5 things you absolutely must know today

Altona photographer selling prints to help Syrian refugees

This is why the Prairies are extraordinary: Altona, Man., landscape photographer Jay Siemens is partnering with Friesen’s Printing to produce a calendar, the proceeds of which will go towards helping Syrian refugees settle in the southern Manitoba community. Friesen’s agreed to cover the cost of designing and printing 1,000 calendars full of Siemens’s images. The calendar “Where I Belong” retails for $20 and can be purchased here. The money will go towards Altona-based Build a Vilage charity, which is “helping five refugee families get their new lives started, helping with their housing and anything else they might need,” Siemens told CBC News. [Source: CBC]

Contested shipwreck could be worth over $1B

The San Jose, an 18^th-century Spanish ship that sank more than 300 years ago, could be the most valuable shipwreck ever discovered, with a value Columbian President Juan Manuel Santos estimates at $1-billion U.S. Santos said last week that the wreck was found in Colombian waters by Columbian salvagers. But that claim is being disputed by Washington-based Sea Search Armada, a crew that maintains they found the ship more than three decades ago. Though this dispute will go to court, many such cases that involve interpreting international law have ruled that sunken warships belong to their country of origin. In this case, Spain. And, if this is the case, it is up to Spain to decide the fate of the wreckage. Those who study such things predict the dollar value aboard the San Jose to be greater than the $1-billion Santos predicted. [Source: National Geographic]

Argentina swears in new president

Outgoing Argentinian President Cristina Fernandez will hand her country over to Mauricio Macri later today after the successor she chose suffered a defeat in last month’s elections. Fernandez’s presidency is being called “divisive” with heavy spending on social programs and explicit alignment with leftist rulers like the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Bolivian President Evo Morales. Economists predict that the country’s heaving spending over the last 12 years has brought it to its knees. Macri ran on promises to undo much of what Fernandez did, with an emphasis on restoring relations with the U.S. [Source: CTV News]

Winnipeg police buy armoured vehicle, spend $343K

The Winnipeg Police now have at their disposal an armoured, tactical vehicle, which put them out $343,000, according to CTV News. The expenditure was made in part as a preparedness measure following last year’s attack on police in Moncton, N.B. Supt. Gord Perrier told news sources the force had resisted purchasing such a vehicle in the past due to concerns surrounding the militarization of police. Winnipeg was one of only a few Canadian cities without such a vehicle. [Source: CTV News]

North Korea claims to have h-bomb, experts skeptical

Kim Jong-un is back in the news, and this time his threats are for real, according to North Korea’s state media KCNA, which quoted saying they are “ready to detonate a self-reliant A-bomb and H-bomb.” The claim that North Korea has successfully produced a hydrogen bomb has not been verified by sources outside of KCNA’s report. Experts are skeptical. The country has said things like this before, claiming to have nuclear weapons, but this is considered the first reference to possessing a hydrogen bomb. “It’s hard to regard North Korea as possessing an H-bomb,” Lee Chun-geun, a research fellow at the Science and Technology Policy Institute in South Korea, told Yonhap. [Source: BBC]

***

For more interesting stuff, follow @spectatortrib on Twitter. And find us on Instagram, too: @spectatortribune.  

Follow this link to subscribe to 5 things you absolutely must know today: http://eepurl.com/5LB