Election call and getting Canadians out of Afghanistan: In The News for Aug. 13

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 Aug. 13 …

What we are watching in Canada …

OTTAWA— Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is expected to trigger an election on Sunday by asking Gov. Gen. Mary Simon to dissolve Parliament even though Canada’s top doctor says the country is now in the grips of a fourth wave of COVID-19.

A senior Liberal Party of Canada source, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss matters not public, confirmed Thursday the prime minister’s plan to visit Simon, with the election expected to take place on Sept. 20.

The confirmation followed months of speculation that Trudeau would send Canadians to the polls two years after the last election, in which he was only able to secure a minority government.

The real question had been when, rather than if, the prime minister would pull the trigger given the unpredictable nature of the COVID-19 pandemic, which chief public health officer Dr. Theresa Tam warned Thursday is again on the upswing.

“The latest national surveillance data indicate that a fourth wave is underway in Canada and that cases are plotting along a strong resurgence trajectory,” Tam said during a federal COVID-19 update.

Polls suggest it’s far from certain the Liberals can regain a majority but Trudeau is gambling that general satisfaction with his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic — and the unprecedented billions doled out in emergency aid — will propel them to a majority.

Opposition parties have blasted the idea of an early election and accused the Liberals of sending Canadians to the polls during the pandemic for the sole purpose of trying to win a majority, a move they describe as unnecessary and reckless.

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Also this …

VANCOUVER — Lawyers for Meng Wanzhou are expected to present their defence in a Vancouver court today, explaining why the Huawei executive should not be extradited to the United States to face fraud charges. 

The 2018 arrest of Meng, who is the Chinese telecom company’s chief financial officer, embroiled Canada in a bitter dispute between the United States and China. 

She is accused of misrepresenting Huawei’s control over another company that did business in Iran during a presentation to HSBC, putting the international bank at risk of violating U.S. sanctions against the country.

Meng and Huawei have consistently denied the charges. 

Lawyers for Canada’s attorney general, who represent the United States in the case, have argued that Meng’s misrepresentations were part of a deliberate and co-ordinated plan that prevented HSBC from making commercial decisions based on honest and accurate information. 

Meng’s extradition hearing is expected to wrap up next week. 

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And this …

OTTAWA — An official says Canadian special forces will deploy to Afghanistan where Canadian Embassy staff in Kabul will be evacuated before it closes.

The Associated Press says the official did not say how many troops would be sent.

Meanwhile, the U-S government is rushing 3,000 soldiers to the Kabul airport to help with a partial evacuation of the U-S Embassy and Britain says it will send 600 troops to Afghanistan to help U-K nationals leave the country.

The moves highlight the speed of the Taliban offensive, including their capture of Kandahar, the second-largest city.

Some 40,000 Canadian troops were deployed in Afghanistan over 13 years as part of the NATO mission before pulling out in 2014.

The first planeload of Afghan refugees who supported the Canadian military mission arrived in Canada earlier this month.

A spokeswoman for Global Affairs says Canada is monitoring the situation in Afghanistan but for security reasons can’t comment on specific operations.

She says Foreign Affairs Minister Marc Garneau is working closely with Canada’s allies and that the security of the Canadian Embassy and its staff in Kabul is the top priority.

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What we are watching in the U.S. … 

LAME DEER, Mont.— Wildfires in Montana threatened rural towns and ranchland and victims of a California blaze returned to their incinerated town even as the region faced another round of dangerous weather.

Firefighters and residents scrambled to save hundreds of homes as flames continued to advance on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation in southeastern Montana.

Since Sunday, the fire has carved its way through some 673 square kilometres and prompted evacuation orders for thousands of people.

As the fire raged across rugged hills and narrow ravines, tribal member Darlene Small helped her grandson move about 100 head of cattle to a new pasture, only to relocate them twice more as the flames from the Richard Spring fire bore down, she said Thursday. An extreme drought that’s blanketing the West has made matters worse by stunting vegetation untouched by fire.

“They’ve got to have pasture where there’s water. If there’s no water, there’s no good pasture,” Small said. 

Gusts and low humidity were creating extreme fire behavior as flames devoured brush, short grass and timber, fire officials said.

