Check the air quality by consulting the weather forecast. For many Canadian parents, the start of the holidays is becoming a headache in cities suffocating under the fumes from the mega fires that are ravaging the country.

• Also read: Weather in Quebec: Gloomy weather under the smog for Thursday

• Also read: Montreal is closing its outdoor sports facilities due to smog

• Also read: Smog: The opening night of the International des Feux Loto-Québec has been cancelled

For several days there have been episodes of unprecedented air pollution in the metropolitan areas of eastern Canada, in Quebec and Ontario.

Vulnerable people, including children, are therefore advised to stay indoors to avoid inhaling the fumes, which contain particularly high concentrations of particulate matter.

Marion Hélies, an animator at a Montreal leisure center, tells AFP about the frustration of her little residents: “The kids can’t hold on anymore because we were inside for several days.”

Air Quality Index (AQI)

How high is the air quality index in your city and what health recommendations are derived from it?

Air Quality Index (AQI US)

101-150

Bad

sensitive people

AQI: GOOD

Great day to be active outside.

AQI: MODERATE

Some people may be particularly sensitive to particulate matter pollution

Particularly sensitive people: Consider reducing the duration and intensity of outdoor activities. Watch for symptoms such as coughing or shortness of breath. These are signs of slowing down.

All the others : Great day to be active outside.

AQI: BAD for
sensitive people

Sensitive groups include people with heart or lung diseases, the elderly, children and young people, minorities and field workers.

Sensitive groups: Reduce the duration and intensity of outdoor activities. It’s okay to be active outside, but take more breaks. Watch for symptoms such as coughing or shortness of breath.

People with heart disease: Symptoms such as palpitations, shortness of breath, or unusual tiredness can indicate a serious problem. If you have any of these symptoms, contact your doctor.

AQI: BAD
for each

Sensitive people: Avoid prolonged or strenuous outdoor activities. Consider moving or moving activities inward.*

All the others : Reduce the duration and intensity of activities. Take more breaks from outdoor activities.

*Note: If you don’t have air conditioning, it can be dangerous to stay indoors with the windows closed during extremely hot weather. If you’re hot, go to a place with air conditioning or check with your community to see if cooling centers are available in your community.

AQI: VERY BAD

Sensitive people: Avoid any physical activity outdoors. Postpone it to a time when the air quality is better or move activities indoors.*

All the others : Avoid prolonged or strenuous activities. Consider moving or moving activities inward.*

*Note: If you don’t have air conditioning, it can be dangerous to stay indoors with the windows closed during extremely hot weather. If you’re hot, go to a place with air conditioning or check with your community to see if cooling centers are available in your community.

AQI: CRITICAL

All the others : Avoid any physical activity outdoors.

Sensitive people: Stay indoors and maintain reduced activity levels. Follow these tips to keep particulate matter levels low indoors.*

*Note: If you don’t have air conditioning, it can be dangerous to stay indoors with the windows closed during extremely hot weather. If you’re hot, go to a place with air conditioning or check with your community to see if cooling centers are available in your community.

“It’s a bit difficult to channel them, given the smoke and rain,” she says, confident she organized a 10-minute trip despite the deteriorating air quality in the French-speaking metropolis.

It is the second time in a few days that the city has been forced to close sports fields and outdoor pools due to the fumes. On the streets, the smell of burning envelops everything – despite fires more than 600 km away. The buildings are obscured by fog and it is difficult to see the sun.

According to the authorities, the air quality index varies between “harmful” and “very harmful”.

After being locked at home for several days, 14-year-old Marin Vicck finally offered to go on a trip. “The air quality is so terrible that it’s difficult to walk around because of the smoke. We feel trapped.”

Kedjar Boudjema is also discouraged by this series of warnings in a few days. Phone in hand, he now consults his air quality application every day.

“When I get notifications, I pay attention, I close the windows,” says the father of a 4-year-old boy, proudly carrying his blue and red Winnie the Pooh umbrella.

“I’m worried about his health, but at the same time it’s complicated not to go out with him at all,” he says wearily.

In Ottawa, where visibility was again very poor on Thursday, Janet Hamill planned her day according to the air quality, preferring to take her two grandchildren, aged 2 and 11, for a walk early in the day so the smoke wouldn’t get too heavy.

