Latest news with #Elwood
Vancouver Sun
3 days ago
- Business
- Vancouver Sun
Metro Vancouver loses bid to delay sewage plant court case as millions of documents strain legal team
The B.C. Supreme Court has rejected Metro Vancouver's request to postpone a multimillion-dollar trial in the lawsuit over North Shore's new sewage-treatment project. Justice Bruce Elwood said in a ruling that Metro Vancouver did not provide compelling evidence to justify postponing the start of the trial from March 1, 2027 to no earlier than Sept. 1, 2028. 'I am not persuaded … that an adjournment is necessary in the interests of justice to ensure that there is a fair trial on the merits of the action,' Elwood wrote. Start your day with a roundup of B.C.-focused news and opinion. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder. The next issue of Sunrise will soon be in your inbox. Please try again Interested in more newsletters? Browse here. The sewage district had said 'it cannot be ready for a trial in the one year and 10 months that remain before the trial date, and that an adjournment of 1½ years is necessary to ensure that it receives a fair trial.' Spanish multinational Acciona is seeking $250 million in damages after Metro Vancouver cancelled its contract to build the wastewater treatment plant. Metro is countersuing for $1 billion. The contract was cancelled in January 2022 after construction had begun. PCL Constructors West Coast Inc. was hired to complete the project, which was supposed to cost $700 million but has ballooned to more than $3.8 billion. It is expected to be complete in 2030. Acciona says it was not possible to design and build the project on the provided site without significant changes. The company also says Metro Vancouver failed to make some payments and refused to acknowledge problems with the original contract. Elwood wrote that he understood that trial preparation was straining the resources of the district's legal team, but said it had not shown 'anything improper or entirely unforeseeable about the scale or complexity of this litigation. Metro Vancouver 'is a sophisticated litigant represented by one of the leading law firms in the country. The resources required to litigate this case on the current schedule are not disproportionate to the amount of money involved, the importance of the issues, or the complexity of the proceedings,' the judge wrote, adding the district may have to devote more resources to the lawsuit. 'However, I am not persuaded at this time that its right to a fair trial is in jeopardy.' Metro Vancouver has not disclosed how much the legal case is costing taxpayers. Elwood wrote that one reason he did not want the trial delayed was because human memory will be a key issue. 'There is a real risk to Acciona of a loss of evidence if the adjournment is granted, which would cause non‑compensable prejudice to Acciona's right to fair trial.' He wrote it has been three years since Metro terminated Acciona's contract, four to 5½ years since the events leading to the termination, six years since the contract was negotiated, and 10 years since the project went to tender. 'If the trial is adjourned, there will be a further 3½-year delay before the witnesses can start to provide their testimony.' He wrote that of Acciona's potential witness list, one has died, three have retired, 13 are unavailable due to health or work restrictions, 30 have left Acciona, 40 don't live in Vancouver, and 20 are close to retirement. Elwood also addressed document disclosure related to the trial. So far, Acciona has produced close to four million documents, while Metro Vancouver has produced 200,000. Metro says it was surprised by the 'sheer number of documents' Acciona produced, while Acciona says it was surprised by the 'paucity of the documents' that Metro produced, Elwood wrote. Metro says its resources are 'being depleted by the document‑review process, thereby impacting its ability to prepare for trial,' the judge wrote. 'There are unquestionably irrelevant and duplicate documents in Acciona's production. However, I do not agree with the assertion … that there are hundreds of thousands of irrelevant documents. In my view, that assertion by (Metro) is based on a misunderstanding of Acciona's evidence of the precision rate of the artificial intelligence model it used to review the documents.' The treatment plant is to replace the Lions Gate facility that provides only primary level wastewater treatment. It is being built between Philip and Pemberton avenues in North Vancouver. It will serve 300,000 residents and be paid for from residential utility rates. For example, households in North Vancouver are expected to pay an additional $590 a year. dcarrigg@
SowetanLIVE
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- SowetanLIVE
Caribbean couture hits G-Star Raw
