Trudeau heads to Warsaw, Charest to join leadership race: In The News for March 10

He is also to meet with the country’s prime minister and president as the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues.

He is also expected to meet with U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris in Poland this evening to discuss the situation in Ukraine.

It will be Trudeau’s final stop on his four-country tour of Europe this week to speak with allies about how to ramp up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime.

He met Wednesday with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and their talks focused on the need for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine and a desire to end the war without further escalation.

Trudeau also announced Wednesday that Canada would send another $50 million in specialized equipment, including Canadian-made cameras for surveillance drones, to help Ukraine defend itself against the Russian invasion.

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Also this …

Former Quebec premier Jean Charest is to appear in Calgary today to formally launch his campaign for the Conservative Party of Canada leadership.

Charest’s bid to lead the Tories means he’s re-entering federal politics for the first time in more than 20 years.

Charest, who is 63, was first elected as an MP in 1984 in former prime minister Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative government and became a cabinet minister before he was 30. He went on to lead the Tories for several years until 1998, when he left federal politics to lead the Quebec Liberal party.

Charest served as Quebec’s premier from 2003 to 2012 before he was defeated in an election that followed massive student protests.

Pierre Poilievre, a high-profile Ottawa-area MP who was the first to declare his candidacy for the Conservative leadership, has been dismissing Charest as favouring policies like the federal carbon price — something many party members detest.

As Quebec’s premier, Charest ushered in a cap-and-trade program.

Charest’s campaign says he informed the party president on Wednesday of his intention to enter the race. He is to make the formal announcement at a Calgary brewery Thursday evening.

Other declared candidates in the Conservative leadership race include rookie Ontario MP Leslyn Lewis and Independent Ontario MPP Roman Baber.

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What we are watching in the U.S. …

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. _ The focus of a trial in Michigan has quickly turned to the question of whether the FBI tricked and cajoled four defendants into agreeing to a plot to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

During the initial round of opening statements to jurors, lawyers on Wednesday tiptoed around whether agents induced the men to commit crimes they wouldn’t have contemplated on their own, known as entrapment.

But U.S. District Judge Robert Jonker subsequently took the unusual step of allowing them to speak again to the jury to specifically address an entrapment defence after hearing them allude to it earlier.

Prosecutors are expected to present more testimony Thursday to show that the four _ Adam Fox, Barry Croft Jr., Daniel Harris and Brandon Caserta _ were poised to get Whitmer before their arrests in October 2020.

“If the defendant was already willing to commit the crime, that is not entrapment,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Roth said. “These defendants were willing and eager, if not already preparing, to commit this crime long before law enforcement got involved.”

Entrapment is a rare, high-risk defence because it’s a concession that crimes may have been committed. Lawyers seek acquittals based of claims of excessive influence and manipulation by agents and informants.

But Roth said the evidence, which will include messages, videos and social media posts, would prove their desire to commit violence apart from anything that informants did or suggested.

The four men are accused of taking critical steps to carry out their plans, including a night drive to northern Michigan to scout Whitmer’s vacation home and figure out how to blow up a bridge, according to the government.

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What we are watching in the rest of the world …

MARIUPOL, Ukraine _ An airstrike on a hospital in the port city of Mariupol killed three people, including a child, the city council said Thursday, as Russian forces intensified their siege of Ukrainian cities.

The attack in the southern port city wounded women waiting to give birth and doctors and buried children in the rubble. Bombs also fell on two hospitals in another city west of the capital.

The World Health Organization said it has confirmed 18 attacks on medical facilities since the Russian invasion began two weeks ago.

Turkey, meanwhile, was hosting the highest-level talks so far between the two sides on Thursday. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he hoped the meeting between Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and his Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba “will open the door to a permanent ceasefire.” But Kuleba said he did not have high expectations.

Ukrainian officials said the attack Wednesday at a medical complex in Mariupol, where a siege has forced residents to scavenge for food and water, killed three people, including a girl, and wounded at least 17 people.

The ground shook more than a mile away when the series of blasts hit. Explosions blew out windows and ripped away much of the front of one building. Police and soldiers rushed to the scene to evacuate victims, carrying a bleeding woman with a swollen belly on a stretcher past burning and mangled cars. Another woman wailed as she clutched her child. In the courtyard, a blast crater extended at least two stories deep.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the Mariupol strike trapped children and others under debris.

“A children’s hospital. A maternity hospital,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address, switching to Russian to express horror at the strike. “What kind of country is this, the Russian Federation, which is afraid of hospitals, afraid of maternity hospitals, and destroys them?”

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On this day in 1842 …

Queen’s University was founded in Kingston, Ont.

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In entertainment …

TORONTO _ The Canadian director of Pixar’s latest outing “Turning Red” points to innumerable elements that could have torpedoed her mission to spotlight a Chinese-Canadian girl in Toronto wrestling with puberty.

Domee Shi packs it full of Canuck jokes, Asian references, immigrant experiences, thirsty teen girl obsessions and a not-so-subtle reference to menstruation.

Her heroine is Mei, a 13-year-old girl in 2002 Toronto who discovers that she has one big problem: she turns into a big red panda whenever she gets a little too excited or anxious.

Shi marvels that she “never” received pushback on any of those unique elements from the studio, possibly because they were all in her very first pitch, which she made just after the success of her 2018 Oscar-winning Pixar short “Bao.”

“I pitched two other ideas that weren’t this personal or Canadian, so they had others to choose from,” Shi notes. “But I think those are the things that drew Pixar to this idea. They had never seen a story that explores a universal coming-of-age through such a uniquely specific lens of a Chinese Canadian girl.”

It helps that the film is anchored not only by a performance from California newcomer Rosalie Chiang as Mei, but Ottawa’s Sandra Oh as her mother Ming, who flips the tiger mom stereotype on its head, granting her greater depth.

“I’m just so pleased to be a part of that storytelling in fleshing out the complicated relationship between a mother and a daughter, and that Ming is a full-fledged character,” Oh says.

More than anything, she has high praise for Shi, the first woman and woman of colour to receive sole directing credit for a Pixar feature.: “You need to have a helmer who knows exactly what she wants to get. Hats off to her for having such a clear vision.”

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Did you see this?

Olga Renneberg’s mother arrived in Canada this week with nothing but the clothes she was wearing and a backpack with her essentials.

She says she told her to pack the most important things — money and documents — because a suitcase would only slow her down from escaping war-torn Ukraine.

Her mother arrived in Edmonton late Monday after leaving her home in Kyiv on Friday.

Renneberg says many people in the Ukrainian-Canadian community would welcome Ukrainians fleeing war, but it’s a matter of them being able to reach Canada.

A Ukrainian food company in central Alberta has said it will employ and support some refugees.

Baba Jenny’s Ukrainian Foods, based in Mannville, hopes to welcome 15 Ukrainians in the coming year.

Karolina Rabianska of Georgetown, Ontario, says she’s also willing to help the refugees in any possible way should some arrive in her area.

The 26-year-old says she has started a GoFundMe page and raised about five-hundred dollars to send to her relatives in Poland to host Ukrainian families at their homes.

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This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 10, 2022.

The Canadian Press

by Canadian Press

Trudeau heads to Warsaw, Charest to join leadership race: In The News for March 10

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