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4:04 ‘Chaos’ inside Federal Vaccine Injury Support Program Kimberly MacDougall lay in a hospital bed beside her injured husband, Stephen, as his final moments came. She and their two kids held him as he took his last breath.Stephen, 45, a service manager for a luxury automobile dealership, had been fighting to live for weeks in May 2021, but stopped struggling. She informed friends on social media that the man she loved, incredibly fit and with no prior health issues, wouldn’t make it.Outside the window of his intensive care room in Peterborough, Ont., an impromptu group of friends soon gathered to hold a vigil, in love and support.“I saw things nobody should see and I wasn’t equipped to deal with,” MacDougall rem...

Former U.S. president Joe Biden, in a lengthy address at a conference in California on Wednesday night, said some of his most significant achievements in office are “changing so rapidly” under the current administration that some European leaders have turned to him for advice. According to The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), without ever mentioning President Donald Trump by name, Biden spoke for more than an hour to thousands of human resources experts invited by the HR trade group SHRM to a gathering in San Diego about the risks of the U.S.’ move toward isolationism and the dangers of abandoning his administration’s efforts to strengthen the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance.“We strengthened NATO in a significant way,” he told the audience on Wednesday, adding that now, he is ...

U.S. House Republicans propelled President Donald Trump’s $4.5 trillion tax breaks and spending cuts bill to final congressional passage Thursday, overcoming multiple setbacks to approve his signature second-term policy package before a Fourth of July deadline. The tight roll call, 218-214, came at a potentially high political cost, with two Republicans joining all Democrats opposed. GOP leaders worked overnight and the president himself leaned on a handful of skeptics to drop their opposition and send the bill to him to sign into law. Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York delayed voting by holding the floor for more than eight hours with a record-breaking speech against the bill.“We have a big job to finish,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La. “With one big beautiful bill we a...

Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are ready to vote on President Donald Trump‘s so-called “Big, Beautiful Bill,” but they had to wait for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to wrap things up first. Jeffries, the Democratic leader, took to the House floor early Thursday morning to rail against the legislation he and other Democrats have warned will pull the social safety net from under millions of Americans and their children — and his speech lasted almost nine hours.Jeffries began speaking just after 5 a.m. Thursday, delaying the final vote in the chamber. According to ABC News, he picked apart the bill and some Republicans who voted for it, as stacks of binders sat next to the podium.“I’ve been given 15 minutes each on a bill of such significant magnitude as it relates t...

The C.D. Howe Institute predicts Ottawa’s recently announced spending plans — which include a much bigger defence budget — will drive its deficits markedly higher in the coming years. In a new analysis released Thursday, the think tank said it expects Canada’s deficit to top $92 billion this fiscal year, given Prime Minister Mark Carney’s plan to meet NATO’s defence spending target of two per cent of GDP.C.D. Howe expects deficit growth to slow after this year but predicts deficits will still average around $78 billion annually over four years — more than double the level forecast by the parliamentary budget officer before the spring federal election.But the report also considers this an “optimistic” scenario that takes into account “speculative savings” in the form of new revenues and cos...