More dialogue, less debate: At an ‘Ethics Bowl,’ students learn to handle tough conversations; The Conversation, December 23, 2025

Rackeb Tesfaye, Knowledge Mobilization Lead and Senior Scientist at the Bridge Research Consortium, Simon Fraser University, Nicolas Fillion, Assistant Professor, Philosophy, Simon Fraser University , The Conversation; More dialogue, less debate: At an ‘Ethics Bowl,’ students learn to handle tough conversations

"As Canadian federal election candidates prepared for their final debate in April 2025, youth across the country were preparing for collaborative conversations around timely and potentially divisive issues for the National Ethics Bowl at the Canadian Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg. 

Ethics Bowl Canada is a non-profit organization that hosts competitions where high school and university students explore complex ethical issues through respectful dialogue in teams. 

Rather than trying to undermine their opponents’ arguments, as in traditional debates, Ethics Bowl competitors win by engaging constructively, responding positively to reasonable criticism and refining or amending their views."

60 Minutes episode on brutal El Salvador prison, pulled from air by CBS, appears online; The Guardian, December 23, 2025

Jenna Amatulli , The Guardian; 60 Minutes episode on brutal El Salvador prison, pulled from air by CBS, appears online

"Alfonsi notes the poor conditions in the prison, showing images of half-dressed men with shaved heads all lined up in rows in front of bunks stacked four high. The bunks have no pillows or pads or blankets. The lights are kept on 24 hours a day and detainees have no access to clean water.

Alfonsi pointed to a 2023 report from the state department that “cited torture and life-threatening prison conditions” in Cecot, she said: “But this year, during a meeting with President Bukele at the White House, President Trump expressed admiration for El Salvador’s prison system,” before airing footage of Trump saying: “They make great facilities. Very strong facilities. They don’t play games.”

The segment also talks to Juan Pappier, deputy director at Human Rights Watch, who helped write an 81-page report that detailed Cecot’s pattern of “systematic torture” and found that nearly half the men in the prison did not actually have a criminal history. Pappier said the study was based on information obtained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s own records. Alfonsi confirmed that 60 Minutes independently corroborated Human Rights Watch’s claims.

William Losada Sánchez, a Venezuelan national and former Cecot inmate, also describes to Alfonsi what it was like to get sent to “the island” – a punishment room where prisoners would be sent if they could not comply with being forced to sit on their knees for 24 hours a day.

“The island is a little room where there’s no light, no ventilation, nothing. It’s a cell for punishment where you can’t see your hand in front of your face. After they locked us in, they came to beat us every half hour and they pounded on the door with their sticks to traumatize us,” he said.

The segment briefly touches on Kristi Noem’s visit to Cecot. Pinto claims the Department of Homeland Security secretary did not speak to a single detainee during her visit...

Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic senator, shared the episode online, saying: “Take a few minutes to watch what they didn’t want you to see. This story should be told.”"

‘60 Minutes’ Report Was Pulled Off the Air. Now It’s on the Internet.; The New York Times, December 23, 2025

Michael M. Grynbaum, The New York Times ; '60 Minutes’ Report Was Pulled Off the Air. Now It’s on the Internet.

"CBS News caused a controversy after it pulled a report from Sunday’s episode of the long-running news program that featured the stories of Venezuelan men who were deported by the Trump administration to a brutal prison in El Salvador. But the 13-minute segment, as originally edited by “60 Minutes” staff members, soon surfaced online in full.

The last-minute change had already set off a political firestorm. Bari Weiss, the network’s editor in chief, said she postponed the segment because its reporting was flawed and incomplete. Her critics — including the “60 Minutes” correspondent who reported the segment, Sharyn Alfonsi — saw it as an attempt by CBS to placate the administration. CBS is owned by David Ellison, a technology heir who is trying to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery in a deal that needs federal regulatory approval.

Now the viewing public can draw its own conclusions. After a Canadian television network briefly posted the video on its streaming app on Monday, copies were quickly downloaded and widely shared on social media."

Bari Weiss yanking a 60 Minutes story is censorship by oligarchy; The Guardian, December 23, 2025

Margaret Sullivan, The Guardian; Bari Weiss yanking a 60 Minutes story is censorship by oligarchy

"One tries to give people the benefit of the doubt. But now, when it comes to Bari Weiss as the editor in chief of CBS News, there is no longer any doubt.

