Canada
American reporter working for VICE News Canada
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On Wednesday, activist investors representing some of the world's biggest funds tried, and failed, to change how two of America's largest oil companies approach climate change. This time, the activists pushing for action on climate change from Exxon Mobil and Chevron weren't just in the street, as has happened often before.
On Tuesday morning, an environmental group filed emergency legal action in an effort to block the restarting of a nuclear reactor at a New York State power plant, where the group alleges that infrastructure failings have not been sufficiently investigated.
On Independence Day, 2013, with kids gone for the summer, a series of messages were sent to staff members at the Miller Street School in Newark, New Jersey, reminding them to do a job vital to ensuring the health and safety of the school's students - changing filters installed on every water fountain and faucet in the building.
Last week, when Didji Ishalook drew a bead on a odd-looking bear walking over the still snow-covered ground near his home in a remote part of northern Canada, he knew it would be an important moment.
Kathleen Tomczyk won't go see President Barack Obama when he visits Flint, Michigan on Wednesday. She's happy he's coming, but she doesn't have time. Instead, the 72-year-old bookkeeper will be at St.
To make payroll each month, Dori Dempster used to have to carry cash to the bank in $10,000 chunks. And that, she said, was before the credit union where her medical marijuana dispensary banked abruptly closed its account. Since it opened in Vancouver in 2008, The Medicinal Cannabis Dispensary has had cash flow that many small businesses would envy.
Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder is hoping that a drink of water will help to replenish lost faith in his administration and - perhaps - temper calls for him to resign over his administration's handling of the Flint water crisis.
Despite cranking his car's air conditioner to full-blast, Sandeep Sarma struggles not to sweat each morning as he creeps along the 21 miles of traffic-clogged road to his office in the Indian city of Bangalore.
Tigers are clawing closer to a comeback. After being pushed to the brink of extinction in the wild by a century of hunting and habitat destruction, roughly 3,890 of the world's largest cats are now spread across 13 countries in Asia, according to data compiled by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
Dangerous levels of lead have contaminated the drinking water of school children in Newark, New Jersey since at least 2012, school officials have announced. Last week, the 35,054-student school district shut off fountains and shipped bottled water into nearly half its schools after annual testing found that 10 percent of water samples contained lead above the legal "action level" set by the US Environmental Protection Agency.
A week after it was revealed that lead was tainting the water of public schools in Newark, New Jersey, school officials continue to remain silent about how long and at what levels lead has been present in the drinking water of the city's schools.
Water filters installed on drinking fountains and taps to protect school children in Newark, New Jersey from the toxic effects of lead were not consistently changed as suggested by the manufacturer and required by the school district's own policy.
School officials were concerned with lead in the water of schools in Newark, New Jersey more than two years before the revelation this week that water in nearly half of the city's public schools contains potentially dangerous levels of the toxic heavy metal.
Lead has been detected in the drinking water of thirty schools in New Jersey's largest city, state and city officials announced Wednesday. Throughout Newark, school water fountains have been shut off and notices not to drink tap water posted after annual testing by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) found elevated levels of the toxic metal in 30 of the city's 66 public schools.
Chinese media reports that police have made a big break in a toxic waste case that came to international attention after a restaurant owner died from inhaling poisonous gases coming from his kitchen drain.
VICE News is closely tracking global environmental change. Check out the Tipping Point blog here . For the world's largest producer of greenhouse gas, a possible drop in emissions would seem to be welcome news. But China has been swift to deny studies that suggest its output of carbon dioxide has already peaked.
Roughly 1.3 million Chinese workers will climb out of mines in the coming years and file out of coal-fired power plants for the last time. Some 500,000 colleagues, laid off from the steel sector, will join them. Together this mass will face the uncertainty of China's shifting economy and effort to turn towards cleaner energy.
From almonds to apples, our food supply relies in large part on the industriousness of buzzing pollinators. But human activities could wipe out many birds, bees, bats, and butterflies, along with hundreds of billions of dollars of food they help grow each year, according to a new United Nations report.
