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Marc Miller, minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, hands small Canadian flags to 53 new Canadian citizens representing 22 diverse nations, at a special ceremony at Canada Place, on Oct. 12, 2023, in Edmonton, Alberta.
HARD NUMBERS: Small towns get big say in immigration, Canada faces arms export lawsuit, Red Sea attacks push up shipping costs, Hotel California suit gets checked out
18: Over the next 18 months, Canada will expand and make permanent a pilot program that gives small towns a say in where immigrants can settle. The program has already resettled close to 5,000 foreigners in rural villages and small towns struggling with labor shortages.
21 million: The Canadian government is facing a lawsuit alleging that $21 million worth of Ottawa’s arms exports to Israel are illegal. The plaintiffs – the Canadian Lawyers for International Human Rights and a Ramallah-based non-profit called Al-Haq Law – allege that arms exports to Israel since Oct. 7 violate Canadian laws that prohibit the sale of weapons that could be used in human rights violations. Ottawa says all exports since Israel launched its assault on Gaza have been “non-lethal” equipment.
1,000: The cost of shipping goods from India or the Middle East to North America is about to go up. Global shipping giant Maersk has raised prices along those routes by $1,000 per container, a hike of around 20%. Houthi attacks on commercial ships in the Red Sea have forced companies like Maersk to take much longer routes around the Cape of Good Hope, which adds at least 15 days to the journey.
3: Well, three lucky guys in New York won’t be “prisoners here of their own device,” or any other device, as it happens. Authorities have dropped charges against a trio of men accused of trying to sell a stolen notepad with handwritten lyrics to the famous Eagles tune “Hotel California.” The pad was swiped from the Eagles’ archives by a biographer in the 1970s and sold to one of three accused men for $50,000 in 2005. Prosecutors said a newly released cache of emails cast doubt on the fairness of the case and asked a judge to drop it.
Cartridges lie on the flags of Russia and North Korea.
North Korea keeps shipping, Russia keeps shooting
For 20 months now, Russia has been shelling Ukraine nonstop — sometimes as often as 80,000 times a day. But even as the war grinds into a deepening stalemate, Western intelligence officials say the Kremlin still has the firepower to keep pounding Ukraine at least through the end of next year.
Estonia’s top defense spook said earlier this week that Russia has at least 4 million artillery shells in its arsenal, enough to hit Ukraine at the current rate of 10,000-15,000 times daily until New Year’s Eve 2025.
A big part of that stockpile has come from North Korea, which reportedly ramped up military cooperation with Russia after a September summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Western intelligence services believe, based on satellite imagery, that Pyongyang has recently sent as many as 500,000 pieces of ammunition to Russia.
Last week, US President Joe Biden asked Congress to approve another $61 billion in aid for Ukraine, more than half of which would reportedly go to military support.