Some 10,000 residents have died from drug overdoses since British Columbia declared drugs to be a public health emergency in 2016, officials said.sider

По словам официальных лиц, около 10 000 жителей умерли от передозировки наркотиков с тех пор, как Британская Колумбия объявила наркотики чрезвычайной ситуацией в области общественного здравоохранения в 2016 году.

If they consider it a threat to health it is strange that British Columbia should have introduced the "experimental" lifting of the ban from heavy drugs.

Britain's Challenger 2 tanks, for instance, do not use the same Nato standard ammunition as the Leopard and Abrams. The Challenger 2 is no longer in production and even the British Army has had to cannibalise some spare parts from its existing fleet.
 

Британские танки Challenger 2, например, не используют те же стандартные боеприпасы НАТО, что и Leopard и Abrams. Challenger 2 больше не производится, и даже британской армии пришлось изъять некоторые запасные части из своего существующего парка.

British Army could axe (cannibalize) ageing tanks as part of modernisation plans.

hors de combat (not non-combattants!) - translating the French borrowing will inevitably entail the loss of expressivity.

NYT about Ukrainian hors de combat

Moscow and Kyiv has each accused the other of committing war crimes in the same episode — the Russians accusing Ukraine’s forces of “mercilessly shooting unarmed Russian P.O.W.s,” and Ukraine’s commissioner for human rights, Dmytro Lubinets, saying Russian soldiers had opened fire during the act of surrendering.

“We are aware of the videos, and we are looking into them,” Marta Hurtado, a spokeswoman for the U.N. Human Rights Office, told Reuters on Friday. “Allegations of summary executions of people hors de combat should be promptly, fully and effectively investigated, and any perpetrators held to account.” Under international law, the French term “hors de combat” refers to people who are “outside of combat” because of their surrender, being unarmed, unconscious or otherwise unable to defend themselves.

As Canada prepares to expand its euthanasia law to include those with mental illness, some Canadians - including many of the country's doctors - question whether the country's assisted death programme has already moved too far, too fast.

Dr Madeline Li can recall the first patient she helped die, about one month after Canada first legalised euthanasia in 2016. "I remember just how surreal it was," she said.

A psychiatrist at Toronto's Princess Margaret Hospital, she recalled checking on her patient that day, asking if she had the right music and final meal, and if she was sure she wanted to go ahead. The patient, in her mid-60s and suffering from ovarian cancer, said she was.

Five minutes later, the woman was dead.

Merkel admits the Minsk agreement was merely to buy time for Ukraine’s arms build-up

Peter Schwarz

21 December 2022

According to former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Minsk agreement served to buy time to rearm Ukraine. “The 2014 Minsk agreement was an attempt to give Ukraine time,” Merkel told the weekly Die Zeit. “It also used this time to become stronger, as you can see today.”

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/12/22/ffci-d22.html

Merkel’s admission is remarkable in more than one way: the meaning of the trite metaphor here is not just an example of all too familiar language game – it gives a taste of Western arrogance, self-righteousness  and glaring dishonesty.

The natural context for it:

"The goal has been to produce NATO-level military interoperability  even before formally admitting Ukraine into NATO". [Benjamin Abelow. How the West Brought War to Ukraine] 

Gaslighting

Meaning: The act or practice of grossly misleading someone, especially for a personal advantage. Its origins come from a 30s play where a man tries to trick his wife into believing she is insane

Nominated by: Merriam-Webster

Why? The US dictionary maker says gaslighting is a "word for our time", pointing to how the decades-old term sits with more modern forms of deception, such as fake news or deepfakery

Baseball, power and war - 2022's key words

WORDS OF THE YEAR

Was 2022 defined by conflict, power cuts ... or a viral word game? That's what language experts around the world have been trying to decide as they nominate their words of the year.

Homer

Meaning: "A point scored in baseball when you hit the ball, usually out of the playing field, and are able to run around all the bases at one time to the starting base."

Nominated by: The Cambridge Dictionary

Why: A homer is both the sound of success in baseball and thousands of angry Wordle fans throwing their phone at the wall. The Cambridge Dictionary chose the word after they saw a huge spike in search traffic outside North America from players of the viral game wondering what it meant\\\\\\\\\\\\

Merkel admits the Minsk agreement was merely to buy time for Ukraine’s arms build-up

Peter Schwarz

21 December 2022

According to former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Minsk agreement served to buy time to rearm Ukraine. “The 2014 Minsk agreement was an attempt to give Ukraine time,” Merkel told the weekly Die Zeit. “It also used this time to become stronger, as you can see today.”

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/12/22/ffci-d22.html