Jamila Bibi, Saskatoon Woman Deported To Pakistan, Faces Stoning

TORONTO - A 65-year-old woman working as a cook in Saskatoon has been deported to her native Pakistan, where her lawyer says her life could be in danger.

Lawyer Bashir Khan says Jamila Bibi was flown out of Toronto on Tuesday afternoon.

He says his client has been barred from re-entering Canada on any visa on the future.

Khan says Bibi fled to Canada in 2007 after being falsely accused of adultery by her husband.

UK unemployment falls to 6.2pc but pay squeeze continues

The squeeze on Britain's households continued last month as official data showed pay packets grew at the slowest pace on record even as unemployment fell at the sharpest pace in more than a quarter of a century.

Average weekly earnings including bonus payments grew by 0.6pc in the three months to the end of July, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Regular pay grew by 0.7pc over the same period, representing the weakest growth since records began in 2001.

U.S. is off to a war that doesn't make sense — again

America is going to war again. People are scared again.

The American news media have a scary monster in the Middle East again, and commentators are practically saluting on air. Again.

Dick Cheney, smirking, is back onstage. Last week, at a speech in Washington, he called for immediate military action, "sustained … across several fronts."

Demonizing the Minimum Wage

With the midterm elections approaching, the United States Congress finds itself in an exaggerated version of its customary posturing gridlock. Among the many urgent issues that it almost certainly won’t address this year are immigration reform, gun control, the Keystone XL Pipeline, the fate of the Export-Import Bank, and the federal minimum wage. A bill to raise the minimum wage from its current level, $7.25 per hour, to $10.10 an hour, over the course of two years, has been rattling around on Capitol Hill for eighteen months—with, it now seems, no hope of passing. Because the federal minimum wage has never been indexed to the cost of living, the debate over its efficacy and morality is regularly reëngaged as its value sinks and Congress is called upon to act.

Home Free?

In 2005, Utah set out to fix a problem that’s often thought of as unfixable: chronic homelessness. The state had almost two thousand chronically homeless people. Most of them had mental-health or substance-abuse issues, or both. At the time, the standard approach was to try to make homeless people “housing ready”: first, you got people into shelters or halfway houses and put them into treatment; only when they made progress could they get a chance at permanent housing. Utah, though, embraced a different strategy, called Housing First: it started by just giving the homeless homes.

Handing mentally ill substance abusers the keys to a new place may sound like an example of wasteful government spending. But it turned out to be the opposite: over time, Housing First has saved the government money. Homeless people are not cheap to take care of. The cost of shelters, emergency-room visits, ambulances, police, and so on quickly piles up. Lloyd Pendleton, the director of Utah’s Homeless Task Force, told me of one individual whose care one year cost nearly a million dollars, and said that, with the traditional approach, the average chronically homeless person used to cost Salt Lake City more than twenty thousand dollars a year. Putting someone into permanent housing costs the state just eight thousand dollars, and that’s after you include the cost of the case managers who work with the formerly homeless to help them adjust. The same is true elsewhere. A Colorado study found that the average homeless person cost the state forty-three thousand dollars a year, while housing that person would cost just seventeen thousand dollars.

Smuggled Across Turkey's Border, Homeless Syrians Call A Bus Station Home

KILIS, Turkey -- Outside of a Turkish bus station, weary travelers shuffle past a taxi driver shouting “To the fence!” in Arabic, offering rides to those wanting to be smuggled across the Syrian border just a couple of miles away.

Bobby Jindal Trusts Science Except When He Doesn't

WASHINGTON -- America needs a leader to bridge the widening gulf between faith and science, and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a devout Roman Catholic with Ivy League-level science training, thinks he can be that person.

As a studious man of immigrant background with the kind of credentials admired by coastal intellectual meritocrats -- Brown, Oxford and McKinsey & Company -- the Republican governor, at least on paper, has a chance to appeal to the middle, should he run for president in 2016. He also has an impressive record as a government bureaucrat and administrator, both in Washington and in Baton Rouge.

This Republican Tried To Stop North Carolina From Apologizing For A Racist Massacre. He’d Like Your Vote, Please.

In 1898, furious that a mixed-race coalition had swept the city's municipal elections, white supremacists burned down a black-owned newspaper in Wilmington, North Carolina; overthrew the local government; and killed at least 25 black residents in a week of rioting. It was one of the worst single incidents of racially motivated violence in American history. But in 2007, when a nonpartisan commission recommended that the state legislature pass a resolution formally apologizing for the massacre, Republican Senate nominee Thom Tillis, then a first-term state representative, rose to block it.

Canadian Telecoms Gave Environment Canada Hundreds Of Subscribers' Information

OTTAWA - Newly disclosed records show Environment Canada obtained information from telecommunications companies about hundreds of subscribers in the last five years.

Employment and Social Development Canada, the Competition Bureau, Justice Canada, the military police and the Transportation Safety Board also say they request subscriber details in the course of their work.

Harper Sidestepped MPs On Supreme Court Pick Due To Nadon 'Leaks'

Concerns over alleged leaks from the all-party panel of MPs that vetted the aborted appointment of Marc Nadon to the Supreme Court led the government to leave MPs out of the loop when it named Justice Clement Gascon to replace him, documents tabled in the House reveal.

In response to a written question filed by Liberal MP Irwin Cotler last June, Justice Minister Peter MacKay confirmed that "it was … felt that certain breaches of confidentiality related to the Nadon appointment had compromised the integrity of the current selection process, and that it needed to be reviewed."