Dozens killed by explosions in Afghanistan
By macleans.ca - Tuesday, December 6, 2011 - 0 Comments
Shiite Muslims targeted in deadliest attack since 2008
An explosion killed at least 55 people in a shrine at the heart of Afghan capital Kabul, followed by a bicycle-bomb that went off killing four more people outside a mosque in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif on Tuesday. The attacks come the day after Western governments pledged long-term support to Afghanistan after combat troops leave in 2014. By targeting commemorations of the Ashura festival, the largest event in the Shiites’ religious calendar, the attacks could mean the resurgence of a historically violent relationship between Sunnis and Shiites in Afghanistan. Large sectarian attacks have plagued neighbouring Pakistan for decades, but have not taken in place in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. No one has claimed responsibility for the attacks.
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Finger guns
By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 1:14 PM - 0 Comments
Conservative MP Jim Hillyer was apparently quite excited to vote in favour of eliminating the long-gun registry.
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Rating downgrade threat could spur euro reform
By macleans.ca - Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 1:02 PM - 0 Comments
S&P puts eurozone credit ratings on negative watch days before EU summit
A threat by Standard and Poor’s to slash the credit ratings of a number of eurozone countries, including Germany and France, could help Berlin and Paris muster support for sweeping regulatory changes, Reuters reports. S&P put 15 euro-area economies on negative credit watch on Monday, just days before Friday’s European Union summit, when German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicholas Sarkozy will urge a change to European rules and advise the implementation of mandatory penalties for countries that exceed deficit targets. S&P also warned that slow growth due to heavy austerity measures might lead to a 40 per cent fall in Eurozone output. Merkel and German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble have dismissed the downgrade threat as “wildly unfair,” and said it simply represents a wake-up call for leaders to “do their duty” on Dec. 9.
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Starting to sort out the Attawapiskat numbers
By John Geddes - Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 12:36 PM - 0 Comments
Dollar figures will never tell the whole dispiriting story of Attawapiskat, Ont., of course, but you’ve got to start someplace.
For the federal government, it seems to me, there’s a straightforward question that must be answered right away, and another much more difficult one that demands longer-term vision. Money is at the core of both:
Firstly, how much would it take to fix the housing crisis, in Attawapiskat and similar remote First Nations communities, if spending is properly managed for a change?
Secondly, is more needed to provide a decent life in remote reserves , or is current funding sufficient if it isn’t squandered, or is the whole notion of trying to sustain these communities a mistake?
The first question is tricky enough, but obviously the second is far more fraught.
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Report: RCMP probing Montreal Port Authority appointment
By macleans.ca - Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 12:17 PM - 0 Comments
Quebec construction industry tied to influence peddling claims
The RCMP is investigating claims of influence peddling related to the appointment of the new president of the Montreal Port Authority, the Globe and Mail reported on Monday. The issue revives a controversy from last May’s election, when then-PMO spokesman Dimitri Soudas was accused of leaning on board members to appoint Robert Abdallah, a former Montreal bureaucrat, to the post. According to Globe sources, police are now investigating whether members of the Quebec construction industry used Conservative contacts in a bid to influence the appointment. Despite Soudas’s intervention, Abdallah did not get the post. Soudas has since left the PMO for a job with the Canadian Olympic Committee.
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Who knew the Swiss wouldn’t take sides?
By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 11:58 AM - 0 Comments
Simon Pearson/Flickr
You may have seen the news that the Swiss government has decided against any major action on the issue of digital piracy. The government’s report found that one third of its population engages in downloading; the report doesn’t seem to distinguish between illegal and legal downloading, but it found that many people don’t distinguish either. (That is, the difference between legally and illegally downloaded content is nebulous to a lot of people.) The conclusion of the report appears to be that the economic benefits of anti-piracy legislation are limited because people often take the money they save through piracy and spend them on other forms of entertainment. So, in theory, it all balances out.