“I’ll get her home before things get really bad. The smoke is just as harsh on them as it is on me, so we stay indoors most of the time,” explains the grandmother.

This heavy pollution could repeat itself throughout the summer, as authorities had warned that the peak of the fire season was not yet reached.

Many are therefore concerned about the long-term health consequences in a country with 10% asthmatics: Calls to Asthma Canada, an association dedicated to this respiratory disease, have almost doubled since the fires began in early May.

Above all, people “want to know what they can do to protect themselves,” its president, Jeff Beach, told AFP.

Canada, which due to its geographical location is warming faster than the rest of the planet, has faced extreme weather events in recent years, the intensity and frequency of which have increased as a result of climate change.

Nobody expected this fire now. France was unprepared for a new wave of unrest in its multicultural slums, and political power is reeling, overwhelmed by a movement that seems to be spiraling out of control.

Anger erupted in the banlieue following the death of Nahel, a 17-year-old teenager shot by a police officer on the outskirts of Paris on Tuesday, and since that day violence has spread geographically to the suburbs of Marseille, Lyon, Nantes and Toulouse. And it refers to symbols of the Republic and of authority, such as town halls and schools, buses and trams, shops and supermarkets, and above all the police.

A young man in his 20s died on Friday from his injuries after falling from the roof of a supermarket on the outskirts of Rouen in Normandy, Le Figaro reported. The fall happened “during a looting,” a police source said, although city prosecutors made it clear that no robbery of the business was taking place at the time.

For now, President Emmanuel Macron is ruling out the imposition of a state of emergency, which in many ways is equivalent to Spain’s state of emergency, as called for by the right and the extreme right. For another similarly troubling situation in the centers of power, one has to look back to the Yellow Vest uprising of 2018.

“We believe that in the current situation there is no need to enact this emergency law,” said an aide to the French president on Thursday, who asked not to be identified. “We think a gradual response is more appropriate,” he added.

The president’s response to the crisis, the largest in the periphery since the three-week riots in 2005, is summed up for the time being in an increase in security: 40,000 police officers and gendarmes on Thursday night throughout France, in addition to helicopters and drones ; 45,000 in the period from Friday to Saturday. Although the intensity of the riots was “lower”, the fourth night of protests saw 1,311 arrests and 79 police officers injured, according to the latest data from the Interior Ministry this Saturday. The night before ended with 875 detained and 249 agents injured.

Join EL PAÍS to follow all the news and read without restrictions.

subscribe to

Macron, relieved after months of anti-pension reform protests ended, faces another unexpected crisis. On Friday he left the European Council in Brussels prematurely and hastily, without holding the usual press conference. Already in Paris, he chaired the crisis cabinet, which was attended by Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne and other important ministers, and made a brief televised statement.

The President announced the cancellation of the planned celebrations in the provinces most affected, as well as an increase in the resources of the police and gendarmerie, which since Friday evening were planning to use armored vehicles. He presented no significant measures, as if to wait and see. But he sent three messages. The first is a condemnation of violence and those who think they exploit it, along the lines of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s radical left. “Nothing justifies violence,” he said.

Emmanuel Macron, this Friday at the Elíseo Palace. POOL (via Portal)

Second message: an appeal to the responsibility of fathers and mothers, since numerous young people and even children took part in the protests in the night from Thursday to Friday, according to some calculations up to a third of the participants. “It’s the responsibility of parents to make sure they stay home,” the president said. “The Republic has no calling to replace them.”

The third targets social networks to suppress messages that go viral inciting violence and to identify those responsible. “Sometimes,” he argued, “we get the impression that some people are living on the streets with the video games that got them high.”

However, the Élysée Palace avoids alarmism in its diagnosis. Macron’s advisers believe there are structural problems in the suburbs, but stress that the president has been taking action to address these issues for years. What worries these days, adds the aforementioned adviser, is above all safety: “The actions of a minority of fairly young people who commit crime, and the residents of the neighborhoods are the first victims.”

The images of burning vehicles and buildings broadcast day and night on television are startling. in front of the videos on social media of looting and firecrackers being fired at the police, of burning bank branches and occasionally of apartment buildings. There’s also a sense that things are getting out of control or could soon be, although the Élysée Palace insists: “The violence is concentrated in some areas, not all of France.”

