Wisdom is the result of a happy marriage between intelligence and experience.
© Carl Dow, Editor and Publisher, True North Perspective
Friday, May 14, 2010, Vol. 5, No, 23 — 227
"True North is for opinion leaders"
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By Christine Dell'Amore
National Geographic News
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13 May 2010 — If efforts fail to cap the leaking Deepwater Horizon wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico oil could gush for years—poisoning coastal habitats for decades, experts say.
Last week the joint federal-industry task force charged with managing the spill tried unsuccessfully to lower a 93-ton containment dome over one of three ruptures in the rig's downed pipe.
Crystals of methane hydrates in the freezing depths clogged an opening on the box, preventing it from funneling the spouting oil up to a waiting ship.
Yesterday a smaller dome was laid on the seafloor near the faulty well, and officials will attempt to install the structure later this week.
But such recovery operations have never been done before in the extreme deep-sea environment around the wellhead, noted Matthew Simmons, retired chair of the energy-industry investment banking firm Simmons & Company International. — Read the full article at The Toronto Star, 935 words.
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Cartoon by Mike Thompson, Comics.com, 13 May 2010.
By Susan Delacourt
The Toronto Star
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13 May 2010, OTTAWA, Canada — Heartened and emboldened by Canada's new anti-abortion stand on foreign aid, thousands of pro-life campaigners flooded in unprecedented numbers to Parliament Hill on Thursday, daring to hope that Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government will take further steps against abortion at home as well as abroad.
The debate that Harper says he doesn't want to reopen in Canada arrived literally on his doorstep on Thursday, with high spirits and demands for the Conservative government to do much more to discourage abortion in this country.
Around 15,000 pro-life campaigners, clearly buoyed by what they see as last month's victory on the foreign-aid front, cheered loudly when numerous speakers talked about the next steps in what one called bringing a "culture of life" to Canada.
"We would like some more courage to do something more in Canada in defence of the unborn," Cardinal Marc Ouellette, of Quebec City, told the crowd.
Ouellette minced no words in explaining later what he would like Harper to do next: "Reopen the discussion in Canada about this judicial void; there is absolutely no protection for the unborn," Ouellette told reporters. "The next step should be a reopening of discussion about the legal situation of abortion in Canada." — Read the full article at The Toronto Star, 858 words.
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Editor's Notes
Friday, May 14, 2010
True North Perspective
Vol. 5, No. 23 (227)
By Geoffrey Dow
Managing Editor
True North Perspective
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Tommy Douglas has been dead since 1986 and the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist in 1991 so, even if you accept the ludicrous claim that the former premier of Saskatchewan and Canada's "father of Medicare" was some kind of treacherous subversive, the claim that information gathered on him from the 1930s through the 1970s could somehow endanger the nation today is one impossible thing to believe too many. — 879 words.
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Humour in the Court of Judge Harold Wright
1. A nursery school pupil told his teacher he'd found a cat, but it was dead. 'How do you know that the cat was dead?' she asked her pupil. 'Because I pissed in its ear and it didn't move,' answered the child innocently.
'You did WHAT?' the teacher exclaimed in surprise.
'You know,' explained the boy, 'I leaned over and went 'Pssst' and it didn't move.' — 837 words.
"News is what (certain) people want to keep hidden. Everything else is just publicity."
PBS journalist Bill Moyers.Your support makes it possible for True North to clear the fog of "publicity" and keep you informed on what's really happening in the world today. Please send your donation to:
Carl Dow, True North, Station E, P.O. Box 4814, Ottawa ON Canada K1S 5H9.
By L. D. Cross
True North Perspective
L. D. Cross of Ottawa is the author of The Quest for the Northwest Passage: exploring the elusive route through Canada's Arctic waters, published by James Lorimer & Company Ltd., Toronto. The book is available online at Chapters/Indigo.ca, Amazon.ca and Amazon.com.
The 1989 Exxon Valdez supertanker spill in Alaska's Prince William Sound was our benchmark for environmental contamination. That has now been eclipsed by the potential of BP's Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig spill in the Gulf of Mexico. What's next? The Northwest Passage as a toilet for crude oil? — 899 words.
