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.

UK offers new North Sea oil, gas licences despite opposition:

I wonder if the Brits really believe this minister’s statement…

“I know it sounds contradictory – but it’s actually good for the environment,“ Climate Minister Graham Stuart said.

“When we burn our own gas, it’s got lower emissions around its production than foreign gas as well as supporting British jobs,” he told the BBC.

No more broken promises: holding government and industry accountable for toxic tailings ponds: Since time immemorial the Athabasca River has been a powerful source
of life in what is currently called Alberta. A Canadian Heritage River –
a designation given to rivers with “outstanding natural, cultural and
recreational values” – the river and its basin is one of the world’s “most ecologically significant wetlands,”
and serves as a home to a variety of flora and fauna, including white
and black spruce, balsam and alpine firs, bears, bighorn sheep, the
endangered whooping crane, and the world’s largest herd of bison, among
many, many others. It is, and long has been, home to many communities of
people, including the Dane-zaa, Sekani, Ktunaxa, Secwepemc (Shuswap),
Salish, Nakoda, Woodland Cree, Chipewyan, and Metis.

But the Athabasca River’s long history as a source of life has also,
ironically, put it in serious danger. Millions of years of ecological
evolution and the Earth’s natural rhythms of flourishing and decay
formed what has become the Alberta tar sands, a sprawling mass of
extractive development that has consumed enough land that it is visible
from space. Part of this sprawl includes tailings ponds, highly toxic
pools containing nearly 500 billion litres of
water, sand, clay, and residual bitumen that contain mercury, arsenic,
benzene, and naphthenic acids that pose a catastrophic risk to life.

On the brink: Global crises ranging from climate to economic meltdown demand radical change: We have damaged our planet through destructive exploitation of fossil
fuels and the insatiable demand for things we don’t need. We are
cooking ourselves to death and it may already be too late to do anything about it.

Multiple and intersecting crises — the pandemic, a changing climate,
wars in Ukraine and elsewhere and associated economic sanctions — have
produced real hardship for millions of people. The effects include food
shortages, hunger, inflation, recessions and soaring energy costs that
undermine climate action as coal-fired generation resumes.

Economically, wealth inequality is unprecedented. The poorest half of the global population hardly owns any wealth, just two per cent of the total. The richest 10 per cent of the global population own 76 per cent.

Yet we continue to believe that the marketplace, left mainly to
self-regulate, will naturally stabilize economies. That belief has led
to unlimited growth and minimal intervention by governments to resolve staggering inequity or even to manage the economy at all.