During Google’s annual I/O developer conference, they simultaneously released a combination of dozens of other AI tools and features – literally dozens. Here are the top six, along with a summary of some of the others.
We believe everyone deserves access to quality WordPress development education, regardless of financial circumstances. That’s why we’re excited to announce that we’re giving away one free spot in our upcoming Modern WordPress Fast Track course to someone who couldn’t otherwise afford it. About the Course Modern WordPress Fast Track is a 10-week course that will… Read More »Win a Free Spot in Modern WordPress Fast Track
Images can quietly wreck your site. They generally slow pages down, eat bandwidth, and frustrate users if they take too long to load – especially on mobile. Any solution to this?
We’re thrilled to announce Modern WordPress Fast Track – a WordPress development course designed to take you from zero to mastery in 10 weeks.
Teaching online shouldn’t feel like wrestling with software, yet that’s what many WordPress LMS plugins make you do. It’s often not entirely their fault, though. After all, transforming WordPress into a full-featured LMS is a significant challenge, and it’s difficult to keep things intuitive while making a lot of functionality possible.
The latest advancements in AI art have taken over the internet. It seems like many people are enjoying the ability to instantly make their vision come to life. One thing that hasn’t gotten as much attention is that you can take AI-generated images (or any images for that matter) and transform them into videos. In this quick guide, I’m going to show you just how you can do it.
During the last week of March, nearly 30 WordPress core committers, project leaders, and team members gathered to discuss WordPress’ release schedule. According to the meeting notes, the conversation was prompted by organizations reducing their contribution hours to the WordPress project. Ultimately, project leadership decided that WordPress 6.8 will be the only major release of 2025. In this post, we’ll talk about what the implications of this are for your site(s) and how you can stay up to date in this new once-per-year world.
Compiled by Paula Gomez Villalba | March 31, 2025
In the wake of the Eagle Mine disaster, Yukon Seed & Restoration hosted a webinar with updates on the disaster response and ongoing risks from the toxic cyanide solution. Mark O’Donoghue, retired Biologist and advisor to the First Nation of Na-Cho Nyäk Dun, explained the initial heap leach failure and outlined the response so far, including water treatment, storage capacity, groundwater contamination, and ongoing monitoring. Cyanide, cobalt and mercury are three major contaminants of concern. Dr. Laurie Chan, Canada Research Chair in Toxicology and Environmental Health and University of Ottawa professor, spoke about their chemistry, toxicity, and environmental health risks. These conversations are especially important as the Eagle Mine disaster continues to unfold, with toxic water still seeping into the land.
“It’s been damage control and it’s been triage… This is all happening very quickly. The emphasis has been on avoiding a catastrophe… If nothing was done to contain the water, we would have had a surface spill of cyanide water and that could still be the case because their ponds are quite full there. It would flow from the creek and the toxins out there would have certainly killed everything down the McQuesten River and it would likely have done so down part of the Stewart River as well.”
“There’s massive contamination that’s gone into the groundwater, both in terms of when it first slid and now it’s been leaking since then… But it is estimated that there’s several hundred thousand cubic meters of contaminated solution in the groundwater. So that’s several hundred million liters. It’s a huge amount of contaminated groundwater in the lower Dublin Gulch area.”
“The plume of contaminated groundwater from the mine site has reached Haggart Creek and is having an increasing effect on water quality in the creek. There’s lots of uncertainties about where the water’s going and whether it’s even reasonable to intercept it.”
“Haggart Creek has huge value biologically and culturally. It’s known as a salmon-spawning stream and a salmon-rearing stream. It also has a hugely important grayling run. This is the most important grayling fishery in the Na-Cho Nyäk Dun traditional territory, right where the Haggart Creek comes into the South McQuesten River. The grayling congregate there in March/April, and people go there and fish through the ice. It is a big community event every year.”
“One of the big problems is that [Victoria Gold’s] water treatment plant was never designed to take cyanide out. It was designed to deal with other water that’s coming out of the mine area where they’re mining [with] high turbidity, other metals in it. This water treatment plant had to be repurposed and basically jury-rigged to try and make it so it could remove the cyanide. Getting this right has taken a lot longer than I expected.”
“Each of these dots is a different water monitoring station within the first four kilometers south of where Dublin Gulch flows into the creek. Water quality stayed quite safe all the way through September and then cyanide started increasing and has increased pretty steadily since then… That’s the case with some other contaminants.
— Mark O’Donoghue with the First Nation of Na-Cho Nyäk Dun
“It’s fairly uncommon to have high levels of cyanide in the environment so there is relatively few data and very few studies looking at the impact of cyanide in the environment.”
“Cyanide is a very well-known poison. It’s very toxic, but at low doses, our bodies can handle it. Moose and caribou, all animals have some capacity to detoxify the cyanide and then excrete it. It doesn’t stay in the body for long. It doesn’t bioaccumulate in the body.”
“Cyanide in water does not bioaccumulate in tissues or fish because it gets transformed and released. [When] eating fish the risk of contaminative cyanide is low… If there’s a dead fish, there may be some residual cyanide in the fish, but if the fish is alive and kicking, it shouldn’t be a major risk of cyanide.”
“Fish and plankton, those little animals or plants that fish eat, are very sensitive to cyanide…The Canadian drinking water guideline is 0.2 milligram per litre. The guideline for fish is .005 milligram per litre. So, humans are more resistant to cyanide than fish.”
“Cyanide actually inhibits respiration in the cell and it doesn’t discriminate what cell. So that’s why cyanide has got systemic toxicity. It affects the whole body.”
“We get cyanide usually through breathing in, eating, drinking water, or even contacts from skin absorption. The concern is not just ingesting water. If the creek or the river is contaminated, if kids are swimming there, then we need to worry about thermal absorption as a route as well, not just drinking.”
