HellsBelle

Proposals to expand the Port of Churchill in northern Manitoba could bring an increase in shipping traffic and commercial activity — and some experts suggest that could affect the behaviour of the whales that are not only a major draw in the area's nearly $100-million tourism industry, but an important food source for some in the North.

"Living up north is so expensive, the food we buy is so expensive — that's why we need to hunt to survive up north."

(Johnny Mamgark, an Inuk [who] grew up in Arviat, Nunavut) is worried more shipping and marine traffic around the Port of Churchill would disrupt the beluga whale population in the area where his family and ancestors have hunted them for centuries.

All settlements in the Israeli-occupied territories are considered illegal under international law. But the planned expansion of Ma'ale Adumim is especially controversial, not least because the Israeli government has boasted it will bury the idea of a Palestinian state — as countries including Canada prepare to recognize one at the United Nations General Assembly next week.

"It is a retaliation, in a way, to the announcement by Canada and other Western states," Palestinian lawyer Hiba Husseini said in an interview at her law offices in Ramallah, a city in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

"[It] sends a strong message to the West: 'If you recognize the State of Palestine, it's really irrelevant for us on the ground. We do whatever we want to do because we control this entire land.'"

(Doug Kobayashi, mayor of Colwood, B.C.) idea was straightforward. After talking to doctors in 2022 about what was important to them, many said less paperwork, more financial stability and a better work/life balance.

Kobayashi's response: Make them municipal employees. This differs from the usual system where many family doctors in Canada are independent contractors and responsible for all aspects of the business plus seeing patients.

"As an employee, we want you to be a doctor 100 per cent of the time. No more administration, we'll look after this. We'll look after hiring your medical office assistants. We will give you a salary, a fixed salary. We will give you benefits, all the benefits," Kobayashi said.

A U.S. appeals court declined on Monday to allow Donald Trump to fire Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook — the first time a president has pursued such action since the central bank's founding in 1913 — in the latest step in a legal battle that threatens the Fed's longstanding independence.

The decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit means that Cook can for now remain at the Fed ahead of its policy meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday, when it is expected to cut U.S. interest rates to shore up a cooling labour market.

The court denied the Justice Department's request to put on hold a judge's order temporarily blocking the Republican president from removing Cook, an appointee of Democratic former president Joe Biden.

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Alán Aspuru-Guzik takes a lot of calls these days from scientists considering an exit from the United States. Aspuru-Guzik, a theoretical chemist, left Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during Donald Trump’s first term as US president, from 2017 to 2021, to join the University of Toronto in Canada and hasn’t looked back. “I’m the happiest guy here,” he says.

Here, Nature talks to Jones, Aspuru-Guzik and others who left during Trump’s first term about relocating and reshaping their careers. They have plenty of advice.

In our national imagination, hockey is a ham-fisted metaphor for patriotic unity: on the campaign trail, Mark Carney pitched himself for prime minister as he likened the country to a team between the second and third periods of a losing hockey game: “We’re getting warmed up, and we’re going to head out in that third period, and we’re going to win.” When Donald Trump installed tariffs: “Canadians are always ready when someone else drops the gloves,” and Canadians should keep our “elbows up.” As prime minister, Carney donned an Edmonton Oilers jersey and skated with the team as the country rooted for a Canadian Stanley Cup victory.

And yet, it’s tempting to call them boys. (I, too, find myself repeatedly referring to them as boys.) They say celebrities are frozen at the ages they become famous, and for the players, this means the sweaty pubescent years when they achieved minor league stardom. To be the lead scorer of your local AAA team is to be the Justin Bieber of your hometown, complete with total insulation from rules or consequences outside of the penalty box. If you’re an Ontario Hockey League player, fans can buy jerseys with your name on them. There’s a never-ending stream of “puck bunnies” (groupies for hockey players).

The five men accused of sexual assault were meant to be living the Canadian dream. Now they find themselves in a courtroom where the system that raised them and the culture that exalted them are also on trial. And what will be revealed is that hockey also functions as a narrative device for gang rape: no player is left behind, everyone touches the puck—score, score, score. After an ugly goal: “They don’t ask how, they ask how many.”

The findings, which are published in Nature, have important implications for our understanding of how Mars evolved. Billions of years ago, the planet may have had a thicker atmosphere that allowed liquid water to flow on the surface.

