Прем’єр­міністр Юлія Свириденко повідомила про створення єдиної платформи урядових зимових програм підтримки для людей, ОСББ, бізнесу та громад під час складної зими.

«Тут зібрано повну інформацію про всі чинні програми, їхні умови та порядок подачі заявок. Це єдина точка доступу до інструментів, які допомагають посилити енергонезалежність домівок, підтримати людей і забезпечити безперебійну роботу бізнесу», — зазначила очільниця уряду. 

Допомога для людей:

• щомісячні виплати для працівників ремонтних бригад;
• «СвітлоДім» для енергонезалежності будинків; пакунки тепла для людей з інвалідністю та одиноких пенсіонерів;
• екофлоу для дітей з інвалідністю групи А.

19 лютого дано початок ще двом програмам для посилення енергонезалежності багатоквартирних будинків і приватних домівок: енергопідтримка для ОСББ та ЖБК; енергопідтримка для приватних будинків і таунгаусів.

Підтримка бізнесу: допомога ФОПам на енергостійкіть від 7500 до 15 000 грн на придбання або ремонт генераторів, пальне чи оплату комунальних послуг; кредит 0% на енергообладнання до 10 млн грн строком до трьох років на генератори; доступні кредити 5—7—9% на енергообладнання, повідомляє Департамент інформації та комунікацій з громадськістю Секретаріату КМУ.

Every awards season, the same question comes round: do voters actually watch the films? 

That suspicion increased after the reported Oscars scandal where it emerged that many Academy members hadn’t actually seen most of the films they were voting on – I mean, The Brutalist and Dune Part 2 were soooo long, right? Everyone assumed the same must be true of Bafta. 

As a Metro film critic and a Bafta voting member, I’m here to tell you how it all actually happens – from the inside.

First, a confession: no one watches every eligible film. This year, 221 films were officially submitted for Bafta consideration. I only watched 112 of them. And I watch films for a living. This Sunday, when I attend the Baftas ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall hosted by Alan Cumming and surrounded by stars like Timothee Chalamet and Jessie Buckley alongside a multitude of talented filmmakers, I doubt a single person has watched every entry submitted. No one watches all 221 – that’s honestly not the point.

Yet what Bafta does require is considerably more rigorous than you might expect.

What happens during the Bafta voting process?

This week, when I submitted my final vote, it took a good half an hour. I had to individually verify how many of the 43 finalists I’d seen, else I would be locked out of some of the 23 categories. And that was just the tip of the Bafta-berg. The reality is that the Bafta Film Awards voting process requires many, many hours of dedication across many months.

Here’s something almost no one outside the membership knows. In early November, before you cast a single vote, Bafta assigns you a randomised group of 15 films to watch. This is specifically designed to level the playing field – so that big-budget films with multi-million-pound awards campaigns don’t dominate. Every voter, regardless of their connections in the industry, is required to engage with those 15 titles.

From then voting consists of three distinct rounds: longlisting, nominations, and winners. Each round has its own rules, its own eligible films, and in some cases, its own specialist voters.

The some 8,300 members of Bafta’s global voting membership don’t vote on everything. Specialist groups – known as Chapters – handle certain categories based on professional expertise.

For example, if you are a director or an editor, you can opt in to vote as part of that Chapter. In most categories, the final round is decided by the wider film-voting membership — though a few awards, like outstanding debut and children’s & family film, are jury-decided all the way through.

The one rule that rules them all is: if you haven’t seen a film, you can’t vote on it.

Who actually checks that you have actually seen the films?

Every qualifying film is made available on Bafta View, the organisation’s secure, private online streaming platform, which means you can watch from anywhere in the world, at any time – though there are also industry screenings you can attend in person if you are based in London.

Bafta can see whether you’ve pressed play on the Bafta View portal, but they can’t crawl into your living room and physically verify you watched every minute with your eyes open. And they can’t tell which films you’ve watched on other platforms or in person. So there is still an element of trust involved. Which, in my experience, is one taken seriously, given the voting body is made up of professional filmmakers and craftspeople.

And, to be fair, compared to the Oscars, Bafta has been tightening this stuff for a while. After its 2020 review, Bafta introduced required ‘conscious voter’ training for all voting members.

The American Academy’s equivalent move is newer: a category-by-category viewing requirement was approved in 2025 and takes effect for the 98th Oscars this March meaning the online ballot unlocks on a category-by-category basis once members’ viewing is verified.

Is the system perfect? Nothing is. Can people still cheat and click they’ve seen a film when they haven’t? Honest answer: yes, but it’s an effort and it involves multiple checks.

