Students demonstrate outside the B.C. legislature in Victoria during a school strike for action on climate change in 2019. (Photo: Jack Adamson/Can Geo Photo Club)

David Boyd has built his career around a simple belief: that people, no matter wher…

The Canadian prime minister made the comments amid a series of police brutality allegations across the country.

“You know that you’re going to have their ear for a second and you know you’re going to finally be able to get a message across.”

Reformers said body cameras and video evidence would stop police brutality. Instead, we’re being told to not believe our own eyes.

“To everyone fighting to fix our broken nation: do not stop,” Alexis Ohanian said in his resignation announcement on Friday.

“In publishing the Tom Cotton piece, haven’t we effectively validated depictions of Black Americans as terrorists in exercising their First Amendment rights to protest police brutality?”

One national guardsman was so appalled by what he saw, he told VICE News he’s going AWOL and refusing to join his unit.

Closed libraries and drop-in centres. Water fountains shut off. Ace Lovell found himself living on the street at the worst possible time.

Slack declined to say whether it is still working with the police department.

In a fiery letter to Trump, Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser demanded he withdraw any military presence.

Protesters are being held as long as 50 hours with no protective gear or ability to socially distance from other protesters in custody — or cops.

A kermode bear and her cub in the Great Bear Rainforest of British Columbia. (Photo: Jean-Daniel Gagne / Can Geo Photo Club)

There’s a little plant in the Northwest Territories called a hairy braya. It’s small and tufty with white flowers and kind of hairy leaves, and was first collected by one of the naturalists on Franklin’s expedition in 1826.

Charles Camsell, second from right, leading a 1914 mapping expedition of the Tazin and Talston Rivers in the Northwest Territories.

What was it like to live in a remote Hudson’s Bay trading post in the 1880s in Canada’s north? In this bonus episode of the Explore series marking the 350th anniversary of the Hudson’s Bay Company, we hear a rare, first-person audio account of life at Fort Simpson in the Northwest Territories. The storyteller is Charles Camsell, founding president of The Royal Canadian Geographical Society, talking about his childhood as the son of an HBC fur trader, in an old Canadian radio recording taped in 1938.

Janice Forsyth is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of First Nations Studies at Western University in London, Ontario, and a member of the Fisher River Cree Nation. Her new book is Reclaiming Tom Longboat: Indigenous Self-Determination in Canadian Sport. (Photo courtesy University of Regina Press)

Sport is seen as the great equalizer, somehow immune from the discrimination that structures everyday life, writes Janice Forsyth in Reclaiming Tom Longboat: Indigenous Self-Determination in Canadian Sport. 

A cyclist prepares to cross the Humber Bay Arch Bridge in Toronto. Since the COVID-19 pandemic hit Canada, many cities have moved to add space for safe outdoor recreation. (Photo: Jonathan Dakin/Can Geo Photo Club)

As the public health messaging around the COVID-19 pandemic shifts from “stay home” to “stay safe,” people across Canada are looking for opportunities to get outside and access public spaces safely. 

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Attracting a range of birds to your yard is easy with a few simple and inexpensive modifications. (Photo: Alexander Wywial/Can Geo Photo Club)

Millions of Canadians are staying home to avoid spreading the coronavirus and are looking for ways to stave off boredom. Why not take steps to add some colour and song to your yard, not only for your entertainment but also for the sake of helping out the birds?

As a companion to the latest edition of Pocket Birds of Canada, here are my top tips to attract birds to your property and enjoy their presence.

One example of the lichen POLAR researcher Ian Hogg monitors using probes and satellite images. (Photo: POLAR)

The COVID-19 pandemic has effectively closed off Canada’s North, where communities have shut their borders to protect already vulnerable health and language systems. The Northwest Territories, the Yukon and Nunavut have all said only essential workers and people who live in their territories will be permitted in. 

A barren-ground caribou bull (Bob Wick/BLM)

It’s springtime in the north. Snow is melting, rivers are breaking up, and barren-ground caribou are on the move. Each spring, the Qamanirjuaq herd walks hundreds of kilometres from the boreal forest to their calving grounds in Nunavut’s Kivalliq region, arriving with the spring green-up. The caribou feast on this first flush of tender, nutrient-rich plant growth. But as climate change heats the north, this green-up is happening earlier in the year. 

Xavier Spano sea kayaking in Les Iles-de-la-Madeleine on the 2019 Canadian Geographic Challenge finalists prize trip. (Photo: Alexandra Pope/Can Geo)

Finishing fourth in the 2019 national finals of the Canadian Geographic Challenge wasn’t enough for Xavier Spano, a Grade 9 student from Burlington, Ont. 

He wanted to win.

And on Sunday, May 31, that’s exactly what Spano did, competing in the 25th Annual Can Geo Challenge virtually from his living room. 

“I definitely studied a little bit more this year than last year,” says Spano. “Other than that, the experience was pretty similar. [The Education team] did a great job of making sure things were close to the same.”

Dear Bob and Doug,

Please take off, eh!