“Organic mercury can bioaccumulate unlike cyanide and cobalt. It will accumulate in the body of fish and animals. The bigger the fish is and the older the fish is, the more mercury it will have in the body… Mercury attacks the brain and the heart… If there’s consistent release of mercury in the environment, the sediment will have high levels of mercury in the river or the creek, and if there is the right bacteria it will become organic mercury that goes into fish. The fish will have high mercury and not be fit for human consumption. It’s a long-term effect, the mercury doesn’t go away easily.”
“Cobalt is 50 times less toxic than cyanide. Since it’s a nutrient and not very toxic, we don’t have any drinking water guidelines for cobalt. But in the environment, cobalt released in soil, water, plants and cannot be created or destroyed. Cobalt in water has two different forms, one that binds to particles and one that dissolves. The dissolved cobalt is more bioavailable and toxic.”
“We are still in the early stage of understanding what are the impacts of these chemicals in the environment and to people in the area. So we need, definitely, more monitoring…and then we need to do risk assessment, looking at this information and having a better understanding of what do people use, where do people hang out to actually estimate the dose, to answer the question of what might be the effects.”
There’s a lot of fear and uncertainty surrounding the Eagle Mine disaster and the decades of cleanup ahead. The impacts aren’t just technical, they’re deeply personal too. This disaster will continue to affect life-sustaining waters and how people connect with the land. It threatens health, culture, and future generations—but this isn’t something we simply have to accept. There are ways to push for accountability, protect communities, and stand in solidarity with the First Nation of Na-cho Nyäk Dun.
“Go to the emergency response webpage and fill out the letter to send to your local MP/MLA demanding that we get a public inquiry on this so we get to the bottom of it and it never happens again. ”
— Chief Dawna Hope, First Nation of Na-Cho Nyäk Dun
The webinar was hosted by Yukon Seed and Restoration on Monday, March 10th, 2025 with in-person showings at Ihdzí’ in Mayo and the NNDDC office in Whitehorse, Yukon. Quotes edited for length and clarity. The full webinar recording can be found here.
Back in 2018 I spent some time in the city of Mitaka – which happens to be where the Ghibli Museum is located. I walked by it several times a week and have fond memories from there. When the internet became flooded with Ghibli style art last week after OpenAI released their newest AI image generator, my reaction was probably more visceral than most people’s. After spending some time Ghibli-ficating myself, reading others’ opinions, and having a few days to reflect on it all, here are my thoughts.
Written by Joti Overduin, rally photos by Adil Darvesh | March 13, 2025
After rallying together in the cold in Whitehorse and across the Yukon and NWT last November, the ruling from the judge to dismiss the Yukon government’s case was very much welcome. It was a decision that reflected the reactions of many from the outset of this confusing and disappointing court action on YESAB’s recommendation that the Michelle Creek mining project not proceed.
The Yukon Supreme Court judge determined that bringing this court action forward was both not legally permissible, and out of step with the constitutionally protected process. The judge didn’t touch on the specifics of the YESAB recommendation or how YESAB went about creating it, as that is meant to be discussed between the Yukon government, Trondëk Hwëch’in, and the First Nation of Na-Cho Nyäk Dun.
At CPAWS Yukon we all shared feelings of deep gratitude to Trondëk Hwëch’in and the First Nation of Na-Cho Nyäk Dun for all the energy, time, and work dedicated to defending the integrity of the Peel Plan and the Final Agreements. There was also a strong focus on the importance of baseline data (information about an area before exploration or mining) to evaluate potential impacts and the effectiveness of mitigation efforts on the land, waters, and wildlife—critical not only for the Peel but for development proposals throughout the Yukon.
![Heard in the Courtroom... Consultation was at the “lowest” level of priority, and not needed until only before mining development, not exploration in any case (Yukon government). If this is how the Peel Plan is to be interpreted and applied in the future, it represents “something much less than [we] bargained for” (Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in). The judicial review itself represents a “failure of reconciliation” (First Nation of Na-cho Nyäk Dun). Lawyers cited numerous legal cases which suggested the precedent that provincial and territorial governments do have a treaty obligation to consult before doing something like this (First Nation of Na-cho Nyäk Dun). Note ruling is expected relatively soon, around Feb 2025; stay tuned for more updates!](https://cpawsyukon.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Michelle-Creek-Court-Case-Update-8-819x1024.png "Heard in the Courtroom... Consultation was at the “lowest” level of priority, and not needed until only before mining development, not exploration in any case (Yukon government). If this is how the Peel Plan is to be interpreted and applied in the future, it represents “something much less than [we] bargained for” (Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in). The judicial review itself represents a “failure of reconciliation” (First Nation of Na-cho Nyäk Dun). Lawyers cited numerous legal cases which suggested the precedent that provincial and territorial governments do have a treaty obligation to consult before doing something like this (First Nation of Na-cho Nyäk Dun). Note ruling is expected relatively soon, around Feb 2025; stay tuned for more updates!")
Peel Watershed court case update from December 2024. This isn’t a comprehensive summary of the court proceedings, but rather a glimpse into some key points that stood out to us.
Now that the court action has been dismissed, it is time for the Yukon government to go back to the process of consulting Trondëk Hwëch’in and the First Nation of Na-Cho Nyäk Dun on YESAB’s recommendation for the proposed exploration project. We remain curious and hopeful that the Yukon government will work together with both First Nations to ensure the Peel Plan is upheld, and that it follows YESAB’s thorough recommendation that this first application to develop in the Peel not go ahead. We must ensure that development in the Peel and throughout the Yukon is done in a way the reflects not just the needs of our generation, but many generations from now too.
