'His loyalty skills are really weak': Trump rants at Ron DeSantis in late-night tirade
February 18, 2023, 7:27 AM ET
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Canada is facing a catastrophic spring wildfire season with massive and powerful blazes out of control in all corners of the country, and thousands more people displaced on Friday.
"This is a scary time for a lot of people from coast to coast to coast," said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, alluding to the vastness of a nation on fire stretching from the Pacific to the Atlantic to the Arctic oceans.
Some 10,000 people on Friday were ordered to evacuate from Sept Iles in Quebec in the face of advancing wildfires.
Steve Beaupre, mayor of the small city on the St. Lawrence River, declared a local state of emergency and announced the mandatory evacuation after nearby wildfires "advanced very quickly" overnight.
Residents were told in the morning to vacate their homes by 4 pm local time (2100 GMT).
Stephane Lauzon, a member of Parliament from Quebec, told a news conference in Ottawa that as many as 10,000 residents, or one-third of the population of Sept Iles, would be displaced.
This followed the evacuation on Thursday of 500 residents of Chapais in the north of the province.
"The situation is quickly changing in Quebec," Lauzon said, adding that about 100 fires, "many more than yesterday," were burning in the province, including about 20 out of control.
'We need rain'
Canada has been hit repeatedly by extreme weather in recent years, the intensity and frequency of which have increased due to global warming.
Across Canada more than 210 fires were burning on Friday after scorching more than 2.7 million hectares (6.7 million acres). A total of 29,000 people had been evacuated before Friday's order.
After major flareups in the west of the country in May, notably in the Prairies provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, firefighting shifted in the past week to Nova Scotia on the Atlantic coast.
Officials hoped rain and cooler temperatures in forecasts for the weekend following a record-breaking heat wave will bring relief.
"Weather has favored the fires all week, not the firefighters. We're hopeful that this will soon change," Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston told a briefing.
"We need rain. Hopefully that rain comes in sufficient amounts this weekend."
Almost 1,000 firefighters from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the United States also arrived or were en route to bolster firefighting efforts.
And Ottawa was deploying the military in Nova Scotia and Quebec to help out, officials said.
'The house is gone'
In Halifax, the largest city in Nova Scotia, busloads of suburban residents were taken on tours for a first glimpse of devastated neighborhoods.
In a video shared by local media, people on the bus could be heard trying to identify items burned or melted. "I think that was my car," a woman says when it stops at the end of a long driveway.
Jason Young told reporters it was "pretty surreal" to see the blackened wooded lots and smoking debris.
"The house is gone. The shed is gone. Everything's gone. On our property, there's nothing left. It's completely gone," he said.
Others weren't ready yet to take it all in. "If I see my property I want to do it with my family, by ourselves, and be able to physically go in and (maybe) sort through stuff," Jody Stuart said, aware that he has lost everything.
About 200 homes, as well as a wooden bridge and a historic private Halifax club founded in 1908, have been destroyed and nearly 20,000 residents have been displaced by wildfires in Nova Scotia.
A few were allowed to return home on Friday after more than a week away.
Houston lamented the "many, many lives turned upside down" by fires, noting a number of people "responding to the fires are evacuees themselves and it's absolutely heartbreaking."
But he also expressed solace: "Though all this despair, zero deaths, zero missing persons, zero serious injuries."
© 2023 AFP
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A proposed law requiring internet giants to pay for news stories moved forward in California on Friday, despite Facebook owner Meta threatening to pull news from its platform if it passes.
The California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA), which cleared the state assembly on Thursday and was in the hands of the state senate, would mandate that large online platforms pay a monthly "journalism usage fee" to news providers whose work appears on their services.
The bill is designed to support local news organizations, which have been decimated in recent years as ad revenue bled away to Google and Facebook, both advertising behemoths.
Meta spokesman Andy Stone on Friday told AFP that if the bill becomes law, Meta "will be forced to remove news from Facebook and Instagram rather than pay into a slush fund that primarily benefits big, out-of-state media companies."
