Sediment and pebbles are all that’s left on the earth around much of Bernardino Mosquera’s small riverside community in northwest Colombia’s Choco region.

Just a year ago, healthy shrubs and trees filled this important biodiversity spot teeming with species native to the land. But then illegal miners arrived, using their heavy machinery to dredge the riverbeds for gold.

“It’s just desert here,” said Mosquera. “Illegal mining affects the ecosystem in every way … it leads to degraded land. There are no trees. The water sources are drying up, it’s polluted by mercury.”

Mosquera is a river guardian, a title bestowed upon him and 13 others. The unpaid guardians serve as the eyes and ears of the Atrato River: They liaise with government institutions on environmental and social issues in the face of aggression from armed groups and hope to reverse the devastation they see along the river. But after eight years, they are increasingly disenchanted by the lack of support from institutions and growing threats from armed groups that control the region.

The artificial intelligence maker OpenAI may face a costly and inconvenient reckoning with its nonprofit origins even as its valuation recently exploded to $157 billion.

Nonprofit tax experts have been closely watching OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, since last November when its board ousted and rehired CEO Sam Altman. Now, some believe the company may have reached — or exceeded — the limits of its corporate structure, under which it is organized as a nonprofit whose mission is to develop artificial intelligence to benefit “all of humanity” but with for-profit subsidiaries under its control.

Jill Horwitz, a professor in law and medicine at UCLA School of Law who has studied OpenAI, said that when two sides of a joint venture between a nonprofit and a for-profit come into conflict, the charitable purpose must always win out.

“It’s the job of the board first, and then the regulators and the court, to ensure that the promise that was made to the public to pursue the charitable interest is kept,” she said.

Canada's parliament has passed a bill that that will cover the full cost of contraception and diabetes drugs for Canadians.

The Liberal government said it is the initial phase of a plan that would expand to become a publicly funded national pharmacare programme.

But two provinces - Alberta and Quebec - have indicated they may opt-out of the programme, accusing Ottawa of interfering in provincial matters.

Opposition Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, whose party is ahead in national polls by a wide margin, does not support the legislation.

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Donald Trump’s campaign requested military aircraft for Trump to fly in during the final weeks of the campaign, expanded flight restrictions over his residences and rallies, ballistic glass pre-positioned in seven battleground states for the campaign’s use and an array of military vehicles to transport Trump, according to emails reviewed by The Washington Post and people familiar with the matter.

The requests are extraordinary and unprecedented - no nominee in recent history has been ferried around in military planes ahead of an election. But the requests came after Trump’s campaign advisers received briefings in which the government said Iran is still actively plotting to kill him, according to the emails reviewed by The Post and the people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive discussions. Trump advisers have grown concerned about drones and missiles, according to the people.

In the emails over the past two weeks from campaign manager Susie Wiles to Ronald L. Rowe Jr., the head of the Secret Service, she expressed displeasure with the Secret Service and said the campaign recently had to cancel a public event at the last minute because of a “lack of personnel” from the Secret Service - instead only putting Trump in a small room with reporters. Wiles said Trump’s campaign is being hampered in its planning because of threats expects to hold far more events in the final weeks of the campaign.

American Jeremy Loffredo was one of five journalists reportedly detained by the Israel Defense Forces on 9 October. He’s reportedly charged with endangering national security and aiding and sharing information with the enemy, apparently because of his reporting on Iranian strikes.

The case requires the immediate attention of American officials (Loffredo has reportedly been released from custody but is barred from leaving Israel as authorities try to build their case). But, no matter what direction it takes, it should serve to highlight the plight of dozens of Palestinian journalists who are being held incommunicado in Israeli prisons.

Loffredo’s American citizenship makes it more likely – but by no means guaranteed – that the Biden administration might actually care that he’s being detained. After all, Joe Biden was eager to claim credit for the release of the journalists Evan Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva, who were held in Russian prison on bogus charges.

If Israel’s theory is that reporters illegally share information with the enemy whenever the enemy reads the news, that could criminalize a whole lot of journalism. If Israel has proof that Loffredo did something more nefarious than that, it should say so, and be specific. The Dissenter reports that several more mainstream journalists reported similar information and footage to Loffredo and weren’t charged – if so, why was a particularly adversarial journalist singled out?

A group of leading legal figures say Fifa has ignored their report into human rights concerns over the 2034 World Cup, warning that the governing body is “dealing with the devil” in planning to take the tournament to Saudi Arabia.