There are a ton of holes in this theory, starting with one that was already pointed out in a comment on the linked article. Piracy is international, while a lot of non-computerized entertainment spending is local. So it may make business sense for the Swiss government to be lenient about piracy: it drives more money into their local entertainment economy and less into legal international entertainment. And on that theory, piracy may still hurt the companies or industries it’s directed at, even if it helps others. Continue…
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‘This is not a language contest’
By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 11:36 AM - 0 Comments
The Chisholm campaign responds to concerns about the candidate’s French.
“I admit I was a bit nervous about speaking French for the first time in front of a national audience. It was tough but I’m proud of the fact that I was able to do it”, said Chisholm, who continues to work daily with a tutor. “A real leader has to deal with difficult challenges and never give up. That’s what I did yesterday. Those are the qualities I will bring as leader of the party”, he said.
Responding to some of the negative comments from pundits, Chisholm pointed out the fact that it was pretty ironic that some people would want to exclude him from the leadership race because he is not yet bilngual following a debate that spoke to the need for inclusion. “I do believe it’s important for our next leader to be able to speak French and I will learn it. However, let’s not forget that this is not a language contest, it’s a leadership contest”, he replied. “Our party needs someone who is ready to lead right now. I might be the only unilingual candidate but I’m also the only one who has the real leadership experience we need”, Chisholm said.
The release is also available en francais.
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How electric cars got stuck in first gear
By Chris Sorensen - Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 10:50 AM - 0 Comments
Electric cars are hitting showrooms, but people aren’t buying
Rick Bowmer/AP
On a recent autumn day, employees of Tesla wheeled their latest electrified creation, the Model S sedan, into the concourse of a bank tower in downtown Toronto. Over the lunch hour, a handful of curious passersby ogled the dark-red vehicle’s sleek lines, leather interior and giant touch-screen monitor.
The Model S is the second production vehicle built by the Silicon Valley-based carmaker founded by American entrepreneur Elon Musk. Its first effort, the US$109,000 Roadster, was launched in 2008 and immediately grabbed eyeballs—not only because it was the first production vehicle to use lithium-ion batteries like those found in laptops, but because it looked car-magazine cool and was capable of zero to 60 mph in as little as 3.7 seconds. Tesla, which has yet to turn a profit, built and sold only 1,800 Roadsters, but that was hardly the point. “We needed to build a proof of concept that put itself on the map pretty quickly,” says Ricardo Reyes, a Tesla spokesperson.
Mission accomplished—sort of. With Tesla leading the way and governments throwing money at “green” industries, electric cars have gone from auto-show concept vehicles to production models, seemingly overnight. There’s only one problem: consumers have so far shown little interest in vehicles that are perceived as expensive, time-consuming to recharge and having a limited driving range. “The buzz around electric cars in the marketplace is far greater than what’s actually being purchased,” says Michelle Krebs, a senior analyst for the car website Edmunds.com. “Electric cars are not catching on.”
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REVIEW: Charles Dickens: A Life
By Nicholas Köhler - Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 10:20 AM - 0 Comments
Book by Claire Tomalin
Dickens at 12 was head of his family: John, his father, considered himself entitled to high living, and his debts put him in jail. By the time he left prison, Charles was working in Covent Garden, labelling jars of shoe polish. When John and a colleague, Charles Dilke, stopped to watch the boy at work, Dilke “went in and gave him half a crown, and received in return a very low bow,” writes Tomalin in her affecting account of a life as full of coincidences, far-fetched luck and wrenching reversals as any Dickens novel.The episode haunted Dickens, and shame long prevented him from telling even his dearest friend, John Forster, who learned of it years later from Dilke, then manager of the Daily News, the very paper Dickens launched as editor in 1846, but then abruptly left amid worries he was finished as a novelist. Indeed, Dickens sensed himself nearing breakdown: bad memories, long suppressed, were resurfacing. That tumult he poured into David Copperfield, another triumph for a man still in his 30s who’d already written Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol and more—a proto-celebrity whose appearances drew vast crowds.