This year, on each Baftas voting round I had to individually verify each film I’d watched. Of the 43 nominees on my final ballot I’d only actually seen 35, which meant I had to abstain from certain categories. And that’s how it should be. Not telling you which ones I’d missed, but if you feel anyone was robbed on Sunday night, you can bring your beef to me.

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If you’ve got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the Metro.co.uk entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@metro.co.uk, calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we’d love to hear from you.

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Two teens have been charged in connection with a foolish TikTok stunt that caused a 16-year-old boy to plummet 50 feet and become trapped inside a shaft on the Queensboro Bridge, as the victim’s loved ones alleged his so-called friends left him there to die.

A 14-year-old boy and a 15-year-old boy have been arrested and charged for their alleged roles in the boneheaded stunt gone wrong on Monday evening, an NYPD spokesperson said on Thursday.

The younger teen has been charged with reckless endangerment and criminal trespassing, and the older boy with criminal trespassing, cops said.

Officers responded to a 911 call on the Queens end of the East River bridge around 5:45 p.m. Monday and found the 16-year-old from Lynbrook, Long Island stuck inside the shaft, police said.

Sources told The Post the boy was filming a stunt to post on TikTok when he fell.

Roughly 75 first responders and 10 pieces of apparatus were needed to rescue the boy, FDNY Deputy Chief Nicholas Corrado said at a press briefing at the scene 

He was rushed to New York Presbyterian Hospital, Weill Cornell, where he was listed in critical but stable condition, police said.

An online petition urging for the stunt to be investigated alleged that two of the teen’s “friends” took videos of the boy, identified as “Frankie,” as he screamed their names “in agony” and sent them to people online.

“Nobody deserves to be abandoned and left to die during the worst and most traumatic moment of their life,” the Change.org petition said.

The petition, which has over 1,000 signatures, alleged that the two pals managed to take the wounded teen’s cell phone to prevent him from calling emergency services and fled the scene to their homes — leaving the boy “inside the bridge shaft suffering and dying.”

“Multiple hours later, an anonymous woman who saw the video contacted authorities,” the petition added. “The FDNY had to search each shaftway of the Queensboro Bridge until they found Frankie’s shoe and blood.”

A GoFundMe for Frankie’s recovery costs said the teen was hypothermic and lost a lot of blood during the terrifying fall, and “now faces a long road of surgeries, recovery, and rehabilitation.”

“His survival is nothing short of a miracle,” the fundraiser for his family said.

TikTok has come under attack in recent years for allowing a string of possibly dangerous stunts to be widely shared and remain on the social media platform.

The NDP leadership candidates began the final official debate with a general acknowledgment they agree on policies, but have different visions for how to achieve their most existential goal — rebuilding the party.

At the close of the debate, each candidate was asked if they are running to rebuild the party or become the prime minister. Four of the five candidates said they are running to rebuild the party, while Ontario organic farmer Tony McQuail was the lone candidate who said he is eyeing the Prime Minister’s Office.

During opening remarks in the Vancouver-area debate, Alberta MP Heather McPherson said the party needs someone who knows how to turn NDP policies and values into electoral wins. She said she has a track record of beating Conservatives in her home province and can expand that nationally.

Following the debate, she said that the NDP has always been the party of “big ideas” but to get them implemented you need get people elected.

“What we really need to do is look across the country and pick up seats where we have lost support, and I think we can do that,” McPherson said after the debate.

“I think there are many areas across the country where we have seen New Democrats are strong, where people actually thought they were electing — they were voting for something they didn’t get,” McPherson said after the debate, alluding to votes lost to the Liberals in 2025.

She then pointed to areas she sees as winnable for the NDP including Vancouver Island, Metro Vancouver and southern Ontario.

Documentarian Avi Lewis said the same approaches seen in past elections will not work and the NDP needs to be putting forward big, bold ideas. He said this can be a winning strategy as his campaign has pulled in the most donations, nearly $780,000 as of Dec. 31, 2025, and is getting significant member support.

Lewis disputed the assertion that they all agree on what the NDP needs to do, and talked about his push for government-run options in groceries, telecoms and banking as a means of addressing affordability.

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“We’ve raised almost as much money on our campaign as all the other campaigns combined, we have signed up new members in 338 out of 343 ridings and we have giant events packed with hundreds of people across the country. So something about our offer is resonating,” Lewis said after the debate.

Dockworker union leader Rob Ashton disputed this, and said people need quicker fixes to address the affordability crisis and establishing these new Crown services will take too long.

Ashton said in his opening statements that the party needs to go back to its working-class roots if it wants to try and win back ridings that it lost in the last election to the Conservatives and Liberals. Ashton said that without that support, their ideas will remain ideas.

He later took a shot at Lewis for his authorship role in the Leap Manifesto, saying it killed the Alberta NDP’s chances of being re-elected under former premier Rachel Notley.