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CBC News
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13 May 2010 — Canada is extending a moratorium on oil and gas exploration on Georges Bank, the rich fishing area southwest of Nova Scotia.
The ban will be in place for an extra three years, the Nova Scotia and federal governments said Thursday. It was set to expire at the end of 2012, but will now last until Dec. 31, 2015.
Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter said extending the ban is the right thing to do.
"We know that any decision on whether or not to lift the moratorium on Georges Bank could have significant economic and environmental impacts on the province, the country, and beyond," Dexter said in a statement Thursday. — Read the full article at CBC News, 533 words.
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From the Desk of Dennis Carr, Sustainable Development Editor
By David Suzuki and Faisal Moola
Straight.com
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It could never happen here. That was Prime Minister Stephen Harper's assurance in the wake of the massive oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, which he referred to as "an environmental catastrophe unlike anything we've seen in quite a long time".
The company behind the spill off the U.S. Gulf coast, British Petroleum, has three licences to drill for oil in the Beaufort Sea in Canada's Arctic. BP and other companies have asked our federal government to relax environmental regulations around Arctic drilling. And B.C. is still pushing to get the federal government to lift a moratorium on drilling off the West Coast. There's also a plan in the works by Enbridge to build a pipeline to carry oil from the tar sands to the B.C. coast, where it will be put on oil tankers for ocean shipping. Questions have also been raised about the safety of an offshore well that Chevron has started drilling off the coast of Newfoundland. It will be deeper than the one in the Gulf of Mexico.
We've been assured many times that the technology is safe, but the Gulf disaster shows that no technology is foolproof. Can we really afford the risk? — — Read the full story at the Straight.com, 754 words.
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By Marci McDonald
Toronto Star
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From the moment I began this book, I was confronted by skeptics who insist that a truly influential religious right could never take root in Canada. For some, that denial seemed like an exercise in wishful thinking, a refusal to face the possibility that the idea of the country they cherish — liberal, tolerant, and not given to extremes of action or belief — might not be in sync with the changing reality.
Others argued that if a Christian right did exist here it would have burst fully formed on to the political scene, a carbon copy of that in the U.S. — raucous and confrontational, openly pulling the strings of the Conservative party and captained by outspoken television preachers with millions of viewers ready to respond to their bidding.
But the American movement has had more than three decades to take shape and flourish; by the time scholars and the mainstream media noticed, it had already infiltrated nearly every level of government from school boards to the Senate, often by stealth.
In this country, where the CRTC has kept the reins on religious broadcasting and Catholics make up a larger proportion of the faith community, the emergent Christian right may look and sound different than its American counterpart, but in the five years since the prospect of same-sex marriage propelled evangelicals into political action, it has spawned a coalition of advocacy groups, think tanks and youth lobbies that have changed the national debate. The "sleeping giant" that Capital Xtra! magazine had warned against in 2005 is now up and about, organizing with a vengeance that will not be easily reversed. As Faytene Kryskow, leader of Christian youth lobby called 4MYCanada, told a parliamentary reception, "We are here, and we are here to stay." — Read the full article at The Toronto Star, 2,692 words.
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By Alex Binkley
True North Perspective
When Prime Minister Stephen Harper picked 98 per cent Canadian content seemingly out of the blue in 2008 as the threshold for Product of Canada labels, he pretty well killed off the hopes of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture for a labelling system that consumers could look for to buy Canadian produced foods. — 619 words.
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By David Pugliese
The Ottawa Citizen
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In an Ottawa courthouse, a precedent-setting battle is unfolding over what rights the public has to see government records.
The fight centres on surveillance documents produced by the RCMP from the 1930s to 1970s about former NDP leader Tommy Douglas, the father of Canada's public health-care system.
Those who have dealt with secrecy in the federal government aren't surprised that federal lawyers would fight tooth-and-nail to prevent the disclosure of decades-old records requested under the Access to Information law.
What has surprised is that the secrecy is being supported by the Office of the Information Commissioner, the independent watchdog of the access law.
"I'm doing the job that the information commissioner should be doing," said Paul Champ, a lawyer who is acting for the Canadian Press journalist who requested the records. — Read the full story at The Ottawa Citizen, 1,437 words.