Dickens was maniacally active, and Tomalin at times risks producing itinerary rather than biography. Still, you want more: her Dickens is moody, a dastardly bargainer with publishers, pathologically social. His judgments are shrewd—he wrote of Toronto that “the wild and rabid toryism … is … appalling.” Catherine, his long-suffering, mismatched wife, is always pregnant (they had 10 children), his father is constantly broke and forging his wealthy son’s name on cheques.
Astonishingly, Dickens himself isn’t overshadowed by his own output: he remains a character—unique, curious, game, as on New Year’s Eve, 1846, when in Paris “he visited the morgue to look at the unidentified bodies laid out there. He went alone at dusk and saw an old man with a grey head in the otherwise empty place.”
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Guesstimates
By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 10:14 AM - 0 Comments
MPs on all sides admit Parliament is failing at one of its primary tasks.
Parliament passes appropriations bills worth billions of dollars without giving them enough scrutiny, say government backbenchers and opposition MPs. “I consider this one of the greatest weaknesses in Parliament. The estimates are tremendously important and deserve a phenomenal amount of scrutiny. This does not happen,” said Conservative MP Daryl Kramp …
This round of supplementary estimates lists $6.6-billion in spending across 68 government departments. Since being tabled Nov. 3, the estimates have been examined in 21 House committee meetings as of Dec. 5, but MPs say it’s a cursory glance. The government spent $270-billion in 2010-2011. “It seems to be treated as a housekeeping issue rather than a serious financial responsibility,” said Mr. Kramp, who is vice-chair of the Public Accounts Committee, and has also sat on the Government Operations and Estimates Committee.
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If you could do it over, would you want to start school at age two?
By the editors - Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 0 Comments
While many two-year-olds already spend their days in child care out of necessity, a new report recommends putting them in public school
Ian Barrett/CP
One of the biggest obstacles to the child care debate is that it’s rarely about kids. More often than not, it’s about the politics and ideology of adults. So it is with a controversial new report arguing all Canadian children should be in school from age two.
While many two-year-olds already spend their days in child care out of necessity, “Early Years Study 3,” by former New Brunswick lieutenant governor Margaret Norrie McCain, the late Dr. Fraser Mustard and daycare advocate Kerry McCuaig, asserts a national imperative to expand existing kindergarten programs so every child has a place in a public school by age two. Quebec’s heavily subsidized $7-a-day child care system is presented as a template and aspiration for all provinces.
Universal child care is always a hot topic, with strongly held views on either side. It’s also been a key platform issue in recent federal elections. (Voters rejected it.) Any reasoned effort to open the school system to much younger children, and at much greater cost to taxpayers, thus has a responsibility to consider both the pros and cons of this idea. The Early Years report has no trouble finding support for its preferred outcome, citing “an avalanche of evidence showing how a public commitment to improving child development can have transformative effects,” particularly for disadvantaged children. But it betrays its biases by ignoring a long list of equally notable disadvantages.
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The Bloc’s four on the floor
By Martin Patriquin - Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 0 Comments
For the four surviving Bloc MPs, working on Parliament Hill has meant constantly having to prove they’re worth listening to
Photograph by Christopher Pike
Every weekday morning at 9 a.m. when the House of Commons is in session, the four remaining Bloc Québécois MPs venture from their offices scattered about Parliament Hill to room 577 of the Confederation Building for their daily caucus meeting. It is an inauspicious venue for a party that for nearly two decades held the majority of Quebec’s seats, not to mention a near monopoly of virtue over the province’s political mindset. The room is roughly 10 by 20 feet and painted a pale blue. Bloc MP André Bellavance secured it last June, and then outfitted it with a table, chairs and a television. Fellow Bloc MP Louis Plamondon, the longest-serving MP in the country, recently joked that the room is so small they can hardly get the door closed once everyone is inside.
On one crisp Tuesday morning in October, room 577 was abuzz with the news of Michael Moldaver, Stephen Harper’s nominee to the Supreme Court. Moldaver, an Ontario native, doesn’t speak French, and to the Bloc his appointment was another linguistic slight on the part of the Conservative government. A month earlier, Harper had appointed as his director of communications a newspaper columnist who doesn’t speak French, and had recently announced that Michael Ferguson, a unilingual anglophone, would be the next auditor general.
