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Senior Royals Join Thousands in London as VE Day Commemorations Begin

Senior Royals Join Thousands in London as VE Day Commemorations Begin

Bloomberg05-05-2025

By THE PRESS ASSOCIATION (Josh Payne, PA Chief Reporter)
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Senior royals have joined thousands of people in London to observe a military procession to begin commemorations marking the end of the Second World War in Europe.
Nato allies joined 1,300 members of the UK armed forces for the parade, with the words of Sir Winston Churchill's 1945 victory speech spoken by actor Timothy Spall kicking off events for the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day.

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Community safety, modernization: Whitehorse's council has adopted a roadmap for its term
Community safety, modernization: Whitehorse's council has adopted a roadmap for its term

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time7 hours ago

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Community safety, modernization: Whitehorse's council has adopted a roadmap for its term

Whitehorse's council has its sights set on six priorities for this term. On Monday night, councillors officially adopted their strategic priorities for the next three and a half years — broad goals such as infrastructure investment, community safety and supporting growth. Mayor Kirk Cameron joined Yukon Morning's guest host Joseph Ho to chat through the priorities. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. How does council decide on its strategic priorities? Our strategic priorities become the framework, if you will, for this council moving forward. Unlike the Legislative Assembly, you don't have one singular platform following an election — you get seven people, all elected independently with their own ideas, their own thinking about issues that are important. They've all been out knocking on doors, listening to Whitehorse residents, and then we all come into council chambers with different perspectives. So our first priority is to get alignment among the seven of us on where we want to take the next four years. What kind of public feedback went into the setting of these priorities? It started at the election. It starts with all of us knocking on doors, listening to Whitehorse residents talking about where they see our city going. I think the big one I heard is the need for infrastructure. First, we're being impacted by growth. This city is, I think, fifth fastest growing in Canada. We're built around municipal infrastructure that, in many cases, goes back to the 1940s and '50s. And then we have climate change. We have the Robert Service Way escarpment to worry about. We've also got our aging water treatment facility. These things are all colliding at the same time to drive the cost up for us quite dramatically. So these strategic priorities connect exactly with this topic around infrastructure drivers. The word 'modernize' comes up a lot in these priorities. Why is renewal such a big theme? Whitehorse has this really interesting journey, starting out as being a pretty quiet little stop on the Yukon River, to becoming a major transportation centre in 1952. We ended up the capital city of the Yukon because of how much that transportation meant to the territory. But throughout all of that history, we kind of cobbled together Whitehorse. We had that Second World War expansion from new federal programming in the 1960s that drove a lot of infrastructure. And so it's been kind of piecemeal over time — growing, but not necessarily all growing in the same direction. We also had a mine here, Whitehorse Copper, which again, drove a certain way and a certain approach to how this city evolved through that period in the '60s and '70s. Now is a time we believe where we can get focused. 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Trump threatens protesters who rain on his military parade Saturday ‘will be met with very big force'

President Donald Trump on Tuesday threatened to forcibly put down any protests that spoil the military parade he has ordered up for his birthday on Saturday to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army's founding during the American Revolutionary War. Speaking in the Oval Office following an impromptu event to discuss forest management ahead of the upcoming summer wildfire season, Trump was riffing on what he described as violent excesses by protesters who've been demonstrating against Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in Los Angeles when he was asked about the possibility of protests against the June 14 parade. The president said it would be an 'amazing day' and cited the 'tanks ... planes ... all sorts of things' that will be on display during the spectacle, which is ostensibly meant to mark the Army's semiquincentennial. He also compared the parade, which breaks from the American tradition that largely eschews militaristic or jingoistic displays of the sort routinely seen in authoritarian countries, to European celebrations of the end of the Second World War. 'We won the war, and we're the only country that didn't celebrate it, and we're going to be celebrating big on Saturday. We're going to have a lot of and if there's any protest that wants to come out, they will be met with very big force,' Trump said. He reiterated the explicit threat a moment later, telling 'those people who want to protest' that they would be 'met with very big force' once more. He also opined further that any protest against the parade on Saturday would consist only of 'people who hate our country.' The president has a long history of pushing for the use of state violence against protests, which he considers to be a personal affront and a reflection of weakness on his part. During protests for racial justice in Washington following the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis, Minnesota police officer, Trump reportedly became enraged after news reports indicated he'd briefly been taken to a bunker beneath the White House after demonstrators breached a Secret Service fence line. He also reportedly pushed to have military and law enforcement open fire on other protesters, asking then his then-Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, General Mark Milley, why National Guard troops deployed as a result of the demonstrations could not shoot protesters in the legs. Trump's ominous threat against protesters exercising their constitutional right to free speech came just moments after he mused aloud about invoking the 1807 Insurrection Act, which would allow him to deploy active duty military forces against the protesters in Los Angeles. Asked whether he'd make use of the 200-year-old law, which would provide an exception to a separate law forbidding active duty troops from engaging in domestic law enforcement, he replied: 'If there's an insurrection, I would certainly invoke it.' Trump referred to television footage of some protesters breaking up concrete bollards to make projectiles and claimed those violent actors were now in custody because of his decision to deploy thousands of National Guard soldiers to Los Angeles without consulting California's Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom. 'They were throwing it at our police. They were throwing it at our soldiers that are there, and we got it stopped, and we have them in custody right now. Look, if we didn't get involved right now, Los Angeles would be burning just like it was burning a number of months ago, with all the houses that were lost, Los Angeles right now would be on fire, and we have it in great shape,' he said. Pressed further on how he'd determine whether the sporadic and limited violence met the definition of 'insurrection' under law, the president says there had been 'certain areas of Los Angeles' that met those criteria over the weekend and attributed the violence to 'paid insurrectionists' and 'paid troublemakers.' He also said he last spoke with Newsom 'a day ago' to complain about the job he's done during the unrest in Los Angeles. 'He's done a bad job, causing a lot of death and a lot of lot of potential death if we didn't send out the National Guard, and last time we gave him a little additional help, you would have Los Angeles would be burning right now,' he said.

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time14 hours ago

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France says Palestinian Authority makes ‘unprecedented commitments' to reform ahead of conference on statehood

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