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By David Pugliese
The Ottawa Citizen
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9 May 2010 — If Walt Disney and Ronald Reagan had lived in Canada, the public would have likely never known the two had worked as FBI informants.
Or at least not for 100 years after the creator of Mickey Mouse and the former president of the United States had spied on union members and alleged Communists in the 1940s and 50s.
The federal government's decision not to fully release its surveillance files on NDP leader Tommy Douglas stands in stark contrast to attitudes south of the border, where unfettered access to many government records, and particularly older files, is allowed.
In the U.S., hundreds of thousands of pages of surveillance documents, on high-profile individuals from civil rights leader Martin Luther King to actor Burt Lancaster have been released.
That includes documents showing a variety of famous people, ranging from Reagan to Disney, informed on others for the FBI, notes a new book, Snitch, A History of the Modern Intelligence Informer by intelligence specialist Steve Hewitt. — Read the full story at The Ottawa Citizen, 461 words.
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By Andrew McIntosh
Toronto Sun
11 May 2010, MONTRÉAL — Montrealer Mohamed Omary might have improperly collected welfare payments in Quebec as he travelled the world and met with Islamic terrorists.
QMI Agency reported on Monday that Omary has collected Quebec government welfare cheques for almost 20 years, even as he criss-crossed Europe to meet six other men who've since been either killed, convicted or linked to global terrorism, Omary made trips to France, Germany, Holland, Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia between 1993 and 1999, and several other trips to Morocco and Turkey, often staying abroad a month at a time, lawyers for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Canadian Security Intelligence Service claimed in recently filed court documents. — Read the full story at the Toronto Sun, 486 words.
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Parkdale is a community in southwest Toronto reaching from Queen Street West down to Lake Ontario. Years ago it was one of the exclusive areas where the wealthy lived, inhabiting large homes with servants' quarters in the "attic". Residents could swim in the unpolluted waters of the lake and during the 1930s and 1940s the waterfront Palais Royale was host to such big bands as Duke Ellington, Count Bassie, Benny Goodman and others.
Now this community is one of the most multi-cultural and diverse in the world. Largely a working class neighbourhood, it also includes everyone from a collection of high-income residents, to welfare recipients, homeless, new immigrants and growing number of artists and young professionals. — 439 words.
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CBC News
 HMCS Shawinigan. (Photo: CBC.) |
A shortage of money and sailors is forcing Canada's navy to mothball half of its fleet of 12 vessels used to patrol the Arctic, Atlantic and Pacific coasts.
In a statement to CBC News, the navy says it made the tough choice to leave several of the 55-metre vessels at dock in Halifax and Esquimalt, B.C., and strip them of their crews because it doesn't have the resources to operate them all.
The navy says the move is necessary to continue the primary mission of defending Canada. — Read the full article at CBC News, 537 words.
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By Allan Woods
The Toronto Star
 HMCS Saskatoon. (Photo: DND Handout.) |
With a defence minister from Atlantic Canada in a government eager to march in lockstep with its military, it's never a good idea to mothball half a dozen ships.
And there is perhaps no worse time than now, as the navy celebrates its hundredth anniversary.
The Canadian Forces found this out the hard way Friday when the country's top soldier cancelled a politically explosive order to take half the navy's coastal patrol vessels out of active service. — Read the full article at CBC News, 342 words.
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CBC News
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A young woman from Gatineau, Que., says she was strip-searched and stranded in Windsor, Ont., in the middle of the night by U.S. border officials.
"It was a horrible experience," said Nina Vroemen, 20, who was on her way to volunteer at a California organic farm.
"There was no need for that humiliation and mistreatment of a young, female Canadian volunteer."
As of Wednesday morning, U.S. immigration officials had not returned calls about the case. — Read the full article at CBC News, 537 words.
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By Campbell Clark
The Globe and Mail
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12 May 2010 — Africa's population is set to boom, but the direction of Canada's Africa policies is less clear. Ottawa has closed embassies, dropped several African countries from its list of targets for bilateral aid and declared a priority shift to the Americas. Despite a bump in recent interest and Prime Minister Stephen Harper's G8 initiative to improve the health of mothers and children in poor counties, African countries still wonder about our plans.