The reddest of red-meat issues, though, was the government’s plan to scrap the long gun registry. A majority of Quebecers support the registry, and in November the province’s national assembly passed a unanimous motion opposing its demise. Yet the Conservative government was pressing ahead regardless—and would scrap the registry database itself, ensuring no other government could ever take up the cause. The two dossiers went to Bloc MP Maria Mourani, who serves as the Bloc’s spokesperson on both public security and official languages. Registering firearms and protecting the French language are ancient Bloc Québécois warhorses, and prior to last spring’s federal election Mourani would have been the go-to face of Quebec’s perpetual opposition to all things Conservative and/or Canadian.
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Why the CBC should be more like HBO
By Andrew Coyne - Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments
Whatever their motives might be, the CBC’s antagonists are, on the whole, right
Photography by Andrew Tolson
There is an undeniably sinister quality to the apparently coordinated campaign of harassment currently under way against the CBC. Were it just occasional sniping from the Tory backbench, were it simply the Quebecor/Sun Media empire beating its favourite hobby horse, were the National Citizens Coalition merely on one of its crusades—were it even all three together—you might call it business as usual.
But when you consider the links between these different organizations—the Prime Minister’s former communications director Kory Teneycke is vice-president of Sun News Network, while the director of the NCC is the former Conservative candidate and online maven Stephen Taylor—the whole thing takes on a different cast. At what point do we conclude that this relentless public mauling at the hands of government MPs and their private sector proxies is intended not merely to expose the CBC to proper scrutiny as a public agency, but to intimidate it in its function as a news organization?
The problem the CBC faces is that whatever their motives might be, its antagonists are, on the whole, right (you should pardon the expression). They are right in terms of the immediate controversy, i.e., whether the corporation is obliged to comply with access to information requests, even from its competitors: clearly, under the law, it must. While the law makes exception for certain types of documents, it cannot be up to the CBC alone to decide which documents qualify for this exception, as a court has lately ruled.
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Bank of Canada holds rate at one per cent
By macleans.ca - Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 9:56 AM - 0 Comments
Carney sees uncertainty, but no need for expansionary policy
The Bank of Canada held its benchmark interest rate at one per cent on Tuesday, citing slowing global growth and a deepening of the sovereign debt crisis in Europe, the Globe and Mail reports. The Bank noted in a statement that Europe was headed toward a downturn that will be “more pronounced” than estimated only a few weeks ago, when governor Mark Carney said the continent was in for a brief recession. The Bank, however, continues to see no need for lowering rates, as recent economic indicators point to a pick-up of activity in the U.S.
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Terrance Wills
By Paul Wells - Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments
At about this time, every year, Terry Wills would take us out to Christmas lunch: Hy’s, maybe, or the Parliamentary restaurant, or a pasta joint on Queen St. long since closed. There were three of us in the Montreal Gazette’s Ottawa bureau in those days, 1994 to 1997 or so. Terry Wills; William Johnson, the dogged political columnist who took pains to earn his nickname “Pit Bill;” and me.
Terry died on Saturday at 73. Very few members of the press gallery will remember him. When he retired, shortly after the 2000 election, he went home happily and left this place behind. I might have seen him once in the last decade.
I was 28 when I arrived in Ottawa and I didn’t know much about much. Terry had been in Ottawa, aside from a stint in Washington for the Globe and Mail, since 1968. He knew Parliament Hill the way few have known it since. I still remember him giving me a tour through the Centre Block’s back halls and passageways. The way he made it perfectly clear, after he sent me into my first scrum and I let the Heritage Minister get away without answering my question, that I was not allowed to let a minister get away again. Continue…
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Making our streets safer
By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 9:15 AM - 0 Comments
Conservative MP Peter Goldring has resigned from the Conservative caucus after being charged for refusing a breathalyzer test this weekend.
Two years ago, on the basis of civil liberties concerns, he criticized a proposal from Mothers Against Drunk Driving that would have required drivers to comply with random screening. He also apparently opposed new drunk driving legislation being pursued by the Alberta government.
