Life in Canada

2025-12-18T15:52:00.002-04:00

Muslim gangs have taken control of one of Britain's most drug-ridden and violent prisons, watchdogs warn

Muslim gangs hold sway at one of the most violent and drug-ridden prisons in Britain, watchdogs have warned.

Chief inspector of prisons Charlie Taylor has served an urgent notification for HMP Swaleside in Kent after discovering dangerously unsafe conditions for prisoners and staff in an unannounced visit earlier this month.

Mr Taylor said the prison was 'filthy', rife with drugs and had a 'pervasive sense of despair', leading him to give it the 'worst scores of any jail in my five years as chief inspector'.

The jail's Independent Monitoring Board previously raised concerns about 'religious gangs' at the facility, where a third of inmates are Muslim.

'A recurring theme is the perception of widespread violence, including bullying by both prisoners and staff, as well as unchecked gang control, particularly by religious gangs, which many prisoners report feeling powerless and unsafe against,' the IMB said.

Their report noted that there was evidence of rival gangs fighting over drugs, racist comments and discrimination against Jewish prisoners.

The IMB described violence as a 'constant theme' and called the manufacturing of blades on site 'ominous'.

There were 107 assaults on staff over a three-month period, with 70 per cent triggered by officers giving instructions.

Six inmates were attacked on their first night at the prison.

In his own inspection, Mr Taylor found inmates at the Category B jail who were too frightened to go to health appointments or use the gym because of fears of violence.

Writing to Justice Secretary David Lammy to issue his urgent notification, Mr Taylor described 'very high levels of violence' as affecting every aspect of prison life, with a third of prisoners surveyed saying they had been assaulted and three quarters felt unsafe.

Drug-taking was 'rife', drones were regularly dropping contraband into the prison, including knives, and inspectors also saw widespread graffiti, fire damage, broken furniture and mouldy showers.

2022-05-06T12:43:00.001-03:00

Canadians have mobiles tracked by Govt.

Canadians' movements, including trips to the liquor store and pharmacy, were closely tracked via their mobile phones without their knowledge during the COVID-19 pandemic, a report sent to a parliamentary committee shows.

Outbreak intelligence analysts BlueDot prepared reports using anonymized data for the Public Health Agency of Canada to help it understand travel patterns during the pandemic.

The federal government provided one of these reports to the House of Commons ethics committee as it probed the collection and use of mobile phone data by the public health agency.

The report reveals the agency was able to view a detailed snapshot of people's behaviour, including visits to the grocery store, gatherings with family and friends, time spent at home and trips to other towns and provinces.

Newsletter sign-up: Get The COVID-19 Brief sent to your inbox

MPs on the ethics committee expressed surprise at how much detail the report contained, even as all identifying information was stripped out.

“Questions remain about the specifics of the data provided if Canadians' rights were violated, and what advice the Liberal government was given,” said Damien Kurek, Conservative MP for Battle River-Crowfoot.

The committee on Wednesday released a report on its overall probe into the agency's collection of phone data during the pandemic. It concluded the government should tell Canadians if it collects data about their movements and allow them to opt out.

The Public Health Agency said it took safeguarding Canadians' privacy very seriously and the analysis on Canadians' movements it received “is not about following individuals' trips to a specific location, but rather in understanding whether the number of visits to specific locations have increased or decreased over time.”

“For example, point-of-interest data from BlueDot identifies the number of visits to grocery stores, parks, liquor stores and hospitals,” a spokesman said. “All we receive is the location of the point of interest and the number of visits for a specific day.”

Adam van Koeverden, parliamentary secretary to the minister of health, sent the sample BlueDot report to the ethics committee on Jan. 31. It covers movements in September 2021.

Canadians have mobiles tracked by Govt.

The report provides information on how many people were moving between specific towns, such as the border community of Abbotsford, B.C., as well as provinces and territories. It shows movements across the Canada-U.S. border, comparing travel to previous weeks and years going back to 2019.

The phone locations allowed the agency to get a picture of gatherings occurring in people's houses, such as over the Labour Day weekend. The report included a graph recording hours spent away from home in each province between Christmas Day 2020 to the week of Sept. 19, 2021.

Kamran Khan, founder and CEO of BlueDot, said the company's role is to produce “infectious disease insights,” not to collect location data directly from mobile devices.

