Canada had an increase of more than 1 million citizens in 2022, bringing its population to more than 39.5 million. 

The 2.7-percent increase was the highest since 1957 with international migration accounting for nearly 96 percent of the growth.

Statistics Canada said that “high job vacancies and labour shortages” have fuelled the high rate of immigration. It also noted Canada’s ageing population, with one in seven residents between the ages of 55 and 64, providing opportunity to welcome more people.

Immigration fuels record-high population growth in Canada | Migration News | Al Jazeera

 Lebanon is in the fourth year of a deep economic crisis, which experts say has its root in decades of corruption and mismanagement by a political class that has ruled the country since the end of the 1975-90 civil war. The crisis has led to school closures and left families unable to afford food and pay for fuel or other basic needs. Government-subsidised electricity, meanwhile, is mostly unavailable.

Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr said, “There is anger. People believe that the political and business elite do not want to solve the crisis because that will involve economic and structural reforms and fighting corruption. If the elite does that, they lose control over the state and its resource which they have been exploiting for years now.”

Patrick Mardini, director of the Lebanese Institute for Market Studies, said “the main reason behind the currency devaluation is the massive printing of Lebanese pound that is being pumped into the system. He told Al Jazeera that “at the beginning of the crisis, we had around four trillion Lebanese pounds in circulation; today we are at around 70 trillion”.

Mardini said the situation was compounded by a lack of confidence and trust in the Central Bank and the whole banking system, as a whole.

Lebanese take to streets as anger over economic meltdown grows | News | Al Jazeera

 The ink is barely dry on the new treaty to protect the high seas and already there are complaints that the treaty is being broached.

Michael Lodge, a British lawyer and the head of the UN-affiliated body responsible for governing mining in the high seas, has been criticised by diplomats who claim he has been pushing them to accelerate the start of deep-sea mining.

A German diplomat said Lodge – the secretary-general of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) – has a duty of neutrality and has overstepped his role in resisting measures put forward by some council members that could slow down approval of the first mining proposals. Franziska Brantner, Germany’s minister for economic affairs and climate action, said: “It is not the task of the secretariat to interfere in the decision making. In the past, you have actively taken a stand against positions and decision-making proposals from individual delegations.” Brantner added that the German government “is seriously concerned about this approach”.

The criticism of Lodge comes at a crucial juncture as the body is expected to receive an application for commercial seabed mining later this year. The authority, which is meeting in Jamaica this week, is still writing regulations that would govern the process.

 Gina Guillén Grillo, Costa Rica’s representative to the seabed authority, said: “Member states should drive the International Seabed Authority. Decisions must come from them & must not be pushed by those who have only administrative duties. Mining the seabed cannot be rushed [because] of the economic interests of a few.”

The row is a measure of growing tensions over who controls the agency, amid pressure from some UN nations to slow down ocean mining, while others want it to go ahead. Germany and Costa Rica are among the increasing number of countries – including France, Spain, Chile, New Zealand and several Pacific nations – that have recently said they do not believe there is enough available data to evaluate the impact of mining on marine life. They have called for a “precautionary pause” or a ban on mining in the high seas.

Duncan Currie, an international legal adviser to the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition and an official observer at the 8 March meeting, told the Guardian: “This is not just a row between diplomats. It is very significant. The executive organ is the council. It is not for the administrative body to be telling the council what decisions they should be making.”

 The Metals Company, a Canadian mining startup, has said it intends to request approval this year to start mining as soon as 2024.

The small Pacific island country of Nauru is one of three states sponsoring The Metals Company, along with the Kingdom of Tonga and the Republic of Kiribati. In 2021, Nauru triggered a two-year rule that obliges the ISA to finalise and adopt regulations for commercial mining by July 2023. According to the Republic of Nauru, if the ISA has not finalised regulations within the time frame, and a mining application has been submitted, then the authority should “nonetheless consider and provisionally approve” it, allowing for extraction to go ahead. However, some authority members believe the agency is under no obligation to approve an application from The Metals Company and Nauru until the regulations are complete.

A spokesperson for the ISA told the Guardian: “The role of the secretariat is not to pass judgment on the position of member states, but to facilitate negotiations and ensure that discussions are informed by the best available science and in accordance with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and the 1994 agreement. The secretariat carries out this mission carefully, deliberately and to the best of its abilities.”

The spokesperson added: “The regulations will only be approved should ISA’s members reach a consensus on its content. In the meantime, only exploration activities will be permitted.”

Row erupts over deep-sea mining as world races to finalise vital regulations | Environment | The Guardian

 Nearly 200,000 people, including more than 40,000 children, could be locked up or forced into destitution if the government’s controversial illegal migration bill becomes law, according to new analysis by the Refugee Council.

The charity has used government data and the numbers of asylum seekers the Home Office said it hopes to deport from the UK, to project how many people are likely to either be forcibly removed or left in limbo in the first three years of the new legislation if it becomes law, at a cost to the taxpayer of around £9bn. 

Under the new rules, people seeking asylum can be detained for 28 days without the right to access a lawyer or apply for bail. Terrorism suspects can only be detained for 14 days.

