Link hosts: Lynn Desjardins, Marc Montgomery, Levon Sevunts

Link hosts: Lynn Desjardins, Marc Montgomery, Levon Sevunts
Photo Credit: RCI

The LINK Online Apr. 23, 2017

Your hosts, Lynn, Levon, Marc

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This April 15, 2017 picture released from North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on April 16, 2017 shows Korean People’s ballistic missiles being displayed through Kim Il-Sung square during a military parade in Pyongyang marking the 105th anniversary of the birth of late North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung.
This April 15, 2017 picture released from North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on April 16, 2017 shows Korean People’s ballistic missiles being displayed through Kim Il-Sung square during a military parade in Pyongyang marking the 105th anniversary of the birth of late North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung. © STR

The world has long been concerned about North Korea and its weapons programme.

While the Obama administration in the U.S. tended to keep its reaction restrained, the new Trump administration seems less inclined towards tolerance of sabre rattling.

The war of words heated up with North Korea’s leader threatening to launch a “super-mighty preemptive strike” against the US and its South Korean ally and “leave them in ashes”.

To find out more about what’s driving the U.S. and North Korean policy in the region, Levon reached out to Marius Grinius.

He is Canada’s former ambassador to both South and North Korea and a Fellow with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute.

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Looking up the Slims River Valley, from the south end of Kluane Lake. The river used to flow down the valley from the Kaskawulsh glacier. © Sue Thomas

Where once a river flowed, now nothing.

It’s the first modern case of what geoscientists call “river piracy”.  That’s when the flow from one river is diverted into another.

In Canada’s northern Yukon territory, the Kaskawulsh glacier feeds two rivers. One, the Slims, fed into Kluane Lake and outflowed into the Kluane river, and eventually found its way north to the Arctic’s Beaufort Sea. The other, the Kaskawulsh River flows south and eventually into the Gulf of Alaska.

But the glacier has melted back and shrunk downward as well resulting in the flow to the Slim’s river cutting a new channel through the glacier and into the flow into the Kaskawulsh River.  This means within a matter of days in 2016, the Slims basically ceased to exist. Marc spoke to Canadian geoscientist Dan Shugar (PhD) at the University of Washington who reported on the phenomenon.

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Canadians are invited to bury a pair of 100 per cent cotton, white underwear. © Soil Conservation Council of Canada

Soil your underwear!  Well no, it’s not at all what you think.

It’s a campaign to get people thinking about the soil in National Soil Conservation Week.

Without healthy soil, plants don’t grow, and without crops and plants, we’re all in trouble.

Lynn spoke to Alan Kruszel, chairman of the Soil Conservation Council of Canada.

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