"We need a strategy. We don't have that," said Lucien Bradet, president of the Canada Council on Africa. "That's what the Africans want. And it's exactly what we need."
Mr. Harper declared the Americas a foreign-policy priority, but there's a murkier question about where Africa fits in. The Conservatives' answer is that it does.
Other countries — China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia — are pursuing aggressive Africa strategies, and critics here argue Canada could be left out of a future economic boom, or disengaged from a continent whose stability will matter. — Read the rest of the article at The Globe and Mail, 971 words.
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By Alberte Villeneuve-Sinclair
True North Perspective
Alberte Villeneuve-Sinclair is the author of The Neglected Garden and two French novels. Visit her website to learn more, www.albertevilleneuve.ca.
This weekend, my daughter invited me to the movies as part of my Mother's Day treat. I suggested we take in The Back-up Plan with Jennifer Lopez. We went to the 9:15 p.m. movie so her brood would be in bed by the time we left. — 1,113 words.
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Spirit Quest
By The Rev. Dr. Hanns F. Skoutajan
Her voice betrayed her age, but the words she uttered, carefully chosen words, gave incontrovertible evidence of an active and conscientious mind. "Revolutionary" I would call her, but why is it revolutionary to be deeply concerned about the kind of country and world that our grandchildren will inherit? — 841 words.
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 A day-old baby boy's heel is pricked for blood during newborn screening. |
12 May 2010 — The B.C. Civil Liberties Association says as many as 800,000 babies in the province have been the victims of privacy violations that began the day they were born.
"A functional DNA database has been created of all the infants born," Eby told CBC News on Wednesday morning.
The association says blood samples taken from infants at birth in B.C. hospitals are used to test for about 50 genetic disorders. But after those tests are completed, the samples are then kept in storage indefinitely by the hospital system, and some have been used for medical research. — Read the full article at CBC News, 515 words.
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From the Alex Binkley, Contributing Editor
By Ben Eisen
Policy Analyst, Frontier Centre for Public Policy
TroyMedia.com
TORONTO, ON, — Canada's healthcare system has a number of important strengths. Most notably, it generally produces good medical outcomes for patients when compared to most other industrialized countries. For example, Canada's cancer and heart attack survival rates are relatively high. Another plus is that our system provides universal access regardless of ability to pay.
But despite these strengths, Canada's model also has some serious weaknesses, in particular, excessive wait times for treatment, especially in comparison to the high quality, universal healthcare systems found in Western Europe. — Read the full article at TroyMedia.com, 735 words.
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CBC News
A Regina man who called 911 to turn himself in for driving drunk has pleaded guilty to impaired driving.
Robert Beatty, 35, was driving to Moose Jaw, Sask., at about 10:30 p.m. on a foggy night in February when he pulled over to the side of the road and called 911, telling dispatchers he was too drunk to drive. — Read the full article at CBC News, 205 words.
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From the Desk of Anita Chan, Contributing Editor, Australia
CLNTranslations.org
9 May 2010 — Since the second half of the 1990s, China has been through waves of privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in a drive to pave the way for a market economy. Previous issues of CLNT have focused on state workers' resistance to such cases of privatization such as the recent Tonghua Steel incident.
This issue will look at an interesting case where an ordinary worker has been persistently and creatively trying to defend workers' interests in an SOE where he worked that has been quietly privatized. What is notable about this case is that this worker, Liu Rongli, mobilized his fellow workers to try and set up a workplace union and struggled to force the management to offer company stocks to its workers and for greater management transparency. In this issue, we translate two articles both written by Liu about the corrupt privatization of state assets in China, and about the difficulties involved in unionizing restructured SOEs. — Read the full article at CLNTranslations.org, 1,219 words.
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Health Watch
CBC News
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12 May 2010 — Top-selling fragrances contain chemicals that can trigger allergic reactions or disrupt hormones but are not listed on labels, according to a new report calling for changes in federal regulations.
