OTTAWA – Whether impartial or partial, Greg Fergus will remain Speaker of the House of Commons, thanks to Jagmeet Singh’s NDP, which in fact “saved” the Speaker with its votes, rejecting the motion presented by the Conservatives to ask the removal of Fergus from his role due to partisan language in an advertisement for a (Liberal) event in his district and other previous “incidents”. →
There is a relatively unknown Italian Engineer who was the subject of the recently produced Netflix biopic, titled “Rose Island”. Italian director Sydney Sibilia explained that he stumbled upon the Engineer’s accomplishments after seeing a Wikipedia photo of the infamous Rose Island Platform (in the pic above). Giorgio Rosa was a maverick Engineer in the 1960s who designed a telescopic pillar system – which he patented – and preassembled on a beach before floating it 12 kilometers off the coast of Rimini, Italy. Simply put, he created his own island.
VANCOUVER – June is Italian Heritage Month and there are many initiatives planned in the various “tricolor” communities scattered throughout Canada, organized with the aim of celebrating Italianness. One of these is the event promoted by the Dante Alighieri Society of British Columbia, based in Vancouver. →
ROME – They too are Italian: of Roma or Sinti origin, it doesn’t matter. They are Italian and they want to be considered as such. And also “to be considered as a resource, not as a problem”: this is what the representatives of the Kethane Roma and Sinti Movement for Italy and the Roma for Democracy association are asking of the next European Parliament, through a series of electoral stands within the Roma camps, a series of meetings with the candidates for the European elections on 8 and 9 June: the aim is to bring the aspiring MEPs into dialogue with the residents of the camps, answering their questions and listening to their proposals. It had never happened before. →
TORONTO – Unions representing thousands of “border” workers (i.e. from the Canada Border Services Agency – CBSA) expect disruption at airports and land crossings this summer, after the majority of the agency’s members voted in favor of the strike: to be precise, 96% of the members of the Customs and Immigration Union (CIU) and the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) voted “yes”. →
