MONTREAL - A former researcher with Quebec's hydro utility who is facing economic espionage charges said Thursday he was applying for work at universities in China as a contingency plan because he was unhappy at Hydro-Québec.

Yuesheng Wang, 38, maintained under cross-examination that there was nothing nefarious about his interest in moving back to China. He explained that it was tied to Hydro-Québec's unwillingness to extend his work visa for more than year at a time and his experience at the institute around 2017 and 2018.

“At that time, my thinking was if I’m not happy at Hydro-Québec, going back to China to be a full professor was one of my options," Wang testified.

The Crown argued that Wang, while he was working at Hydro-Québec, applied to work at Chinese universities under the framework of the Thousand Talents program, a recruitment tool used by the Chinese government to attract foreign-trained scientists to return to work in China.

Religious groups can relax: the federal government is not planning to remove their charitable tax status.

Not that it ever planned to do that. But now we have an official word from the office of Liberal MP Karina Gould, chair of the House of Commons Finance Committee, that it’s not going to happen.

In an email to Al Postma, the Canadian executive director of the Christian Reformed Church (a copy of which I have seen), her office stated there is no plan to remove religion as a charitable purpose from the Canadian Income Tax Act.

Charitable status for religious organizations “is not under review, and this government has no plans to change that,” her office said. “Any suggestion otherwise is false.”

BANGKOK (AP) — It often starts with a text message asking if you are available on weekends, looking for a part-time job or you get a simple “hello” from an unknown number. Halfway across the world, a laborer is usually pulling in 12-16 hour days, sending non-stop messages, hoping someone will take the bait.

The ultimate goal is always to take your money — victims have lost tens of billions to scams and hundreds of thousands of people are in forced labor to keep the schemes going. These workers are often housed in massive complexes scattered across southeast Asia, where the industry has flourished.

Here is why rooting out the scamming industry is such a complex issue:

The crackdown in Myanmar

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Congressional Budget Office on Thursday confirmed it had been hacked, potentially disclosing important government data to malicious actors.

The small government office, with some 275 employees, provides objective, impartial analysis to support lawmakers during the budget process. It is required to produce a cost estimate for nearly every bill approved by a House or Senate committee and will weigh in earlier when asked to do so by lawmakers.

Caitlin Emma, a spokeswoman for the CBO said in a written statement that the agency “has identified the security incident, has taken immediate action to contain it, and has implemented additional monitoring and new security controls to further protect the agency’s systems going forward.”

The Washington Post first wrote the story on the CBO hack, stating that the intrusion was done by a suspected foreign actor, citing four anonymous people familiar with the situation.

Alex Buckman devoted his life to ensuring that the atrocities of the Holocaust would not be forgotten and would never be repeated. He frequently spoke at public events and in schools about his experiences as a child survivor of the Holocaust, volunteered with the Holocaust Education Centre and child survivor group in Vancouver, and in April 2023, accompanied a group of Canadian Jewish high school students on the March of the Living.

The March of the Living (MOL) is an international Holocaust education program that brings students, and sometimes adults, to the sites of the killing fields and camps that were located in Poland. A highlight of the trip is a silent three-kilometre march from Auschwitz to Birkenau.

In the course of the 2023 trip, Buckman shared details of his life story with the young Canadians, describing to them those he lost and those he grieved, while reiterating his life-long conviction that kindness and humanity could make the world a much better place.

Born in Belgium in 1939, Buckman was hidden with 11 different non-Jewish families as a toddler. At four he was delivered to an orphanage, where he remained until the end of the war. When it became clear that his parents would not be coming to get him — as they had been murdered in Auschwitz — his aunt, Rebecca (Becky) Teitelbaum, took him in and raised him as her own.

Every year, right around the time Winnipeg finally starts to flirt with spring, I get some version of the same message:

“Mitch, I need to lose 25 pounds by summer. Let’s go.”

It always arrives with urgency, like fat loss operates on panic. And I get it. People want to feel better in their clothes. They want energy back. They want the belly to shrink. They want to head into warm weather with some confidence.

But there’s a problem with most weight-loss plans, and it’s not a lack of motivation.

I was talking to an American friend who, like me, is appalled by the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Minneapolis and other parts of the U.S.

I told her how helpless I feel as a Canadian while watching the U.S. dissolve into fear, uncertainty and mistrust. Apart from not travelling to that country and not buying American products, what can I do?

“You can write,” she said. Sure, I replied, but I didn’t think it was appropriate for me to dump on America; I don’t live there. “Go ahead,” she said. “We are dumping on ourselves.”

With my American friend’s encouragement, I will say something. But not in my words; I’ll let some American Christians do it.