How do you preserve the G-Star heritage without compromising on modernity? Herrebrugh: We are in a lucky position because we were given time to do profound research in the archives. G-Star has one of the largest general archives. We have been going through all of those and the lookbooks. That's our way of informing ourselves of the DNA, so we infuse ourselves with knowledge of G-Star and eventually process it. What surprised you about the G-Star archives? Botter: A lot of stuff we found from the beginning of the 1990s were still modern, with these intelligent cuts and innovative seaming. So, sometimes we just changed the fit, tweaking it. Herrebrugh: It was the same for me. The quality of the refinement of the garments, the finishing, seaming, buttons, stitching. In the past, they loved to have intentionally wrong stitching but in the right placements. That inspired us. Botter has been worn by Madonna, Lewis Hamilton, and Burna Boy. Who would you like to see the Raw Research collection on? Botter: We are always inspired by African artists. I recently found out that my roots are in Nigeria. So, when I'm listening to the music, I'm feeling these similarities. I'm inspired by [musicians like] Asaki, Davido, Burna Boy, and Rema. For me, it's also about giving the podium to up-and-coming artists. Herrebrugh: It's beautiful how they blend everything … in a way that makes it their own. In terms of fashion, mixing women- and menswear. In music, mixing different cultures. They make the storytelling so personal — that's why we feel connected. What should we expect with the preview next month? Herrebrugh: The first collection is very curated. We were in love with the Elwood jeans. Why has this strong patent piece never been explored more? So this is something we played with, thinking about the Elwood details but implementing them in a jacket. We loved the 3D cutting of G-Star and the washings. You are going to see some visual washings that inspired us when we were on a trip in Dominican Republic, where my family is from. Do you know yet what the Paris Fashion Week collection will look like? Botter: I have had some dreams about it. We have been working on it for over a month. It's heading in a direction, but it's still open. * This article forms part of a commercial collaboration with G-Star Raw
Hindustan Times
13-05-2025
- Hindustan Times
Page to screen: The Nickel Boys
Subjugation, not education, is the cornerstone of Nickel Academy, a reform school for young offenders in America's Jim Crow South. Crushing the spirit overrides igniting the minds of Black students kept separate and unequal on campus. The default language spoken by the staff is violence. As a fresh-faced idealist shaped by Martin Luther King's sermons about loving your oppressor and breaking down racial barriers with non-violence learns, 'violence is the only lever big enough to move the world.' Colson Whitehead modelled the fictional reformatory of his 2019 novel The Nickel Boys on Dozier School, a Florida institution that closed in 2011 after operating for more than a century despite repeated allegations of beatings, rape, forced labour and murder at the hands of staff. Dozens of boys are estimated to have died on campus grounds with three times as many black victims as white. As of 2019, 82 unmarked graves had been found. The anonymity of the black youth who suffered endless abuse at Dozier led Whitehead to imagine their untold stories in The Nickel Boys, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about a life-changing friendship between two boys, Elwood and Turner, hoping to survive a school of horrors. Whitehead presents the sickening reality of everyday life in Nickel with a thoughtful restraint. Not one to lay it on thick, he is forensic with his prose whether describing a young Elwood playing games with the kitchen staff at the hotel where his nana works, his after-school job at a convenience store or the systemic cruelties at Nickel. Maintaining a plainspoken tone throughout lends a devastating weight to the story as it progresses. While walking to college for his first day of classes, Elwood unknowingly hitchhikes with a man driving a stolen car and gets sentenced to Nickel. At first glance, Nickel looks innocuous with its manicured green lawns and red-brick buildings, like the college he almost went to or any other. The grisly truth reveals itself once he is directed to the black side of the campus. Just as Whitehead keeps the violence largely off page in the novel, RaMell Ross keeps it off frame in his blistering film adaptation. It is hidden away in the edges and shadows of subjectivity. Cries of students savagely beaten at night are masked by the drones of an industrial fan. When Elwood (Ethan Herisse) sees a young boy being harassed by two bullies in the dormitory bathroom, he intervenes — a gesture that earns all four a visit to the torture chamber. There, each student is flogged with a leather strap by the white superintendent Spencer (Hamish Linklater). The camera, standing in for the darting eyes of a nervous Elwood waiting for his turn, glances at a Bible on a nearby table and his restless legs. Ross doesn't show the flogging. Instead, he cuts to fuzzy stills of Dozier boys from the archives. The