A broadcast-news neophyte, Weiss has no business in that exalted role. She proved that beyond any remaining doubt last weekend, pulling a powerful and important piece of journalism just days before it was due to air, charging that it wasn’t ready. Whatever her claims about the story’s supposed flaws, this looks like a clear case of censorship-by-editor to protect the interests of powerful, rich and influential people.

The 60 Minutes piece – about the brutal conditions at an El Salvador prison where the Trump administration has sent Venezuelan migrants without due process – had already been thoroughly edited, fact-checked and sent through the network’s standards desk and its legal department. The story was promoted and scheduled, and trailers for it were getting millions of views.

I’m less bothered by the screw-ups in this situation – for example, the segment is already all over the internet as, essentially, a Canadian bootleg – than I am by her apparent willingness to use her position to protect the powerful and take care of business for the oligarchy. Which appears to be precisely what she was hired to do.

Journalism is supposed to “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted”, but Weiss seems to have it backwards.

I can’t know what’s in her mind, of course, but I know her actions – her gaslighting about how it would be such a disservice to the public to publish this supposedly incomplete piece, and her ridiculous offer to provide a storied reporting staff with a couple of phone numbers of highly placed Trump officials."

MAGA-Curious CBS Boss Goes Silent on Axed ‘60 Minutes’ Segment; The Daily Beast, December 23, 2025

Josh Fiallo , The Daily Beast; MAGA-Curious CBS Boss Goes Silent on Axed ‘60 Minutes’ Segment

"Discussion of the growing 60 Minutes controversy was conspicuously absent from a CBS editorial meeting on Tuesday morning.

The network’s MAGA-curious new editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, who personally spiked a segment critical of the Trump administration that was set to air Sunday night, was on the call but did not address the now-viral report that a Canadian affiliate mistakenly aired...

Although it did not receive its primetime Sunday evening slot, the 14-minute segment still reached a global audience after the Canadian broadcaster Global TV mistakenly published the episode on its streaming app. 

The clip has repeatedly been hit with copyright strikes on YouTube and other social media platforms, but it keeps popping back up on X, BlueSky, and Substack."

‘I ultimately had to comply’: ‘60 Minutes’ EP faces fallout after Bari Weiss shelves story; The Washington Post, December 22, 2025

Liam Scott

 and 

Scott Nover

, The Washington Post; ‘I ultimately had to comply’: ‘60 Minutes’ EP faces fallout after Bari Weiss shelves story

"Kelly McBride, senior vice president at the Poynter Institute, said requiring on-camera interviews with administration officials could be abused to manipulate coverage.

“It would give them the power to pick and choose which stories they want to go out,” McBride said. “It would allow them to literally craft the narrative themselves.”

It’s also uncommon for such a deeply reported segment to be pulled at the last minute, according to McBride. “This is a really high stakes story, and if she [Weiss] wanted to be involved in the process of green lighting or red lighting, that should not happen the day before the story is ready to run,” McBride said."

Yanked "60 Minutes" episode aired in Canada; Axios, December 22, 2025

Sara Fischer , Axios; Yanked "60 Minutes" episode aired in Canada

[Kip Currier: CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss "knows her assignment": run editorial interference for oligarch Paramount Skydance tech baron bosses Larry and David Ellison (who own CBS) and the Trump 2.0 administration.

In one of the first major tests of Weiss's censorial assignment, she has both succeeded and failed: (1) blocking the airing of a damning 60 Minutes segment set to hear on December 21, 2025 on the human rights and due process violations of the Trump 2.0 administration in deporting detainees to El Salvador's notorious CECOT prison gulag, and (2) unsuccessfully stopping the blocked video from leaking to Canada and the San Francisco-based Internet Archive.]

[Excerpt]

"The "60 Minutes" segment pulled from air by CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss did not include new comments from Trump administration officials, according to a copy of the segment viewed by Axios.

Why it matters: The segment, anchored by correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, caused uproar internally over whether it was pulled for political reasons. 

• The package was distributed via an app owned by Global Television which airs "60 Minutes" in Canada.

Zoom in: The segment included interviews with two people who were imprisoned at CECOT, an executive from the nonprofit Human Rights Watch and the director of UC Berkeley's Human Rights Center Investigations Lab.

• One college student, who was detained by U.S. customs before getting deported to CECOT, describes being tortured upon arrival. 
• 
  
• Another man told Alfonsi that he and others were taken to "a little room where there's no light, no ventilation, nothing."
• 
  
• "It's a cell for punishment where you can't see your hand in front of your face. After they locked us in, they came to beat us every half hour, and they pounded on the door with their sticks to traumatize us while we were in there."
• 
  
• "60 Minutes" also said it reviewed available ICE data to confirm Human Rights Watch's findings that suggested only eight deported men had been sentenced for violent or potentially violent crimes.
• 
  

The other side: The segment ends with Alfonsi saying the Department of Homeland Security "declined our request for an interview and referred all questions about CECOT to El Salvador. The government there did not respond to our request."