Don Briere was once convicted and sent to prison for running British Columbia's largest network of marijuana grow ops. So on Wednesday, when a Canadian judge ruled that the ban on growing medicinal marijuana at home was unconstitutional, Briere was elated.
At the behest of Uncle Sam, the World Trade Organization (WTO) has spiked parts of a plan to spread solar energy across India - where more than 300 million people lack electricity. Yesterday, a WTO arbitration panel sided with the United States, which in 2013 complained that India's massive initiative to develop solar power discriminates against American business.
Canada's largest chain of pharmacies is looking to cash in on Justin Trudeau's green rush, as they test the waters on selling medical marijuana. And it looks like they've paid for a team of high-price lobbyists to get the job done.
Canadian medical marijuana patients have won the right to grow their own bud in a landmark court ruling released Wednesday. Federal Judge Michael Phelan has ruled in favor of four British Columbia residents, declaring the country's medical marijuana regime, known as the Marijuana for Medical Purposes Regulations (MMPR), unconstitutional.
VICE News is closely tracking global environmental change. Check out the Tipping Point blog here . New research suggests that the world's oceans rose faster in the last 100 years than they did in nearly all of the preceding 3,000. Between 1900 and 2000 seas swelled an average of 14 centimeters (5.5 inches) worldwide - a rate unprecedented in history.
Even as lead poisoned their water, residents of Flint, Michigan paid the highest prices in the country to keep the tap on, according to a survey of the 500 largest water systems in the United States. In 2015, a typical household in Flint paid $864.32 a year for the undrinkable water, says the report authored by Food and Water Watch.
Air pollution caused more than 5.5 million premature deaths in 2013, with more than half of those occurring in China and India, according to a new study, and pollution mortalities are expected to continue rising. Researchers found that poor air quality in China and India - the world's fastest growing economies - killed 1.6 million and 1.4 million people in those nations, respectively.
Green groups and the American government are expected to lobby the global community to classify polar bears as a species threatened with extinction. But Canada, home to sixty percent of the world's polar bears, is prepared to fight back.
Two-and-a-half years after a train carrying millions of gallons of crude oil derailed and exploded in the small Quebec town of Lac-Mégantic, scientists are finding deformities in the fish living in nearby rivers. That's led the government to a revelation: crude oil is bad for fish. No shit.
For decades, a battle raged amidst the trees of Great Bear Rainforest, with First Nations, environmentalists and the lumber industry clashing over logging and land rights. But on Monday, the government of British Columbia announced that 'the war of the woods' would give way to peace agreement.
Five alleged Hells Angels charged with murder, criminal conspiracy and more will walk free, after a Quebec judge brought their trial to a shocking and abrupt end. On Friday morning, Superior Court Justice James Brunton ordered a stop to the jury trial because of abuses and irregularities in the Crown's handling of the case.
The first global regulations on greenhouse gas emissions from the aviation sector are being decried by prominent climate scientists and green groups as serving industry ahead of the environment. On Monday, the aviation agency of the United Nations announced a set of emission-reduction standards for airplanes.
On August 22, Don Wesley Sr. loaded supplies into a small boat and pushed off the shore near his tribal village of Lax Kw'alaams, bound for an uninhabited island 600 miles north of Vancouver. As the hereditary chief motored through the chill coastal waters of British Columbia, his son, Don Wesley Jr.
Every day cars, trucks, and semi-trailers stop in front of St. Mary's Church in Flint, Michigan, some coming from nearby towns and others from as far off as Cleveland and Chicago. But all of the vehicles carry the same precious cargo: clean water.
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) faces intensifying criticism for its finding that hydraulic fracturing has no "widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water" - and the pushback comes not from activists, but from the agency's own science advisors.
British Columbia may be known for its bud now, but Canada has had a complicated relationship with marijuana over the years. A synopsis: 1922 Emily Murphy, an iconic early feminist and Canada's first female judge, published "The Black Candle," a 400-page screed against drug use and the threat of the "black and yellow races."
