An El Nino-less summer is coming. Here's what that could mean for Canada
As Canadians brace themselves for summer temperatures, forecasters say a weakening El Nino cycle doesn’t mean relief from the heat.
An attorney for Harvey Weinstein at his Los Angeles rape and sexual assault trial told jurors Thursday that prosecutors' case relies entirely on asking them to trust women whose testimony showed they were untrustworthy.
"Take my word for it," Jackson told jurors in his closing argument. "Five words that sum up the entirety of the prosecution's case."
Everything else prosecutors presented, through a month's of testimony from 44 witnesses, "was smoke and mirrors," Jackson said.
Weinstein is charged with raping and sexually assaulting two women and committing sexual battery against two others.
Jackson urged jurors to look past the drama and emotion of the testimony those four women gave, and focus on the factual evidence.
"Believe us because we're mad, believe us because we cried," Jackson said jurors were being asked to do. "Well fury does not make fact. And tears do not make truth."
Jackson said the stories of two women who Weinstein allegedly sexually assaulted on back-to-back days in 2013 "simply never happened."
Weinstein's alleged rape and assault of the other two women in 2005 and 2010 were "100% consensual" encounters that the women engaged in for the sake of career advancement that they later became "desperate to relabel" as non-consensual, Jackson said.
"These were women with whom Harvey had transactional relationships and transactional sex," he said.
Jackson argued that the women were perfectly willing to exchange sex for favors or status when the incidents happened in 2005 and 2010. But after the #MeToo explosion around Weinstein with stories in the New York Times and the New Yorker in 2017, they were regretful.
"They played the game. They hate it now, unequivocally," Jackson said. "But what about then? What about before the 2017 dogpile started on Mr. Weinstein?"
He dwelled on a judge's instruction he said was essential, that if jurors found that any significant thing a witness said was untrue, they should consider disbelieving everything the witness said.
The defence is set to finish its closing argument in the afternoon, and after the prosecutor's rebuttal, jurors will begin deliberations.
Weinstein is already serving a 23-year sentence for a conviction in New York.
Prosecutors completed their closing argument earlier Thursday after giving most of it Wednesday, and urged jurors to complete Weinstein's takedown by convicting him in California.
"It is time for the defendant's reign of terror to end," Deputy District Attorney Marlene Martinez said. "It is time for the kingmaker to be brought to justice."
As Canadians brace themselves for summer temperatures, forecasters say a weakening El Nino cycle doesn’t mean relief from the heat.
Canada Post is increasing stamp prices for the third time since 2019, a move the Crown corporation says is a "reality" of its sales-based revenue structure.
The federal New Democrats are calling out Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and his party for trying to block the bill that could pave the way for millions of Canadians to access birth control and diabetes coverage.
Defence lawyers of Jeremy Skibicki have admitted in court the accused killed four Indigenous women, but argues he is not criminally responsible for the deaths by way of mental disorder – this latest development has triggered a judge-alone trial rather than a jury trial.
A daily spoonful of olive oil could lower your risk of dying from dementia, according to a new study by Harvard scientists.
An Ontario MPP was asked again to leave the Ontario legislature on Monday for wearing a keffiyeh, a garment that was banned by the Speaker last month due to its political symbolism.
H5N1 or avian flu is decimating wildlife around the world and is now spreading among cattle in the United States, sparking concerns about 'pandemic potential' for humans. Now a health expert is urging Canada to scale up surveillance north of the border.
Democratic Institutions Minister Dominic LeBlanc will be tabling legislation on Monday aimed at countering foreign interference in Canada. Federal officials have scheduled a technical briefing on the incoming bill for Monday afternoon.
Polish prosecutors have discontinued an investigation into human skeletons found at a site where German dictator Adolf Hitler and other Nazi leaders spent time during the Second World War because the advanced state of decay made it impossible to determine the cause of death, a spokesman said Monday.
Eighty-two-year-old Susan Neufeldt and 90-year-old Ulrich Richter are no spring chickens, but their love blossomed over the weekend with their wedding at Pine View Manor just outside of Rosthern.
Alberta Ballet's double-bill production of 'Der Wolf' and 'The Rite of Spring' marks not only its final show of the season, but the last production for twin sisters Alexandra and Jennifer Gibson.
A mother goose and her goslings caused a bit of a traffic jam on a busy stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway near Vancouver Saturday.
A British Columbia mayor has been censured by city council – stripping him of his travel and lobbying budgets and removing him from city committees – for allegedly distributing a book that questions the history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada.
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.
A group of SaskPower workers recently received special recognition at the legislature – for their efforts in repairing one of Saskatchewan's largest power plants after it was knocked offline for months following a serious flood last summer.
A police officer on Montreal's South Shore anonymously donated a kidney that wound up drastically changing the life of a schoolteacher living on dialysis.
Since 1932, Montreal's Henri Henri has been filled to the brim with every possible kind of hat, from newsboy caps to feathered fedoras.
Police in Oak Bay, B.C., had to close a stretch of road Sunday to help an elephant seal named Emerson get safely back into the water.