“The part that I disagree with is not communicating with the provincial NDP, the Alberta NDP, before bringing it forward, before dropping it on the table in Alberta,” Ashton said after the debate.

“Because that’s when the sitting government, sitting NDP government had to fight and defend themselves.”

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Natural resources key in upcoming NDP leadership race: analysis

Lewis defended the Leap Manifesto saying it had wide union buy-in and was adopted as a resolution by three-quarters of NDP members as a federal policy resolution at the party’s 2016 convention in Edmonton.

McPherson said that the party only agreed to look at the Leap Manifesto and it gave provincial conservative leaders, including former Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall, a cudgel to beat the NDP with.

Social worker Tanille Johnston opened the debate saying that she is honoured to be the first Indigenous person to be on a federal leadership ballot.

She said Canada needs to bring in a universal basic income to pull people out of poverty, end fossil fuel subsidies and have proper government-to-government relations with Indigenous communities.

Johnston said that the party and leader need to physically go to more places they don’t have seats, speak to people and more importantly listen to those community needs.

“Not going to the places and spaces where we have big opportunities is not helping us. Prince Albert, huge opportunity in Prince Albert, (Sask.) and a lot of people might not see that. Prince Albert has a very high Indigenous population and people tell me all the time well Indigenous people don’t vote,” Johnston said during the debate.

“I’m like ‘well have you had a gone and had a conversation with them?’ … No we haven’t.”

McQuail said Canada needs a radical societal reworking to address climate change and the affordability crisis. He said Canada needs to redistribute wealth and shift the country’s capitalist, consumer society to a more sustainable system.

“We have to talk about how do we not only change the economy and transition it to renewables, but how do we redesign to drastically reduce the amount of energy and resources that economies use,” McQuail said during the debate.

“Because our economic growth, which has been promoted for the 45 years since I got involved in politics is actually becoming a cancer on the planet.”

Yves Engler, a Montreal activist who was not allowed to run in the race, and a small group of protesters tried to enter the studio during the debate. They banged on the doors, shouting “Let us in!”

Local police arrived at the studio in New Westminster, B.C., to remove the protesters.

The broadcast of the debate was not interrupted by the protest.

Engler had promised to disrupt the race after his candidacy was not approved.

The race will be decided through a ranked ballot vote. Voting opens on March 9 and closed on March 28 at 7 p.m. Voters will be able to cast their ballot online, by phone or mail.

The next NDP leader will be announced on March 29 during the party’s convention in Winnipeg.

One student leader at Yukon University says student voices are now finally being heard as an ongoing labour dispute between the university and the union representing its employees continues.

The Public Service Alliance of Canada, which represents unionized workers at the university, has been negotiating a new collective agreement with the university for more than a year. The Yukon University Employees’ Union voted in January in favour of striking.

Unionized staff could legally strike as early as March 2, with at least 72-hours notice.

David Rojas, the student union representative in the university’s senate, said some students are already experiencing uncertainty and stress over what a possible strike could mean for their tuition, graduation and immigration status.

“We strongly encourage both parties to return to the negotiation table and reach a resolution that avoids disruption entirely because the students came to Yukon University to build their futures and protecting that future must remain the top priority for both sides,” Rojas said.

“Without students there’s no sense to have a university infrastructure, instructors or even authorities.”

Rojas got a chance to share those student concerns at a meeting of the university’s governing senate this week. The meeting was moved to a bigger room, with extra chairs added to try to accommodate a few dozen observers in attendance.

His presentation was followed by a round of applause.

A senate member told the room they needed more time to grapple with the new information Rojas delivered.

The senate held off on voting on proposed academic disruption plans. Instead, they struck up an ad hoc committee that includes some student union representatives to ensure student perspectives are better reflected in the plans.

Yukon University interim president Shelagh Rowles noted it was a tough item to discuss but the senate found a solution.

Rojas called the meeting a “complete success.”

He remains optimistic that the employer and employees’ union will return to the bargaining table and reach a deal without a strike.

The equivalent of more than 700 students were enrolled full time at the university, which also had more than 700 staff including unionized and non-unionized workers, according to the university’s latest annual report.

The university recently updated its web page with questions and answers about how a potential labour action at Yukon University could impact students.

The university and the employees’ union are scheduled to meet again on Feb. 23.

A suspected case of avian influenza in Nova Scotia’s Lunenburg County is under investigation by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.

In an emailed statement to CBC News, the agency said it received a notification from the province on Feb. 18 regarding concerns about potentially sick birds in Lunenburg County. 

“CFIA is currently organizing the necessary logistics and plans to conduct sampling as soon as possible,” the statement said.