The report, released Wednesday by Environmental Defence in Canada and the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics in the U.S., assessed 17 fragrances bought in both countries that were tested by an independent laboratory in California.
They included Britney Spears' Curious, Calvin Klein Eternity, Abercrombie & Fitch Fierce and Old Spice body spray. Read the full article at TruthOut.org, 2,013 words.
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By Dennis Leary
AlterNet.org
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11 May 2010 — I am of Irish descent.
We have two traditional drugs: alcohol and religion. Both of which produce the same eventual side effects: dropping to your knees and feeling guilty.
When it comes to prescription drugs, for me — it's all about the side effects.
Nausea, anal leakage, dysplasia, and temporary blindness are not just great name choices for late 80's heavy metal bands — they are but a few of the little prices Americans are willing to pay each time they swallow a magic pill designed to help them lose weight, gain confidence, stop shaking or become the proud owners of medically-induced erections.
I was raised by illegal-alien Irish immigrants who taught me that anything worth having is worth suffering for so the desire to clear up a heavy bout of back pain by ingesting a handful of Vitamin A (known as Advil to the occasional user) is well-worth whatever possible future damage it may do to my liver, brain or eyeballs (I'm not exactly sure of what side effects Advil may produce because I've never bothered to read the warnings on the label — the print is too small and I can never find my glasses). — Read the full article at AlterNet.org, 956 words.
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Lewrockwell.com
6 May 2010 — There's no doubt broccoli, watercress and acai berries are overflowing with healthy vitamins and minerals, but what about the foods we actually want to eat? As a new study reveals that the once-demonised egg should be regarded as a 'superfood' (it's packed with vital antioxidants and nutrients), we uncover the other surprising wonderfoods sitting right under our noses... — Read the rest of the article at Lewrockwell.com717 words.
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By Ellen Friedrichs
AlterNet.org
This Mother's Day, the birth control pill turned fifty. Never far from debate, the pill has spent the past five decades being hailed as a women's liberator, scorned as a moral malady, and tweaked in an ongoing effort to reduce this medication's numerous side effects. But in all that tweaking one issue has never been at the forefront, namely an attempt to reduce the effect that the pill has on a user's libido. — Read the full article at AlterNet.org, 288 words.
In case you missed it ... and always worth repeating
Let's say that news throughout human time has been free. Take that time when Ugh Wayne went over to the cave of Mugh Payne with news that the chief of his group had broken a leg while chasing his laughing wife around the fire. That news was given freely and received as such with much knowing smiles and smirks to say nothing of grunts of approval or disapproval. — 688 words.
By Muriel Kane
RawStory.com
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14 May 2010 — Earlier this week, the International Red Cross confirmed the existence of a secret "Black Jail" within the Bagram prison complex in Afghanistan, where high-value detainees were held and allegedly abused. Since then, additional details have continued to emerge.
The New York Times reported last November that former prisoners and human rights researchers had described how prisoners were held at the facility for weeks at a time without being allowed outside contact. The BBC also obtained accounts from prisoners who said they had been subjected to isolation, sleep deprivation, and cold. Read the full article at RawStory.com, 2,013 words.
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Winning hearts and minds in Afghanistan — one murder at a time
Seymour Hersh spoke at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Geneva on April 24, 2010.
11 May 2010 — HERSH: The purpose of my [Abu Ghraib] stories was to take it out of the field and into the White House. It's not that the President or the Secretary of Defense Mr. Rumsfeld, or Bush, or Cheney, it's not that they knew what happened in Abu Ghraib. It's that they had allowed this kind of activity to happen.
And I'll tell you right now, one of the great tragedies of my country is that Mr. Obama is looking the other way, because equally horrible things are happening to prisoners, to those we capture in Afghanistan. They're being executed on the battlefield. It's unbelievable stuff going on there that doesn't necessarily get reported. Things don't change.
[...]
What they've done in the field now is, they tell the troops, you have to make a determination within a day or two or so whether or not the prisoners you have, the detainees, are Taliban. You must extract whatever tactical intelligence you can get, as opposed to strategic, long-range intelligence, immediately. And if you cannot conclude they're Taliban, you must turn them free. What it means is, and I've been told this anecdotally by five or six different people, battlefield executions are taking place. Well, if they can't prove they're Taliban, bam. If we don't do it ourselves, we turn them over to the nearby Afghan troops and by the time we walk three feet the bullets are flying. And that's going on now.
