Cheer up Montreal, the cheerleaders are back; In The News for Feb. 11

In The News is a roundup of stories from The Canadian Press designed to kickstart your day. Here is what’s on the radar of our editors for the morning of Feb. 11 …

What we are watching in Canada …

Opponents of a natural gas pipeline in northwestern British Columbia say they believe protests across the country are sparking a growing awareness of Indigenous rights that will lead to long-term change.

Protesters blocked train traffic in east Vancouver on Monday afternoon to support Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs who oppose the Coastal GasLink pipeline. The protest came hours after nearly 60 people were arrested for obstructing busy ports in the city and in nearby Delta.

Demonstrators gathered on the B.C. legislature steps in Victoria, where traffic was also tied up because of blockages on two bridges Monday evening.

Pipeline opponents also gathered at the office of the Crown-Indigenous relations minister in Toronto, the federal justice building in Ottawa, a commuter train line in Montreal and outside an event with the natural resources minister in St. John’s, N.L.

Jen Wickham, a spokeswoman for one of the five clans that make up the Wet’suwet’en Nation, said she believes non-Indigenous Canadians are becoming more aware of First Nations rights.

“I think that people are starting to wake up to the fact that we have the right to our territory,” she said. “They’re upset and they’re taking to the streets. They’re occupying offices, they’re stopping traffic and they’re stopping trains. They’re saying, loud and clear, ‘This is not OK.’ “

The RCMP began enforcing a court injunction last week against people camped near a pipeline work site in Houston. Mounties said 14 people were arrested and expected to appear in B.C. Supreme Court on Monday.

—

Also this …

A second Canadian plane has left the quarantined region of Hubei, China, bearing more Canadians who have asked to return from the centre of the novel coronavirus outbreak, the federal government says.

Foreign Affairs Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne said there was room for about 200 passengers aboard the flight from Wuhan.

The plane is bringing back the last group of Canadians who want to be repatriated, said Champagne, who is travelling with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Africa and the Middle East.

There were 236 Canadians hoping to board the plane from a city that has been under quarantine for weeks as Chinese authorities try to contain the virus’s spread, Canadian officials had said Sunday.

The government plans to unite the latest batch of evacuees with the 213 Canadians and their families who left Wuhan last week, and who are already under a mandatory quarantine at Canadian Forces Base Trenton in southern Ontario.

But they might not be staying in the same modern accommodations as those who arrived last week, Canada’s chief public health officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, warned in a briefing Monday.

— 

What we are watching in the U.S. …

In the waning hours before New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary voting begins, Democratic presidential candidates took varied approaches to the expectations game as they look to advance deeper into what could be an extended nominating fight.

Bernie Sanders showed the same confidence he displayed ahead of last week’s Iowa caucuses, which ended with a split decision between the Vermont senator and former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana. “If we win here tomorrow, I think we’ve got a path to victory for the Democratic nomination,” Sanders declared in Rindge.

Former Vice-President Joe Biden, once the national front-runner, tamped down expectations amid prospects of a second consecutive disappointment before the race turns to more racially diverse states he believes can restore his contender status. “This is just getting started,” he told CBS.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren fell somewhere between those approaches, vowing to make a comeback but not predicting victory. “Look, I’ve been counted down and out for much of my life,” Warren told reporters. “You get knocked down. You get back up.”

Buttigieg and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the biggest surprises of the 2020 contest so far, looked to extend their rides despite uncertainty about what’s ahead for two campaigns with overwhelmingly white bases.

—

What we are watching in the rest of the world …

Uganda scrambled to respond to the arrival of the biggest locust outbreak that parts of East Africa have seen in decades, while the United Nations warned that “we simply cannot afford another major shock” to an already vulnerable region.

An emergency government meeting hours after the locusts were spotted inside Uganda on Sunday decided to deploy military forces to help with ground-based pesticide spraying, while two planes for aerial spraying will arrive as soon as possible, a statement said. Aerial spraying is considered the only effective control.

The swarms of billions of locusts have been destroying crops in Kenya, which hasn’t seen such an outbreak in 70 years, as well as Somalia and Ethiopia, which haven’t seen this in a quarter-century. The insects have exploited favourable wet conditions after unusually heavy rains, and experts say climate change is expected to bring more of the same.

Keith Cressman, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organizations senior locust forecasting officer, said Kenya has received “waves and waves of swarms” since the beginning of the year from the Horn of Africa, and “over the weekend they moved on the side of Mount Kilimanjaro across the border into Tanzania.”

