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De Bruin wins monobob bronze, Canada roars into women’s hockey final

Published

3 years ago

9 minute read

BEIJING — Christine de Bruin wore an Olympic medal around her neck for the first time in her career, and the Canadian bobsledder liked the feeling.

“It feels awesome,” she said of the bronze medal she claimed in the Olympic debut of the monobob. “It feels heavy. It’s nice.”

No doubt, the feeling of two medals would be even nicer.

The native of Stony Plain, Alta., picked up Canada’s first sliding medal of the Beijing Olympics on Monday when she raced to third place in the monobob in a time of four minutes 21.03 seconds.

She will have a chance to add to Canada’s coffers in the two-woman event on Saturday. She said the knowledge of the track at Yanqing National Sliding Centre gained during her monobob runs should serve her well.

“It means that I have a really good understanding of the track and with Buj (Kristen Bujnowski), my brakewoman behind me, we have a very competitive push,” de Bruin said.

“Put the two together and we should have a great result.”

Kaillie Humphries, de Bruin’s former teammate, led a one-two punch atop the podium for the United States with a dominating time of 4:19.27. American veteran Elana Meyers Taylor took silver in 4:20.81.

Humphries picked up her fourth Olympic medal. She won two gold and a bronze in the two-woman event as a competitor for Canada before switching to represent the United States after the 2018 Pyeongchang Games.

Elsewhere on Monday, Canada assured itself of at least one more medal in Beijing with a 10-3 win over Switzerland in the women’s hockey semifinals. The Canadians will face the winner of a later semifinal between the United States and Finland for gold on Thursday.

Canada’s women’s curling team rebounded from a three-game losing streak with an 11-5 win over Russia, and looked to even its record with a win over Britain later Monday. The men’s curling squad improved to 4-2 with a comfortable 7-3 win over Italy. And the nation’s snowboarders look poised to add to their success after a total of five athletes qualified for the finals of the men’s and women’s big air events.

Max Parrot will be looking to follow up his gold-medal slopestyle performance from last week with a similar result in the big air, and appeared on form after topping the men’s qualifier.

Parrot said he was “stoked” by his performance, despite making a mistake on his third jump, but said his focus was firmly on the future.

“I’ve got my ticket for the final so really just focusing on that,” he said. “That’s what’s important. It’s not to finish first in (qualifiers) or second or third, it’s to make it to the final.”

Teammate Mark McMorris was eighth and Darcy Sharpe finished 12th to secure the last spot in the final. Sébastien Toutant, the event’s defending champion, fell twice and did not advance.

On the women’s side, Laurie Blouin qualified fourth for the big air final and Jasmine Baird was 10th.

Seventeen-year-old Olivia Asselin also qualified for the finals of the women’s freestyle skiing slopestyle. Asselin finished in 11th after scoring a 64.68 on her first run at the Genting Snow Park in Zhangjiakou. Megan Oldham, who finished fourth in the big air, did not advance to the final.

Humphries’ first gold medal sliding for the United States came after a trying four years that included an acrimonious split with Bobsleigh Canada Skeleton — the sport’s national governing body.

Humphries filed a harassment complaint with the organization in 2018, claiming she was “repeatedly and horribly verbally and mentally abused by the head coach.”

Todd Hays, who led the U.S. women’s team from 2011 to 2014, has been Canada’s head coach since 2017.

The allegations remain under investigation.

Asked if she had any words for Canada, Humphries started off by saying “not really” before continuing.

“I’m still Canadian,” said the dual citizen. “I will never forget my time as part of Canada, and I am so proud and honoured to still consider myself Canadian. I am also American. To me, it’s not a rivalry. I’m not picking and choosing one country over the other.

“Canada will always hold my past. Every single time I represented Team Canada, I did so with my heart and soul. The U.S.A. has my future.”

Toronto’s Cynthia Appiah was eighth on the 1,615-metre, 16-turn track located about 90 kilometres north of Beijing.

In women’s hockey, team captain Marie-Philip Poulin scored twice and Claire Thompson had a goal and two assists as the Canadians set a new Olympic tournament record with 54 goals.

“I know when you look at the Olympic scores, you kind of think it has been an easy road for us, but that could not have been any further from the truth,” forward Sarah Nurse said.

“We want to generate a ton of offence but we know we have to clean things up defensively. I know going into the championship (game) we will have to tighten some things up defensively.”

In figure skating, Toronto’s Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier of Unionville, Ont., finished a disappointing seventh in ice dance in what could be their last Olympics.

Gilles and Poirier botched a rotational lift, which was reflected in their score of 204.78.

Gilles fought back tears as she tried to explain what went wrong. Poirier said to her gently: “You were amazing.”

They could still capture a medal in the team event, pending the decision on the Russian team. Canada was fourth in the team event, but Russia, which was first, could be disqualified after it was revealed that 15-year-old superstar Kamila Valieva tested positive for a banned heart drug.

Valieva was cleared to continue competing by the Court of Arbitration for Sport on Monday, but any medal she wins could still be taken from her.

Those issues will be dealt with in a separate, longer-term investigation of the positive doping test that will be led by the Russian anti-doping agency.

The International Olympic Committee said Monday afternoon that if Valieva finishes in the top three, there will be no medal ceremony during the Games. There will also be no ceremony for the team event.