Firefighters parked a bus during the riots in Nanterre this morning. MOHAMMED BADRA (EFE)

Violence is a horror for the vast majority of French people, but its meaning varies according to social background, ethnicity, place of residence or belief.

On the one hand, France, which in many cases votes right or far right, is the definitive proof that the country is in the abyss described in recent films such as Athena or Bac Nord, or in prophecies such as the writer’s Michel Houellebecq. . Éric Zemmour, a far-right candidate in the last presidential election and convicted of inciting racial hatred, says this is the prologue to a civil war, a diagnosis police unions Alliance Police and UNSA seem to share in a statement: “We are at war . Tomorrow we will be in resistance and the government needs to be aware of that.”

There is another part of the residents who point precisely to the police. It’s not just France: spokeswoman for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Ravina Shamdasani, said: “It’s time the country took a serious look at the deep-rooted problems of racism and racial discrimination in law enforcement.”

And there is a third France where life goes on as much, or almost: central Paris, the scene of so many open battles, was immune to the riots until early Friday morning when windows smashed and looted.

A few dozen onlookers gathered that morning in front of the looted Nike brand store in the central Forum des Halles in Paris, next to the Center Pompidou tourist hub. There were tourists taking selfies – demonstrations, riots are almost part of Parisian folklore – and also young people from the banlieue who, when they come to Paris, usually meet in the shopping centers or in the squares of this district.

“Destroying is pointless,” says a boy who traveled from the outskirts to have lunch with two friends. They are between 16 and 19 years old, they are French and black and they claim that the police do not treat them or the Arabs in the same way as white people. The death of Nahel, who was of North African descent, is evidence of this. For this reason, another of the boys points out: “It’s normal for people to rebel a bit”. And another adds: “We are French!” We also bring France to life! Not just the whites!”

A city worker walks past a smashed shop window during protests in Lyon this Saturday. OLIVIER CHASSIGNOLE (AFP)

The funeral of the young Nahel will be celebrated this Saturday in Nanterre in a private setting so as not to aggravate the mood even further. The police officer who fired the shots was charged with involuntary manslaughter and jailed on Thursday. His lawyer told the media that he called the victim’s family and asked for forgiveness. His line of defense is that after seeing the boy disobey orders several times, he shot the car he was driving without permission to prevent him and the other agent accompanying him , or other persons ran over.

What will happen from now on? Will the 2005 riots last three weeks? Will they continue to spread? “It’s difficult to make predictions,” replies the aforementioned Élysée source. “There are many people calling for calm, we hope for a speedy return to calm.”

Follow all international information on Facebook and Twitteror in our weekly newsletter.

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Two weeks after a refugee boat sank off the coast of Greece, leaving hundreds missing, five survivors met by AFP near Athens have accused coastguards of a lack of will to rescue.

Since the tragedy, however, the Greek government has shifted sole responsibility to the smuggling networks.

“The real responsibility lies with the criminal gangs who filled the boat with desperate people (…) without even giving them life jackets,” Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said in Brussels on Thursday.

Away from the Greek police, who scrupulously control access to the Malakasa refugee camp north of Athens, Hassan, a 26-year-old Syrian refugee, does not hide his anger at the Coast Guard, whose slow intervention was denounced on June 14 by NGOs and the media.

“I didn’t get the impression at all that the Greek coast guard wanted to rescue us,” he laments.

He is one of 104 men, including many Syrians, rescued by the Coast Guard after the fishing boat went down.

According to their statements, there were between 600 and 750 passengers on board, including women and children in the hold of the boat who could not be rescued.

“I don’t know exactly how many there were, but we heard their screams, their screams,” recalls Ahmad, a 27-year-old Syrian.

At least 82 people drowned and hundreds more disappeared when this trawler, leaving Libya for Italy, capsized on June 14 before sinking 47 nautical miles from Pylos (south) within 15 minutes.

This sinking raised many questions about the responsibility of the Greek authorities.

“It wasn’t an accident”

The Coast Guard gave only fragmentary information about the conditions of the sinking. A judicial investigation into the causes of this tragedy has been launched in Greece.

On Monday, the European Border Agency said Athens had ignored an offer of additional air support from Frontex.

According to the five survivors interviewed, ropes were thrown at their distressed boat twice by the Coast Guard to tow them away. The rope let go the first time.