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Turned away
By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 8:15 AM - 0 Comments
Attawapiskat turned away the third-party manager yesterday. John Duncan’s office expressed its disappointment in a statement last night.
Today, the Third Party Manager was in the community with AANDC officials. When he arrived he was asked to leave by community leadership on behalf of Chief Theresa Spence. The Third Party Manager, Jacques Marion, wished to respect the volatile situation and is currently not in the community. He remains in full control of funding from Aboriginal Affairs to the community and is hoping to work with the community to address urgent needs. It is extremely worrying that the Chief and council are not open to outside assistance. Minister Duncan met with Chief Theresa Spence, and Grand Chief Stan Louttit and reiterated that our government’s priority is to ensure that residents of Attawapiskat have access to safe, warm, and dry shelter. The Minister stressed that all parties should put the needs of the people first. He asked that the Chief and Council work with the Third Party Manager to identify the immediate needs of the community. Minister Duncan remains committed to this plan of action.
Kathryn Blaze Carlson compares the competing claims.
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CanCon, CommCon: what’s the diff?
By Peter Nowak - Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 8:08 AM - 0 Comments
I had a few days to be a tourist on my trip to Berlin last week and one of the more fun things I did was visit the DDR Museum, which provides visitors with an excellent documentation of what life was like in communist East Germany before the Wall fell in 1989.
The museum has exhibits detailing the obvious stuff, like shortages of everything from toilet paper to gasoline, as well as the spying efforts of the Stasi secret police. It also sheds light on some of the really dumb ideas, such as requiring school children to take communal potty breaks. The kids would all go take a dump together and could not pull up their pants until everyone had finished. Continue…
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Rogues of the year
By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments
From scam marriage to b-day parties with dictators–they’ve done it
Kim Kardashian
In perfecting the art of modern celebrity, Kim Kardashian wed pro basketball player Kris Humphries and filed for divorced 72 days later, thus going from bride to newlywed to divorcee in record time and ensuring a seamless run on magazine covers. For the record, her lawyer says the marriage was not a sham. (Jumana El Heloueh/Reuters)
Silvio Berlusconi
With his support in parliament crumbling and his country buckling under debt, Silvio Berlusconi left the Italian prime minister’s palazzo for the last time in November, but it wasn’t to go to a debauched party. Outside, a crowd chanted “buffoon” as he went. With that, the European financial crisis did what so many allegations of corruption and so many tales of “bunga bunga” could not: break Il Cavaliere’s hold on Italy. (Remo Casilli/Reuters)
Barry Bonds
After years of investigation, accusations and legal wrangling, baseball’s home run king Barry Bonds was convicted of one count of obstruction of justice. Whether or not he knowingly took steroids will remain a point of dispute, much like his accomplishments on the field. A spot in the Hall of Fame for the disgraced slugger seems unlikely. (Noah Berger/AP Photo)
Lindsay Lohan
In January, Lohan got out of rehab. She was promptly charged with stealing a $2,500 necklace from an upscale jewellery store. The rest of the year was a whirlwind of photo ops at court appearances and at her community service. Then she decided to pose for Playboy in a pictorial inspired by Marilyn Monroe (the second time she has portrayed the doomed starlet for a magazine). Hugh Hefner says the nude photos are “very classy.” (James Devaney/WireImage)
Dominique Strauss-Kahn
On May 13, Dominique Strauss-Kahn was the managing director of the International Monetary Fund and touted as the future president of France. Then a hotel maid accused him of sexual assault. Then a French writer made a similar charge. Then he was linked to a prostitution ring. Looking dejected, he appeared recently on the cover of Le Parisien under the headline, “DSK, a man alone.” (Francois Guillot/AFP/Getty Images)
Anthony Weiner
Though his surname elicits puns, it was technically not Anthony Weiner’s penis that got him in trouble. It was, more accurately, his photographing that penis (or at least a suggestive bulge in his boxers), and then sending that photo, via Twitter, to a woman who was not his wife, that undid his promising political career. A social media sex scandal for the 21st century. (Shannon Stapleton/Reuters)