He said BlueDot has no interest in the movements or lifestyles of individuals.

“Our only goal is to help protect lives and livelihoods from infectious diseases, which requires intelligence about overall trends in populations,” he said.

The company procured anonymous and aggregated data from third-party vendors so there was no information about the specific device the data came from.

“None of the information ever includes demographic information or specific identifiers or anything like a name, telephone number, email or address,” he said.

“The data and analysis that we do provide are indicators: statistical summaries of anonymous device information, such as the total number of devices travelling between two cities.”

The public health agency gave The Canadian Press an example of the way the data is presented to them, showing addresses of beer and liquor stores, the number of visits and the date the visits occurred. It included no names or identifying personal information.

2022-05-01T12:55:00.000-03:00

Euthanasia Canada Laws

There is an endlessly repeated witticism by the poet Anatole France that ‘the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.’ What France certainly did not foresee is that an entire country – and an ostentatiously progressive one at that – has decided to take his sarcasm at face value and to its natural conclusion.

Since last year, Canadian law, in all its majesty, has allowed both the rich as well as the poor to kill themselves if they are too poor to continue living with dignity. In fact, the ever-generous Canadian state will even pay for their deaths. What it will not do is spend money to allow them to live instead of killing themselves.

As with most slippery slopes, it all began with a strongly worded denial that it exists. In 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada reversed 22 years of its own jurisprudence by striking down the country’s ban on assisted suicide as unconstitutional, blithely dismissing fears that the ruling would ‘initiate a descent down a slippery slope into homicide’ against the vulnerable as founded on ‘anecdotal examples’. The next year, Parliament duly enacted legislation allowing euthanasia, but only for those who suffer from a terminal illness whose natural death was ‘reasonably foreseeable’.

It only took five years for the proverbial slope to come into view, when the Canadian parliament enacted Bill C-7, a sweeping euthanasia law which repealed the ‘reasonably foreseeable’ requirement – and the requirement that the condition should be ‘terminal’. Now, as long as someone is suffering from an illness or disability which ‘cannot be relieved under conditions that you consider acceptable’, they can take advantage of what is now known euphemistically as ‘medical assistance in dying’ (MAID for short) for free.

Soon enough, Canadians from across the country discovered that although they would otherwise prefer to live, they were too poor to improve their conditions to a degree which was acceptable.

Not coincidentally, Canada has some of the lowest social care spending of any industrialised country, palliative care is only accessible to a minority, and waiting times in the public healthcare sector can be unbearable, to the point where the same Supreme Court which legalised euthanasia declared those waiting times to be a violation of the right to life back in 2005.

Many in the healthcare sector came to the same conclusion. Even before Bill C-7 was enacted, reports of abuse were rife. A man with a neurodegenerative disease testified to Parliament that nurses and a medical ethicist at a hospital tried to coerce him into killing himself by threatening to bankrupt him with extra costs or by kicking him out of the hospital, and by withholding water from him for 20 days. Virtually every disability rights group in the country opposed the new law. To no effect: for once, the government found it convenient to ignore these otherwise impeccably progressive groups.

Since then, things have only gotten worse. A woman in Ontario was forced into euthanasia because her housing benefits did not allow her to get better housing which didn’t aggravate her crippling allergies. Another disabled woman applied to die because she ‘simply cannot afford to keep on living’. Another sought euthanasia because Covid-related debt left her unable to pay for the treatment which kept her chronic pain bearable – under the present government, disabled Canadians got $600 in additional financial assistance during Covid; university students got $5,000.

When the family of a 35-year-old disabled man who resorted to euthanasia arrived at the care home where he lived, they encountered ‘urine on the floor… spots where there was feces on the floor… spots where your feet were just sticking. Like, if you stood at his bedside and when you went to walk away, your foot was literally stuck.’ According to the Canadian government, the assisted suicide law is about ‘prioritis[ing] the individual autonomy of Canadians’; one may wonder how much autonomy a disabled man lying in his own filth had in weighing death over life.