The second time, “the rope from the military boat was attached to the bow, and it suddenly started zigzagging very quickly, creating waves.” That’s when the boat capsized,” says Salim, a 28-year-old Syrian.

This exile, who, fearing for his safety, asked for anonymity like the others, went so far as to accuse the Coast Guard of premeditated action: “It wasn’t an accident!”

According to the Council for Refugees (GCR), between 35 and 40 survivors reported the same events as the Coast Guard towed the boat with a cable.

“Why did you tow the boat? We must await the results of the investigation,” notes Lefteris Papagiannakis, director of the GCR, but points to a glaring delay in the rescue operation.

On the morning of June 13, passengers from this derelict boat alerted the NGO alarm phone before two commercial boats in the area brought them water and food.

According to the Greek government, “the coast guard had also approached the boat, they threw a rope to stabilize it, but the migrants refused to help”.

When asked by AFP about the progress of the Coast Guard operation, the Navy Department replied that “these questions are part of the investigation being conducted, which is being conducted under strict confidentiality.”

inflatable boats

According to survivors, a drone and a helicopter hover over the vehicle.

“The engine completely died just before midnight (June 13). After that, the Greek Coast Guard arrived,” notes Ahmad.

At around 2 a.m. local time (2300 GMT) on June 14, Salim jumped into the water after the trawler capsized. He’s still wearing his steaming watch on his wrist.

“The Coast Guard watched us from afar for at least 10 minutes before sending two inflatable boats to help us,” he continues, tears in his eyes.

Azad, 21, swam for an hour to reach the Coast Guard boat. “Some who couldn’t swim wanted to hold on to us, we had to think about their survival,” he says, moved.

Before this tragedy, Salim had already experienced hell in Libya: “I was spent eight months in hangars where we were crammed with dozens of people,” describes this Syrian from Deraa, the bastion of rebellion against the regime.

“I don’t know why I survived all this…” says Rukayan, a Kurd from Kobané in Syria who is haunted by the images of the shipwreck. Her 17-year-old cousin is missing.

After the third day at sea, water and food began to run out. “Two people died of thirst, others drank sea water,” says his friend Hassan.

God help America! A historically low number of American adults say they are “extremely” proud to be American ahead of July 4, a new poll shows

• According to Gallup, just 39 percent of adults expressed “extreme” pride in the US, just 1 percent more than in 2022
• About 48 percent believe “the nation’s best days are behind us,” while 43 percent believe they are yet to come, according to a separate Fox News poll

By Aneeta Bhole

Published: 23:07, 30 June 2023 | Updated: 1:22 PM, July 1, 2023

A new poll shows that a historically low number of US adults feel “extremely” proud to be American, with the number falling dramatically since the 9/11 years.

According to Gallup, just 39 percent of adults expressed “extreme” pride in the US, just 1 percent more than in 2022.

The result was 16 points lower than the first question in 2001 and significantly lower than the 65-70 percent recorded in the years after 9/11.

About 48 percent of Americans believe “the nation’s best days are behind us,” while 43 percent believe they are yet to come, according to a separate Fox News poll.

Rachel Campos-Duffy at Fox & Friends suggested that the “denigration” of the nation’s founding fathers in schools and colleges may have had an impact on younger Americans

Party affiliation and age seem to have a significant impact on national pride.

Meanwhile, 50 percent of US adults ages 55 and older say they are “extremely” proud to be American, 40 percent for those ages 35 to 54, and 18 percent for those ages 18 to 34.

Speaking on a panel at Fox & Friends, Rachel Campos-Duffy reflected that the “denigration” of the nation’s founding fathers in schools and colleges had an impact on younger Americans.

About 60 percent of Republicans and 29 percent of Democrats expressed “extreme” pride, while independent voters recorded the lowest level at 33 percent.

Campos-Duffy stressed that this could potentially affect military participation, where recruit numbers are already low.

“It has tremendous implications.” I mean, think of our military. Who would want to die for a country they don’t love?’ She asked.

Republican nominee Senator Tim Scott was later asked why so many people believed the country was going in the wrong direction.

“Let’s stop telling Americans the lie that the left is telling them that we live in a racist, declining country, that this is not the land of opportunity, this is the land of oppression,” he said.

“Let’s stop selling the drug of victimization and the narcotic of desperation.” Let’s begin to engage the American people in the painful, truthful history of America by meeting this challenge.”