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By Harry R. Weber and John Curran/Associated Press
MichaelMoore.com
10 May 2010, ON THE GULF OF MEXICO — A remote-controlled submarine shot a chemical dispersant into the maw of a massive undersea oil leak Monday, further evidence that authorities expect the gusher to keep erupting into the Gulf of Mexico for weeks or more.
Crews using the deep-sea robot attempted to thin the oil — which is rushing up from the seabed at a pace of about 210,000 gallons per day — after getting approval from the Environmental Protection Agency, BP spokesman Mark Proegler told The Associated Press. The agency had halted two previous rounds of the dispersant to test its potential impact on the environment, and approved a third round of spraying that began early Monday, Proegler said.The EPA said in a statement the effects of the chemicals were still widely unknown. — Read the full article at MichaelMoore.com, 656 words.
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By Gareth Porter
InterPress Service
10 May 2010, WASHINGTON — Although Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's plan for wresting the Afghan provinces of Helmand and Kandahar from the Taliban is still in its early stages of implementation, there are already signs that setbacks and obstacles it has encountered have raised serious doubts among top military officials in Washington about whether the plan is going to work.
Scepticism about McChrystal's ambitious aims was implicit in the way the Pentagon report on the war issued Apr. 26 assessed the progress of the campaign in Marja. Now, as Afghan President Hamid Karzai begins a four-day round of consultations with President Barack Obama and other senior U.S. officials here this week, the new report has been given even more pointed expression by an unnamed "senior military official" quoted in a column in the Washington Post Sunday by David Ignatius.
The senior military officer criticised McChrystal's announcement in February that he had "a government in a box, ready to roll in" for the Marja campaign, for having created "an expectation of rapidity and efficiency that doesn't exist now", according to Ignatius.
The same military official is also quoted as pointing out that parts of Helmand that were supposed to have been cleared by the offensive in February and March are in fact still under Taliban control and that Afghan government performance in the wake of the offensive had been disappointing. — Read the full article at InterPress Service, 1,175 words.
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Associated Press
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11 May 2010 — American commanders, worried about increased violence in the wake of Iraq's inconclusive elections, are now reconsidering the pace of a major troop pullout this summer, U.S. officials said Tuesday.
The withdrawal of the first major wave of troops is expected to be delayed by about a month, the officials said. Waiting much longer could endanger President Barack Obama's goal of reducing the force level from 92,000 to 50,000 troops by Aug. 31.
More than two months after parliamentary elections, the Iraqis have still not formed a new government, and militants aiming to exploit the void have carried out attacks like Monday's bombings and shootings that killed at least 119 people — the country's bloodiest day of 2010. — Read the full article at RawStory.com, 1,241 words.
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Interview: Noam Chomsky
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By Joel Whitney
Guernica
Noam Chomsky discusses his forthcoming book, the hypocrisy of neoliberalism, where he feels hopeful about democracy despite U.S. terrorism, and his friendship — okay, passing acquaintance — with Hugo Chavez and other "pink tide" presidents. — Read the full article at Guernica, 568 words.
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By Lydia Polgreen
The New York Times
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13 May 2010, NEW DELHI — The trains arrive with a whisper. The doors slide open and a puff of refrigerated air confronts the city's summertime miasma. A bell dings, the doors close and the train whisks its passengers to the next stop.
This sequence of events might seem utterly ordinary on train platforms in Berlin or Bangkok, Stockholm or Singapore. But here in the sweaty heart of India's northernmost megacity, the runaway success of the city's almost complete subway system, known as the Metro, is a feat bordering on miraculous, and it offers new hope that India's perpetually decrepit urban infrastructure can be dragged into the 21st century.
The Delhi Metro manages to defy just about every stereotype of urban India. It is scrupulously clean, impeccably maintained and almost unfailingly punctual. Its cars are the latest models, complete with air-conditioning and even power outlets to let commuters charge their mobile phones and laptops. Its signaling and other safety technology is first rate, and the system is among the best in the world, urban transport experts say. Despite cheap fares, less than 20 cents for the shortest ride and about 67 cents for the longest, the system manages to turn an operating profit. — Read the full article at The New York Times.
