The folly of war: the wisdom of peace

In the 1980s I was a peace advocate —I still am. One of the founders and first president of the Educators for Social Responsibility, I helped organize, promote and speak at peace and anti-nuclear rallies and marches. We developed, collected and distributed peace curricula from across Canada for teaching in Manitoba schools.

U.S. says it’s pausing long-standing military board with Canada

WASHINGTON - The U.S. undersecretary of defence for policy said Monday that the United States is pausing a long-standing military board, claiming "Canada has failed to make credible progress on its defense commitments."

In a post on social media, Elbridge Colby said his department is pausing the Permanent Joint Board on Defense "to reassess how this forum benefits shared North American defense."

The board was established in 1940 and is an advisory forum for U.S.-Canada bilateral defence co-operation.

Colby said the United States "can no longer avoid the gaps between rhetoric and reality" in the post, where he shared a link to a transcript of Prime Minister Mark Carney's January speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

A third world war — not as close as many fear

A Politico opinion poll conducted in the four biggest NATO countries in February revealed almost identical popular expectations about the likelihood of a global war in the next five years. In every one — the U.S., the U.K., France and Germany — they think it is quite likely.

Forty-six per cent of Americans think that, and so do 43 per cent of British and French people. The Germans are the optimists in the group, but even 40 per cent of them think a third world war is no more than five years away.

Canadians agree about that, but unlike the Europeans, who see the Russians as the biggest threat, Canadians fear an American invasion most.

These expectations and fears are not exactly wrong, but they are certainly premature. A world war is a war that involves all the great powers. We haven’t had anything like that for 80 years. The probability that it will happen in the next five years is not zero, but it is a very, very small number.

AtkinsRéalis bets on nuclear-powered AI factories amid data centre surge

MONTREAL - AtkinsRéalis Group Inc.'s nuclear business powered a 34 per cent year-over-year jump in profits last quarter, as the engineering company banks on the technology to seize on soaring demand for energy-hungry AI data centres.

The Montreal-based firm's nuclear division now accounts for a quarter of total revenue versus 15 per cent two years ago, said CEO Ian Edwards. The segment boasted organic revenue growth of nearly 37 per cent to reach a quarterly record high of $737 million.

Preliminary work is now underway at Ontario's Pickering nuclear power station after AtkinsRéalis and Aecon Group Inc. signed a $2.1-billion contract for a life extension on four reactors last year. Money is also rolling in from Romania, where the company secured a deal in 2025 to extend the life of a reactor at the Cernavoda nuclear plant — after winning a contract the year before to build two new multibillion-dollar reactors there.

Atkins' ambitions go beyond traditional nuclear plants. In March, it announced it was teaming up with Nvidia to ramp up deployment of nuclear-powered artificial intelligence factories, as the two parties explore how to work the chipmaking giant's technologies into developing the facilities.

Some Japanese snack packages are turning black-and-white as Iran war depletes ink supply

TOKYO (AP) — The packaging on some snacks in Japan is turning a somber black-and-white, as the war in Iran disrupts the supply of an ingredient used in colored ink.

Tokyo-based Calbee Inc., which makes potato chips and cereal, said what’s inside remains the same. Calbee's popular snacks are available in Japan's ubiquitous convenience stores and shipped to the United States, China and Australia.

“This measure is intended to help maintain a stable supply of products,” it said in a statement this week.

The change on 14 products in its lineup will start May 25, limiting ink colors to just two, the company said, noting it was necessary to respond flexibly to changing geopolitical conditions.

Ukrainian drone pilots turn a military exercise in Sweden into a critical warning for NATO

GOTLAND, Sweden (AP) — The war game scenario was this: One of NATO ’s newest members, Sweden, was under threat by an unnamed country that was building up troops along the military alliance’s eastern border. And in an unusual twist, non-NATO member Ukraine was there to advise on drone warfare — and delivered a critical warning to the alliance.

The Associated Press was allowed to witness the Swedish-led military exercise this week as Europe faces not only the threat of Russia but the wavering of NATO’s most powerful member, the United States.

The war game that also involved U.S. forces played out with a real threat in mind. For months, Russia has ramped up sabotage including cyberattacks against critical infrastructure and disinformation against countries across Europe, as detailed by an AP investigation.

The war game scenario — with the Swedish island of Gotland in theory facing power outages and food shortages because of sabotage — tested what NATO members might do before NATO’s collective defense clause, Article 5, has been invoked.

Federal government dismisses calls for radar sites to remain as farmland

OTTAWA - The federal government has rejected calls from some residents in southern Ontario to find other spots to set up planned Arctic over-the-horizon radar installations in order to preserve farmland.