The same conditions turned California’s Dixie Fire into a furious blaze that last week burned down much of the small town of Greenville in the northern Sierra Nevada. The fire that began a month ago has destroyed some 550 homes.

On Thursday, residents were trying to cope with the magnitude of the losses.

“Everything that I own is now ashes or twisted metal. That’s just all it is,” said Greenville resident Ken Donnell, who escaped with just the clothes on his back.

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What we are watching in the rest of the world …

KABUL — Afghanistan’s rapidly-advancing Taliban insurgents entered a western provincial capital, an official said Friday, hours after they captured the country’s second and third largest cities in a lightning advance just weeks before America is set to end its longest war.

The seizure of Kandahar and Herat marks the biggest prizes yet for the Taliban, who have taken 12 of Afghanistan’s 34 provincial capitals as part of a weeklong blitz.

While Kabul itself isn’t directly under threat yet, the losses and the battles elsewhere further tighten the grip of a resurgent Taliban, who are estimated to now hold over two-thirds of the country and continue to press their offensive.

Thousands of Afghans have fled their homes amid fears the Taliban will again impose a brutal, repressive government, all but eliminating women’s rights and conducting public executions. Peace talks in Qatar remain stalled, though diplomats are still meeting.

The latest U.S. military intelligence assessment suggests Kabul could come under insurgent pressure within 30 days and that, if current trends hold, the Taliban could gain full control of the country within a few months. The Afghan government may be forced to pull back to defend the capital and just a few other cities in the coming days if the Taliban maintain momentum.

Bill Roggio, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said the Afghan army has rotted from within due to corruption and mismanagement, leaving troops in the field poorly equipped and with little motivation to fight. The Taliban, meanwhile, have spent a decade taking control of large swaths of the countryside, positioning themselves to rapidly seize key infrastructure and urban areas once President Joe Biden announced the U.S. withdrawal.

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On this day in 1992 …

A Manitoba court ruled that mandatory Christian prayer in the province’s schools was unconstitutional. Manitoba was Canada’s last bastion of compulsory school prayer.

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In entertainment …

Projectors began lighting up the big screens at many Cineplex Inc. movie theatres over the spring, but Canada’s biggest cinema chain still faced another quarter of deep losses.

The impact of theatre closures from the COVID-19 pandemic and moviegoers still cautious to return to multiplexes continued to wreak havoc on the company’s financial results in the second quarter as it lost $103.7 million.

Cineplex also introduced a ticket price increase across the country, which chief executive Ellis Jacob told The Canadian Press was “about three per cent, on average.”

That would amount to nearly 50 cents extra for a regular ticket at one of the Toronto locations, though Jacob pointed out the price could be less substantial in other parts of the country. It could also be more for premium tickets, such as Imax or VIP theatre screenings.

The decision was made to “kind of offset operating costs — all of the costs have gone up,” Jacob said of running the business amid a pandemic.

“It was basically early spring that we started to look at it because we were looking at costs and we were looking at where things stood and we haven’t taken a price increase for a while.”

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ICYMI …

More than 17,000 years ago, a woolly mammoth roamed enough of the Alaskan landscape to circle the Earth twice.

That’s according to a new paper from an international team of researchers who retraced the lifetime of one of the extinct ancient Arctic creatures.

The mammoth’s story is written in its tusk through tiny isotopes, which are tiny atoms, said Mat Wooller, a paleoecologist at the University of Alaska.

“Isotopes are like a little chemical GPS (global positioning system) recorder,” Wooller said.

Looking at the isotopes, researchers analyzed 400,000 microscopic data points in a two-metre long woolly mammoth tusk found in Alaska in 2018. They were able to determine the animal was a male who lived to be 28 years old, he said.

The way the tusk grows makes it easier to analyze, said Clement Bataille, a University of Ottawa researcher who also worked on the project.

Each year, new layers grow on the mammoth’s tusk, “as if we you were stacking a bunch of ice cream cones on top of each other,” he said.

The isotopes found in the mammoth’s tusk were matched with maps created by analyzing the teeth of hundreds of small rodents across Alaska. That data set was then used as a baseline to trace the mammoth’s movements across Alaska.

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This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 13, 2021

The Canadian Press