Welcome to your Saturday Posted. It is now officially December, which means you now have our full permission to put up Christmas items. Over here at the Edmonton Posted office, we are militant about appropriate timing for seasonal decorations and bow to nobody in our assertion that holiday lights and trees and music — if that’s your thing — must wait until December. But, when you consider your music choices, please spare a thought for the retail workers who have to listen to the same songs on repeat for an entire month.
Sign up to receive the daily top stories from the National Post, a division of Postmedia Network Inc.
Thanks for signing up!
A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder.
The next issue of NP Posted will soon be in your inbox.
CHINA’S COVID POLICY
China is facing the largest protests in decades over its zero-COVID policy — likely since the student uprising that ended in the Tiananmen Square massacre. Yet, while there are some signs the approach may soften to COVID-19 in the future, the Communist party still holds stubbornly to its intensive lockdown measures. The National Post’s Tom Blackwell reports that there’s a combination of ideology and virology at play. China has gone in fully on zero-COVID, and needs to show it can work. Meanwhile, it also has lower rates of natural immunity and inferior vaccines, meaning that any loosening of restrictions could have disastrous health consequences. “They’ve just painted themselves into a corner that’s going to be hard to get out of,” says Dr. Paul Hunter, professor of medicine at the UK’s University of East Anglia. “Whatever you do, at some point you will get a pretty scary surge of infections.”
DINNER ON MARS
Have you ever considered what a person might eat on Mars? We assumed it was toothpaste tubes full of nutritional goop. But it turns out inventive scientists are working on things that we can eat in space, such as specially prepared kimchee, a Korean dish. Laura Brehaut, the National Post’s food writer, takes a look at a new book, Dinner on Mars, written by Evan Fraser, the director of the University of Guelph’s Arrell Food Institute, and Lenore Newman, Canada Research Chair in Food Security and the Environment at the University of the Fraser Valley. The book looks at, hypothetically, what humans might eat on a Mars colony, and what those of us back on Earth can learn from these new foods. As just one example, animal agriculture would be a bit of a challenge on the Red Planet — raising the question of why we even do it here. Even then, the soil on Mars is different. It’s a challenging question … but we love the idea of seeing space cows roaming the Martian landscape.
NATIONAL POST NEWS QUIZ
Ready to test your mettle against the news of the week? We bring you another edition of the National Post news quiz. A passing bit of knowledge about the controversial Alberta sovereignty act — it was all over the news this week! — will help you out on this one.
ET CETERA
DEAR DIARY
In the weekly satirical feature Dear Diary, the National Post re-imagines a week in the life of a newsmaker. This week, Tristin Hopper takes a journey inside the thoughts of the Ruger No. 1: I look more like kitchenware than a deadly weapon. If I’m going to have any chance of looking intimidating in that kind of crowd, I’m going to at least need a pistol grip, a half-can of black paint and maybe a couple “Don’t Tread on Me” stickers.
SNAPSHOT
-
Posted: Trudeau in the hot seat
-
Posted: How to fix Canadian health care
