Parents of infant who died in wrong-way crash on Ontario's Hwy. 401 were in same vehicle
Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit has released new details about a wrong-way collision in Whitby on Monday night that claimed the lives of four people.
The drought-stricken island nation of Madagascar is a "wake up call” to what the world can expect in coming years due to climate change, the head of the United Nations' food aid agency said Tuesday.
David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Program, told The Associated Press in an interview that what's happening in the south of the Indian Ocean country is “the beginning of what we can expect” to see as the effects of global warming become more pronounced.
“Madagascar was heartbreaking,” Beasley said, referring to his recent visit there. “It's just desperate.”
Some 38 million people worldwide were displaced last year because of climate change, leaving them vulnerable to hunger, according to Beasley. A worst--case scenario could an see that number sore to 216 million people displaced due to climate change by 2050.
Some 38 million people worldwide were displaced last year because of climate change, leaving them vulnerable to hunger, according to Beasley. A worst--case scenario could an see that number soar to 216 million people displaced due to climate change by 2050.
That's the year many industrialized nations - but not China, Russia or India - have set as their target for achieving carbon neutrality, meaning reducing greenhouse gas emissions to the point where they can be absorbed and effectively add zero to the atmosphere.
When Beasley, a former South Carolina governor, took the World Food Program helm in 2017, the top reason for people being on the brink of starvation was man-made conflict, followed by climate change, he said.
But since then, climate change has been eclipsing conflicts as the bigger driver in displacing people and leaving them not knowing where their next meal will come from. Last year, about 38 million, he said, were displaced “strictly because of climate shocks, climate change,” Beasley said.
“I would like to think this is the worst-case scenario - 216 million people by 2050 that will be migrating or displaced because of climate change,” he said.
According to updated WFP figures released Tuesday, close to 30,000 people on Madagascar will be one step away from famine by the end of the year, and some 1.1 million already suffer from severe hunger. The island is struggling with exceptionally warm temperatures, drought and sandstorms.
Crops have wilted, and harvests are scarce. People have taken to eating cactus leaves, which usually are cattle fodder, the UN food agency said.
“Madagascar is not an isolated incident,” Beasley said. ”The world needs to look to Madagascar to see what is coming your way and (to) many other countries around the world.“
He pointed out that Madagascar, a country of 27 million people, accounts for only the tiniest fraction of greenhouse gas emissions in global terms.
“What did they do to contribute to climate change?” he asked rhetorically.
The World Food Program has been supplying some 700,000 people on the island with food and supplemental nutritional products for pregnant and nursing women and children.
In Ethiopia, by contrast, famine is man-made, caused by conflict.
The World Food Program estimates that 5.2 million people are in need of of emergency food assistance in Tigray, Ethiopia's embattled northern region. United Nations officials have warned in recent weeks that more than 400,000 people could face starvation and death if humanitarian aid isn't delivered quickly, but hardly any aid can get to those who desperately need to eat.
The Tigray forces say they are pressuring Ethiopia's government to lift a months-long blockade on their region of around 6 million people, where basic services have been cut off and humanitarian food and medical aid denied.
Beasley says the WFP has been “messaging to all sides, including the Ethiopian government, the leadership, that this is a crisis”' needing immediate access for food aid. But “we're not making headway,” he said.
“We're not able to get (food aid) trucks in or get fuel in. We're not even able to get the cash to the people we need to pay,” Beasley told the AP.
As a result, Tigray's people “have to be dying at unprecedented numbers, but we can't get the access we need,” he said. “It's a disgrace.”
He said the WFP should be moving in 30 trucks of day loaded with food, and another 70 full of medicine and other humanitarian assistance. “We're not even getting 10% of that in trucks a day,” the agency director said.
For many of Tigray's people, Beasley said, it has come down to “either die or migrate.”
Paradoxically, Afghanistan's new Taliban rulers have allowed WFP access to food distribution centers and schools where many teachers are going unpaid, and protected WFP warehouses, while international donors haven't been supplying sufficient funding, Beasley said.
“You run into the issue of donors (who) do not want to be seen in any way as aiding or abetting or supporting the Taliban,” Beasley said.
In Afghanistan, 22.8 million people - half of the population - face acute food insecurity, or are “marching toward starvation,” as Beasley put it.
Conflict and drought combined to create that impoverished nation's food crisis.
The dire situation will grow even more critical starting in January, when the WFP's food stocks for Afghanistan will run low, if more donors don't come through.
“That price tag is $230 million a month feeding them” at only partial rations, Beasley said, adding: that “there are 8.7 million people in Afghanistan knocking of famine's door,.”
The UN agency was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year.
Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit has released new details about a wrong-way collision in Whitby on Monday night that claimed the lives of four people.
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.
A British Columbia mayor has been censured by city council – stripping him of his travel and lobbying budgets and removing him from city committees – for allegedly distributing a book that questions the history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada.
A spike in impaired driving-related collisions has caused Ontario’s provincial police to begin enforcing mandatory alcohol screening (MAS) at all traffic stops in the Greater Toronto Area -- a move one civil rights group says is ‘not acceptable.’
William Nylander scored twice and Joseph Woll made 22 saves as the Toronto Maple Leafs downed the Boston Bruins 2-1 on Thursday to force Game 7 in their first-round series.
Jurors in the hush money trial of Donald Trump heard a recording Thursday of him discussing with his then-lawyer and personal fixer a plan to purchase the silence of a Playboy model who has said she had an affair with the former president.
Staff at a small southern Alberta office supply store were shocked to find someone had broken into the business last week, but they were even more confused when they discovered the culprit was a bear.
A federal judge on Thursday sentenced a scuba dive boat captain to four years in custody and three years supervised release for criminal negligence after 34 people died in a fire aboard the vessel.
Fake text message and email campaigns trying to get money and information out of unsuspecting Canadian taxpayers have started circulating, just months after the federal government rebranded the carbon tax rebate the Canada Carbon Rebate.
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.
A group of SaskPower workers recently received special recognition at the legislature – for their efforts in repairing one of Saskatchewan's largest power plants after it was knocked offline for months following a serious flood last summer.
A police officer on Montreal's South Shore anonymously donated a kidney that wound up drastically changing the life of a schoolteacher living on dialysis.
Since 1932, Montreal's Henri Henri has been filled to the brim with every possible kind of hat, from newsboy caps to feathered fedoras.
Police in Oak Bay, B.C., had to close a stretch of road Sunday to help an elephant seal named Emerson get safely back into the water.
Out of more than 9,000 entries from over 2,000 breweries in 50 countries, a handful of B.C. brews landed on the podium at the World Beer Cup this week.
Raneem, 10, lives with a neurological condition and liver disease and needs Cholbam, a medication, for a longer and healthier life.
The lawyer for a residential school survivor leading a proposed class-action defamation lawsuit against the Catholic Church over residential schools says the court action is a last resort.
Mounties in Nanaimo, B.C., say two late-night revellers are lucky their allegedly drunken antics weren't reported to police after security cameras captured the men trying to steal a heavy sign from a downtown business.