Yours,@CAFinUS pic.twitter.com/gu48YsfBYj

— Canadian Forces in 🇺🇸 (@CAFinUS) May 30, 2020

A new international study is the first to analyze the long-term climate sensitivity of Earth’s tropical forests. (Photo: iStock

Amid a warming climate, scientists have uncovered some good news: Earth’s tropical forests can handle the heat and can continue to store carbon up to a certain point. In other words, these carbon-hoarding tropical forests can continue to be a natural weapon in combating climate change. 

However, this comes with a warning: this can only be done if global greenhouse gas emissions are limited, and if temperatures remain under a certain threshold. 

Dr. Earline Austin, 63 yo NYC Physician, died on 4/3. Originally from Guyana, she lived in Fresh Meadows and was affiliated with Staten Island University Hospital. Attended Ross University for Medical School. May her memory be a blessing

Emily Chung, in the CBC, with everything you need to know to understand R-naught values.

Andy Larsen, in the Salt Lake City Tribune, with a breakdown of different locations and events and what we know of their risks in terms of spreading COVID.

Kimberly A. Prather, Chia C. Wang, and Robert T. Schooley, in Science, on how if you want life to return to some remote semblance of before’s normal, if you’re not already doing so, you need to start wearing a damn mask

Clayton Dalton, in The New Yorker, on what we lose when we become numb to mass death.

       

Related Stories

• Saturday Stories: The COVID files
• Saturday Stories: This week in COVID19
• Saturday Stories: The COVID Roundup

 

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When I grew up, of course we were all in the Children’s Choir at church, and every school grade had its own choir every year to perform at the school Christmas concert. Its how I learned all my carols and Christmas songs
Of course its been years now since I was in a choir, but I do remember once, about 40 years ago, when I participated with hundreds of others in a Sing-Along Messiah at the McPherson Playhouse in Victoria —  what a great experience that was.
Now we are finding out that the recent COVID research says choirs are a prime mode of virus transmission:

It may be the single most famous outbreak in the U.S.: the Skagit County, Wash., choir practice.
Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention compiled the results of its contact tracing. The choir met every Tuesday evening until March 10. At that last meeting, 61 members were present and chairs were arranged close together in six rows of 20 with many empty chairs. They practiced for 40 minutes together, for 50 minutes separated into two smaller groups, and then for 45 minutes sang together again. There was a 15-minute break between the second and third session for oranges and cookies, but many didn’t eat.  No one reported physical contact between members and most everyone left immediately after practice. Hand sanitizer was distributed. But, in the end, 53 of the 61 contracted the coronavirus. Three were hospitalized, two died.
This seems to happen repeatedly. The Amsterdam Mixed Choir gave a performance March 8; 102 out of 130 singers tested positive. Fifty members of the Berlin Cathedral Choir tested positive as well.

I’ll bet it has something to do with the act of singing – maybe the forceful expelling of breath from deep in the lungs spreads the virus droplets further. Who knows? 
Whatever the reason, I think singing together in public is likely not going to be happening anymore, not until a vaccine is available.
So I guess there are going to be no more Choir!Choir!Choir! experiences:

This may be the way choirs will sing together now:

Even the Mormon Tabernacle Choir did an online Sing-Along Messiah this Easter.
But for one last time, here’s the real thing:

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“We don’t know what the food-service sector will look like,” said Jaime Chamberlain, a fresh-produce importer based in Nogales, Arizona. When the pandemic largely shut down the US in mid-March, “I lost about 96 percent of my food-service contracts from one day to the next. That is an incredible hit to my business.”
Now, Chamberlain asks, “Are people going to go back to cruise lines? Will they go to a restaurant that seats 100 people? Will that restaurant be able to operate with the same amount of seating? Maybe there’ll be no more conventions for 1,000 people… I think people are going to be very reluctant.”
Burkett, speaking by phone from his Mississippi farm, shares those and other worries, and not just on his own account.“As a farmer, the dilemma I’ve got right now, is we don’t have a market. I’ve got crops going to be there to harvest, and I don’t know if we’ll have someone to sell to or not.” In a few weeks, Burkett said he will have more than 120,000 ears of sweet corn to harvest — all meant to go to restaurants that may or may not need them. “My biggest fear is the fear of how long this is going to last. I have to decide now what I’m going to plant in the fall. I’ve got to order seeds, get the ground ready,” Burkett said. He’s decided, for example, to go ahead and plant seedless watermelons, so they’ll be ready to sell this fall to the New Orleans school system — and he’ll have to hope the schools are open.

Canada is going to be having similar problems, because nobody knows what is going to happen.

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Here are Obama’s two addresses tonight to the HBCU and high school 2020 graduating classes. 

Mary Agyeiwaa Agyapong, UK RN, 28 years old, died from COVID April 12th. May her memory be a blessing.

Peter Piot, one of the scientists who discovered Ebola, in Science, with his thoughts on COVID, both as an expert and as a survivor.

       

Related Stories

• Saturday Stories: The COVID Roundup
• Saturday Stories: This Week in #COVID19
• Saturday Stories: The Week in #COVID19 And Some Stories Worth Reading

 

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