Ali Does It Herself has a blog up on a great idea for food storage.   I’m all about getting rid of plastic for the environment, and this is a way to do that.  I usually use glass for storing food,  but this looks promising, too.

A young masked warrior at #OccupyINAC Vancouver, April 18, 2016. Photo via Facebook.

Occupations of offices of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC) continue in Toronto, Winnipeg and Vancouver, along with protests across the country and a tent camp in Regina.  Below is the statement from Vancouver #Occupy INAC (hopefully we’ll get a text version to post).

REGINA,Sk: APRIL 19, 2016 – The landlord has put up a temporary fence to keep protesters at the INAC office on city property on the 1800 block Albert St. . Photo by Bryan Schlosser

by Kerry Benjoe, Regina Leader-Post, April 19, 2016

A fence wasn’t enough to deter protesters in front of the Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC) office in Regina Tuesday.

For a third day the office remained closed to the public as protesters maintained a presence outside. At 3 p.m., a six-foot metal fence was placed on the property line in front of the INAC building, but protesters only moved their tents outside of the fence onto public property. They plan to stay put.

I recently did some research on a subject I knew little about, social entrepreneurship.  I went to the library and checked out David Bornstein’s book, How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas.  After all, a blurb on the cover from a NY Times review says it is “A bible in the field.”  Social entrepreneurship is often non-profit and is best known in a global sense—the Grameen Bank and all those NGOs (non-governmental organizations) that are registered with the United Nations.  Bornstein explains that social entrepreneurs bring characteristics of business and competition into the way “the ‘noncommercial’ or ‘social’ business of society is structured. Around the world, this work has been dominated by centralized decision making and top-down, usually governmental, institutions. It has been managed a little like a planned economy.”(p. 276)

But, continues Bornstein, governments are often not ideal: “As in business, advancing…

The second battle in the well-funded war against job protections for school teachers was won last week by teachers. The Washington Post’s Emma Brown  explains that a California appeals court on Thursday overturned the Vergara lawsuit and “upheld the state’s laws regarding teacher tenure, dismissal and layoffs, handing a major victory to teachers unions.”

Last week’s “ruling reverses a lower court’s 2014 decision that found after a 10-week trial that job protection statutes for teachers had created illegal inequalities: Poor and minority children were more likely to be saddled with ineffective teachers who were difficult to fire. The plaintiffs in the case presented a new civil rights argument against teacher tenure laws, and when it was successful, it was widely expected to be the first of many similar legal challenges in other states.” In their lawsuit, plaintiffs had alleged that job protections for teachers caused the poorest children to be…

Sue Deranger with the Newo Yotina Friendship Centre protests outside Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC) offices in Regina. Activists have been occupying INAC offices in Toronto, Winnipeg, and James Bay following news of the suicide crisis in the Attawapiskat First Nation in northern Ontario. Occupiers are demanding that the federal government offer more than band-aid “solutions” Don Healy / Regina Leader-Post, April 15, 2016

by Kerry Benjoe, Regina Leader-Post, April 15, 2016

The doors may have been locked, but that did not stop a noon-hour protest on one of Regina’s busiest streets from taking place.

On Friday, protestors carrying signs some of which read: Colonialism Kills, Indigenous Lives Matter and INAC = Canadian Apartheid gathered outside the Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC) office on Albert Street. It was held in solidarity with similar protests happening across the country.

Graphic: Rebel Youth Magazine

by Jay Watts, Rebel Youth, April 15, 2016

In 1995, a report issued as part of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples called suicide “one of the most urgent problems facing aboriginal communities.” 22 years later, Canada’s ongoing colonial project is still taking a staggering and gruesome toll on the health and lives of First Nations. In Attawapiskat, a community of close to 2,000, there were 11 suicide attempts last Saturday [April 9, 2016], on top of 100 suicide attempts since last September.