breakfastmtn

As the world gets grim, CanCon sees me through.

A recent article made the argument that CBC television should return to the weirdness of its roots. It’s a fair claim, to which one might answer, have you watched Saint-Pierre?

The fictional cop drama set on the island of Saint-Pierre is a banana-pants experience. I understand that it’s supposed to be gritty and dark, but there is something terribly and unintentionally hilarious about the show.

I think it’s the unintentional part that I find most endearing. It harkens back to CBC productions of old that tried to ape bigger, more generously resourced American shows, but just couldn’t seem to get things right.

A particular flavour of Canadian-ness always leaked through.

A Russian drone attack on a bus carrying mine workers in Ukraine’s central-eastern Dnipropetrovsk region has killed at least 12 people, officials said.

The bus was driving about 40 miles (65km) from the frontline, according to police. Images published by Ukraine’s state emergency service showed what appeared to be an empty bus, its side windows shattered and windscreen hanging from the front.

DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company, said those killed were travelling from one of its mining facilities after they had finished their shift.

“The enemy drone hit near a company shuttle bus in the Pavlograd district. Preliminarily, 12 people were killed and seven more were wounded,” the head of the regional military administration, Oleksandr Ganzha, said on Telegram.

An earlier drone attack in the region overnight killed a man and a woman in the central city of Dnipro, Ganzha said in an earlier post. A drone also struck a maternity hospital in the southern Zaporizhzhia region on Sunday, wounding at least seven people including two women receiving a medical examination.

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Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal reported "a cascade shutdown" in Ukraine's power grid in the morning on Jan. 31, following disruptions to transmission lines between Romania and Moldova, as well as between western and central Ukraine.

Shmyhal said that the nuclear power plants are operating at reduced capacity following the outage.

Ukraine's state-owned grid operator, Ukrenergo, said at around 2 p.m. local time that emergency blackouts were in place in Kyiv and the surrounding region, as well as Cherkasy, Chernivtsi, Zhytomyr, and Kharkiv oblasts.

DTEK also reported emergency power cuts in southern Odesa Oblast and central-eastern Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.

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