‘Draconian’ migration bill could leave tens of thousands destitute or locked up | Refugees | The Guardian

 The number of people lacking access to safe drinking water in cities around the world will double by 2050, research has found, amid warnings of an imminent water crisis that is likely to “spiral out of control”.

Nearly 1 billion people in cities around the world face water scarcity today and the number is likely to reach between 1.7 billion and 2.4 billion within the next three decades, according to the UN World Water Development Report, published on Tuesday ahead of a vital UN summit. 

Urban water demand is predicted to increase by 80% by 2050. Water shortages are also becoming a more frequent occurrence in rural areas, the report found. Currently, between 2 billion and 3 billion people experience water shortages for at least a month a year.

Audrey Azoulay, director general of Unesco, the UN agency that produced the report, said governments must cooperate over water. “There is an urgent need to establish strong international mechanisms to prevent the global water crisis from spiralling out of control. Water is our common future, and it is essential to act together to share it equitably and manage it sustainably,”

About 2 billion people globally do not have safe drinking water, while 3.6 billion lack access to safely managed sanitation. Water use has been growing globally by about 1% a year for the last 40 years and this will continue. About a 10th of the global population lives in countries with high water stress.

Number of city dwellers lacking safe water to double by 2050 | Water | The Guardian

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a new synthesis report. 195 governments commissioned it and the summary was agreed line by line. It is accepted fact by nations worldwide, and a shared basis for future action.

The report’s conclusions are terrifying and wearily familiar.

Every region is experiencing “widespread adverse impacts”. 

Almost half the world’s population is “highly vulnerable” to climate change impacts. Expected repercussions will escalate rapidly. 

It concludes that there is a “rapidly closing window of opportunity” to secure a livable future.

The message is the same: immediate and deep cuts to greenhouse gas emissions in all sectors.

Will it happen?

 Across the U.S., hundreds of thousands of nursing home residents are locked in a wretched bind: Driven into poverty, forced to hand over all income and left to live on a stipend as low as $30 a month. In a long-term care system that subjects some of society’s frailest to daily indignities, Medicaid’s personal needs allowance, as the stipend is called, is among the most ubiquitous, yet least known.

Nearly two-thirds of American nursing home residents have their care paid for by Medicaid and, in exchange, all Social Security, pension and other income they would receive is instead rerouted to go toward their bill. The personal needs allowance is meant to pay for anything not provided by the home, from a phone to clothes and shoes to a birthday present for a grandchild.  Congress hasn’t raised the allowance in decades. Medicaid was created in 1965 as part of the Great Society programs of Lyndon B. Johnson. A 1972 amendment established the personal needs allowance, set at a minimum of $25 monthly. Unlike other benefits like Social Security, cost-of-living increases were not built into personal needs allowance rules. Had it been linked to inflation, it would be about $180 today. But Congress has raised the minimum rate only once, to $30, in 1987. It has remained there ever since.

When Marla Carter visits her mother-in-law at a nursing home in Owensboro, Kentucky, the scene feels more 19th-century poorhouse than modern-day America. With just a $40 allowance, residents are dressed in ill-fitting hand-me-downs or hospital gowns that drape open. Some have no socks or shoes. Basic supplies run low. Many don’t even have a pen to write with.

“That’s what was so surprising to us,” Carter says, “the poverty.”

In nursing homes, impoverished live final days on pennies | AP News

 Private firms are making increased profits as the government pays millions of pounds a day to put up asylum seekers in the UK.

 The United States remains one of the most dangerous wealthy nations for a woman to give birth. Compared to other countries, the maternal mortality rate was twice as high in the US than in the UK, Germany and France; and three times higher than in Spain, Italy, Japan and several other countries,

 The World Health Organization (WHO) is warning of a “silent pandemic” of antimicrobial resistance. Five million deaths are associated every year due to antimicrobial resistance, according to the release.  2.8 million antimicrobial-resistant infections occur in the U.S. each year, and more than 35,000 people die as a result,

“Antibiotic resistance is one of the major concerns in modern medicine today,” Dr. Aaron Glatt, chief of infectious diseases at Mount Sinai South Nassau Hospital on Long Island, New York, explained. “There is a dearth of safe, effective and inexpensive agents to use to treat many of these significant infections. It is critical that new and innovative products be investigated.” Glatt added.

Pharmaceutical companies must invest in the research and development phase to find an antimicrobial agent that will combat drug resistant pathogens, experts say. Yet these drugs are as likely to fail during this process as drugs for other diseases that may yield a much better return on the investment, such as cancer and heart drugs. 

It’s often simply cheaper to bring ‘me-too’ drugs to the market than try and completely redesign a new drug. Look at how many different statin drugs we have that are basically identical. How many SSRI [selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor] depression drugs are available with minimal differences.

You only ever need an antibiotic ideally for a brief period of time, yet a cholesterol drug or an HIV antiviral is forever.

‘Silent pandemic’ warning from WHO: Bacteria killing too many people due to antimicrobial resistance | Fox News