streetfestival

Thought I'd chuck this up since game 1 feels like the most exciting match of the day. At the start of the season, 76ers @ Celtics would have looked like a good match.

While the NBA avoids competing with the NFL, I heard the NFL has 2 games on today plus a Beyoncé half-time show lol.

Happy holidays to Rezz and all other c/NBAers!

In Asia, particularly Thailand and India, tourists can often interact closely with captive elephants, while African elephant tourism is more focused on observing free-ranging animals in national parks.

The researchers identified at least 12 confirmed or potential zoonotic infections that can be transmitted between elephants and humans in tourism settings.

Tuberculosis (TB) emerged as a primary concern, with studies finding TB prevalence rates of 16 to 23% in captive elephant populations.

The researchers emphasize that even in highly regulated environments like zoos, disease transmission between elephants and humans continues to occur. They conclude that lower-regulated tourism activities cannot reasonably be expected to manage these risks effectively.

One study of 1,422 captive elephants in Thailand found that 86% were kept on short chains when not being used for tourist activities, with 26% confined to concrete floors. Another survey revealed that 40% of observed elephants exhibited stereotypic behaviors indicative of psychological distress.

The federal government will not subject Ontario’s Highway 413 to an environmental review, clearing the way for construction on the project to begin as soon as 2025.

Environmental Defence, an advocacy group, tried to urge the review forward in October after Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives introduced a bill that weakened Ontario’s environmental oversight of Highway 413. The charity made a formal request to federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, who was mandated by law to respond by mid-January.

The latest request for that federal oversight was, to some, a last hope for stopping the project before shovels hit the ground.

But on the Friday before Christmas — with the governing Liberals in turmoil following the resignation of former finance minister and deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland and a controversial cabinet shuffle — the federal government quietly posted a notice online, saying there will be no review.

“Ontarians are being let down by the federal government’s decision to not put back in place a federal impact assessment for Highway 413,” Gray said. “It is now impossible for federal decision-makers to understand how to best mitigate cumulative impacts on the environment, and to understand species at risk and conditions downstream.”

There are 29 federally-listed endangered species along the highway route. Among these are aquatic species in need of protection, such as the silver shiner and the redside dace, Gray noted.

Evidence strongly indicates the redside dace minnow may no longer exist in the wild in Canada, if the highway is built, Gray said.

“The federal government has a responsibility under the Species at Risk Act to ensure the survival and recovery of federally protected aquatic species,” Gray said. “Allowing this highway to move forward would destroy the remaining habitat of these endangered species.”

The group says environmental assessments, when conducted properly, prevent the government from falsely claiming that a project is safe.

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh has vowed he will help defeat the governing Liberals in a confidence vote when the House returns. The Conservatives, locked firmly ahead in the polls, have been demanding an election all fall, while the Bloc has also recently called for an election early in the new year.

Singh could still change his mind and many scenarios remain possible, such as an opposition party negotiating a big-ticket item into the budget then having a fall election as scheduled, but that's looking less and less tenable.

"It no longer makes a whole lot of sense to cut some sort of a deal and be a partner to the government that you're about to vilify a couple of months later as Public Enemy no. 1," Baran said.

A leadership race would be a hurried affair compared to Liberal party contests in the past. When Trudeau was elected leader in 2013, the race took some six months, though in 1993 the Progressive Conservatives elected Kim Campbell in a contest lasting about three months.

On Dec. 23, the bureau opened consultations on its greenwashing guidelines. Interested parties can submit feedback to the Competition Bureau by email until Feb. 28, 2025, and submissions will be posted publicly.

The Competition Act is a law designed to prevent anti-competitive practices like price-fixing, false marketing and other deceptions. The law was amended in June to specifically address greenwashing. There was swift and strong pushback from oil and gas industry players and some politicians.

A new report released Tuesday by the United Nations’ expert panel on biodiversity makes the case for a different approach based on addressing the “nexus” between two or more out of five essential issue areas: climate change, biodiversity, food, human health, and water. Such an approach is not only more likely to help the world meet various U.N. targets on biodiversity, sustainable development, and climate mitigation; it’s also more cost-effective.

“We have to move decisions and actions beyond single-issue silos,” said Paula Harrison, a professor of land and water modeling at the U.K. Centre for Ecology and Hydrology and a co-chair of the report, in a statement. Other scientific reports have studied the interlinkages between two or three of these issues, but she told reporters on Tuesday that this latest report is the “most ambitious” to date.

The new report was the result of three years of work of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, or IPBES, an expert body that’s analogous to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which periodically assesses the state of the science on global warming.

Tl;dr: plant-based food options are on the rise at Canadian universities.

I'm skeptical of some universities' self-reported #s though, particularly "York University hit 60 per cent vegan offerings in 2024."

Tl;dr: plant-based food options are on the rise at Canadian universities.

I'm skeptical of some universities' self-reported #s though, particularly "York University hit 60 per cent vegan offerings in 2024."

With a provincial election that left the BC NDP in government by a small margin, there’s no doubt that 2024 signalled a clear shift to the far-right with the expressed support of extreme candidates with extreme positions.

Amidst shifting political winds, we consider seven once common, now preventable diseases.

There’s a concerning trend emerging in Canada and the United States when it comes to vaccine hesitancy.

In the United States, a key legal adviser to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the man tapped to be the next U.S. health secretary, is working to get rid of polio and hepatitis B vaccines in America, according to the New York Times. Kennedy himself has vocally opposed vaccines for years.

On Canada’s East Coast, where vaccinations are readily available, three out of every 10 kids are not vaccinated against measles.

It’s not too different on the West Coast. Wong said that last year only around 69 per cent of two-year-olds in B.C. were up to date on all recommended vaccines, down from 74 per cent in 2017. By seven years old, that percentage falls to 66 per cent, which is down from 73 per cent in 2021, Wong added.

As costs and damage rise, the government needs to focus on prevention and learn from First Nations.

Wildfires in the province now drive global climate change, often producing more greenhouse gas emissions than all other B.C. sources combined. Canadian wildfires in 2023 produced more GHGs than total national emissions of Germany.

But one of the most powerful reasons for action is economic — we simply can’t afford the status quo. Losses from B.C. wildfires cost tens of billions of dollars. The government reported spending over $1 billion fighting 2023 wildfires.

Yet such firefighting costs are just the tip of the economic spear. The total costs of a wildfire can range from six to 30 times the suppression costs.

For example, total costs of the 2016 Fort McMurray fire are estimated at about $9 billion to $11 billion — roughly 20 times the firefighting costs.

As wildfire conditions worsen, how will we support all the mills whose wood supply has burned? All the wineries with smoke-spoiled product? All the motels, campgrounds and restaurants emptied by smoky summers? All the Indigenous communities evacuated repeatedly? All the highways and dikes washed away by wildfire-caused flooding?

And how will we pay the increased health costs? A University of California, Los Angeles, study has linked 11 years of California wildfire smoke to more than 50,000 premature deaths and $400 billion in economic impact.