This thicker atmosphere may have been kept in place by a protective magnetic field, like the one Earth has. However, Mars lacks such a field today. Scientists have wondered whether the loss of this magnetic field led to the red planet losing its atmosphere to space over time and becoming the cold, dry desert it is today.

From residual magnetization in the crust, we think that Mars did once have a magnetic field, possibly from a core structure similar to that of Earth. However, scientists think that the core must have cooled and stopped moving at some point in its history.

The race to replace former NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, meanwhile, kicked off this week.

Singh stepped down from the party’s leadership on election night, after he lost his own seat and the number of MPs elected to the House of Commons was slashed to seven.

One of the party’s leadership race rules is drawing criticism: namely that of the 500 member signatures required on a potential candidate’s nomination form, at least half must be from members who do not identify as a cisgender man.

On a recent episode of The Paikin Podcast, hosted by Canadian journalist Steve Paikin, Davies said that in his view, the NDP during the last election veered “too much from (its) class-based analysis to identity politics.” He said the party needs to find the “right balance” of those things.

A simple question lies behind Patrick de Kruyff's Tax Court of Canada victory last month over the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA): Who on earth would suggest taking Toronto's Don Valley Parkway at rush hour?

An auditor in Vancouver, that's who.

The basic rule for the deduction is that the move has to cut at least 40 kilometres off the daily commute.

But for some reason Google Maps kept giving the CRA a much shorter route than it did de Kryuff, despite the fact they both punched in the same coordinates at the same time of day Monday to Friday — the heart of rush hour, 4:45 p.m.

And then de Kruyff found the flaw that led to a precedent-setting ruling that could pave the way for tax relief for other urban commuters: the CRA's employee was in B.C. — getting Google Maps's suggestions to navigate Toronto traffic at 4:45 p.m. Pacific time.

That's 7:45 p.m. Eastern.

When New York Attorney General Letitia James accused Donald Trump of committing fraud by lying to banks and insurance companies about the value of his properties, he never really denied it. Everyone does things like this, his lawyers argued, and no bank ever lost money—so what’s the big deal?

But now that he’s in back office, Trump seems to have decided that telling banks things that aren’t true while seeking loans is a very big deal after all. His administration has launched investigations into James herself and Lisa Cook, a Biden-appointee on the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, alleging both women improperly told banks that two different properties each owned were both their primary residences. He’s previously made similar accusations against one of his main Democratic antagonists in Congress, California Sen. Adam Schiff.

The investigations were launched with the help of Bill Pulte, the Trump appointee leading the Federal Housing Finance Agency. On Friday, Reuters reported that relatives of Pulte appear to have done the very thing Trump and Pulte are targeting James and Cook over. Reuters says that Pulte’s father and stepmother had simultaneously requested “homestead exemptions”—a discount on property taxes for a primary residence—on two different properties, one in Michigan and one in Florida. It’s not clear if it is illegal to do so, and in some cases, tax experts told Reuters, it is permissible—for example if a married couple live separately. But after being asked about the Pultes’ situation, local tax officials promptly revoked the exemption on the Michigan house, Reuters reported.

Keith Sockman, associate professor of biology at UNC-Chapel Hill, quantified the abundance of flying insects during 15 seasons between 2004 and 2024 on a subalpine meadow in Colorado, a site with 38 years of weather data and minimal direct human impact. He discovered an average annual decline of 6.6% in insect abundance, amounting to a 72.4% drop over the 20-year period. The study also found that this steep decline is associated with rising summer temperatures.

"Insects have a unique, if inauspicious position in the biodiversity crisis due to the ecological services, such as nutrient cycling and pollination, they provide and to their vulnerability to environmental change," Sockman said. "Insects are necessary for terrestrial and fresh-water ecosystems to function."

Cross-posted from https://lemmy.world/post/35482552

Facing a swirl of questions about a potential job in the Trump administration, Mayor Eric Adams of New York City stood outside City Hall on Thursday and suggested he was not going anywhere.

But in private, Mr. Adams has told a small group of friends and advisers that he is seriously considering job opportunities that could prompt him to suspend his re-election campaign, according to people familiar with the conversations.

The talks about Mr. Adams’s future have involved intermediaries for President Trump, including Steve Witkoff, a New York real estate investor who is one of Mr. Trump’s closest advisers. The mayor and Mr. Witkoff conferred in Florida this week in a previously undisclosed meeting, according to four people briefed on it.