• The segment included previous comments made by President Trump, who said El Salvador's prison system has "very strong facilities, and they don't play games.""

CBS Frantically Tries to Stop People From Seeing Censored ‘60 Minutes’; The Daily Beast, December 23, 2025

William Vaillancourt  , The Daily Beast; CBS Frantically Tries to Stop People From Seeing Censored ‘60 Minutes’

"The 60 Minutes story that CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss abruptly pulled from the air on Sunday has been leaked—and the network is responding with copyright takedowns.

Canadian broadcaster Global TV aired the segment, which deals with Venezuelan migrants to the U.S. whom the Trump administration deported to CECOT, the notorious prison in El Salvador. Videos of the segment—in some instances, people recording their television screens—began circulating on Monday. But many didn’t last.

Paramount Skydance, CBS News’ parent company, began issuing a flurry of copyright notices on X, YouTube, and other platforms.

But the video was ultimately saved in the Internet Archive, among other places. 

In it, a Venezuelan college student who sought asylum in the U.S.—and says he has no criminal record—describes what happened to him at CECOT.

“There was blood everywhere, screams, people crying, people who couldn’t take it and were urinating and vomiting on themselves,” Luis Munoz Pinto said. “Four guards grabbed me, and they beat me until I bled until the point of agony. They knocked our faces against the wall. That was when they broke one of my teeth.”"

'Technology isn't neutral': Calgary bishop raises ethical questions around AI; Calgary Herald, November 26, 2025

 Devon Dekuyper , Calgary Herald; 'Technology isn't neutral': Calgary bishop raises ethical questions around AI

"We, as human beings, use technology, and we also have to be able to understand it, but also to apply it such that it does not impact negatively the human person, their flourishing (or) society,' said Bishop McGrattan"

Education report calling for ethical AI use contains over 15 fake sources; Ars Technica, September 12, 2025

BENJ EDWARDS, Ars Technica ; Education report calling for ethical AI use contains over 15 fake sources

"On Friday, CBC News reported that a major education reform document prepared for the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador contains at least 15 fabricated citations that academics suspect were generated by an AI language model—despite the same report calling for "ethical" AI use in schools.

"A Vision for the Future: Transforming and Modernizing Education," released August 28, serves as a 10-year roadmap for modernizing the province's public schools and post-secondary institutions. The 418-page document took 18 months to complete and was unveiled by co-chairs Anne Burke and Karen Goodnough, both professors at Memorial University's Faculty of Education, alongside Education Minister Bernard Davis...

The irony runs deep

The presence of potentially AI-generated fake citations becomes especially awkward given that one of the report's 110 recommendations specifically states the provincial government should "provide learners and educators with essential AI knowledge, including ethics, data privacy, and responsible technology use."

Sarah Martin, a Memorial political science professor who spent days reviewing the document, discovered multiple fabricated citations. "Around the references I cannot find, I can't imagine another explanation," she told CBC. "You're like, 'This has to be right, this can't not be.' This is a citation in a very important document for educational policy.""

Can you copyright artwork made using AI?; NPR, August 25, 2025

 

Emma Jacobs, Wailin Wong, Julia Ritchey, Kate Concannon , NPR; Can you copyright artwork made using AI?

"Copyright is the legal system used to reward and protect creations made by humans. But with growing adoption of artificial intelligence, does copyright extend to artwork that’s made using AI? Today on the show, how a test case over a Vincent Van Gogh mashup is testing the boundaries of copyright law."

Why a professor of fascism left the US: ‘The lesson of 1933 is – you get out’; The Guardian, June 16, 2025

Jonathan Freedland , The Guardian; Why a professor of fascism left the US: ‘The lesson of 1933 is – you get out’

"But when Trump won again last November, there was no doubt in her mind. However bad things had looked in 2016, now was worse. “So much had been dismantled … the guardrails, or the checks and balances, had systematically been taken down. The supreme court’s ruling on immunity; the failure to hold Trump accountable for anything, including the fact that he incited, you know, a violent insurrection on the Capitol, that he encouraged a mob that threatened to hang his vice-president, that he called up the Georgia secretary of state and asked him to find votes. I felt like we were in much more dangerous territory.”

