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A statue of McGill University founder James McGill is seen on the campus in Montreal, October 2, 2009.

REUTERS/Shaun Best

Trouble on the northern border

Canadian Immigration Minister Marc Millerwarned Canada on Sunday of an “alarming trend.” Foreign students are making asylum claims – the latest issue to confront his government as it struggles to get the immigration system under control.

In recent years, Canadian universities and colleges have increasingly relied on foreign students, who pay higher tuition than Canadians, to deal with funding shortfalls. But the wave of students – more than a million were admitted in 2023 – is being blamed for everything from a shortage of rental accommodations to security fears. A Pakistani national arrested as he was allegedly en route to New York to conduct a mass shooting at a Jewish centre came to Canada on a student visa.

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Luisa Vieira

Graphic Truth: The state of cellphone bans in schools

Should smartphones be banned in schools? Three-quarters of US schools already restrict the use of cellphones during lesson hours, but only a handful of state governments have imposed blanket restrictions. Florida became the first one last year, followed by Illinois and Virginia, where bans will take effect this school year. In Canada, half a dozen provincial governments have passed restrictions.

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Students at Martin Van Buren High School in Queens

Kyle Mazza / SOPA Images via Reuters

Hard Numbers: Segregation is back, Thai activist dies in jail, French “Fly” freed, New US arms sale to Israel

19.8: Over the past three decades, the share of US public schools where 90% of the students are non-white has nearly tripled to 19.8%, according to a UCLA report. Experts say the rise of charter schools and expansion of school choice is partly to blame for this de facto segregation. The data, crunched by the UCLA Civil Rights Project, come on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the landmark Brown vs. Boardof Education case in which the US Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation at schools.

110: A young Thai activist jailed for demanding reform of the country’s uncriticizable monarchy has died after a 110-day hunger strike. Twenty-eight year old Netiporn “Bung” Sanesangkhom had been jailed under Thailand’s severe lèse-majesté laws after asking people’s opinion of the monarchy in public spaces in 2022.

2: A manhunt is underway in France after two masked gunmen ambushed a prison van and freed a notorious drug dealer nicknamed “The Fly.” The incident is the latest in a trend of rising narco-related crime in Europe, as authorities seize record volumes of cocaine entering the EU while rival gangs fight for turf and clientele. Of course, when it comes to jailbreaks, the cinema-obsessed French gangster Rédoine Faïd remains the master of the craft.

1 billion: The Biden administration reportedly told lawmakers it’s moving forward with a new sale of roughly $1 billion worth of arms to Israel, including tactical vehicles and ammunition. This news comes as the administration continues to butt heads with Israel over the Rafah operation, and just days after President Joe Biden put a hold on a shipment of bombs to the Jewish state as concerns rise over the mounting death toll amid the war with Hamas in Gaza.

Why the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals are not on track to be financed soon
Why the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals are not on track to be financed soon | Global Stage

Why the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals are not on track to be financed soon

The world faces a sustainable development crisis, and while most countries have strategies in place, they don’t have the cash to back them up. How far off track are we with the financing needed to support the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals, ranging from quality education and health care to climate action and clean water?

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Ghana, Accra, 2023-02-16. Young schoolchildren in uniform learning multiplication tables. Illustration image of children in a school in Ghana. A little girl is at the blackboard reciting in front of the class.

Photograph by Jean-Francois Fort / Hans Lucas via Reuters

To get rich, Ghana needs to wise up

About a quarter of all the chocolate you eat comes from Ghanaian cacao, so with prices at all-time highs, Ghanaian farmers should be raking it in. Instead, they’re selling at fixed prices to a government that’s struggling to settle its debts after a crushing $30 billion default last year.

On Monday, Ghana failed to reach a debt deal to restructure $13 billion in debt, breaching the terms of its International Monetary Fund bailout and pushing the country to the brink. According to the IMF, Ghana is borrowing too much in the same high-interest rate environment that led to the original default. If the government cannot formulate a plan that meets IMF standards, it risks $360 million in upcoming relief.

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Paige Fusco

Graphic Truth: Apprenticeships are on the rise

Whether it’s the price of college, the promise of the gig economy, or simply the desire to get paid while training, apprenticeships are having a moment. In the US, this surge has coincided with an 8% drop in undergraduate college enrollment; in Canada, it comes amid high youth unemployment.

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University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill testifies before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce in Washington.

REUTERS/Ken Cedeno

A bad case of “academentia” that needs to be cured

This week Claudine Gay, Sally Kornbluth, and M. Elizabeth Magill, the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania, were brought before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce to speak about the dangerous rise of antisemitism on campus, especially since the Oct. 7 attacks.

The Israel-Hamas war has triggered an alarming rise in antisemitic incidents on and off campus and also a rise in Islamophobic incidents. It was so bad that back on Nov. 14, President Joe Biden released an action plan to combat antisemitic and Islamophobic events on US campuses.

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The Graphic Truth: Indians hold 40% of Canadian student visas

The fallout from allegations that India was behind the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar has thrown Indo-Canadian relations into the lurch. Each side has expelled a diplomat from the other, and India’s Embassy in Canada stopped processing visas – a serious diplomatic gesture, no doubt, but the material impacts are likely to be small. Only around 80,000 Canadians visited India in 2021 out of more than 1.5 million foreign tourists.

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