On Thursday night, Liberal leader Justin Trudeau made a surprise appearance at a campaign event in a hip, nameless bar in the heart of a Montreal riding that has been enemy territory for nearly a decade. Leafy Outremont is Thomas Mulcair country, but the NDP leader was 300 miles north on this particular night, campaigning against the Conservatives in the Sagneau region of Quebec.
The government of Canada on Saturday announced new measures to accelerate its process for accepting refugees into the country, with the intent of admitting 10,000 new refugees from Syria by September of next year.
The C8 Carbine is advertised as having "been battle proven in harsh combat environments ... for over 25 years," but, according to the Toronto police, the weapon's lightness and accuracy also makes it well-suited for Canada's urban environments. Plus, it can pierce body armor.
As one of the largest blizzards ever recorded barreled down on the shore town of Cape May, New Jersey, local restaurateur Keith Laudeman was more worried with rising tides than with falling snow. Laudeman and his staff at the Lobster House began moving equipment and cars up to higher ground last Wednesday - but to no avail.
Every day in Muskeg River, Alberta, dump trucks the size of small buildings lumber back and forth from an open pit mine, carrying tens of thousands of pounds of slick black sand - the raw material for what US President Barack Obama called Canada's "extraordinarily dirty" oil.
Decades of gradually rising temperatures culminated in two hours of "catastrophic" flooding in Canada's Northwest Territories, as a small lake burst through its melting embankment and sent tens of thousands of cubic meters of water crashing into a neighboring valley.
In the midst of a tight three-way race, Canada's Conservative prime minister eked out a huge victory in the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement on Monday - managing to safeguard the country's highly protected dairy industry.
Hundreds of Canadian university professors are condemning the campaign strategy of Stephen Harper's Conservative Party, which they allege has turned, in the last weeks of the election, to mongering fear and hate in order to win votes.
As oil prices continue to drop towards an uncertain bottom, tensions between environmentalist and industry are mounting around another natural resource: Canada's forests. A long brewing dispute over the largest undisturbed boreal forest on earth, nearly 2-million square miles of pines and firs stretched across northern Canada, began to heat up this week when 13 American environmental advocacy groups wrote the governments of Ontario and Quebec urging them to support new conservation efforts.
It was all cheers and free beers at Montreal's Queen Elizabeth Hotel on Monday night, as the hundreds of gathered Liberal supporters celebrated the next prime minister of Canada: Justin Trudeau. "Canadians from all across this country sent a clear message tonight.
In the wake of the terror attacks in Burkina Faso that left 29 people dead and dozens more wounded, the mother of one of the six Canadian victims is denouncing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's plan to withdraw Canadian jets from the fight against the Islamic State.
Pillars of light stood on Sunday night amidst the Montreal skyline as a young girl's voice pierced the silence. "Geneviève Bergeron, Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Edward," she read to a vigil assembled in Mount Royal Parc to remember the women murdered in 1989 at the École Polytechnique, in what has come to be known as the Montreal Massacre.
It's taken years for Malaysia's national petroleum company to get its $36 billion fracking project to the point of breaking ground. The massive deal would ship Canadian natural gas to energy-hungry markets in Asia. But with the environmental assessment of nearing completion, political headwind and resistance from First Nations may yet unravel the plan.
The area of frozen ocean that caps the North Pole was smaller this past month than during any January on record. Measurements released last week by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) showed Arctic sea ice at the lowest level since satellite record keeping began in 1979 - roughly 35,000 square miles smaller than 2011's record low and over 400,000 square miles smaller than the historic average.
On a bright morning one week before the start of the Canadian federal election campaign, a veteran warrior of Quebec's separatist movement strapped his feet into the pedals of an old white road bike and began to ride north along the Saint Lawrence River.
A private Canadian university that forbids sex outside the confines of heterosexual marriage has taken its fight to set up a law school to court, in a case that is testing the balance between same-sex equality rights and freedom of religion.
