Shorter Question Everything

Canada
Pharmaceuticals company GlaxoSmithKline PLC said Tuesday it has advised medical staff in Canada to not use one batch of swine flu vaccines in case they trigger life-threatening allergies. White said the batch at issue, which has been distributed across Canada, contains 172,000 doses of the vaccine. She declined to say how many doses had been administered before the advice to stop using them was given. White said U.K.-based GlaxoSmithKline wrote to Canadian health care professionals advising them to stop using the batch on Nov. 18. She says a total of 7.5 million doses of the vaccine have been distributed in Canada.

Afghanistan
U.S. President Barack Obama will announce a history-shaping decision “within days” on whether to escalate the war in Afghanistan with tens of thousands more troops, the White House said Tuesday. Aides declined to comment on news reports that Obama would use a prime-time speech Tuesday to unveil plans to try to turn the worsening conflict around by ordering some 34,000 more U.S. soldiers to the strife-torn country.

Canada
Some 637,000 Canadian children are still living in low-income families, 20 years after Ed Broadbent and other federal politicians unanimously agreed to end child poverty, according to a new report. The rate of child and family poverty has gone down only slightly over the past 20 years, to 9.5 per cent in 2007 from 11.9 per cent in 1989 — a “national disgrace, ” the former NDP leader says. The 2009 Report Card on Child and Family Poverty in Canada, released by the national awareness group Campaign 2000, says the most recent figure is 637,000 Canadian children who live in a family where a majority of money is spent on necessities such as food, clothing and shelter.