Despite the Canadian government’s insistence that assisted suicide is all about individual autonomy, it has also kept an eye on its fiscal advantages. Even before Bill C-7 entered into force, the country’s Parliamentary Budget Officer published a report about the cost savings it would create: whereas the old MAID regime saved $86.9 million per year – a ‘net cost reduction’, in the sterile words of the report – Bill C-7 would create additional net savings of $62 million per year. Healthcare, particular for those suffering from chronic conditions, is expensive; but assisted suicide only costs the taxpayer $2,327 per ‘case’. And, of course, those who have to rely wholly on government-provided Medicare pose a far greater burden on the exchequer than those who have savings or private insurance.

And yet Canada’s lavishly subsidised media, with some honourable exceptions, has expressed remarkably little curiosity about the open social murder of citizens in one of the world’s wealthiest countries. Perhaps, like many doctors, journalists are afraid of being accused of being ‘unprogressive’ for questioning the new culture of death, a fatal accusation in polite circles. Canada’s public broadcaster, which in 2020 reassured Canadians that there was ‘no link between poverty, choosing medically assisted death’, has had little to say about any of the subsequent developments.

Next year, the floodgates will open even further when those suffering from mental illness – another disproportionately poor group – become eligible for assisted suicide, although enthusiastic doctors and nurses have already pre-empted the law. There is already talk of allowing ‘mature minors’ access to euthanasia too – just think of the lifetime savings. But remember, slippery slopes are always a fallacy.

2020-09-02T13:51:00.001-03:00

NEDLANDS, Australia — A groundbreaking discovery in Australia is giving new meaning to the term natural remedy. Using hundreds of honeybees, a new study reveals the venom in these insects’ stingers quickly kills breast cancer cells. Dr. Ciara Duffy says honeybee venom destroys multiple types of breast cancer, even the hard to treat triple-negative variety.
The study in the journal npj Precision Oncology finds honeybee venom not only eradicates these cancers, it also breaks up a cancerous cell’s ability to reproduce. The venom also contains a compound called melittin which researchers say helps this natural remedy stop the disease with remarkable speed.
“The venom was extremely potent,” the researcher from the Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research says in a media release. “We found that melittin can completely destroy cancer cell membranes within 60 minutes.”
In just 20 minutes, melittin breaks down the chemical messages breast cancer cells transmits to trigger both cell growth and cell division. The compound suppresses the receptors that commonly overexpress themselves in triple-negative breast cancer and HER2-enriched breast cancer.
Venom was also tested against hormone receptor positive breast cancer cells and normal breast cells. With a specifically concentrated dose of the venom, researchers are able to kill 100 percent of cancer cells. At the same time, the study finds bee venom does little harm to normal cells.
“This study demonstrates how melittin interferes with signaling pathways within breast cancer cells to reduce cell replication. It provides another wonderful example of where compounds in nature can be used to treat human diseases,” Professor Peter Klinkenhe from the University of Western Australia says.

Do all bees carry this special venom?

Although there are around 20,000 different species of bees, the study finds not every insect can fight cancer. Dr. Duffy’s tests on 312 honeybees and bumblebees from Perth, Western Australia reveal bumblebee venom does not induce cancer cell death. Honeybees from other regions however, share this special ability to rapidly stop the disease.
“I found that the European honeybee in Australia, Ireland and England produced almost identical effects in breast cancer compared to normal cells,” Duffy reports.
Researchers add Perth bees are some of the healthiest members of their species. While the study dissects live bee stingers to extract melittin, it finds this compound can be successfully reproduced in labs.
“The synthetic product mirrored the majority of the anti-cancer effects of honeybee venom,” the Australian scientist adds.

Adding honeybee venom to chemotherapy treatments

Study authors say melittin can also help current cancer treatments like chemotherapy. The report discovers melittin also forms numerous pores (tiny holes) in the breast cancer cell membrane. Duffy suspects other cancer drugs may be able to use these openings to penetrate the cells and kill the disease.
“We found that melittin can be used with small molecules or chemotherapies, such as docetaxel, to treat highly-aggressive types of breast cancer. The combination of melittin and docetaxel was extremely efficient in reducing tumor growth in mice.”
Using bee venom as a medical remedy has been studied since the 1950’s, but Duffy’s team says it’s only been considered as treatment for cancer during the last two decades. More research needs to be done to find out what kind of a dose human patients will require
.

French ban on mobile phones in schools

2018-08-13T16:18:00.002-03:00

Canadian mobiles tracked by Govt