Quebec’s contentious secularism bill banning religious symbols for teachers, police officers and other public servants in positions of authority was voted into law late Sunday. Premier Francois Legault’s government used its majority to push through Bill 21 by a vote of 73 to 35 after applying the mechanism of closure to end debate on the […]
PARIS (BLOOMBERG) – United States Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross downplayed the prospect of a major trade deal emerging from a possible meeting between President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Group of 20 summit in Osaka this month. “I think the most that will come out of the G-20 might be an […]
SAN FRANCISCO/WASHINGTON (REUTERS) – Huawei’s American chip suppliers, including Qualcomm and Intel, are quietly pressing the US government to ease its ban on sales to the Chinese tech giant, even as Huawei itself avoids typical government lobbying, people familiar with the situation said. Executives from top US chipmakers Intel and Xilinx attended a meeting in […]
WASHINGTON (NYTIMES) – The visa applications of hundreds of international students seeking to work in the United States this summer are languishing at the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, where increased processing times have left students stranded and university leaders struggling with the fallout. Students have written petitions and panicked letters to some of the […]
The Canadian government’s contracting arm is backing a proposed new satellite system that will use big data analytics to provide commercially available data about the Earth and its orbit amid growing concerns about the risks posed by space debris. Support from the Canadian Commercial Corporation (CCC) will allow Canadian startup NorthStar Earth and Space to […]
The Pointe-Saint-Charles neighbourhood is isolated from the rest of Montreal by the Lachine Canal and the railroad, meaning that for years it was the kind of place that many people, even other Montrealers, never visited. But despite its relative obscurity, the working-class neighbourhood south of downtown has a history of community activism that has reverberated […]
WASHINGTON (WASHINGTON POST) – United States President Donald Trump on Sunday (June 16) floated the possibility of staying in office longer than two terms, suggesting in a morning tweet that his supporters might “demand that I stay longer.” The president has previously joked about serving more than two terms as president, including at an event […]
State adversaries like Russia will not be the only sources trying to influence the Canadian election with disinformation — the global far right will likely be doing the same, according to one expert on online conflict and extremism. In an interview with The West Block‘s Mercedes Stephenson, Sasha Havlicek said the effects of disinformation and […]
NEW YORK (AFP) – A massive outage blacked out Argentina and Uruguay on Sunday (June 16), leaving both South American countries, with a population of about 48 million people, without electricity, power companies said. Uruguay’s system went down at 7:06 am local time (6:06 pm Singapore time), according to the Uruguayan power company UTE, which […]
Essex Hemphill was a black and gay writer, editor and activist who died in 1995 at 38. Mr. Hemphill, who was one of the many queer creators lost in the AIDS epidemic, remains an instrumental figure in gay American letters and in the lives of queer black artists at large. This new essay is the […]