Ukraine war: how the Biden administration is responding to Putin’s threats to go nuclear: Joe Biden has warned
that any use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine by Russia could
lead to “Armageddon”. Speaking at a Democratic fundraising event in New
York on October 6, the US president said the crisis was the closest the
world had come to nuclear catastrophe for sixty years.

“We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the
Cuban missile crisis,” he said, going on to talk about Putin’s repeated
threats to resort to Russia’s nuclear arsenal if he felt Russia was
under threat: “We’ve got a guy I know fairly well. He’s not joking when
he talks about potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological
or chemical weapons because his military is, you might say,
significantly underperforming.”

The possibility of Russia using weapons of mass destruction
has hung over the conflict since Russian troops invaded Ukraine in late
February.
Several times – most recently after Russia annexed four Ukrainian
provinces and declared them part of the federation – the Kremlin
leadership has dropped heavy hints that they would use “all available
means” at their disposal to defend themselves, particularly against any
intervention from Nato.

This fits in with a key element of the theory of nuclear deterrence – the use of nuclear weapons as a threat, in this case to deter Nato from getting involved. When Biden declared in March he would not start “world war III” over Ukraine, this was taken as a clear reference to the risk of nuclear war.

Canadian government ‘discriminated against’ Black public service workers: One week after the Black Class Action Secretariat (BCAS) submitted a
complaint to the United Nations arguing the federal government of Canada
has systemically discriminated against and excluded Black Canadian
public service workers, the federal government is pushing for the courts
to dismiss a class action lawsuit related to the allegations.

The complaint argues Black Canadian workers in the public service
have been denied employment and promotions for decades, while the
government has failed to protect them from anti-Black racism in the
workforce.

It comes more than one year after a class action lawsuit was launched
against the federal government to the tune of $2.5 billion.

Sent to the UN Commission for Human Rights’ Special Rapporteur on
contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and
related intolerance, the complaint calls on the United Nations to hold
Canada accountable for failing to follow international law.

A recession we don’t need to have:

Some now claim that Canadian policy-makers overdid that rescue
effort: because total household income rose during the pandemic, for
example, with income supports more than offsetting the decline in
employment income during the initial COVID recession. I reject that
argument. Those policy interventions, and the subsequent recovery of GDP
and pre-tax-and-subsidy incomes, are not mutually independent. The
interventions explain why the economy did not contract further
and for longer. Without those interventions, household incomes would be
much lower today, and the supposed “excess stimulus” would have
disappeared.

The same goes for arguments that the Bank of Canada overshot the mark
with its monetary stimulus. The economy recovered more strongly and
quickly than expected at the beginning of the pandemic. But that was not
an “error” in forecasting – it was the result of the fiscal
and monetary rescue effort. It’s not just that the Bank of Canada could
not have foreseen that rapid rebound in GDP and employment and spending.
(It couldn’t be expected to.) More important, the Bank’s own actions
helped achieve that stronger-than-expected rebound.

If both fiscal and monetary policy had been less aggressive in 2020,
as those with 20:20 hindsight now recommend, then this vibrant recovery
(which seems to indicate that less supports were needed) wouldn’t have
occurred.

There should be no surprise that these unprecedented events should
still be causing further disruptions and challenges. Chief among them,
of course, is the acceleration in inflation over the last year.

Demagogues like Pierre Poilievre claim that this inflation is the
personal responsibility of the Prime Minister, or the result of the Bank
of Canada “printing money”. This is outright, crude misinformation.

Canada bans more than 10K Iran Revolutionary Guard members from entering country – National | Globalnews.ca: Canada has permanently banned half the membership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) from ever entering Canada, as protests sweep the nation following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini.

Amini died last month while in the custody of Iran’s so-called morality police for reportedly wearing her hijab too loosely.

“We will be pursuing a listing of the Iranian regime, including the IRGC
leadership, under the most powerful provision of the Immigration and
Refugee Protection Act,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said, speaking to
reporters on Friday.

“The designation of a regime is a permanent
decision. This means that more than 10,000 members of the IRGC
leadership, for example, will be inadmissible to Canada forever.”

How poverty, not pain, is driving Canadians with disabilities to consider medically-assisted death – National | Globalnews.ca: “We’re
hearing about people who are choosing medical assistance in dying or
thinking about it more because they don’t have money to live.”

Dr. Dosani is a palliative care physician and professor of community and family medicine at the University of Toronto.

“People are living in abject poverty when they’re on social assistance, in almost every province and territory across Canada.”

The
numbers are grim. Looking across the country, provincial disability
support rates vary from a low of $705 per month in New Brunswick, to a
high of $1,685 in Alberta. Try getting by on $1,228 per month in
Toronto, or $1,358 in Vancouver, where the average rent on a one-bedroom
apartment is about $2,500.

The result is that according to a 2017 report from Statistics Canada,
nearly a quarter of disabled people are living in poverty. That’s
roughly 1.5 million people, or a city about the population of Montreal.

“When
people are living in such a situation where they’re structurally placed
in poverty, is medical assistance in dying really a choice or is it
coercion? That’s the question we need to ask ourselves,” Dr. Dosani
says.