Parliament received a flurry of petitions in recent months criticizing National Defence for buying up plots of quality farmland near Barrie, Ont., for the new radar system, and calling on Ottawa to register the land under an agricultural trust.

The government says the long-range radar, a $6 billion project to modernize Norad surveillance equipment, will make detecting threats in Arctic airspace faster and easier.

The federal government bought 288 hectares of land in Clearview Township, west of Barrie, for an antenna receiver site, upsetting local residents. It also acquired land for a transmitter site in Kawartha Lakes, about 70 km north of Oshawa, Ont.

Baltic, Nordic officials urge Canadians to learn from the Russian threats they face

OTTAWA - European officials are warning that Russia's meddling in the Baltic Sea is likely a preview of tactics Moscow could someday deploy in Canada's High North.

A recent panel discussion in Ottawa hosted by the Polish embassy touched on how Estonia, Poland and Nordic countries like Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark are responding to Russian threats that emerge from the sky, sea and online.

Polish Ambassador Witold Dzielski gave the example of an explosion last November on a rail line used to transport military goods to Ukraine, which his government suspects was orchestrated by Russia.

"Saboteurs are hired in order to conduct kinetic attacks," he said.

Mass cybersecurity breach of learning platform hits Canadian post-secondary schools

Multiple post-secondary institutions across Canada say they've been impacted by a cyberattack targeting an education system used by thousands of schools globally.

Technology company Instructure said it launched an investigation on April 29 after detecting "unauthorized activity" in Canvas, a learning platform for schools that manages student coursework, grades and other education materials.

Information affected by the attack may include names, emails and messages exchanged within the platform, but there's no evidence that passwords, financial information or government identifiers have been compromised, the company said.

Instructure said Canvas went off-line temporarily but is now available to use, and an investigation into the breach is ongoing with a third-party forensic firm and law enforcement.

Foreign actors producing more false content about Alberta separatism: report

EDMONTON - Foreign actors are increasingly generating articles, podcasts and social media posts riddled with disinformation about Alberta's separatist movement, says a new report.

The report from a team of researchers, published Wednesday by the Canadian monitoring platform DisinfoWatch, says the campaigns are coming out of Russia and the United States.

It says social media influencers with millions of followers are generating the disinformation in the United States.

"This matters because influencers increasingly command more attention than traditional institutions and can move fringe narratives into mainstream political debate," the report says.

Despite discrimination, Winnipeg proved to be good fit for Jews fleeing Holocaust

Freda Shiel was 10 years old when the train from Halifax pulled into Winnipeg in 1948. Other families on the platform were met by relatives. Freda and her parents stood there alone. “It was a heartbreaking moment,” she recalled 40 years later, when the Winnipeg Second Generation Group came to record what she remembered.

In the years after May 8, 1945, the end of the Second World War in Europe, hundreds of thousands of survivors and refugees had to find somewhere to go. Some of them, through routes that were rarely straightforward, ended up here. By the late 1950s, roughly 1,000 Holocaust survivors had settled in Winnipeg — more than five per cent of the city’s Jewish population. Forty-eight testimonies including Freda’s, recorded in 1988 and 1989 and now held at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, are still relatively unknown. What they say about this city is more precise, and more complicated, than either a story of welcome or of failure.

Winnipeg did not simply receive these newcomers. It admitted them on terms they would spend decades reshaping. Philip Weiss arrived the same year as Freda. He had survived the ghettos and labour camps of occupied Poland and finally the Nazi concentration camp Mauthausen, where American troops liberated him on May 5, 1945 — a date he carried for the rest of his life. He landed in Halifax on Feb. 11, 1948, his birthday, and took the train west. After years in cattle cars, he marvelled at the white tablecloths and silver cutlery in the dining car, at cherry pie and banana splits that seemed almost unreal on the Canadian Prairies.

Like Weiss, most survivors came through schemes like the Tailor Project, a joint initiative of the Canadian Jewish Congress, garment manufacturers and the federal government that offered entry on the condition that they work in the needle trades.

Canada is getting a sovereign wealth fund. What does that mean and how do they work?

Prime Minister Mark Carney announced the creation of the country's first-ever sovereign wealth fund on Monday, called the Canada Strong Fund.

Carney pitched the new fund as a way for Canadians to invest in nation-building projects in areas that include energy, infrastructure, mining, agriculture and technology.

Here's what you need to know about sovereign wealth funds and how they operate.

What is a sovereign wealth fund?

Former minister Catherine McKenna blasts the heads of Canadian oil companies

MONTRÉAL - Former environment minister Catherine McKenna says the leaders of Canada's oil industry are figures close to American President Donald Trump who are "taking us for fools" and putting both the economy and environment at risk.