Canada’s Marion Thénault was seventh in women’s aerials. Thénault, from Sherbrooke, Que., just missed out on the superfinal with a 91.29 on her second run of the final. Thénault was part of the team that won the bronze medal in the mixed team aerials event.

China’s Xu Mengtao won gold with 108.61 points in the superfinal.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 14, 2022.

The Canadian Press

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International

CBS settles with Trump over doctored 60 Minutes Harris interview

Published on July 2, 2025

By

MXM logo MxM News

CBS will pay Donald Trump more than $30 million to settle a lawsuit over a 2024 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. The deal also includes a new rule requiring unedited transcripts of future candidate interviews.

Key Details:

  • Trump will receive $16 million immediately to cover legal costs, with remaining funds earmarked for pro-conservative messaging and future causes, including his presidential library.
  • CBS agreed to release full, unedited transcripts of all future presidential candidate interviews—a policy insiders are calling the “Trump Rule.”
  • Trump’s lawsuit accused CBS of deceptively editing a 60 Minutes interview with Harris in 2024 to protect her ahead of the election; the FCC later obtained the full transcript after a complaint was filed.

Diving Deeper:

CBS and Paramount Global have agreed to pay President Donald Trump more than $30 million to settle a lawsuit over a 2024 60 Minutes interview with then–Vice President Kamala Harris, Fox News Digital reported Tuesday. Trump accused the network of election interference, saying CBS selectively edited Harris to shield her from backlash in the final stretch of the campaign.

The settlement includes a $16 million upfront payment to cover legal expenses and other discretionary uses, including funding for Trump’s future presidential library. Additional funds—expected to push the total package well above $30 million—will support conservative-aligned messaging such as advertisements and public service announcements.

As part of the deal, CBS also agreed to a new editorial policy mandating the public release of full, unedited transcripts of any future interviews with presidential candidates. The internal nickname for the new rule is reportedly the “Trump Rule.”

Trump initially sought $20 billion in damages, citing a Face the Nation preview that aired Harris’s rambling response to a question about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. That portion of the interview was widely mocked. A more polished answer was aired separately during a primetime 60 Minutes special, prompting allegations that CBS intentionally split Harris’s answer to minimize political fallout.

The FCC later ordered CBS to release the full transcript and raw footage after a complaint was filed. The materials confirmed that both versions came from the same response—cut in half across different broadcasts.

CBS denied wrongdoing but the fallout rocked the network. 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens resigned in April after losing control over editorial decisions. CBS News President Wendy McMahon also stepped down in May, saying the company’s direction no longer aligned with her own.

Several CBS veterans strongly opposed any settlement. “The unanimous view at 60 Minutes is that there should be no settlement, and no money paid, because the lawsuit is complete bulls***,” one producer told Fox News Digital. Correspondent Scott Pelley had warned that settling would be “very damaging” to the network’s reputation.

The final agreement includes no admission of guilt and no direct personal payment to Trump—but it locks in a substantial cash payout and forces a new standard for transparency in how networks handle presidential interviews.

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International

RFK Jr. tells Tucker how Big Pharma uses ‘perverse incentives’ to get vaccines approved

Published on July 1, 2025

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Matt Lamb

Kennedy defended his decision to fire all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which he decried as a tool used to “rubber stamp” vaccines.

The vaccine approval process is a “bundle of perverse incentives” since pharmaceutical companies stand to make billions of dollars in revenue from it, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Tucker Carlson recently.

Kennedy appeared on Carlson’s show yesterday to discuss a variety of issues, including the potential link between autism and vaccines and his overhauling of the vaccine advisory committee at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month.

Kennedy began by explaining that Big Pharma has been targeting academic journals to ensure its products receive favorable reviews.

“The journals won’t publish anything critical of vaccines … there’s so much pressure on them. They’re funded by pharmaceutical companies, and they’ll lose advertising and revenue from reprints,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy then noted that Big Pharma will “pay to get something published in these journals,” before accusing industry leaders of pushing drugs on doctors and of hiring “mercenary scientists” to manipulate data until their product is deemed safe and effective.

The entire complex is broken due to the “perverse incentives,” he lamented.

Later in the interview, Kennedy defended his decision to fire all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) in June, which he decried as a mere tool to “rubber stamp” vaccines.

This sort of “agency capture” explains the lucrative nature of vaccines, he added.

Kennedy then summarized the “perverse” process as follows:

First of all, the federal government often times actually designs the vaccine, [the National Institutes of Health] would design it, would hand it over to the pharmaceutical company. The pharmaceutical company then runs it … first through [the] FDA, then through [the] ACIP, and gets it recommended.

If you can get that recommendation you now got a billion dollars in — at least — revenues by the end of the year, every year, forever. So, there was a gold rush to add new vaccines to the schedule and ACIP never turned away a single vaccine … that came to them they recommended, and a lot of these vaccines are for diseases that are not even casually contagious.

Kennedy further pointed to the Hepatitis B shot for newborns as an example of how the industry has been corrupted.

In 1999, the CDC “looked at children who had received the hepatitis vaccine within the first 30 days of life and compared those children to children who had received the vaccine later — or not at all. And they found an 1,135% elevated risk of autism among the vaccinated children. It shocked them. They kept the study secret and manipulated it through five different iterations to try to bury the link,” he said.

“We want to protect public health,” Kennedy explained, but “these vaccines … can cause chronic disease, chronic injuries that last a lifetime.”

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