For a Monday

This just in:

A massive fire broke out at Notre Dame Cathedral in central Paris on Monday afternoon, sending flames shooting out of the roof of the Catholic landmark and toppling its iconic spire.

The cause of the blaze is not yet known and there have no reports of injuries or fatalities.

Fire officials told Agence France-Presse that the fire was potentially linked to the renovation of the building. Scaffolding could be seen ablaze on the roof of the famous façade.

Church spokesman Andre Finot told French media that the fire cathedral’s frame was also aflame.

“Everything is burning,” Finot said.

There was good news.

“Good news: all the works of art were saved,” reported French journalist Nicolas Delesalle. “The treasure of the Cathedral is intact, the Crown of thorns, the Holy sacraments.”

An accident? An act of arson? A visual of the state of post-religious Europe?





A shooting in Penticton leave four people dead:

Four people are dead and a man is in custody after a shooting spree in Penticton on Monday.

The incident prompted a massive police response, in which officers asked people to stay out of a large area of downtown Penticton.

The province of Ontario challenges the carbon tax in court:

The Ontario government’s fight is not with whether climate change is real — “it is” — but with whether the federal government is attempting a massive constitutional power grab to impose a carbon tax on provincial residents, the Ontario Court of Appeal heard Monday.

Ontario Attorney General lawyer Josh Hunter said the federal government is insisting that the only way to lower carbon dioxide emissions is through a pricing scheme that raises the cost of fuels like gasoline and natural gas.

“Quite frankly, that’s a policy question,” Hunter said. “Which legislature is the question we’re here to answer.”

Ontario is challenging the constitutionality of the federal carbon backstop legislation that imposes a carbon pricing scheme in provinces that have balked at putting a price on emissions.

Justin's favourite country is China. He actively pursued a trade with China. Chinese businessmen have contributed to his dad's foundation. He was reluctant to have Meng Wanzhou extradited to the US:

When I was last in Canada — in Ottawa, a few months ago — I was pretty dismayed at the extent of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) influence in the federal Parliament. I should probably not say any more to stay on the right side of the libel laws.

I have also been dismayed by the brazenness of friends of the Chinese Communist Party and their activities. I’m thinking, for instance, of Chinese students on university campuses, and the really extraordinary attack on the Tibetan student who was elected … president of the (University of Toronto Scarborough campus) student union.

My response is to ask what are the authorities doing about this — the university authorities and political authorities? I think that’s the real measure of China’s influence.

I’m kind of dismayed at the apparent unwillingness of authorities to defend those essential democratic principles, including in this case the right of a minority person to participate in the democratic process on campus.

Perhaps there should be no police presence in Nunavut at all. Everyone could hope that there would no reason to ever require the police. That should work:

The lawsuit alleges Mounties aren’t trained in how to deal with possible suicides. It claims officers don’t speak the language of the people and don’t use the communication tools they have.

It also refers to “the personal and cultural biases of the officers … both unexpressed and which they had expressed in the community.”

It accuses the RCMP of failing to recruit Inuktut-speaking officers or civilian members who could build bridges with local people.

A statement of defence has not been filed and none of the allegations has been proven. The RCMP did not respond to a call for comment.

A note about DNA:

Pike says the mitochondrial DNA that has caught his attention is matrilineal, and he suspects it came from a woman who travelled to Newfoundland around the early 1600s and had daughters, who then passed the mitochondrial DNA down to their daughters, and so on.

The first woman’s identity and country of origin could reveal a previously unknown settler population, or at the very least shed light on the story of an unwittingly influential ancestor, Pike said.

Yes, about that:

Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is found outside the nucleus of the cell and is thus independent of the chromosomes. Like the y-chromosome, mtDNA is not recombined or shuffled, and it is passed more or less unchanged from mothers to their children, both males and females. Males do not pass on their mtDNA, so it can only be used to study maternal lines. There are disadvantages to mtDNA in comparison to y-chromosomes as well as some advantages. ...

 

Males as well as females can be tested to determine their mtDNA. This is useful if a matriline has recently come to an end or is about to end for lack of daughters. 

Just putting it out there. 

A Scottish missionary is being honoured in Hungary for refusing to abandon her students during the Holocaust:

Thousands of Hungarians attended the annual March of the Living in Budapest on Sunday to commemorate victims of the Holocaust, including Jane Haining, a Scottish missionary who refused to abandon her Jewish charges during World War Two.

Israel's Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem estimates that 565,000 Hungarian Jews were killed in the Holocaust, most of them deported to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland between May and July 1944.

Haining, who had taught Christian and Jewish girls at a boarding school of the Church of Scotland's Mission in Budapest, was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944 and later died in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

"From April 5, we had to put on the yellow star. Miss Haining called in the children and she cried with us," said 83-year-old Agnes Rostas, one of Haining's former Jewish pupils, who was eight at the time of the Scottish missionary's arrest.

"Miss Haining was a very warm-hearted human being. I have never met anyone like her all my life."

Within half an hour of Haining's arrest, the remaining teachers packed up the children and shuttled them off to their parents, Rostas said.

Another milestone in human achievement:

Israeli researchers have printed a 3-D heart using a patient’s own cells, something they say could be used to patch diseased hearts — and possibly, full transplants.

The heart the Tel Aviv University team printed in about three hours is too small for humans — about 2.5 centimetres, or the size of a rabbit’s heart. But it’s the first to be printed with all blood vessels, ventricles and chambers, using an ink made from the patient’s own biological materials.

“It’s completely biocompatible and matches the patient,” reducing the chances of rejection inside the body, said Tal Dvir, the professor who directed the project.

Researchers took fatty tissue from a patient, then separated it into cellular and non-cellular components. The cells were then “reprogrammed” to become stem cells, which turned into heart cells. The non-cellular materials were turned into a gel that served as the bio-ink for printing, Dvir explained.