One team member
estimated that the total number of dead fish was around 65,000 and that
70 percent of the salmon died before being able to reproduce.
During a normal summer, pink and chum salmon will travel from the
Pacific Ocean into more inland streams and estuaries to spawn. After the
fish release their eggs and milt, another word for salmon sperm, most
of the animals usually die from exhaustion.
She was only 28 years old and had no reason to believe she was anything other than perfectly healthy, except for a few headaches.
But after waking up on a stretcher in the hallway of a Toronto hospital after suffering three grand mal seizures, doctors found a cancerous tumour the size of her fist on the front left lobe of her brain.
A 2021 study conducted by the pharmaceutical pricing consultancy PDCI Market Access found 17 to 30 per cent of cancer patients aged 25 to–64 in Ontario have no form of drug coverage whatsoever.
Those patients are left to navigate complex bureaucratic red tape as they attempt to apply to emergency or high-cost provincial drug programs, or to compassionate programs provided by pharmaceutical manufacturers to avoid eye-popping medical bills.
All of this paperwork takes time, and a vast amount of already-depleted energy to complete.
Needless to say, for Grundy, both time and energy were in short supply after her rare-cancer diagnosis.
“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.
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.