distorted images of real lives folded into fiction serve to challenge the sanitising of history while condemning the violence of erasure. Where the book is written in the third person, the film is shot almost entirely from a first-person vantage. We are thrust into the film with the camera aligned with the subjective perspectives of Elwood and Turner. We are invited to inhabit their perspectives, see what they see, hear what they hear, fear what they fear, and experience the terror of their everyday life and the poetry of their resilience. It is a formal choice purposed to untether blackness from an essentialised mode of looking, to reclaim black stories from white imaginations. And it shifts the very nature of how we engage with the film, from passive spectators to active witnesses. The stakes feel immediate and enveloping as we are kept rooted in a limited subjectivity and refused the respite of blinking at the horrors. Images of violence against black bodies have been historically refracted through the depersonalising, voyeuristic lenses of white image-makers. In reimagining Whitehead's novel, Ross takes Toni Morrison's advice: 'Take away the gaze of the white male. Once you take that out, the whole world opens up.' Abandoned by his parents, Elwood grew up with his nana Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) in segregated Tallahassee. He is a diligent student, loves reading encyclopaedias and plans to go to college. When he gets a Dr King record for Christmas, it awakens a strong belief in justice and civil rights. In the film, a young Elwood is introduced to Dr King when he sees the 'How Long, Not Long' speech on a TV through a store display window – where we also catch a teasing glimpse of Elwood in the reflection. Our first view of him in the full comes when he meets Turner (Brandon Wilson) at the cafeteria table in Nickel. The point of view switches from Elwood's to Turner's with the same scene playing from both their perspectives to contrast their dispositions. Turner is the sceptical pragmatist to Elwood's naive idealist. The key to surviving Nickel is no different to surviving outside, Turner tells Elwood. 'You gotta watch how people act. What they do. And then try to figure out how to get around them, like an obstacle course.' Navigating the obstacle course together puts Turner's honed every-man-for-himself instincts to the test. When Elwood is recovering from his beatings in the infirmary, Turner eats soap powder to make himself sick and join him. Riding out the sentence is easier said than done when at the mercy of a sadist like Spencer. But the pair's bond grants them the courage to dream of an escape out of Nickel. The film centres Elwood and Turner's shared destiny without forgoing any aspects of the brutal conditions that birth their alliance. That separate is inherently unequal is evidenced by the frayed clothes black students are given, the unpaid jobs they are coerced into and the brutality they are subjected to. When a black boy misunderstands the staff's instructions to tank a rigged game against a white opponent, he is beaten to death for insubordination. Abuse is so normalised it is spoken of in euphemisms. The torture chamber is nicknamed 'the white house' by the black boys and 'the ice cream factory' by the white boys limping out with multi-coloured bruises. 'A date on Lovers' Lane' suggests rape. 'Community service' refers to a door-to-door facility provided to local businessmen who pay Nickel a tidy sum for the supplies meant for black students. This vile enterprise is made doubly so by the fact that Turner and Elwood are enlisted to help the white student Harper (Fred Hechinger) on his delivery assignments in town. Leaving school grounds allows the two to taste the brief but sweet joy of freedom. But the potential consequences if the two, as opposed to Harper, were to give in to the temptation to escape underlines the power asymmetry of segregation. The doctrine of separate but equal is further complicated at Nickel by Jamie, a student of Mexican descent who keeps getting tossed back and forth between the black and white sides of the school because the staff can't seem to agree on where he belongs. When Elwood and Turner converse, the boomeranging POVs resemble a shot/reverse shot. The fluidity of the camerawork ensures we are never taken out of the story. The camera becoming the eyes of Elwood and Turner doesn't mean it moves and blinks like the human eye. Instead of an accurate simulation of 20/20 vision, Ross opts for a more lyrical approximation that stays true to the story's emotional scope. The leads performing with a camera rigged to their bodies or performing with a camera as scene partner doesn't rob the film of its gravity. It simply puts the emphasis on the power of perspective over the strength of performance. If the novel opens with an exhumation of bodies in the present, the film opens with an evocation of memories from the past: oranges dangle from a tree in the warm breeze of sunny Florida; below a hand strokes the grass