TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Israel’s Cabinet unanimously approved a proposal on Sunday to designate violence against Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during World War I as a genocide.

The step, which still needs approval in Parliament, reflects deteriorating ties between Israel and Turkey. Turkey has fiercely lobbied to prevent countries from officially recognizing the mass deaths of Armenians around 1915 as a genocide, even as Armenians have pushed for it.

Historians estimate that up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks around the time of World War I, an event widely viewed by scholars as the first genocide of the 20th century. Turkey denies that the deaths constituted genocide, saying the toll has been inflated and that those killed were victims of civil war and unrest.

For years, Israel never officially broached the subject for fear of angering Turkey, but that relationship has soured over the past two decades, especially as the most recent wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran have dragged on.

Manitobans are being asked if they want to end seasonal time changes by making either standard or daylight savings time permanent in the province.

So far, three-quarters of those who answered a survey by Winnipeg-based Prairie Research Associates support an end to seasonal time changes. Of those, 34 per cent prefer a move to permanent daylight time — which means the sun would rise and set later each day.

Eighteen per cent prefer standard time, while 21 per cent just want the province to choose one time or another.

Talk about time change got me thinking about how such a change could impact religious groups.

Graydon Nicholas, a retired lawyer, judge and an elder from the Wolastoqey First Nation in New Brunswick, understands only too well the negative impact of colonization on Indigenous people in the Americas.

He also understands the role the Roman Catholic Church played in it through what became known as the Doctrine of Discovery — the idea that by “discovering” the Americas, colonizing countries like Spain and Portugal could claim Indigenous land as their own.

But Nicholas, who is Roman Catholic, also believes the story is more complicated than most people realize and also incomplete without noting opposition from those in the Church during that age of discovery and conquest.

That includes Dominican priests such as Antonio de Montesinos, who publicly condemned Spanish and Portuguese abuses against Indigenous people in the Americas during that time.

Due to unprecedented levels of antisemitism in Canada in the last few years, most organizers of Jewish community events, in Winnipeg as elsewhere across the country, no longer publicly advertise the location of those events, choosing instead to share that information only with those who are registered in advance and, in some cases, only to those who provide proof of identification.

The fact that the organizers of a conference entitled Faith Not Fear still felt the need to follow that practice is less ironic than it is pragmatic. Not publicly identifying the conference’s location seemed to be the only way to ensure that its participants could safely meet to learn about protecting themselves, their community institutions and their freedom to walk through university campuses and city streets without being harassed because of their religion, culture or an international conflict in which they play no part.

Faith Not Fear: Building Jewish Leadership for a New Era in Canada took place in Vaughan, Ont., on the evening of Sunday, June 14. It was, as Simon Wolle, CEO of conference co-sponsor B’nai Brith Canada, explains, “a fresh initiative bringing together voices and organizations at a time when there is a national crisis of antisemitism.”

“The conference was inspired by the need to address Canada’s systemic failure to address threats to the Jewish community, the ongoing threat to Canadian values and its effect on the lived experience of Jewish Canadians in particular,” Wolle said.

There’s a rule in nature that you can’t only do one thing. If you dam a river to make hydroelectricity, you will impede the fish trying to swim upriver to spawn. If you drain wetlands, flooding usually increases elsewhere. If you remove trees from steep slopes, erosion results.

In December, last year, Canada experienced the truth of that rule in another way. That’s when Parliament passed Bill C-3 to extend citizenship to those born outside of Canada.

The new rules retroactively restore Canadian citizenship to someone who was born outside of Canada before December 15, 2025 and who can prove that an ancestor, such as grandparent or great-grandparent, was a Canadian citizen on or after January 1, 1947.

Called the Act to Amend the Citizenship Act, the bill was designed to fix a problem that arose after an Ontario court ruled the “first-generation limit” on citizenship was unconstitutional.

“As an observant Jew who was celebrating Shavuot, a holiday mentioned in the Hebrew Bible as a time of rejoicing, I was shocked to open my paper on Friday morning to see our premier indulging in an antisemitic Christian trope — apparently being tough on drug dealers is ‘Old Testament,’ and having love and compassion for drug users is ‘New Testament’?”

That’s what a writer of a letter to the editor of the Free Press said last week. He was writing in response to a remark made by premier Wab Kinew about his approach to drug dealers and drug users in the province.

At an event on May 21, Kinew said Manitoba’s stance would be “Old Testament for the drug dealers, New Testament for the drug users.”

By that he meant there will be “harm reduction and compassion and recovery” for users, but “law enforcement” for those who deal drugs.

Decades have passed since We Shall Overcome was deemed the unofficial anthem of the American civil rights and anti-war movements, but the folk song — originally a gospel spiritual — remains as relevant today, and as frequently sung, as it was back in the 1960s. In the last few months alone, the song’s lyrics have loudly echoed through the crowds at non-violent rallies, protests and sit-ins around the world, and been performed onstage by renowned artists, social activists and community choirs.

One of those community choirs is the Canadian Mennonite University’s (CMU) Voices for Peace. Voices for Peace was launched in March 2026 as an extension of the Anabaptist university’s Singing Resistance program. That program had brought like-minded voices together earlier in the winter to sing in solidarity with those being affected by the ICE raids in Minneapolis.

“We started getting questions about how this work might extend to community protests,” says Anneli Loepp Thiessen, an assistant professor of music at the university and one of the choir co-ordinators. “So we began Voices for Peace as a mobile, rapid-response group that can share music for peace at protests or other community events.”

The mobile, rapid-response nature of the group means that it is not a traditional or typical choir.