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Canada announced Tuesday the decriminalization of hard drugs in small quantities in a British Columbia pilot project aiming to tame an opioid crisis that has killed thousands — by treating addictions rather than jailing users for possession.

Responding to a request by British Columbia, federal Mental Health and Addictions Minister Carolyn Bennett said an exemption from the criminal code to allow for personal possession of opioids, cocaine, methamphetamine and other hard drugs  would kick in on January 31, 2023 and last three years.

Adults in the Pacific coast province will not face arrest or charges for possession of up to 2.5 grams of hard drugs, nor will their drugs be seized by police.

Instead users will be provided with information on how to access medical help for addictions.

“For too many years, the ideological opposition to harm reduction has cost lives,” Bennett told a news conference in announcing the pilot.

“We are doing this to save lives, but also to give people using drugs their dignity and choices,” she said, adding that it could become “a template for other jurisdictions across Canada.”

Kennedy Stewart, the mayor of Vancouver — the epicentre of the crisis — said the decision “marks a fundamental rethinking of drug policy that favors healthcare over handcuffs.”

Calling it a “historic, brave and groundbreaking step in the fight to save lives from the poisoned drug crisis,” he said it would also reduce petty crimes that often feed drug habits.

Several Canadian cities, including Montreal and Toronto, have signalled a desire for similar legal exemptions. 

A small leftist faction in Parliament, the New Democratic Party, meanwhile, is to unveil Wednesday a proposed bill to decriminalize drug possession nationwide. It is expected to be defeated.

– ‘Shame and fear’ –

Bennett stressed that the exemption granted to British Columbia “is not legalization.”

It will, however, make the province only the second jurisdiction in North America to decriminalize hard drugs after the US state of Oregon did so in November 2020.

Oregon’s initiative has reportedly had mixed results as few people have taken up offers of addiction help.

Substances abuse has left thousands dead in British Columbia. Its Addictions Minister Sheila Malcolmson told AFP in November when it applied for the exemption that the province was facing “an overdose crisis that’s causing a terrible loss of life.”

The pandemic compounded its impacts, she said at Tuesday’s news conference.

“Shame and fear keep people from accessing the care that they need,” she explained. “And the fear of being criminalized has led many people to hide their addiction and use drugs alone. And using alone can mean dying alone.” 

Several drug users surveyed by AFP have said the amount of drugs allowed under the exemption is too small, as their daily consumption is far greater. Bennett acknowledged this but said it’s a starting point.

She also said calls are growing louder for Ottawa to regulate a safe supply of hard drugs now often laced with toxic substances.

But first, she added, evidence must be collected from the pilot to show the approach works.

According to federal government data, 26,690 people have died of opioid overdoses across Canada from January 2016 to September 2021.

In British Columbia, an estimated six people die each day from opioid-related drug poisoning. Roughly 9,400 have died since public health officials declared the situation a public health emergency in 2016.

Here are the latest developments in the war in Ukraine:

– Russians seize ‘most’ of key eastern city –

Russian forces seize control of most of the eastern Ukrainian city of Severodonetsk, a regional governor says. 

“Unfortunately, today, Russian troops control most of the city,” Lugansk governor Sergiy Gaiday says in a video. 

The industrial city is key to Russia’s goal of capturing the Donbas region, where Moscow has shifted the bulk of its firepower since failing to seize Kyiv.

– Nitric acid tank ‘hit’ –

Gaiday also says Russian forces struck a tank containing nitric acid at a Severodonetsk chemical plant, calling on residents to stay in shelters.

“For the Russian military, for Russian commanders, for Russian soldiers, any madness is absolutely acceptable,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says in an evening video address on Telegram.

– EU agrees ban on most Russian oil –

EU leaders agree to ban most Russian oil imports, after reaching a deal with Hungary that allows it to keep receiving Russian crude.

The deal bans oil imports delivered by tankers but exempts pipeline deliveries, a key demand of landlocked Hungary, whose leader Viktor Orban had warned that a full oil blockade would be an “atomic bomb” for his country’s economy.