in a yard; a gentle voice beckons a young Elwood to come inside. Light, sensory details and impressionist touches give vivid shape to memories, be it condensation on a beer can from the time Elwood's parents played cards with friends or nana icing a cake. Ross adds his own poetic flourishes to enrich his POV conceit: pencils drop from the ceiling in a magical moment when a Dr King speech is played in class; sparks from a pick-up truck dragging a crucifix along the road and cameos from stray alligators heighten the hellish nightmare of Nickel. The first-person perspective flips to third when the film flashes forward from the events at Nickel to an adult Elwood (Daveed Diggs) living with his girlfriend, running a moving company and growing old in New York. It's as if he had to become a whole different person to survive. The camera stays over the shoulder of a man who has dissociated to keep the past in the past but remains haunted by the spectre of trauma. Limiting the POV to the third person allowed Whitehead to withhold the big reveal at the end. Oscillating between dual perspectives and between the past and present doesn't soften the weight of the reveal in the film. But the reveal itself shouldn't surprise alert viewers. As for the truth about Nickel, it doesn't come out until the 2010s when unmarked graves are discovered on the site where the reformatory once stood and now an office park is to be built by a real estate developer. A shocking atrocity is but a cause of annoyance for the developer. Like Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, Nickel Boys is a saga about escaping Deep South captivity, informed by real-life atrocities American history would rather sweep under the rug. That Elwood and Turner come up against horrors Cora and Cesar were subjected to a century before attests to how little had changed. The ghosts of the injustices that transpired feel present to this day: in police harassment, disproportionate incarceration, hyper-surveillance and all the promising futures derailed by a system focused on social control and maintaining the power hierarchy within the US. Reformatories were established with the belief that young offenders were deserving of mercy away from hardened adult criminals. But it was neither mercy nor a foundation for adulthood that these schools offered. Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bangalore.
Daily Mail
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Former WAG Brodie Ryan slammed for her dramatic breakup posts following split from AFL star Nathan Buckley: 'Posh and Becks you ain't'
Brodie Ryan is copping criticism online following her public split from former Collingwood premiership star and coach Nathan Buckley. The former WAG, 36, who has posted a number of updates in the wake of her breakup from the AFL star, 52, was sensationally slammed by one Instagram user on account of her dramatic posts. 'She has issued a statement akin to Buckingham Palace announcing the death of Princess Diana,' wrote journalist Amanda Goff, formerly Samantha X, who recently made the move to Melbourne. 'The heartbroken lass even referred to herself and Nathan as "Brodes and Buck" - which I'm pretty sure no one has ever said. Ever. 'Sorry 'Broes you many be well-known for being Nathan's bird in Melbourne but Posh and Becks you ain't,' she wrote. Brodie recently revealed on social media that she'll be moving out of the Melbourne home she purchased with Nathan following their split. The brunette announced in an emotional Instagram post on Tuesday she is leaving the bayside suburb of Elwood altogether. Brodie posted an image as she enjoyed a glass of wine at the local tavern. 'End of an era. Sad to say goodbye to my favourite little community of Elwood,' she captioned the post. Brodie and Nathan purchased a property together in the highly sought-after suburb and moved into the home in June last year. Her post came just hours after Brodie announced the pair have decided to part ways, while Nathan still remains silent on the breakup. 'To the followers of the 'Brodes and Bucks' journey,' the former WAG began. 'After much reflection and consideration, Nath and I have decided to part ways,' she continued. 'Thank you for your kind messages and support over the past couple of months of heartache. I am truly grateful for your kindness and consideration. 'This decision was not made lightly, and we are grateful for the time we shared, the memories we created, and the support we received from each other and all of you. 'While we will no longer be a couple, I will always respect Nathan and the friendship that developed between us 3-4 years ago and have a lot of love for him and his boys and our beautiful dog Tank.' Brodie concluded: 'We appreciate your understanding and kindness over the past couple of months and continuing through this transition period. 'We kindly ask for privacy as we navigate this new chapter in our lives. 'Thank you for your continued support and for being a part of our journey. With respect and gratitude, Brodie.'