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By Alexandra Odynova and Galina Stolyarova
The St. Petersburg Times
 A reproduction of Rublev's 'Trinity' is painted at the State Tretyakov Gallery. (Photo: Igor Tabakov/The St. Petersburg Times.) |
11 May 2010 — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is atoning for the sins of the Bolsheviks — or delivering a heavy blow to Russian culture, depending on whom you ask.
His government is pushing to transfer thousands of "religious items" from museums to the Russian Orthodox Church, a move that art experts and museum workers fear will lead to the ruin of important artifacts now preserved in museums and put many items off-limits to the public.
Gennady Vdovin, director of the Ostankino Estate Museum in Moscow, said the clergy has frequently neglected church property in the past.
"There are a lot of examples when museum experts have found icons thrown out by priests in backyards," Vdovin told The St. Petersburg Times. — Read the full article at The St. Petersburg Times, 2,013 words.
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By Tom Lasseter
McClatchy Newspapers
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| A petrol delivery vehicle drives past a PetroChina gas station in Beijing, March 25. (Photo: Jason Lee/Reuters.) |
12 May 2010, BEIJING — As world powers wrangle this month at the United Nations about how to handle Iran's nuclear plans, China is attempting to balance its thirst for Iranian oil and natural gas with its ambition to be a diplomatic heavyweight.
Tough sanctions against Iran could have serious economic consequences for China, one of the five veto-wielding permanent members of the U.N. Security Council.
Any significant disruption of China's oil and gas supplies, coupled with setbacks to the country's development deals in those sectors, could hamper Beijing's scramble to ensure that its booming economic growth keeps pace with the rising expectations of its people. — Read the full article at McClatchy Newspapers, 1,149 words.
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Interview: Jean Ziegler
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By Ramine Abadie
Translated by Isabelle Metral
'Humanité
Sociologist and UNO official Jean Ziegler, who has signed l'Humanité's petition, has just published an updated version of la Haine de l'Occident (The Hatred of the West). He is interviewed by l'Humanité's correspondent in Geneva. — Read the full article at TruthOut.org, 568 words.
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By Yana Kunichoff
TruthOut.org
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Amy Goodman, host of the Democracy Now! news program and two of her producers filed a federal lawsuit against the cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis on Wednesday, following the journalists' arrest and mistreatment while covering the 2008 Republican National Convention.
Filed with the Center for Constitutional Rights in a federal court in Minnesota, the lawsuit says authorities violated the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment to Goodman, her producers and other journalists when they interfered with their right to gather news. — 1,149 words.
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Science
By Robert Lee Hotz
The Wall Street Journal
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6 May 2010 — The burly Ice Age hunters known as Neanderthals, a long-extinct species, survive today in the genes of almost everyone outside Africa, according to an international research team who offer the first molecular evidence that early humans mated and produced children in liaisons with Neanderthals.
In a significant advance, the researchers mapped most of the Neanderthal genome — the first time that the heredity of such an ancient human species has been reliably reconstructed. The researchers, able for the first time to compare the relatively complete genetic coding of modern and prehistoric human species, found the Neanderthal legacy accounts for up to 4 per cent of the human genome among people in much of the world today.
By comparing the Neanderthal genetic information to the modern human genome, the scientists were able to home in on hints of subtle differences between the ancient and modern DNA affecting skin, stature, fertility and brain power that may have given Homo sapiens an edge over their predecessors. — Read the full article at The Wall Street Journal, 1,238 words.
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NASA
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| Compare & contrast: Rocks on surface of Saturn's moon Tital (left), river rocks on Earth (right). |
11 May 2010 — It appears flash flooding has paved streambeds in the Xanadu region of Saturn's moon Titan with thousands of sparkling crystal balls of ice, according to scientists with NASA's Cassini spacecraft. By analyzing the way the terrain has scattered radar beams, scientists deduce the spheres measure at least a few centimeters (inches) and maybe up to a couple of meters (yards) in diameter. The spheres likely originated as part of water-ice bedrock in higher terrain in Xanadu.