The bill has to make its way through the state senate and be signed by Governor Gavin Newsom to become law.
The CJPA is like other legislative texts pending across the globe.
In Australia, Facebook in 2021 briefly blocked news articles over a similar law and Google threatened to pull its search engine from the country before they made deals to pay several media groups.
In the European Union, tech giants can be asked to pay a copyright fee to publishers for links posted in search results or feeds.
"The CJPA is riddled with holes, the biggest of which is that the bill primarily funds national media outlets that spread misinformation," said Chamber of Progress chief executive Adam Kovacevich.
"It’s sad the Assembly is passing the buck to the Senate rather than fixing the bill's problems."
The chamber is a trade group with a list of partners that includes Amazon, Apple, Google, and Meta.
A study posted by the chamber concluded that "disinformation outlets" including Fox News would benefit most from the California law.
The bill defines online platforms as those having at least 50 million monthly active users in the United States; a billion monthly users worldwide, or be valued at more than $550 billion based on its stock price.
- Money for reporters? -
Fees paid would be based on the number of views and news providers would be required to spend it on journalism and support staff, according to the text of the bill.
Stone noted that the wording of the bill means revenue from the law would not have to be spent on reporters covering news.
The California state assembly website indicated the bill was sent to a senate committee responsible for scheduling debates and votes on legislation, with no indication of when it would go to a vote.
"Meta's threat to take down news is undemocratic and unbecoming," trade group News Media Alliance said in a posted statement.
"We have seen this in their playbook before."
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last month slammed Meta after executives said it would block news for Canadian Facebook and Instagram users in response to the proposed law there.
The Canada law builds on Australia's New Media Bargaining Code, which was a world first, aimed at making Google and Meta pay for news content on their platforms.
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Churchill Downs, home of the famed Kentucky Derby, will suspend racing at the conclusion of this weekend's competition to examine safety measures after 12 horse deaths in the past month, officials said Friday.
With operations shut down at the iconic track in Louisville, Kentucky, the remainder of its Spring Meet, scheduled to run to July 3, will be relocated to Ellis Park in Henderson, Kentucky, starting on Saturday, June 10.
Churchill Downs Incorporated said in a statement Friday that officials would conduct a "top-to-bottom review of all safety and surface protocols and integrity measures in collaboration and consultation with nationwide experts."
The move comes a day after Churchill Downs announced that new safety measures would be implemented aimed at improving horse safety.
Those moves included restricting horses to four starts in a rolling eight-week span and eligibility bans for horses that do not perform well.
Officials also paused a program of track-based incentives, including trainer start bonuses and purse payout allocations to every race finisher through last place.
But with the reason for the spike in equine fatalities still a mystery, Churchill Downs officials have opted to pursue further evaluation of track safety measures out of "an abundance of caution."
"Following a thorough internal review and concurrent investigations conducted by the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission and Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority, no single factor has been identified as a potential cause and no discernable pattern has been detected to link the fatalities," Churchill Downs said in a statement.
"Diagnostics testing of the racetrack by experts have not raised concerns and the experts have concluded that the surface is consistent with prior measurements from Churchill Downs in past years," the company addded.
"Even though the investigations and expert reports have indicated no surface issues, in an abundance of caution, and in alignment with a recommendation from HISA, CDI has elected to relocate the meet in order to conduct a top-to-bottom review of all safety and surface protocols and integrity measures in collaboration and consultation with nationwide experts."
Mage won the Kentucky Derby on May 6, capping a disturbing week at Churchill Downs where seven horses died within 10 days -- two of them euthanized after they were injured in support races on Derby day.
The 11th and 12th fatalities occurred last Friday and Saturday, when Lost in Limbo and Kimberley Dream suffered injuries while racing and were euthanized.
Ellis Park is also owned and operated by Churchill Downs Inc., and chief executive Bill Carstanjen said moving the remainder of the meeting there would allow it to meet its "immense responsibility as the economic engine of the Thoroughbred industry in Kentucky which provides jobs and income for thousands of families every day."
© 2023 AFP
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