SEATTLE (AP) — Like the tobacco, oil, gun, opioid and vaping industries before them, the big U.S. social media companies are now facing lawsuits brought by public entities that seek to hold them accountable for a huge societal problem — in their case, the mental health crisis among youth. But the new lawsuits — one […]

HALIFAX — Deaths in Nova Scotia emergency rooms were up 10 per cent in 2022 from the previous year, an increase that a Nova Scotia Health official says was “not unexpected” as more patients — and patients with more acute needs — visited ERs. Alyson Lamb, the executive director of health services with Nova Scotia […]

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — TikTok will be banned from all Mississippi-issued government devices and the state’s network, Gov. Tate Reeves announced Wednesday in a letter to department and agency heads. The Republican said he issued the directive to safeguard sensitive information from the popular social media app, which is owned by private Chinese company ByteDance […]

OTTAWA — The federal public safety minister says he is prepared to work with other parliamentarians to revise the Liberal government’s cybersecurity bill after civil society groups and opposition MPs raised transparency and accountability concerns. While he is open to changes, Marco Mendicino said in a recent interview the bill that was introduced last year […]

HALIFAX — Nova Scotia’s Justice Department said Tuesday it won’t pursue legal action against a politician who posted information about a woman who died in hospital after a seven-hour wait for a doctor. The department sent an email Friday to Elizabeth Smith-McCrossin, the Independent member for Cumberland North, advising her to take down a letter […]

WASHINGTON (AP) — With security threats to Supreme Court justices still fresh memories, Chief Justice John Roberts on Saturday praised programs that protect judges, saying that “we must support judges by ensuring their safety.” Roberts and other conservative Supreme Court justices were the subject of protests, some at their homes, after the May leak of […]

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Indiana has blocked the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok from state devices, its technology office said Thursday. The Indiana Office of Technology “blocked TikTok from being used in our state system and on our state devices” as of Dec. 7, office spokesman Graig Lubsen told The Journal Gazette. The Office of Technology […]

TAPACHULA, Mexico (AP) — When migrants arrive to the main crossing point into southern Mexico — a steamy city with no job opportunities, a place packed with foreigners eager to keep moving north — they soon learn the only way to cut through the red tape and expedite what can be a monthslong process is […]

OTTAWA — An advocacy group for those who reveal wrongdoing says it cannot support a new task force looking at the federal whistleblowing regime because it lacks someone with “lived experience” as an actual whistleblower. In a letter to Treasury Board President Mona Fortier, Whistleblowing Canada Research Society president Pamela Forward calls the absence a […]

ATLANTA (AP) — Federal proposals that would have significantly boosted security funding for election offices and heightened penalties for threatening their staff failed to advance this year, leaving state officials looking to their legislatures for support. The massive budget bill that passed Congress on Friday will send $75 million in election security grants to states, […]

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Facebook’s corporate parent has agreed to pay $725 million to settle a lawsuit alleging the world’s largest social media platform allowed millions of its users’ personal information to be fed to Cambridge Analytica, a firm that supported Donald Trump’s victorious presidential campaign in 2016. Terms of the settlement reached by Meta […]

OTTAWA — The young Russian seaman who turned up exhausted and bleeding on the British Columbia shore struck a Canadian intelligence official as well mannered, sincere and athletic, built like Tarzan of the movies. Less than two years later, defector Sergei Kourdakov would die in a California motel room — apparently by accidentally shooting himself — after […]