Kweku Adoboli
In the early morning hours of a Thursday in September, London police arrested UBS trader Kweku Adoboli. His alleged crime? Unauthorized trading that had cost the Swiss bank some $2 billion. The so-called “rogue trader” faces charges, but three executives, including bank CEO Oswald Grubel, resigned in response. (Sang Tan/AP Photo)
Hilary Swank
In her defence, Hilary Swank claims the celebration in Grozny that she flew across the globe to attend was not necessarily meant to mark the birthday of notorious Chechen dictator Ramzan Kadyrov. She just sort of ended up wishing him a happy birthday while she was there. These things happen. (Musa Sadulayev/AP Photo)
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Villains: Meet the shame gang
By Colby Cosh and Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments
From Norway gunman Anders Behring Breivik to cancer fraudster Ashley Kirilow: portraits of evil
Getty Images
MADMAN OF NORWAY
Anders Behring Breivik, a 31-year-old Norwegian ultranationalist obsessed with the Muslim presence in Europe, allegedly killed eight people in a bombing of government buildings in Oslo and 69 more in a shooting rampage. Most of the victims were teenagers attending a summer camp held on the island of Utøya by the youth wing of the country’s Labour Party. “I had to save Norway and Western Europe from Muslim takeover,” Breivik later told a court. “Labour has betrayed the country and the people.”HAREM COULDN’T SAVE HIM
U.S. Navy SEALs killed 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden after the CIA discovered him living in a three-story compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, 1,300 m from the national military academy. The SEALs chosen to enter Pakistan without notifying the country’s compromised government cheered when told, “We think we found Osama bin Laden and your job is to kill him.” Bin Laden’s last line of defence ended up being two shrieking wives who unsuccessfully tried to shield him as SEALs broke into his bedroom.
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Villains: CBS has lost its Sheen
By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments
As Two and a Half Men rolls on without him, Charlie treads the familiar path of a washed-up star and turns to cable tv
Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic/Getty Images
The biggest threat to a Charlie Sheen comeback may be the show that fired him. Sheen was dismissed from Two and a Half Men in March after insulting its creator, Chuck Lorre, in a radio interview. Immediately after, he began claiming that the show’s success was entirely due to him. When Ashton Kutcher was chosen to replace him, Sheen said that the show’s ratings would plummet—and advised Kutcher to “enjoy Planet Chuck. There is no air, laughter, loyalty or love there.” But it turns out that the show can survive without him; despite overwhelmingly negative reviews and a big ratings drop from its season premiere, the Kutcher-ized version of the show is still getting higher ratings than it did last year with Sheen. For Sheen, it’s a total buzz kill.When he was fired, Sheen won new fans with his swaggering, incoherent style and catchphrases like “winning” and “tiger blood.” For the past eight years, he’d seemingly gotten away with numerous allegations of abusive and addictive behaviour: when asked about Sheen’s moral turpitude, CBS executive Nina Tassler merely said that “on a professional level, he does his job, he does it well, the show is a hit. That’s all I have to say.” Not long after the firing, Radar Online reported that CBS was even trying to get Sheen back on the show and sweep all the rehab and abuse allegations under the rug again.
Once Kutcher was signed up, though, Sheen no longer seemed invincible, and that diminished his stature almost instantly. Before Kutcher, media outlets couldn’t stop writing about Sheen, even if it was only to point out that audiences were booing and walking out of his “Violent Torpedo of Truth” series of live shows. After Two and a Half Men replaced him, Sheen just became that guy who used to be on television, and Kutcher became the bigger story.
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Heroes: none but the brave
By Emma Teitel - Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments
From average Joes like Dennis Manuge to celebs like Kate Winslet
AVERAGE JOES:
Dennis Manuge
The Canadian military veteran became a hero among his peers when he led a lawsuit against the government over cuts to veterans’ long-term disability insurance benefits. Manuge, who was injured at Canadian Forces Base Petawawa in 2002, had $10,000 of his disability pension clawed back by the government after he left the military.
