Quebec man who threatened Trudeau, Legault online sentenced to 20 months in jail
A Quebec man who pleaded guilty to threatening Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Premier François Legault has been sentenced to 20 months in jail.
Crushing poverty is forcing displaced people in Afghanistan to make some very desperate choices.
For some, this means selling their kidney. But for other families, it means selling their own daughters into marriage, a grim fate for thousands of young girls.
Children play in the dirt in a sprawl of camps on the outskirts of Herat, driven there by drought and war.
Hungry, unhealthy kids, not yet starving, but wretchedly poor.
In the camps, an elderly woman cries for help.
“Too many nights,” she tells CTV News, “I don’t have anything to eat.”
During the day it can be warm, but it gets freezing cold at night. And mud huts offer little comfort. People scavenge for scraps of plastic to burn or sell for a few cents.
Mullah Sadeq and his family arrived here a couple of months ago, to a plot of hard packed mud, scattered with flimsy cloth tents.
“The drought was so bad in our village, we came here looking for foreign aid,” he said.
And the need to survive has forced many to turn to an unimaginable solution: selling their daughters into marriage while they are still children.
It’s almost become common practice.
Seven-year-old Zinab has already been promised to a man from another province.
“We didn’t have any food or warm clothes,” says her mother. “So we sold my daughter to survive.”
There’s also a thriving mafia-like trade in selling organs.
One man sold a kidney two months ago for $3,000.
“I had debts,” he says. “And I had to feed my children. There was no other choice but to sell my kidney.”
Shah Wazir Ahmadi volunteers for a foundation trying to stop organ sales. But it’s not working, he says.
“Poor people are encouraged to do it,” he said. “And buyers come into the camps looking for sellers.”
One woman familiar with the trade is Delaram, who told CTV News that she not only sold her right kidney, but also two of her young daughters into future marriages.
She describes it as sacrificing one child to save others.
"Six months after the takeover by the Taliban, Afghanistan is hanging by a thread,” United Nations Secretary-General Antontio Guterres said in a security council meeting this week. “For Afghans, daily life has become a frozen hell."
The United Nations has called for more aid to be given to the country in order to boost the economy and help some of those who have been backed into a corner by poverty.
“The approximately $1 billion that we asked for last year to address the humanitarian crisis now must be supplemented by $4.4 billion in additional humanitarian assistance for 2022, as set out in our recent appeal,” UN Special Envoy on Afghanistan Deborah Lyons said in the meeting.
Lyons added that they are seeking an additional $3.6 billion for the One-UN Transitional Engagement Framework (TEF) for Afghanistan, an initiative that was launched today to assist Afghans in 2022.
“But this comprehensive and system-wide strategy introduces a basic human needs pillar that will deliver essential services such as health and education, as well as provide maintenance for community infrastructure and promote livelihoods and social cohesion with a special emphasis on the socioeconomic needs of women and girls,” she said.”
One of the big problems is that following the Taliban’s takeover, foreign aid has largely been cut off.
"At this moment of maximum need, these rules must be seriously reviewed,” Guterres said. “I repeat my call to issue general licenses covering transactions necessary to all humanitarian activities. We need to give financial institutions and commercial partners legal assurance that they can work with humanitarian operators without fear of breaching sanctions.”
Whether or not aid could come in time to save more young girls from being sold, and more families from resorting to selling organs, is unclear.
With the war in Afghanistan over, some of those who fled to Herat years ago say they’d be willing to return home now, but don’t have the means.
A Quebec man who pleaded guilty to threatening Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Premier François Legault has been sentenced to 20 months in jail.
A 60-year-old man and a 55-year-old woman killed in a wrong-way crash on Highway 401 earlier this week have been identified by the Consulate General of India in Toronto.
The adorable trio of child actors from the 1993 classic comedy 'Mrs. Doubtfire,' which starred the late and great Robin Williams, are all grown up and looking back on their seminal time together.
The erstwhile group of senators and MPs studying the federal government's invocation of the Emergencies Act over the "Freedom Convoy" was supposed to present its findings in December. December of 2022, that is.
The Ukrainian village of Ocheretyne has been battered by fighting, drone footage obtained by The Associated Press shows. The village has been a target for Russian forces in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine.
A delegation of the Palestinian militant group Hamas was in Cairo on Saturday as Egyptian state media reported "noticeable progress" in ongoing cease-fire talks with Israel while an Israeli official downplayed the prospects for a full end to the war.
Saing Chhoeun was locked out of his Charlotte, N.C., home on Monday as law enforcement with high-powered rifles descended into his yard and garage, using a car as a shield as they were met with a shower of gunfire from the direction of his neighbor's house.
A source close to singer Britney Spears tells CNN that the pop star is 'home and safe' after she had a 'major fight' with her boyfriend on Wednesday night at the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood.
TD Bank Group could be hit with more severe penalties than previously expected, says a banking analyst after a report that the investigation it faces in the U.S. is tied to laundering illicit fentanyl profits.
Alberta Ballet's double-bill production of 'Der Wolf' and 'The Rite of Spring' marks not only its final show of the season, but the last production for twin sisters Alexandra and Jennifer Gibson.
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.
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.