasted into space to snag a sample of an asteroid, a spacecraft is set to deliver its rare cargo on Sunday — and Canada is getting a piece of the interstellar bounty.The NASA-led mission launched OSIRIS-REx into space in 2016 to collect from the surface of an asteroid material that scientists hope will offer them insight into the formation of the solar system. The spacecraft began orbiting the asteroid — called Bennu — in 2018 and grabbed a sample in 2020. It started its return trip to Earth in 2021, and a capsule with the rocks and space dust is expected to land in the Utah desert on Sunday, before the spacecraft continues on a mission to another asteroid.Canada contributed a laser altimeter to the mission — a device that measures altitude and distance — that has allowed Bennu to become the “most precisely surveyed body in our solar system,” says Cameron Dickinson, a staff engineer at Canadian space company MDA Ltd., which designed the C...