If your week has flown by, in just a few minutes you will be listening or reading reports from La Presse that made the headlines this week.
Posted at 3:54pm
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The coroner’s public inquiry into the death of Amélie Champagne
Quebec Chief Coroner Pascale Descary has ordered a public inquiry into the death of Amélie Champagne. The 22-year-old, who was suffering from persistent symptoms of Lyme disease, recently committed suicide. Her father, Alain Champagne, told columnist Patrick Lagacé that she was admitted to Sherbrooke University Hospital after attempting suicide. Since the patient lived in metropolitan France, Estrie Hospital referred her to CHUM in Montreal. Unfortunately, Amélie Champagne committed suicide the day before her appointment. The public inquiry aims in particular to clarify the circumstances of the young woman’s death.
Election campaign: slip-ups on immigration
The issue of immigration monopolized the election campaign and caused slips for four weeks. Prime Minister François Legault said taking in more than 50,000 immigrants was “a bit suicidal”. Parti Québécois sends anti-Islamic tweets. Conservative Party leader Éric Duhaime said he was considering building a wall on the Canada-US border to prevent asylum seekers from crossing. And outgoing Immigration Minister Jean Boulet peddled several falsehoods about newcomers who “go to Montreal, don’t work, don’t speak French, or don’t adhere to the values of Quebec society.” How do migrants perceive this election campaign? Not very well, according to testimonies collected by La Presse. These Quebec elections have frightened Francisco Morataya. The discourse on immigration is skewing more and more to the right, he says, and that doesn’t bode well for others like him who want to choose Quebec as a welcoming country.
Russian men flee the country
At least 200,000 people have left Russia since Vladimir Putin announced the partial mobilization of 300,000 men last Wednesday. The total mobilization pool in Russia is 25 million people. Russian President Vladimir Putin also signed on Friday the annexation of four regions of Ukraine that Moscow holds in whole or in part. The four regions will be officially annexed at the end of September after hastily organized so-called regional referendums. The vote was described as a “first leg” by Kyiv and its Western backers.
Women at the center of protests in Iran
The death of Mahsa Amini has shocked the people of Iran. The 22-year-old was arrested by the country’s regulatory agency on September 13 for wearing “inappropriate clothing” that revealed a lock of hair. The protest movement triggered by his death is entering its third week. On Friday there were 83 dead in the numerous demonstrations. Homa Hoodfar is a professor at Concordia University. She was detained in Iran for four months in 2016. “For me, we are at a turning point. The regime really needs to take a major turn. But from what I see now, it won’t last. And women, like women’s rights, are at the center of this protest movement. We’ve seen women in earlier movements, but never like we do today,” she says.
A first success for planetary defense
NASA’s DART probe successfully completed its mission: to hit the asteroid Dimorphos on Monday evening to deflect its trajectory. A Quebec engineer, Julie Bellerose, was responsible for the piloting. Launched last November, the DART probe was designed to measure how Dimorphos’ orbit around Didymos will have changed after the collision. About 500 asteroids larger than 150 meters in diameter are identified each year. But only 10,000 of the 25,000 asteroids of this size are known. For comparison, the asteroid that spelled death for dinosaurs 65 million years ago was 10 km in diameter, and the one that injured nearly 1,500 people in Siberia in 2013 was 20 meters in diameter.