We got some news about 24 Sussex Drive.

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government plans to restore the prime minister’s residence at 24 Sussex Drive by launching a national design competition and fundraising campaign.

The prime minister said the winning design proposal will be announced by Canada Day next year.

Carney said the heritage building is now in a critical state from decades of neglect, and he does not want to see it crumble.

“It has not been cared for with the respect it deserves,” Carney said at a news conference outside the building on Friday.

“After decades of deferred maintenance and neglect, this house sits empty. It has been uninhabitable for more than a decade.”

The 35-room mansion, built in 1896, was abandoned as the official Ottawa residence of the prime minister in 2015.

The Canadian Press has more. 

Mark Siezen, the CEO of Bouwinvest, was in Ottawa earlier this month for a series of meetings with senior government officials to secure support for the firm’s proposal for the reciprocal elimination of taxes on pension fund investors.

He said in an interview on Thursday that he left those meetings feeling that “things are going to start moving quite quickly,” opening the door for a potential announcement should Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten make a rumoured visit to Canada in the coming months.

“I’m actually quite bullish [and] quite positive. There’s been a lot of momentum in the Netherlands since we got a new government in February.”

A Canadian government source offered a more cautious assessment of the discussions.

Read more from Marco Vigliotti.

Wondering whether the soccer momentum will last? Here’s a story on that.

As the FIFA World Cup hits the halfway mark, the federal government is focusing on making sure the next generation of players can still take the field.

Those in the youth sports space say the hardest part of getting Canadian kids into soccer isn’t convincing them to watch the World Cup — it’s making sure they can afford to play after the tournament ends.

That’s the challenge the federal government says it’s trying to address with a new program to build 25 community soccer pitches across Canada over the next four years.

Just this week, Secretary of State for Sport Adam van Koeverden announced a community soccer pitch in Surrey B.C.

“We want sports to be available for everyone who wants to play, because we know that talent is everywhere across our country but we want opportunities to be right across our country as well,” van Koeverden said in an interview with iPolitics. 

Sydney Ko has more. 

In Other Headlines

Internationally

Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, has vowed to fight to save “as many people as possible” as the official death toll from the country’s worst earthquake in more than a century almost doubled, but frustration was growing at the perceived sluggishness of the government’s response.

Rodríguez’s brother, Jorge, who is the president of the national assembly, said on Friday that the official number of dead had risen to 920. Delcy Rodríguez had earlier said that almost 3,000 people were injured. Speaking during a tour of La Guaira, the most devastated region, she said foreign search and rescue groups were starting to arrive.

“We offer our solidarity [to families of victims],” Rodríguez said late on Thursday outside the ruins of an eight-floor seafront hotel that had been obliterated by twin 7.2- and 7.5-magnitude quakes.

Volunteer searchers and the relatives of the many missing voiced exasperation and anger at the lack of an official response as they waited for government teams.

The Guardian has more. 

NABLUS, West Bank — It was supposed to be the happiest day of Raghed al-Shami’s life. She was about to give birth to a baby boy. But instead of having her husband beside her for the arrival of their first child, Shami found herself kneeling over her husband’s lifeless body for a last goodbye before being taken to the maternity ward. Nayef Samaro had been on his way to meet her at the hospital when he was shot dead by an Israeli soldier.

Samaro, 25, was killed during an Israeli military raid on May 3 on a busy shopping thoroughfare in Nablus. He is one of the 1,103 Palestinians, including 241 children, in the occupied West Bank that the United Nations says have been killed by Israeli settlers or security forces since the Hamas-led attack on Israel from Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023. It’s part of an unprecedented increase in Israeli military operations and attacks in the West Bank for which the perpetrators are almost never prosecuted.

“We have seen that impunity is a given,” Ajith Sunghay, head of the U.N. Human Rights Office for the Occupied Palestinian Territory, told NPR. “There is no accountability for violence by Israeli settlers or by the Israeli military.”

Samaro’s family says on the day of the Israeli military raid on Nablus’ old city, he was working at a restaurant and was shot as he left to go to the hospital where his wife would later give birth to their child.

Read more from NPR.

In Other International Headlines

The Kicker

Canada may be across the pond from Europe, but it could soon find itself on one of the continent’s biggest stages – Eurovision.

CBC became a full member of the European Broadcasting Union on Thursday, opening up the potential debut.

Read more from the New York Times.