CP derailed and Ukraine rejects Russia’s surrender demand: In The News for Mar. 21

The company and union both blamed each other for causing the work stoppage, though both also said they were still talking with federal mediators on Sunday.

Canadian Chamber of Commerce President Perrin Beatty says O’Regan must table back to work legislation immediately. He warns the consequences to the supply chain — already battered by the COVID-19 pandemic and uncertainty in northern Europe — could be severe.

The House of Commons resumes today following a two-week break, so legislation could come immediately if the government so chooses.

But a spokeswoman for O’Regan said yesterday that the government believes the best deal is reached at the bargaining table.

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Also this …

IQALUIT — Nunavut Legal Aid is to intervene at the Supreme Court of Canada for the first time on Wednesday in a case that could affect how Inuit are sentenced.

It involves the constitutionality of a section in the Criminal Code that limits conditional sentences, or house arrest.

Eva Tache-Green, a lawyer will Nunavut Legal Aid, says conditional sentences are important for Inuit offenders because it means they can stay closer to their community rather than being sent south to serve time.

Nunavut has the highest incarceration rate in Canada, but only two of its 25 fly-in communities have jails.

There are no federal prisons.

Tache-Green says that means offenders often have to travel hundreds — if not thousands — of kilometres from home to serve a sentence.

She says conditional sentences in the community provide a higher chance of rehabilitation.

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What we are watching in the U.S. …

WASHINGTON — The Senate Judiciary Committee is beginning historic confirmation hearings Monday for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who would be the first Black woman on the Supreme Court.

Barring a significant misstep by the 51-year-old Jackson, a federal judge for the past nine years, Democrats who control the Senate by the slimmest of margins intend to wrap up her confirmation before Easter.

Jackson is expected to present an opening statement Monday afternoon, then answer questions from the committee’s 11 Democrats and 11 Republicans over the next two days. She will be introduced by Thomas B. Griffith, a retired judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and Lisa M. Fairfax, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School.

Jackson appeared before the same committee last year, after President Joe Biden chose her to fill an opening on the federal appeals court in Washington, just down the hill from the Supreme Court.

Her testimony will give most Americans, as well as the Senate, their most extensive look yet at the Harvard-trained lawyer with a resume that includes two years as a federal public defender. That makes her the first nominee with significant criminal defense experience since Thurgood Marshall, the first Black American to serve on the nation’s highest court.

In addition to being the first Black woman on the Supreme Court, Jackson would be the third Black justice, after Marshall and his successor, Justice Clarence Thomas.

The American Bar Association, which evaluates judicial nominees, on Friday gave Jackson’s its highest rating, unanimously “well qualified.”

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What we are watching in the rest of the world …

LVIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian officials defiantly rejected a Russian demand that their forces in Mariupol lay down arms and raise white flags Monday in exchange for safe passage out of the besieged strategic port city.

Russia has been barraging the encircled southern city on the Sea of Azov, hitting an art school sheltering some 400 people only hours before offering to open two corridors out of the city in return for the capitulation of its defenders, according to Ukrainian officials.

Ukrainian officials rejected the Russian proposal for safe passage out of Mariupol even before Moscow’s 5 a.m. deadline for a response came and went.

“There can be no talk of any surrender, laying down of arms,” Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Irina Vereshchuk told the news outlet Ukrainian Pravda. “We have already informed the Russian side about this.”

The Russian Ministry of Defense said authorities in Mariupol could face a military tribunal if they sided with what it described as “bandits,” the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti reported.

Earlier attempts to evacuate civilian residents from Mariupol and other Ukrainian cities have failed or only partly succeeded, with bombardments continuing as civilians sought to flee.

Ahead of the latest offer, a Russian airstrike hit the school where some 400 civilians had been taking shelter and it was not clear how many casualties there were, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a video address early Monday.

“They are under the rubble, and we don’t know how many of them have survived,” he said.

The fall of Mariupol would allow Russian forces in southern and eastern Ukraine to unite. But Western military analysts say that even if the surrounded city is taken, the troops battling a block at a time for control there may be too depleted to help secure Russian breakthroughs on other fronts.

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In entertainment …

Next week, Ari Wegner could make Oscar history.

The 37-year-old Australian has a very good shot at being the first woman to win an Academy Award for best cinematography for helping create the indelible images of “The Power of the Dog” alongside director Jane Campion.

Campion and Wegner battled the extreme conditions of the New Zealand landscape to transport audiences to a desolate ranch in 1920s Montana.

Together they created an unforgettable piece about human fragility that garnered the most nominations of any film this year.

Some of the images, like a shot of two actors silhouetted through a barn door, are the kinds that aspiring filmmakers are already studying.

Wegner is only the second woman to have been nominated for the cinematography award.

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Also this …

NEW YORK — Ye will not be performing at the Grammys this year.

A report published in The Blast says the musician was told on Friday that his act had been pulled from the show, which is set to take place on April 3.

A representative for Ye, who changed his name from Kanye West, confirmed the information in The Blast article in an email to the Associated Press. She did not offer additional comment.

Ye had not been confirmed yet as someone set to perform at the show, which has announced acts such as Billie Eilish, BTS, Lil’ Nas X and Olivia Rodrigo. Ye’s album “Donda” is nominated for album of the year. Representatives from the Recording Academy have not responded to multiple requests for comment.

According to reports, the decision was made in response to his “concerning online behavior.”

Trevor Noah, who is hosting the Grammy Awards, called Ye’s treatment of his ex-wife-Kim Kardashian “more and more belligerent” on The Daily Show last week.

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OTTAWA — After more than 20 years delivering babies into the world, Dr. Stefanie Green decided to specialize in delivering suffering people out of it.

She was among the first Canadian physicians to offer medical assistance in dying, known as MAID, once it became legal in this country in 2016.

Green has now written a book, “This is Assisted Dying: A Doctor’s Story of Empowering Patients at the End of Life,” describing the first year of her new practice.

She provides heartbreaking details of patients she helped, and the ones she could not because of the restrictive nature of the new law, which limited the procedure to people whose natural deaths were “reasonably foreseeable.”

She describes the gratitude of grieving family members but also the man who accused her of murdering his aunt. The loving last words exchanged between a husband and wife, lying naked together in bed, and the patient whose parting words to her good-for-nothing grandson were “clean up your crap.”

Green also describes in painstaking detail the care that goes into assessing a patient’s eligibility for an assisted death and the series of lethal injections designed to gently ease a patient into sleep, then a deep coma before the heart finally stops.

The book, Green said in an interview, was partly an attempt to stimulate discussion about the end of life, a topic most people are afraid to talk about. But it was also therapeutic for her.

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This report by The Canadian Press was first published Mar. 21, 2022

The Canadian Press

by Canadian Press

CP derailed and Ukraine rejects Russia’s surrender demand: In The News for Mar. 21

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