Events so far have vindicated those fears. The deportations; students disappeared off the streets, one famously caught on video as she was bundled into an unmarked car by masked immigration agents; the humiliation of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as Trump and JD Vance ordered the Ukrainian president to express his gratitude to them, even as they were “abusing” him, an episode, says Shore, “right out of Stalinism” – to say nothing of Trump’s regular attacks on “USA-hating judges” who rule against the executive branch. It adds up to a playbook that is all too familiar. “Dark fantasies are coming true.”...

She also worries that instead of fighting back, “people become atomised. The arbitrariness of terror atomises people. You know, people put their heads down, they go quiet, they get in line, if only for the very reasonable, rational reason that any individual acting rationally has a reason to think that the personal cost of refusing to make a compromise is going to be greater than the social benefit of their one act of resistance. So you get a classic collective action problem.”"

The U.S.-Canada Border Runs Through This Library. That’s Now a Problem.; The New York Times, May 30, 2025

Norimitsu Onishi, The New York Times ; The U.S.-Canada Border Runs Through This Library. That’s Now a Problem.

"“I think there’s a sentiment of this little library being bullied by this powerful administration, and that helped encourage people to contribute,” said Steve Timmins, a Canadian visiting the library. “In light of what’s going on, it’s an important symbol of the friendship that cannot be taken away.”"

Have journalists skipped the ethics conversation when it comes to using AI?; The Conversation, May 13, 2025

Angela Misri, Assistant Professor, School of Journalism, Toronto Metropolitan University, April Lindgren, Professor emerita/adjunct professor, Toronto Metropolitan University School of Journalism, Toronto Metropolitan University, Nicole Blanchett, Associate Professor, Journalism, Toronto Metropolitan University , The Conversation; Have journalists skipped the ethics conversation when it comes to using AI?

"Artificial intelligence (AI) is being used in journalistic work for everything from transcribing interviews and translating articlesto writing and publishing local weather, economic reports and water quality stories.

It’s even being used to identify story ideas from the minutes of municipal council meetings in cases where time-strapped reporters don’t have time to do so. 

What’s lagging behind all this experimentation are the important conversations about the ethics of using these tools. This disconnect was evident when we interviewed journalists in a mix of newsrooms across Canada from July 2022 to July 2023, and it remains a problem today. 

We conducted semi-structured interviews with 13 journalists from 11 Canadian newsrooms. Many of the people we spoke to told us that they had worked at multiple media organizations throughout their careers.

The key findings from our recently published research:"

Dismay as cross-border library caught in US-Canada feud: ‘We just want to stay open’; The Guardian, April 13, 2025

Leyland Cecco , The Guardian; Dismay as cross-border library caught in US-Canada feud: ‘We just want to stay open’

"For weeks, curious onlookers, outraged supporters and gaggles of media have descended on both Stanstead, Quebec, and Derby Line, Vermont, after US officials announced the main entrance to the library, which sits in Vermont, would soon be cut off to Canadians. They cited drug traffickers and smugglers “exploiting” the accessibility and said the closure meant “we are ending such exploitation by criminals and protecting Americans” without providing evidence...

Under the new rules which go into effect in October, Canadians will need to go through a formal border crossing before entering the library.

The news, met with disbelief from patrons and staff, followed a closely watched visit by the US secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem, in March. Touring the library, Noem said “USA number one!” and then hopped over the black tape separating the two countries and said “51st state” when she landed in Canada. She repeated the joke – echoing Donald Trump’s recent fixation on annexing Canada – three times...

Of the thousands of books tucked into the library’s stacks, one author has emerged as a patron favourite: Louise Penny, the bestselling Canadian novelist and creator of the detective Armand Gamache. Her novels are by far the most borrowed and the celebrated writer, whose works have repeatedly topped the New York Times bestseller chart, is also a frequent visitor to the library.

“It’s very hard to not go immediately to the dystopian novels. What’s the first thing a despot or a tyrant does? They target libraries. They target writers. It targets books. Targets anyone who could read and think and become a dissenting voice,” she said. “Nothing good is going to come of this. It would be laughable if it wasn’t so serious.”

The tour for Penny’s forthcoming book Black Wolf, which coincidentally imagines plans to force Canada into becoming the 51st state was due to start at the Kennedy Center in Washington. But a recent decision by Trump to fire the previous board of the Kennedy Center for its support of “woke” programming, and to install himself as board chair, has prompted widespread artistic backlash."

