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Thailand counts votes in key election with opposition favored to win

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:11:16 GMT

BANGKOK (AP) — Vote counting was underway Sunday in Thailand’s general election, touted as a pivotal chance for change nine years after incumbent Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha first came to power in a 2014 coup. He is now running against the daughter of the politician who is the military’s top nemesis.The polls closed at 5 p.m. and some results were expected in early evening, with a fuller picture coming later Sunday night. Thai elections use paper ballots that are counted publicly at polling stations. The opposition Pheu Thai Party, headed by Paetongtarn Shinawatra, is widely predicted to win at least a healthy plurality of the seats in the 500-member lower House. After casting her ballot, Paetongtarn said every vote is important for effecting change in Thailand and that she has high hopes for the final result.But who heads the next government won’t by decided by Sunday’s vote alone. The prime minister will be selected in July in a joint session of the Ho...

Powerful Cyclone Mocha makes landfall in Myanmar, tearing off roofs and killing at least 3

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:11:16 GMT

DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) — Thousands of people hunkered down Sunday in monasteries, pagodas and schools, seeking shelter from a powerful storm that slammed into the coast of Myanmar, tearing the roofs off buildings and killing at least three people.The center of Cyclone Mocha made landfall Sunday afternoon in Myanmar’s Rakhine state near Sittwe township wind speeds up to 209 kilometers (130 miles) per hour, Myanmar’s Meteorological Department said.Myanmar’s military information office said the storm had damaged houses, electrical transformers, cell phone towers, boats and lampposts in Sittwe, Kyaukpyu, and Gwa townships. It said the storm also tore roofs off of sport buildings on the Coco Islands, about 425 kilometers (264 miles) southwest of the country’s largest city, Yangon.Rakhine-based media reported that streets and basements of the houses in Sittwe’s low-lying areas were flooded. Much of the area is cut off from telephone and internet service after high winds crumpled cell phon...

Ukrainian president says counteroffensive does not aim to attack Russian territory

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:11:16 GMT

BERLIN (AP) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Sunday his country is preparing a counteroffensive designed to liberate areas occupied by Russia, not to attack Russian territory.Speaking during a news conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin, Zelenskyy said Ukraine’s goal is to free the territories within its internationally recognized borders.Scholz told Zelenskyy that Germany will support Ukraine “for as long as necessary.”Zelenskyy was welcomed with military honors Sunday as he made his first visit to Germany since Russia invaded Ukraine.The Ukrainian president is visiting allies in search of further arms deliveries to help his country fend off the Russian invasion, and funds to rebuild what’s been destroyed by more than a year of devastating conflict.A Luftwaffe jet flew Zelenskyy to the German capital from Rome, where he had met Saturday with Pope Francis and Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni.On the eve of his arrival — which is taking place amid ti...

A timeline of negotiations toward the Volkswagen battery plant in Canada

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:11:16 GMT

OTTAWA — March 15, 2021: Volkswagen AG announces its intention to build six new electric vehicle battery manufacturing plants by 2030.March 17, 2022: Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne cold calls Scott Keogh, who was then the CEO of Volkswagen Group of America, and invites him to Canada for a meeting.April 27, 2022: The regional board members of Volkswagen in North America travel to Toronto to meet with Champagne and Vic Fedeli, minister of economic development in Ontario. Some executives from Volkswagen’s headquarters in Germany join virtually.May 9-13, 2022: Champagne travels to Germany for the first time and meets with Volkswagen executives.May 22-26, 2022: Champagnes speaks again with Volkswagen leadership on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.July 7: Volkswagen launches a new subsidiary, PowerCo, to manage its battery factories and breaks ground on its first gigafactory in Salzgitter, Germany.Aug. 16, 2022: President ...

How an ‘energizer bunny,’ cheeseburgers and $14 billion helped Canada woo Volkswagen

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:11:16 GMT

The $14-billion deal that will see Volkswagen, the world’s largest automaker, set up a manufacturing presence in Canada for the first time in history, took a year of negotiations on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.But the talks that led Volkswagen to choose southwestern Ontario for the location of its first battery plant outside Europe all started with a whim.Out of the blue in early 2022, Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne decided he should call the company’s then-North American CEO, Scott Keogh. His staff dug up the number.Champagne said in an interview with The Canadian Press that he’d never met Keogh before, but he got him on the phone on St. Patrick’s Day last year. “I introduced myself, and I said, ‘Listen, here I am, Minister Champagne from Canada. I would like to start a discussion.'”Volkswagen has sold cars in Canada for decades, but it has never made them here. Still, like other large automakers, it is making the transi...

