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Canada struggles to restore power after storm; bodies found
Hundreds of thousands of people in Atlantic Canada remained without power on Sunday, officials said they found the body of a woman after former Hurricane Fiona tore down homes, roofs and blocked roads in the country’s Atlantic province swept into the sea.
After soaring north from the Caribbean Sea, Fiona made landfall as a tropical cyclone before dawn Saturday, hitting Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Quebec with hurricane-strength winds, rain and waves.
Defence Minister Anita Anand said the military would help clear fallen trees, restore transport links and do whatever else was needed if needed. She did not specify how many troops would be deployed.
Fiona has been blamed for at least five deaths in the Caribbean and one in Canada. Authorities found the body of a 73-year-old woman missing in the water in the town of Channel-Port Aux Basques on Newfoundland’s southern coast.
Waves hit her residence Saturday morning, tearing apart part of the basement, police said. Her body was recovered late Sunday afternoon with the assistance of the Canadian Coast Guard and other rescue teams, the RCMP said in a release posted on social media.
“Living in coastal communities, we know what to expect, and sadly, the sea has taken our other share,” said Gudie Hutchings, MP from Newfoundland.
As of Sunday, more than 252,000 Nova Scotia power customers and more than 82,000 marine power customers in PEI, or about 95% of the total, remained in the dark. So do more than 20,600 homes and businesses in New Brunswick.
More than 415,000 Nova Scotia power customers — about 80 per cent of the province’s nearly 1 million people — were affected by the outage Saturday.
The utility company said it could take days to get everyone’s lights back on.
Russia’s call-up splits EU; Ukraine says it shows weakness
Russia’s eagerness to mobilize hundreds of thousands of recruits to stem heavy losses in Ukraine was a tacit agreement that its “army cannot fight”, Ukraine’s president said on Sunday, as divisions deepened in Europe over whether to welcome or reject Russians fleeing Ukraine. call.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky also said in an interview with CBS that he was bracing for more Russian changes to Ukraine’s power infrastructure as the weather cools and the Kremlin tries to increase pressure on Ukraine and its Western backers. Lots of attacks. Zelensky warned that this winter “will be very difficult.”
“They’ll launch missiles, they’ll target our grid. It’s a challenge, but we’re not afraid,” he said on “Face the Nation.”
He described Russia’s mobilization — the first such call-up since World War II — as a signal of weakness rather than strength, saying: “They admit that their military can no longer fight Ukraine.”
Zelensky also said that Ukraine has acquired the NASAMS air defense system from the United States, which uses surface-to-air missiles to track and shoot down incoming missiles or aircraft. Zelensky did not say how much Ukraine received.
While the European Union is now largely off-limits to most Russians, with direct flights halted and land borders increasingly closed to them, a large number of Russian men fleeing military service are causing divisions among European officials over whether they should be given a safe haven.
Part of the mobilization also sparked protests in Russia, with fresh anti-war demonstrations on Sunday.
After rocky start, hopes for drug legalization in Oregon
Two years after Oregon residents voted to legalize hard drugs and poured hundreds of millions of dollars into treatment, there have been few calls for these services, and the state has been slow to fund them.
When voters passed the state’s pioneering Drug Addiction Treatment and Recovery Act in 2020, the emphasis was on treatment as much as on decriminalizing possession of personal-use amounts of heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and other drugs.
But Oregon still has one of the highest addiction rates in the country. Fatal overdose increased by nearly 20% from the previous year, with more than 1,000 deaths. According to testimony before lawmakers, more than half of the state’s addiction treatment programs lack the capacity to meet demand because they don’t have enough staff and funding.
Supporters want more states to follow Oregon’s lead, saying decriminalization reduces the stigma of addiction and frees addicts from jail time and criminal records. If another state were to consider decriminalization, Oregon’s situation would almost certainly be taken into account.
Steve Allen, director of behavioral health at the Oregon Department of Health, acknowledged that more than $302 million was spent on facilities that help people get out of drugs or at least use drugs, despite his announcement that he had reached a “real milestone.” They are safer.
“The road to getting here has not been easy. Oregon is the first state to try this bold and transformative approach,” Allen told a state Senate committee on Wednesday.
Still, one expert told lawmakers the effort was doomed to fail unless people with addiction were treated.
Keith Humphreys, an addiction researcher and professor at Stanford University, said: “If there are no formal or informal pressures for addicts to seek treatment and recovery and therefore to stop using drugs, we should expect drug use, addiction and The resulting injury rates will continue to be high,” said a former senior adviser to the university and the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.
Exit polls: Italy’s far-right leader’s coalition leads vote
Far-right leader Giorgio Melloni’s electoral coalition appeared to be well ahead in Italy’s national vote, an exit poll on state television showed shortly after polls closed on Sunday night.
Compared with the closest contender, the centre-left coalition of the former Democratic prime minister, Meloni’s Italian brother, allied with two right-wing parties, appears set to receive as much as 45 percent of the vote in both houses of parliament, Rai state broadcaster Enrico Letta said. , apparently got a 29.5% approval rating. Rai said the exit poll had a 3.5 percent margin of error.
Meloni, 45, is likely to become Italy’s first far-right prime minister since the end of World War II and the country’s first woman to hold the position. Her party has neo-fascist roots and needs to form a coalition with her main ally, anti-immigration coalition leader Matteo Salvini and conservative former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, to secure a firm seat in parliament Majority seats.
Meloni’s meteoric rise in the EU’s third-largest economy comes at a pivotal moment as much of the continent struggles with soaring energy bills, the fallout from the war in Ukraine.
“Today you can help write history,” Meloni tweeted on Sunday.
Meloni’s party was built on the legacy of the neo-fascist party founded shortly after the war by the nostalgic of the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.
Cuba holds unusual vote on law allowing same-sex marriage
Cuba held a rare referendum on Sunday on an unusually controversial law — a government-backed “family law” code that allows same-sex couples to marry and adopt, and outlines the rights of children and grandparents.
Cuba holds parliamentary elections every two years, and no political parties are allowed except the Communist Party, but referendums on specific laws are rarely held.
Rarely has an officially backed measure been as openly criticized as the 400-plus-article family law, which has been questioned by many members of the island’s growing evangelical community.
Comprehensive regulations would also allow for surrogacy, wider rights for grandparents over grandchildren, measures to protect older people and prevent gender-based violence.
President Miguel Diaz-Canel, who pushed for the law, acknowledged resistance when he voted on Sunday.
“Most of us would vote for the code, but it still has issues that our society as a whole doesn’t understand,” he said.
Market vendor Miguel Alberto Galindo, 64, said he had already voted for the measure: “It’s time for gays and lesbians to have the same rights as everyone else,” he said.
But Alejandro Rodríguez, a 33-year-old hardware store worker, said he voted against the measure, saying: “Some things in the code are good, but some things are Bad.” He said he disagreed with giving gay couples the same rights as “normal” families.
The measure was approved by Cuba’s parliament, the National Assembly, after thousands of government-organized information sessions were held across the country this year.
— Associated Press
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