Raif Badawi's children miss him. It's been several years since they were separated from the Saudi blogger, whose imprisonment and punishment of 1,000 lashes has made headlines around the world, and Najwa, 11, Tirad, 10, and Myriam, 7 are adjusting to life as refugees in Sherbrooke, Quebec.
Six years ago a senior diplomat's allegation that Canada was complicit in the torture of Afghan prisoners embroiled the country in a national controversy that nearly toppled the Conservative government. Now, in the lead up to a federal election, a new report renews calls for a judicial inquiry into the explosive affair, arguing that "unanswered questions" remain in this murky chapter of Canada's history.
Ontario has become the first Canadian province to regulate e-cigarettes, as debate over their potential role in tobacco harm-reduction continues. On Tuesday, members of provincial parliament from all three political parties overwhelmingly voted to pass the Making Healthier Choices Act .
In the coming months, a lake in the Northwest Territories is expected to breach the earthen embankment containing it and flow over a cliff, sending tens of thousands of cubic meters of water crashing into a neighboring valley.
Thomas Mulcair shocked politicos recently by sharpening the NDP's stance on a tender political issue, telling a Quebec-based news magazine in clear, unambiguous terms that he opposes the Energy East pipeline. Except he didn't.
A Quebec court has ordered two Montreal police officers to pay $15,000 to a prominent Canadian activist they wrongfully arrested and detained for five days in 2007.
Photo via Flickr user TBEC Review Ray Yeates always assumed he would die a smoker. An adherent of Alcoholics Anonymous with over 35 years hard-fought sobriety, the 66-year-old says that when he found out that Bill W., one of AA's founders, had continued to smoke through emphysema and dependence on an oxygen tank, he became certain that his life would end the same way.
Two Montrealers who earlier this year traveled to the Middle East with the alleged intent of joining the so-called Islamic State (IS) have reportedly returned to Canada. In January, a group of four men and two women, aged 18 and 19, from the Montreal area traveled to Turkey and then Syria with the hope of fighting for IS.
Stock up on your vapes now, because the government is slowly moving to develop regulations on the sale of e-cigarettes.
The publication ban on the name of the Nova Scotia teenager who hanged herself after images of her alleged sexual assault were widely circulated is absurd and contrary to the public good. Her name needs to be heard, and the Crown should categorically forgo prosecuting those who use it.
Last Thursday, more than 2,000 and fewer than 76,000 people marched through the streets of Montreal to protest austerity-and that's as accurate as news reports on the demonstration allow us to be. Media descriptions of the size of the April 2 march by students, trade unionists, professors and others include "a large throng," "thousands," "several thousand," "tens of thousands," "30 thousand," "75 thousand" and more.
Flavour Crafters, one of Canada's largest manufacturers of e-cigarette liquids, received a 26-page report from a chemical analysis laboratory in Durham, North Carolina.
Beginning in 2015, applicants to Montclair State University need not stress over their standardized test scores. Last Monday, July 29, the university announced that it will become one of the more than 800 schools nationwide to make submitting SAT and ACT scores optional for undergraduate applicants.
For years, Nantha Kumar, the eccentric Malaysian chef who slung pad thai from a hole-in-the-wall on Duluth was one of the hidden gems of Montreal's food scene. But in 2011, nearly overnight, Kumar and his restaurant disappeared.
While biking home last night, I was doored. Moments before I would have ridden past a parked car, its front passenger-side door was opened and, with no time to react, I was caught a glancing blow in the leg. The force of my moving body hitting the car door spun me forward, my bike twisting ...
A Muslim teacher once jailed by Canada as a security threat denied on Friday he had radicalized Canadian teens believed to have headed to Syria to fight with Islamic State, saying his school had only brief contact with one of the six students.
Acting state Education Commissioner David Hespe wants to be clear: passing a PARCC test is not a high school graduation requirement, at least through 2018. But earning a satisfactory score on one of the new Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers tests is among the possible options, announced on Oct.
For the first time, in the spring of 2015, students in the Montclair School District will take the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) tests.