A decision on the Saudi bid to host the World Cup is to be made in December, although it appears to be a foregone conclusion given there are no other bidders. The lawyers – Prof Mark Pieth, Stefan Wehrenberg and Rodney Dixon KC – submitted a report to Fifa in May pointing out areas in which the Saudi state breached the human rights policies of world football’s governing body.

Pieth said that going to Saudi Arabia was a “big risk” for Fifa. “My understanding is that Saudi Arabia is quite a bit nervous [about public criticism] and they are dangerous,” he said. “That’s my take. I’m not shy to say it in public. People are really dealing with the devil here. So there is a big risk.”

Authorities in the German city of Cologne have evacuated three hospitals and thousands of homes after the discovery of an unexploded second world war bomb during construction work on a new medical campus.

The 1,000kg US aerial bomb, equipped with a front and rear impact detonator, is due to be defused on Friday.

A complex evacuation procedure had been in the planning since excavation work on the site began about six months ago, owing to well-founded fears that unexploded ordnance would be discovered there.

A US-made munition was used in a strike on central Beirut that killed 22 people and wounded 117, according to an analysis of shrapnel found by the Guardian at the scene of the attack.

The strike on Thursday night hit an apartment complex in the densely populated neighbourhood of Basta, levelling the apartment building and destroying cars and the interiors of nearby residences.

It was the deadliest strike on Lebanon’s capital city since fighting between Hezbollah and Israel started a year ago.

A first responder on the scene said rescue crews had worked overnight to find survivors and recover the dead from under rubble. They said the building had more people living there than usual as residents had recently welcomed people displaced from Israeli bombing in south Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut. That elevated the number of people wounded and killed in the airstrike.

Cindy Ali, the Toronto mother who was acquitted in the 2011 death of her 16-year-old daughter Cynara after serving more than four years in prison, is suing Toronto police and the city for more than $10 million.

“Officers took little care to secure the scene in the hours following the event, and the forensic team neglected to take fingerprint or DNA samples from several surfaces that Cindy said the home invaders touched,” (Cindy's) claim reads.

The claim stats that despite the investigation’s failure to produce “any incriminating evidence,” Ali was arrested on March 8, 2012 and charged with manslaughter. The charge was later upgraded to first-degree murder on Oct. 17, 2012.

The suit is seeking damages in the amount of $8 million from the Toronto Police Services Board and Frank Skubic, $2 million from the City of Toronto and Bujokas, and an additional $500,000 from all defendants.

The Office of the Provincial Veterinarian Animal Welfare informed the Winnipeg Police Service (WPS) about the videos and images in August 2024.

Police note the content was posted on the dark web, and approximately 10 cats were believed to be involved. Some of the animals were acquired through social media selling platforms.

A 55-year-old woman and 40-year-old man have been charged with killing or injuring animals; causing unnecessary suffering to an animal; failing to provide adequate medical attention to an animal when it was ill or wounded; and inflicting upon an animal acute suffering, serious injury or harm, or extreme anxiety or distress that significantly impairs its health or well-being.

Archaeologists have identified the cannibalized remains of a senior officer who perished during an ill-fated 19th-century Arctic expedition, offering insight into its lost crew’s tragic and grisly final days.

By comparing DNA from the bones with a sample from a living relative, the new research revealed the skeletal remains belonged to James Fitzjames, captain of the HMS Erebus. The Royal Navy vessel and its sister ship, the HMS Terror, had been under the command of Sir John Franklin, who led the voyage to explore unnavigated areas of the Northwest Passage. The treacherous shortcut across the top of North America meanders through the islands of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.

A different team of researchers in 1993 found 451 bones thought to belong to at least 13 of Franklin’s sailors at a site on King William Island in Canada’s Nunavut territory. The remains identified as Fitzjames’ in the new study, published September 24 in the Journal of Archaeological Science were among them.

Accounts gathered from local Inuit people in the 1850s suggested that some of the crew members resorted to cannibalism. While these reports were initially met with disbelief in England, subsequent investigations conducted over the past four decades found a significant number of bones had cut marks that offered silent evidence of the expedition’s catastrophic end.

Income inequality in Canada has hit the highest level ever recorded as wealth becomes increasingly concentrated in fewer hands, says Canada's statistics agency.

The gap in the share of disposable income between the richest two-fifths of Canadians and the bottom two-fifths grew to 47 percentage points in the second quarter of 2024, Statistics Canada reported Thursday.

That's the widest gap recorded since 1999, when Statistics Canada first started collecting such data.

The gap was driven by the top 20 per cent of income earners, who saw the largest increase in their share of disposable income, the report said. That increase was driven largely by investment gains, which the statistics agency attributed to high interest rates.