“Also over the weekend they moved into northeastern Uganda,” he told a news conference at U.N. headquarters in New York. “We’re expecting any day they will move across the border into the southeast corner of South Sudan,” where another several million people face hunger as the country struggles to emerge from civil war.

A medium-size swarm of locusts can eat the same amount of food as the entire population of Kenya, Cressman said, and “that swarm in one day can eat the same amount of food as everybody here in the tri-state area, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York. So not taking action in time — you can see the consequences.”

—

ICYMI (In case you missed it) …

MONTREAL — The Montreal Alouettes will have cheerleaders on the field this upcoming Canadian Football League season.

The team has announced that it is reversing an earlier decision to cut its cheerleading squad after receiving fan feedback asking the Alouettes to reconsider.

The Alouettes had announced last week that they were going ahead without a cheerleading squad in 2020 in an effort to cut costs.

In a statement Monday, the Alouettes calls their squad “the best cheerleaders in the country.”

“The fans reached out, our members spoke up, they asked us in a very constructive and respectful manner, for the vast majority of them, to reconsider our position,” the Alouettes says. “They also clearly demonstrated their profound attachment to our cheerleader team, and to the Alouettes. Consequently, we listened and read all communication.”

Toronto-based businessmen Sid Spiegel and Gary Stern purchased the club from the CFL last month. The CFL had been operating the team since the Wetenhall family sold it to the league last spring.

The eight other CFL clubs all have cheerleaders.

—

Weird and wild …

CALGARY — A fearsome lizard with a name meaning “reaper of death” is the first new tyrannosaur species to be identified in Canada in 50 years.

Tyrannosaurs were large meat-eating dinosaurs that walked on two legs and had short arms, two fingers and massive skulls with dagger-like teeth. Tyrannosaurus rex is the most famous in this group.

Jared Voris was examining skull fragments stored in a drawer at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alta., as part of his masters thesis when he noticed features not seen in other tyrannosaur specimens. The most obvious were prominent vertical ridges along the upper jaw line.

“We’d find one feature, and then we’d find another, and then it would just kind of cascade into finally understanding that this was something completely different than what we’d seen before,” says Voris, who is now working on his PhD in paleontology at the University of Calgary.

Voris figures the beast could have been about eight metres long with an 80-centimetre skull.

“It would have been quite an imposing animal,” he says. “It definitely would have caused some panic.”

The new species is named Thanatotheristes degrootorum, which combines the Greek word for “reaper of death” with the name of a southern Alberta couple, the DeGroots, who happened upon the fossil fragments along the shore of the Bow River west of Medicine Hat, Alta., in 2010.

—

Know your news …

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made a surprise visit to Canada’s troops at the Ali Al-salem Air Base in Kuwait on Monday. What’s the name of the mission Canadian soldiers are on in that part of the world?

(Keep scrolling for the answer)

—

On this day in 1978 …

A Pacific Western Airlines plane crashed while attempting to land in Cranbrook, B.C. The crash, which killed 43 people, was blamed on a snowplow left on the runway.

—

Entertaiment news …

TORONTO —  Oscar-winning filmmaker Spike Lee will receive a lifetime achievement award from the Toronto Black Film Festival on Thursday, just days after an Oscars show in which all four acting awards went to white actors.

In fact, there was only one person of colour nominated in an acting category at Sunday’s show — Cynthia Erivo, who played the lead in the Harriet Tubman biopic “Harriet.”

Meanwhile, no female filmmakers were nominated for best director.

“It’s not going to turn around until there’s more diversity amongst the gatekeepers,” Lee say .

“These are the people that have a green-light vote. That’s when a fundamental change will happen and we get rid of the feast or famine thing.”

Lee said he feels the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has “done a great job of getting more people in as voting members.”

But he “knew there was no way in hell people of colour” would get the same amount of Oscar nominations in the acting categories this year that they did 2017, when Denzel Washington, Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, Naomie Harris, Ruth Negga, Mahershala Ali, and Dev Patel were all up for trophies.

“That wasn’t happening,” Lee said, noting such situations usually run in cycles.

The Toronto Black Film Festival kicks off Feb. 12 with Van Maximilian Carlson’s “Princess of the Row” and closes Feb. 16 with Bernard Attal’s “Restless.”

Lee has also appeared at the Montreal Black Film Festival.

—

Know your news answer …

Operation Impact. There are 850 Canadians deployed as part of the mission, 250 of which were part of a United Nations mission in Iraq to train national security forces and build up military education institutions with the goal of preventing the return of the Islamic State group, sometimes referred to as Daesh.

—

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 11, 2020.

The Canadian Press