European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen says the accord will cut around 90 percent of the EU’s Russian oil imports by the end of the year.

But EU leaders play down the prospects of getting a ban on Russian gas in a next round of sanctions.

– Gazprom cuts gas supplies –

Danish energy company Orsted says Russian gas giant Gazprom Export will cut supplies to Denmark on June 1 after the Danish company refused to pay in rubles.

Dutch energy firm GasTerra says Gazprom has suspended its gas supplies for the same reason.

Finland, Bulgaria and Poland have already seen their gas supplies severed.

– ‘Thousands’ of alleged war crimes in Donbas –

Ukraine is investigating several thousand cases of suspected war crimes in the Donbas region, Kyiv’s chief prosecutor says.

On a visit to The Hague, Ukraine’s prosecutor general Iryna Venediktova says some 15,000 cases of alleged war crimes have been reported countrywide since Russia’s invasion on February 24.

– Mariupol port resumes business – 

A Russia-bound cargo ship has left occupied Mariupol, less than two weeks after the last Ukrainian defenders of the strategic port city surrendered, the city’s new rulers say.

Dozens of container ships are blocked in Ukrainian ports which have been blockaded by Russian vessels. Russia is in talks with Turkey about creating a secure corridor for shipping companies.

Separately, French President Emmanuel Macron says he and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz have urged Vladimir Putin to end Russia’s blockade of the major Ukrainian Black Sea port of Odessa under the terms of a UN resolution.

– ‘Banking sanctions hurt Africa’

The chairman of the African Union, Macky Sall, warns EU leaders their decision to expel Russian banks from the SWIFT financial messaging system risks hurting Africa’s food supplies by making it harder to import Russian grain.

On Monday, the EU barred Russia’s largest bank Sberbank from SWIFT as part of a sixth round of sanctions on the Russian economy.

The move makes it difficult for the bank to receive or make international payments but Sberbank says it is operating “as normal”.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says it was up to the West and Kyiv to resolve the growing global food crisis.

Turkey’s top diplomat says Lavrov will arrive in Turkey on June 8 for talks on unblocking grain exports from Ukraine.

– Two more Russian soldiers convicted –

Two Russian soldiers are sentenced to more than 11 years in jail in Ukraine for breaching the rules of war by shelling civilian areas in the northeastern Kharkiv region.

Their convictions come a week after a Kyiv court sentenced a 21-year-old Russian soldier to life in prison for shooting dead an unarmed civilian on his bicycle.

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Iran condemned as “not fair” Tuesday a report by the UN nuclear watchdog on traces of nuclear material found at three undeclared sites.

The comments came with talks deadlocked since March on reviving a 2015 nuclear agreement between Tehran and world powers.

“Unfortunately, this report does not reflect the reality of the negotiations between Iran and the IAEA,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh told reporters, referring to the Monday report by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

“It’s not a fair and balanced report,” he said, adding: “We expect this path to be corrected.”

In the report, the watchdog said it still had questions which were “not clarified” regarding nuclear material previously found at three sites — Marivan, Varamin and Turquzabad — which had not been declared by Iran as having hosted nuclear activities.

It said its long-running efforts to get Iranian officials to explain the presence of nuclear material had failed to provide answers to its questions.

Iran and the IAEA agreed in March on an approach for resolving the issue of the sites, one of the remaining obstacles to reviving the 2015 deal. IAEA chief Rafael Grossi is due to “report his conclusions” to the watchdog’s board of governors at a meeting scheduled for next week.

Formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the 2015 deal gave Iran relief from crippling economic sanctions in exchange for curbs on its nuclear activities.

Then-US president Donald Trump unilaterally pulled out of the pact in 2018 and reimposed biting sanctions, prompting Iran to begin rolling back on its own commitments.

President Joe Biden’s administration says it favours a return to the deal, including lifting key sanctions, but has rejected an Iranian demand to reverse Trump’s designation on a terrorism blacklist of the elite Revolutionary Guards.

State Department spokesman Ned Price said that the United States had “full faith and confidence in the IAEA” and Grossi.