Daily Mail
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Brodie Ryan confirms she is moving out of the house she shares with Nathan Buckley as AFL star remains silent on breakup announcement
Brodie Ryan has revealed she'll be leaving the home she shares with AFL star Nathan Buckley following their split. The brunette revealed in an Instagram post on Tuesday, she will be moving out of the home the former couple shared in the bayside Melbourne suburb of Elwood. Brodie posted an image as she enjoyed a glass of wine at the local tavern. 'End of an era. Sad to say goodbye to my favourite little community of Elwood,' she captioned the post. Brodie and Nathan purchased a property together in the highly sought-after suburb and moved into the home in June last year. Her post came just hours after Brodie announced the pair have decided to part ways while Nathan still remains silent on the breakup. 'To the followers of the "Brodes and Bucks" journey,' the former WAG began. 'After much reflection and consideration, Nath and I have decided to part ways,' she continued. 'Thank you for your kind messages and support over the past couple of months of heartache. I am truly grateful for your kindness and consideration. 'This decision was not made lightly, and we are grateful for the time we shared, the memories we created, and the support we received from each other and all of you. 'While we will no longer be a couple, I will always respect Nathan and the friendship that developed between us 3-4 years ago and have a lot of love for him and his boys and our beautiful dog Tank.' Brodie concluded: 'We appreciate your understanding and kindness over the past couple of months and continuing through this transition period. 'We kindly ask for privacy as we navigate this new chapter in our lives. Thank you for your continued support and for being a part of our journey. With respect and gratitude, Brodie.' The sad ending comes just months after the pair took their relationship to the next level by recently jetting off to the island paradise of Fiji for a very special family occasion. 'This decision was not made lightly, and we are grateful for the time we shared, the memories we created, and the support we received from each other and all of you,' she wrote 'It's a big family holiday with all of Nath's family,' Ryan told the Herald Sun at the Australian Open. It's not the couple's first getaway, they've enjoyed several mini-breaks so far on homegrown soil. 'We've been to the New South Wales coast in the... campervan, we've been to Eildon, Fairhaven, Sorrento and we'll also be going to Queensland,' she told the publication at the time. Brodie previously revealed she and Nathan connected over their similar upbringings, after they began dating in 2022. Despite their 17-year age gap, the Melbourne businesswoman said they have so much in common and that they push each other every day to be their best selves. 'Helping others be the best version of themselves and prioritising their mental health and wellbeing and giving back to others is a passion both Nath and I have always shared. These topics were a big attraction to each in the beginning,' she said. 'We had very similar upbringings and share a lot of the same values due to this,' she continued. 'I have always been enthusiastic about helping others where I can, and to have a partner that exercises this same passion every day with his family, friends, and the wider community inspires me.' Brodie said Nathan's public profile has given him the opportunity to help others through hardships and to give back, and that she is 'inspired' by the work he does.