Pipeline plot twist: where Line 5 threatens nature, now nature is a threat to Line 5

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:11:16 GMT

WASHINGTON — The controversial Canada-U.S. oil and gas conduit known as Line 5 could be facing its toughest challenger yet: the very watershed the pipeline’s detractors are trying to protect. Spring flooding has washed away significant portions of the riverbank where Line 5 intersects Wisconsin’s Bad River, a meandering, 120-kilometre course through Indigenous territory that feeds Lake Superior and a complex network of ecologically delicate wetlands.The Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa has been in court with Alberta energy giant Enbridge Inc. since 2019 in an effort to compel the pipeline’s owner and operator to reroute Line 5 around its traditional territory.But last month, Mother Nature raised the stakes. “There can be little doubt now that the small amount of remaining bank could be eroded and the pipeline undermined and breached in short order,” the band’s lawyers argued in an emergency motion filed last week. “Very little ma...

Literary calendar for week of May 14

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:11:16 GMT

ABOUT “YOUNG MUNGO”: Authors Euan Kerr and Deborah Schlick introduce and discuss Douglas Stuard’s “Young Mungo,” in a book appreciation event. 6 p.m. Tuesday, May 16, SubText Books, 6 W. Fifth St., St. Paul.ANTONIA DEIGNAN: Presents “Underwater Daughter.” 7 p.m. Tuesday, May 16, Magers & Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Ave. S., Mpls.TOVE DANOVICH: Taps into the renewed interest in keeping chickens in urban areas with “Under the Henfluence: Inside the World of Backyard Chickens and the People Who Love Them,” inspired by the eight chickens in her suburban yard in Portland, Ore. In her book she looks at the history of domesticated chickens and interviews people breeding, training, healing and adoring chickens, from a hatchery in Iowa to a chicken show in Ohio to a rooster rescue in Minnesota. 7 p.m. Monday, May 15, Magers & Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Ave. S., Mpls.EVELYN KLEIN: Minnesota independent scholar discusses the poet as historian an...

Zeynep Tufekci: The pandemic threat that hasn’t gone away

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:11:16 GMT

In December 2014, two monkeys in outdoor cages at the Tulane National Primate Research Center, about 40 miles north of New Orleans, became ill with Burkholderia pseudomallei, a deadly bacteria in the federal government’s highest risk category, reserved for pathogens like smallpox, anthrax and Ebola. This is the category for which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sees “significant potential for mass casualties or severe effects.”A short drive from the cages, there was a lab working with the pathogen, which at the time had never been found naturally in the continental United StatesSome of the staff members who worked with the monkeys were not told of the infections for nearly a month after the pathogen was suspected and 10 days after it was confirmed.In March 2015, the Tulane center’s director, Andrew Lackner, claimed that “various Burkholderia species have been present in domestic animals in Louisiana since at least 2004, long before any scientific study of the organism...

Letters: What population growth do we imagine we need to accommodate in St. Paul?

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:11:16 GMT

What population growth?Your report, ”Loosen St. Paul zoning to allow more multi-family dwellings? Six views”, missed the most fundamental question: Why do we need to accommodate substantially more population growth?Here is the reality. The United States stopped having enough babies to replace people who are dying somewhere around 2008.  Currently, we are producing about 1.8 babies for every two people who die, and fertility rates have been declining since about 1950. Without immigration, we would be a cold Japan. It is unlikely we will see sizable changes in the rates of immigration into the future.When people do come to the United States, they are choosing warmer, lower-tax states, like Texas or Arizona. Since 2010, Minnesota has ranked 30th in terms of growth, growing only 8% over the last 10+ years. During the same time period, Texas grew over 21%.And when people do choose the Twin Cities, they can choose St. Paul, or they can choose a safer, lower-cost suburb with higher-ranked ...

Literary pick for week of May 14

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:11:16 GMT

Merwin and Louise, sibling Sycamore seeds living 100 million years in the Cretaceous period, long to put down roots and grow into big trees. But when a fire forces them to leave their mother tree prematurely, they find themselves catapulted into the unknown, far from home.Brian SelznickThat’s the essence of Caldecott medalist Brian Selznick’s new book “Big Tree,” which he will introduce with a reading at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, May 17, at the University of St. Thomas O’Shaughnessy Education Center, 2115 Summit Ave., St. Paul, in partnership with St. Paul’s Red Balloon Bookshop.“Big Tree” (Scholastic), began as a planned collaboration between Selznick and producer/director Steven Spielberg for a film project that never got off the ground. But both men agreed it would make a terrific book, and it lives up to that prediction with starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal and The Horn Book. It is enlivened with nearly 300...