Quebec City celebrated its founding on July 3, 1608, yesterday and also 400 years of French-speaking peoples in North America yesterday.
A day of speeches and concerts were scheduled, but the party itself will keep going through October with performances by Celine Dion and Paul McCartney.
Celebrations were to start with a salute to Samuel de Champlain, the French explorer who in the spring of 1608 crossed the North Atlantic Ocean and headed up the Saint Lawrence River to establish the city with 30 other men.
Several guests, including Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his French counterpart Francois Fillon, were expected to attend the ceremonies.
Former French prime ministers Alain Juppe and Jean-Pierre Raffarin, as well as former presidential candidate Segolene Royal also made a trip from Paris. Royal governs a region of France, Poitou-Charentes, where Champlain was born.
“Proving that French culture and language has survived here for four centuries, I find that remarkable,” Royal said, noting a fraternity between Quebec and France that was echoed in a speech by Alain Juppe, the mayor of Bordeaux on Wednesday during a ceremony welcoming to Quebec the Belem, France’s oldest tall sailing ship.
Protests, however, threaten the fun, with municipal unions in the midst of contract negotiations threatening to seek attention to their plight, and pacifists announcing their intentions to protest a military parade’s inclusion in the program.
Quebec separatists, meanwhile, have criticized Canada’s federal government for suggesting the city’s festivities are also a celebration of the beginnings of Canada.
Australians were downloading virtual private networks (VPNs) in droves, while one of the world’s largest porn distributors said it was blocking users from its platforms as the country yesterday rolled out sweeping online age restriction. Australia in December became the first country to impose a nationwide ban on teenagers using social media. A separate law now requires artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot services to keep certain content — including pornography, extreme violence and self-harm and eating disorder material — from minors or face fines of up to A$49.5 million (US$34.6 million). The country also joined Britain, France and dozens of US states requiring
Hungarian authorities temporarily detained seven Ukrainian citizens and seized two armored cars carrying tens of millions of euros in cash across Hungary on suspicion of money laundering, officials said on Friday. The Ukrainians were released on Friday, following their detention on Thursday, but Hungarian officials held onto the cash, prompting Ukraine to accuse Hungary’s Russia-friendly government of illegally seizing the money. “We will not tolerate this state banditism,” Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said. The seven detained Ukrainians were employees of the Ukrainian state-owned Oschadbank, who were traveling in the two armored cars that were carrying the money between Austria and
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MORE BANS: Australia last year required sites to remove accounts held by under-16s, with a few countries pushing for similar action at an EU level and India considering its own ban Indonesia on Friday said it would ban social media access for children under 16, citing threats from online pornography, cyberbullying, online fraud and Internet addiction. “Accounts belonging to children under 16 on high-risk platforms will start to be deactivated, beginning with YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Bigo Live and Roblox,” Indonesian Minister of Communications and Digital Meutya Hafid said. “The government is stepping in so that parents no longer have to fight alone against the giants of the algorithm. Implementation will begin on March 28, 2026,” she said. The social media ban would be introduced in stages “until all platforms fulfill their
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