Earlier this month, cases of bird flu were confirmed in backyard flocks in the Pictou and Yarmouth areas.

Amy VanderHeide, chair of Chicken Farmers of Nova Scotia, which represents commercial chicken farmers in the province, told CBC Radio’s Maritime Noon that it’s not surprising to see avian influenza at this time of year, because it’s the peak migration season for the Atlantic Flyway.

“The backyard flocks being often kept outside or allowed outside, it just allows for the commingling of the wild birds with our domestic birds and that increases the risk of them contracting avian influenza,” she said.

Last March, Nova Scotia found two cases of avian influenza, according to CFIA’s tracking information.

Though commercial chicken farms remain unaffected, VanderHeide said farmers are maintaining strict biosecurity protocols to protect the industry because avian flu among commercial chicken farming means an automatic cull.

“CFIA does cover some costs of things like depopulation and disposal, but it is mentally taxing you,” she said.

“We care for our folks, we care for our birds, and we want them of course to go into the food system as they were meant to be. So dealing with all of that is definitely a strain for mental health.”

VanderHeide said it’s also vital for the public to understand that avian influenza is a threat to backyard flocks and commercial farms.

She urges backyard owners to isolate domestic birds from wild populations, and to disinfect coops, boots and clothing.

“A positive test of this means that you lose your flock,” she said. “So putting some of these biosecurity measures in place is a great idea.”

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The P.E.I. Fisherman’s Association is pushing back against the provincial government’s attempts to grant a sitting cabinet minister the ability to maintain his lobster fleet.

Sidney MacEwen, the Progressive Conservative MLA for Morell-Donagh and a lobster fisherman of more than 20 years, was named to Premier Rob Lantz’s cabinet last week as the minister for both the housing and transportation portfolios.

P.E.I.’s Conflict of Interest Act states that cabinet ministers must place their business assets into a blind trust during their time on executive council. Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s owner-operator policy, however, requires that MacEwen’s lobster fishing licence stay in his name.

MacEwen said he’s applied to DFO to name a substitute operator for his lobster operation, and that he has no intention of fishing this spring — but he wants to keep the fleet’s licence in his name, and said the Conflict of Interest Act should be changed to allow him to do so.

WATCH | Fishermen concerned over P.E.I. cabinet minister’s efforts to keep lobster licence in his name:

Fishermen concerned over P.E.I. cabinet minister’s efforts to keep lobster licence in his name

The P.E.I. Fishermen’s Association is speaking out about a provincial cabinet minister’s plans to have a substitute operator for his lobster fleet this spring. The organization is calling Sidney MacEwen’s plans troubling, and says Premier Rob Lantz should have consulted with the association. CBC’s Wayne Thibodeau reports.

Ian MacPherson, executive director of the P.E.I. Fishermen’s Association, said in a news release Thursday that the owner-operator policy is the “cornerstone” of an independent fishery and requires that the licence holder be on the boat, fishing that licence.

He said in the release that it’s “troubling” MacEwen wants to retain his licence while not being in the boat.

MacPherson told CBC News that said he doesn’t see a cabinet position as a good enough reason for an exemption. He noted that MacEwen seems confident he’ll get one, but that the policy is supposed to be used for medical issues that temporarily prevent a licence holder from operating their fleet.

“It’s a pretty rigorous process. I’m not saying it’s a perfect process but, at the end of the day, to revise something or even look at it needs a lot of discussion,” MacPherson said.

“That’s very concerning if something can be changed that quickly.”

Lantz said in an interview earlier this week that he has “spoken to people at the highest level of the federal government” about the exemption and that he’s certain MacEwen can serve in cabinet and keep his licence.

MacPherson said he is disappointed that the association was not contacted or consulted by the premier’s office.

“We’ve always had good dialogue with the province,” he said. 

“It’s a real concern that the premier has gone on a very specific issue that hasn’t been talked about or even mentioned to the PEIFA.… Certainly there’s going to be pushback.”

If we’re going to circumvent process, then that leads to bigger issues.– Ian MacPherson, P.E.I. Fishermen’s Association

MacPherson said the issue isn’t just limited to P.E.I., but to fishermen across Atlantic Canada.

“There are some policies … that need to be updated or changed, but that’s an industry-wide thing. This is not something we can say, ‘OK, 60 days, let’s change it and let’s change it for this group of people or that group of people,’” he said. 

“We’re talking legislation, we’re talking a process. And if we’re going to circumvent process, then that leads to bigger issues and problems.”

When reached by CBC News late Thursday, MacEwen said he isn’t looking to change any rules. He said he plans to apply to DFO for a substitute operator, making the argument that his cabinet post is an “exceptional circumstance.”

CBC News has also reached out to DFO, which said it’s working on our request for more information.