“Iran must fully cooperate with the IAEA without further delay,” he told reporters in Washington.

The parties to the pact with Iran saw it as the best way to stop it from building a nuclear bomb -– a goal Tehran has always denied.

– Iran sees Israeli hand –

While most of the activities discussed in the IAEA report are thought to date back to the early 2000s, sources say that one of the sites, in the Turquzabad district of Tehran, may have been used for storing uranium as recently as 2018.

Iran saw an Israeli hand in the IAEA’s latest findings. 

“It is feared that the political pressure exerted by the Zionist regime and some other actors has caused the normal path of the agency’s reports to change from technical to political,” Khatibzadeh said.

Israel on Tuesday accused its arch-foe Iran of stealing classified documents from the IAEA to hide evidence of its nuclear programme.

Israel is adamantly opposed to the 2015 nuclear deal and any effort to restore it. 

“Iran stole classified documents from the UN’s Atomic Agency IAEA and used that information to systematically evade nuclear probes,” Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett wrote on Twitter. 

“How do we know? Because we got our hands on Iran’s deception plan,” Bennett wrote. His tweet included a link to eight files of documents in English and Farsi, as well as photographs.

The files were part of a cache allegedly taken by Israeli agents from an Iranian warehouse in 2018.

Iran’s representative to the IAEA, Mohammad Reza Ghaebi, said earlier that the IAEA’s report “does not reflect Iran’s extensive cooperation with the agency”.

“The agency should be aware of the destructive consequences of publishing such one-sided reports.”

– Feud over reviving deal –

In a separate report published Monday, the IAEA estimated that Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium had grown to more than 18 times the limit agreed in the 2015 deal.

Iran seeks the lifting of all sanctions that followed Trump’s 2018 pullout.

“The pause in the negotiations is due to the US not giving an answer to the initiatives proposed by Iran and Europe,” Khatibzadeh said.

Price replied that the United States was ready to return “immediately” to the agreement and that — for now — it continued to be “in our national interest to do so”.

“It is ultimately up to Iran to decide to drop demands that go beyond the JCPOA and to engage in good faith,” he said.

South Korean K-pop supergroup BTS used a White House visit Tuesday to call out a growth in anti-Asian hate crimes in the United States.

The singer Park Ji-min, better known as Jimin, said through a translator ahead of a meeting with President Joe Biden that the group is “devastated by the recent surge of hate crimes.”

Another member, Suga, appealed for tolerance, saying, “It’s not wrong to be different. I think equality begins when we open up and embrace all of our differences.”

All seven members of the K-pop sensation took to the White House briefing room podium, briefly addressing reporters who were assembled for the daily back-and-forth with Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.

Dressed in matching dark suits and ties, with white shirts, the boy band came to the White House with a serious message.

Biden issued the invitation to “discuss the need to come together in solidarity, Asian inclusion and representation, and addressing anti-Asian hate crimes and discrimination, which have become more prominent issues in recent years,” the White House said.

Anti-Asian sentiment and violence in the US have grown during the coronavirus pandemic in a trend many blame on fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic.

Biden’s Republican predecessor Donald Trump often blamed the pandemic, which originated with an outbreak in Wuhan, China, as “the China virus” and also mocked the deadly virus as “kung flu.”

The trend stands out within a general rise in violent crime, with the ugliest incident taking place in the Atlanta area, where a man shot dead eight people at massage spas, six of them Asian women.

The White House praised BTS’ floppy haired, stylish sensations as “youth ambassadors who spread a message of hope and positivity across the world.”

Band members, all in their 20s and who frequently appear wearing earrings and lipstick, have given a voice to a generation comfortable with gender fluidity.

They are credited with generating billions for the South Korean economy, and their label enjoyed a surge in profits despite holding fewer concerts during the pandemic.

Biden, who at 79 is the oldest person to become president, has often reached out to young celebrities and social media influencers to try and inject some glamor into his team’s messaging on social and health issues.

These included pop singer Olivia Rodrigo and the Jonas Brothers in campaigns to persuade young Americans to get their Covid-19 vaccines.