Yale professor who studies fascism fleeing US to work in Canada; The Guardian, March 26, 2025

Rachel Leingang , The Guardian; Yale professor who studies fascism fleeing US to work in Canada

"A Yale professor who studies fascism is leaving the US to work at a Canadian university because of the current US political climate, which he worries is putting the US at risk of becoming a “fascist dictatorship”.

Jason Stanley, who wrote the 2018 book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, has accepted a position at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.

Stanley told the Daily Nous, a philosophy profession website, that he made the decision “to raise my kids in a country that is not tilting towards a fascist dictatorship”...

Social media posts spread on Wednesday, noting the alarm sounded by a scholar of fascism leaving the country over its political climate. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the journalist and creator of the 1619 Project, wrote on the social media platform Bluesky: “When scholars of authoritarianism and fascism leave US universities because of the deteriorating political situation here, we should really worry.”"

A truck driver's quiet kindness on the highway leads to gratitude and recognition; CBC, December 27, 2024

CBC; A truck driver's quiet kindness on the highway leads to gratitude and recognition

"When trucker Daljit Sohi spotted a woman drop her purse in a B.C. parking lot, he immediately stepped in to help.

What followed was a three-hour drive to return her belongings, a gesture that would later earn him a generous gift and nomination for a prestigious trucking award...

Sohi, who has been with the company since 2021, hadn't told anyone at work about what happened, not even his family. 

Harpreet Sabharwal, HR Manager at Triple Eight Transport, praised Sohi's humility.

"The gentleman is quite humble to not boast about himself but we were quite surprised in a positive way.""

'No consequences' for violating human rights in privately funded research in Canada, says ethics expert; CBC, December 2, 2024

Geoff Leo , CBC; 'No consequences' for violating human rights in privately funded research in Canada, says ethics expert

"Knowing that PASS had been approved by two Canadian universities, Parente thought, "I could write a book just on this." Instead, she is adding a chapter on it in her forthcoming book, tentatively titled Ethics on Trial: Protecting Humans in Canada's Broken Research System.

But through her interactions with CBC, Parente made another discovery: the federal government body that oversees research ethics, the Secretariat on the Responsible Conduct of Research, does not have jurisdiction over privately funded clinical trials — which make up about 85 per cent of all such research in this country.

"I was shocked at this revelation," she said. "Everyone I have spoken to were just as shocked." 

Martin Letendre, a Quebec-based lawyer and research ethicist, said this fact demonstrates that Canada's research ethics system is the "wild West." 

"Clearly, it makes absolutely no sense," said Letendre, who is president of Veritas IRB, a private research ethics board founded by Parente. "It's going to come as a total shock to anyone in academia who is studying or experts on the governance of research in the country.""

What Springfield, Ohio, can teach Canadians about digital mis- and disinformation; Toronto Star, October 5, 2024

Bessma Momani and Shelly Ghai Bajaj , Toronto Star; What Springfield, Ohio, can teach Canadians about digital mis- and disinformation

"Digital disinformation can be dangerous and too often, racialized ethnocultural communities bear the brunt of it.

Disinformation during election time certainly gets media attention, but it is the everyday disinformation that we need to pay attention to. We need to wake up to see how this near constant flow — the ‘slow drip of polarizing and illiberal narratives’ — erodes Canadian values and social cohesion...

In fact, foreign interference in Canada’s democratic and electoral processes, including the use of disinformation, is expected to play an even larger role in future election cycles.

Thankfully there is growing awareness to this problem; one poll estimates that 84 per cent of Canadians are concerned about disinformation and potential impact on democracy. Canadians are also aware of the potential weaponization of emergent technologies and capabilities with 80 per cent of Canadians indicating concern about the abuse of AI and the spread of AI-generated disinformation in the lead-up to the 2025 federal election.

But, while this growing awareness and attention is positive, we need to pay attention to disinformation in everyday contexts, to help build societal resilience and prevent social polarization."

Tech companies battle content creators over use of copyrighted material to train AI models; The Canadian Press via CBC, June 30, 2024

 Anja Karadeglija , The Canadian Press via CBC; Tech companies battle content creators over use of copyrighted material to train AI models

"Canadian creators and publishers want the government to do something about the unauthorized and usually unreported use of their content to train generative artificial intelligence systems.

But AI companies maintain that using the material to train their systems doesn't violate copyright, and say limiting its use would stymie the development of AI in Canada.

The two sides are making their cases in recently published submissions to a consultation on copyright and AI being undertaken by the federal government as it considers how Canada's copyright laws should address the emergence of generative AI systems like OpenAI's ChatGPT."