Terence Haight
Dubbed the “mystery millionaire,” the rural Ontarian made headlines posthumously when it was discovered that he left $1,035,948.55 to the small town of Gravenhurst in his will. According to the National Post, nobody is sure why he donated the money (some speculate it’s because his late wife was raised in Gravenhurst), but it is greatly appreciated—by the town’s mayor, especially.
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Villains: Gadhafi reign of fear in
By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments
He had Libyan dissidents gunned down in London, sponsored the Italian Red Brigades, and kept an album of photographs of Condoleeza Rice–to cite a few
Eric Vandeville/Getty Image
Of the three dictators who have thus far been toppled by the populist uprisings known as the Arab Spring, the cruellest, strangest and most depraved was Moammar Gadhafi of Libya.He ruled the country for 42 years, after seizing power in a 1969 coup. It was not enough for Gadhafi to lead Libya; he tried to remake it. Gadhafi wrote a manifesto, his “Green Book,” dealing with subjects from the economy to horsemanship, but all fall under the principle of “jamahiriya”—a made-up word that roughly translates as “the state of the masses.”
In reality, though, the masses had no say over how they were governed. Gadhafi’s rule was total and arbitrary. He banned alcohol and private property. He closed tea shops because unemployed men hanging around in them made Libyans appear lazy. The only constant was fear. East Germans helped him set up the secret police. They built networks of informants, arrested dissidents, tortured and hanged them. Even Libyans abroad were not safe. Eleven protesters, plus British policewoman Yvonne Fletcher, were gunned down outside the Libyan Embassy in London in 1984.
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Heroes: the Fukushima 50
By Jason Kirby - Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments
When 700 workers were evacuated from a Japanese nuclear power plant, these few stayed behind to battle a meltdown
Nuclean AND/EPA/Keystone Press
In an age of 24/7 cable channels, news sites, blogs and Twitter feeds, it’s not unusual for the attention of great swaths of humanity to turn to the plight of a small number of souls, such as trapped miners or the survivors of mass shootings. When a 9.0-magnitude earthquake rocked Japan’s east coast on March 11, and a towering tsunami devastated the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, however, the world watched in horror, and with hope, as a small army of workers fought to prevent the plant’s nuclear reactors from melting down and filling the skies with deadly radiation. Rarely before did so many feel they had so much at stake in the success of so few.They became known as the Fukushima 50, a nameless, faceless last line of defence against a full-blown nuclear catastrophe. They stayed behind when, four days after the earthquake and tsunami happened, spiking radiation levels forced the evacuation of 700 employees of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), which owned and operated the plant. That skeleton crew struggled to pump water into the reactors to keep them from overheating.
It was brutal work, and the threat of radiation poisoning was constant. A series of hydrogen gas explosions destroyed reactor containment buildings, sending 11 workers to hospital. Throughout the ordeal, workers were also constantly buffeted by aftershocks and the threat of yet another destructive wave washing through the power plant.
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Why Gingrich is a real threat to Romney
By John Parisella - Monday, December 5, 2011 at 7:04 PM - 0 Comments
First, there was Donald Trump. Then came Michelle Bachmann and Herman Cain. Later, there was Rick Perry, and now Newt Gingrich. Through it all, support for Mitt Romney has been steady and he continues to do well in a matchup against President Obama. But the picture could soon be changing as we near caucus and primary season. Late challenges can be hazardous to a consistent frontrunner if he fails to develop traction, as seems to be the case with Romney.
With Herman Cain dropping out (‘suspending’ is a misnomer) and expected to endorse a former rival (Newt?), it is now clear that Mitt Romney will face another big challenge for the nomination. Unlike Trump, Cain, Perry, and Bachman, who were weak contenders, Gingrich is a force. He is experienced, occasionally ruthless, and appears much stronger on policy matters than Romney.
Gingrich is currently leading in Iowa and second in New Hampshire, where he could close the gap with a victory in Iowa. He is also leading in both South Carolina and Florida. Should these poll results translate into actual votes for Gingrich in the early stages of the primary, Romney will have difficulty recovering. Continue…