Canada's official greenhouse gas inventory was published last week. It showed that in 2024, oil and gas production was the only sector in the country to have increased its greenhouse gas emissions.

"In Canada, we expect, Canadians expect everyone to step up and do their parts. But instead, we have oil and gas, which is largely foreign-owned, largely U.S.-owned, who aren't doing their part. All they're doing is increasing our emissions and demanding subsidies," McKenna said in an interview while at Montreal's climate summit last week.

She adds that oil companies are "demanding that Canadian taxpayers pay the bill for cleaning up the pollution they cause and building pipelines they won’t risk their own money on."

Jury finds that Ticketmaster and Live Nation had an anticompetitive monopoly over big concert venues

NEW YORK (AP) — A jury found Wednesday that entertainment giant Live Nation, which hosts tens of thousands of concerts a year, and its Ticketmaster subsidiary had a harmful monopoly over big venues.

The ruling, in a lawsuit brought by dozens of states, won’t immediately bring relief for concertgoers who have long complained about high ticket prices. But it could cost Live Nation hundreds of millions of dollars and perhaps force the company to sell some of its concert venues when the judge hands out penalties later.

Among other things, the jury found Ticketmaster's anticompetitive practices led to people in 22 states paying an extra $1.72 per ticket, which the judge could order the companies to pay back.

A jury in New York deliberated for four days before reaching its decision. State attorneys general who sued Live Nation said the verdict could potentially lead to lower ticket prices for music fans.

Holocaust survivors, family members mark solemn day by remembering not to forget

Rob Berkowits carries a black and white photo in his wallet — of his father, Alex, and fellow prisoners in a Nazi Germany concentration camp — as a constant reminder the challenges in his life are small.

Canada in the European Union? Poll suggests broad openness to the idea

OTTAWA - New polling suggests a majority of Canadians think Canada should explore joining the European Union at a fraught time for geopolitical relations.

A survey of 4,000 people conducted by Spark Advocacy's polling arm in March found that one in four respondents thought it would be a good idea for Canada to formally join the economic and political bloc of European nations.

A further 58 per cent indicated it was a proposal worth considering further, while the remainder said it was a bad idea.

The Spark poll cannot be assigned a margin of error because it was conducted online.

The Latest: Artemis II astronauts reach orbit on historic mission to the moon and back

Four astronauts embarked on a high-stakes flight around the moon Wednesday, humanity’s first lunar voyage in more than half a century and the thrilling leadoff in NASA’s push toward a landing in two years.

NASA's launch team loaded more than 700,000 gallons of fuel into the 32-story Space Launch System rocket early Wednesday, setting the stage for blast off in the evening at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Artemis astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen are on board. They’ll hurtle several thousand miles beyond the moon, hang a U-turn and then come straight back. No circling around the moon, no stopping for a moonwalk — just a quick out-and-back lasting less than 10 days. NASA promises more boot prints in the gray lunar dust, but not before a couple practice missions.

Unlike the Apollo missions that sent astronauts to the moon from 1968 through 1972, Artemis’ debut crew includes a woman, a person of color and a Canadian citizen.

‘Massive operation’: Canadian driller, shipper enlisted to help tap Greenland oil

CALGARY -

The promotional video shows a small creek trickling through a mossy patch in an otherwise brown, barren landscape, icebergs looming just offshore.

A petroleum engineer dips a hand into the stream, then takes a sniff.

"It smells like crude oil," he says, grinning at the camera.

U.S. congressman introduces bill targeting Online Streaming Act

OTTAWA - A Republican congressman in Washington has introduced a new bill taking aim at Canada’s Online Streaming Act.

The bill would trigger an investigation of the streaming legislation by the Office of the United States Trade Representative, Rep. Lloyd Smucker's office said in a news release.

The statement said if the trade representative finds the implementation of the streaming bill discriminates against or burdens American commerce, the USTR would be directed to take “necessary retaliatory action.”

Under the Online Streaming Act, the federal broadcast regulator has ordered large foreign platforms to make a five per cent contribution toward Canadian content.

Local TV stations ask regulator to force Meta to pay for posting some news content

OTTAWA - Some local and independent TV stations are asking the federal broadcast regulator to start a process to force Meta to pay for allowing some news content on Facebook and Instagram.

They say that despite Meta’s move in 2023 to pull news from its platforms in response to the Online News Act, some content remains available.

The Online News Act requires Meta and Google to compensate media outlets for displaying their content. While Meta pulled news from its platforms in response and has not been required to pay news outlets, Google has been making payments under the act.

In a submission to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, the stations cite examples of online posts that included news content, such as text and screenshots of stories and video clips.