"It's amazing to hear that the things that were wrong with the school system when my daughters were in school are still wrong," said Montclair author Valerie Wesley during a Montclair Civil Rights Commission's meeting. Wesley's older daughter is 40.
"A lot of schools were running on Chalk 2.0," joked Barry Haines, the new technology director for the Montclair School District. While this was said in jest, it captures the serious technology deficiencies that have existed in Montclair schools - deficiencies the district has been working to remedy.
In spring of 2015, the Montclair Women's Club will celebrate its centennial. By spring 2016, the club may no longer exist. During a meeting on Tuesday, Sept. 16, Montclair Women's Club President Laurie Waite-Fellner announced to a gathering of 14 members that financial troubles may force the organization to sell its historic home at 82 Union St.
A lesson learned: If you have a football game that goes late into the evening, you can expect the next Board of Education meeting to go even later. The board meeting this past Monday, Oct. 6, saw district officials reporting on how to foster high expectations in Montclair schools, the results of the "district climate survey," and the measures taken to safeguard student data.
Travelers on NJ Transit's Montclair-Boonton Line should anticipate fewer and slower trains in the wake of Tuesday night's derailment. NJ Transit has announced that the derailment, which occurred between the Walnut and Bay Street stations around 6:30 p.m., was caused by the failure of two of the concrete ties which serve to secure the rails.
Where problems of race and economics become entangled, you will find a knot of Gordian difficulty. The members of the Achievement Gap Advisory Panel, the volunteer group set to examine these issues, are clear that there is no fast way to slice through the tangle of racial and socio-economic inequalities that have long existed in Montclair's public schools.
Jake Bleiberg Special to The Gazette MONTREAL - At the intersection of Berri St. and de Maisonneuve Blvd., nestled between the Bibliothèque nationale, the bus terminal and the Université du Québec à Montréal campus, is a square where two worlds converge.
A couple of days spent watching TV is not what a suspension is supposed to be. However, that's how suspensions frequently turn out. To make suspensions something more than quality couch-time and to support some of the Montclair School District's at-risk students, the Montclair Neighborhood Development Corp.
The urge to take a break from daily life and become someone dif- ferent — someone exciting — is one to which we can all relate. It is this longing, combined with the comedy of plastic weaponry and mock com- bat, that is at the heart of the upcom- ing made-in-Montreal web show LARPs: The Series, which premières Monday at larpstheseries.com.
Editor's Note: An earlier draft of this story misstated that the derailment occurred on Wednesday evening when it, in fact, occurred on Tuesday evening. A commuter-laden NJ Transit train derailed yards from the Pine Street crossing in Montclair around 6:20 Tuesday evening.
239,700 is a lot of money to owe, and to overlook. This sum was recently discovered to be owed to the Montclair School District by the Montclair Education Association, the union that represents most of the district's employees.
It has become obvious that a great deal of support for Bill 60 is also energized by fear, intolerance and a false belief that there is such a thing as a right not to feel uncomfortable.
As the Quartier des spectacles attracts vibrant crowds during the summer festival season, this storied city square has become part of the scene without... Jake Bleiberg Special to The Gazette MONTREAL - Place Émilie-Gamelin bears the name of the nun who, in the 1840s, founded the Sisters of Providence and established the Asile de la Providence - a building that the sisters operated as a combination convent, orphanage, and soup kitchen - on the site.
It’s an annual rite of spring for mountain bikers keen to put rubber on dirt after the long winter: riding the illegal trails in the woods of Mount Royal.
"Every student doesn't have to be served pink cupcakes," said the chief academic officer of the Montclair School District, Gail Clarke. The cupcakes are meant explain how the Common Core State Standards affects teachers, a relationship that advocates against education reform have criticized as being overly prescriptive.
MONTREAL - When was the last time you ate out or went to a bar on Prince-Arthur St.? Prince-Arthur St. E., that is, the cobbled stretch between St-Laurent Blvd. and Carré St-Louis. Think about it for a minute. If you're like most Montrealers, it has been a while.