"What we believe happened in this area is a lot like what creates polished river rocks on Earth," said Alice Le Gall, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and the lead author of the study, which used the Cassini radar instrument. "Bouncing downstream smoothes out the edges of rocks."
As foothill residents know in southern California and other areas, sudden rains can trigger mudslides and flooding at the mountainous fringes of desert areas. Those flows can pick up boulders and debris and tumble them downstream. On Titan, the flows appear to have occurred periodically for eons, on a catastrophic scale. The process on Titan, however, involves rain made of liquid methane and ethane, rather than Earth's water rain. — Read the full article at NASA's website, 758 words.
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TerraDaily.com
3 May 2010 — A deep ocean current with a volume equivalent to 40 Amazon Rivers has been discovered by Japanese and Australian scientists near the Kerguelen plateau, in the Indian Ocean sector of the Southern Ocean, 4,200 kilometres south-west of Perth.
In a paper published in Nature Geoscience, the researchers described the current -more than three kilometres below the Ocean's surface — as an important pathway in a global network of ocean currents that influence climate patterns.
"The current carries dense, oxygen-rich water that sinks near Antarctica to the deep ocean basins further north," says co-author Dr Steve Rintoul from the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems CRC and CSIRO's Wealth from Oceans Flagship.
"Without this supply of Antarctic water, the deepest levels of the ocean would have little oxygen. — Read the rest of the article at TerraDaily.com words.
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TerraDaily.com
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3 May 2010, PRINCETON NJ — For insight into what can happen when the Earth's carbon cycle is altered — a cause and consequence of climate change — scientists can look to an event that occurred some 720 million years ago.
New data from a Princeton University-led team of geologists suggest that an episode called "snowball Earth," which may have covered the continents and oceans in a thick sheet of ice, produced a dramatic change in the carbon cycle. This change in the carbon cycle, in turn, may have triggered future ice ages.
Pinpointing the causes and effects of the extreme shift in the way carbon moved through the oceans, the biosphere and the atmosphere — the magnitude of which has not been observed at any other time in Earth history — is important for understanding just how much Earth's climate can change and how the planet responds to such disturbances. — Read the rest of the article at TerraDaily.com1,347 words.
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Looking forward ...
By David Sirota
TruthOut.org
Imagine, if you can, an alternate universe.
Imagine that in this alternate universe, a foreign military power begins flying remote-controlled warplanes over your town, using on-board missiles to kill hundreds of your innocent neighbors.
Now imagine that when you read the newspaper about this ongoing bloodbath, you learn that the foreign nation's top general is nonchalantly telling reporters that his troops are also killing "an amazing number" of your cultural brethren in an adjacent country. Imagine further learning that this foreign power is expanding the drone attacks on your community despite the attacks' well-known record of killing innocents. And finally, imagine that when you turn on your television, you see the perpetrator nation's tuxedo-clad leader cracking stand-up comedy jokes about drone strikes — jokes that prompt guffaws from an audience of that nation's elite.
Ask yourself: How would you and your fellow citizens respond? Would you call homegrown militias mounting a defense "patriots" or would you call them "terrorists"? Would you agree with your leaders when they angrily tell reporters that violent defiance should be expected? — Read the full article at TruthOut.org words.
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By Charlie Devereux
Reuters
8 May 2010, CARACAS — Venezuela's Hugo Chavez may have recently discovered the joys of "tweeting," but now he is finding that Twitter can also have drawbacks for presidents.
The Latin American country's loquacious leftist leader launched himself onto the micro-blogging site last week to counter opponents who have increasingly been using it to pour scorn on his government. — Read the full article at IOL.co.za, 273 words.
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By Wang Jingqiong and Li Yuefeng
China Daily
10 May 2010, SHANGQIU, Henan — A convicted murderer has been declared innocent and released after languishing for about 10 years in jail — because his alleged victim returned home.
Zhao Zuohai, a 57-year-old resident of Zhaolou village in Zhecheng county, was wrongfully convicted of the murder of a fellow villager in 1999, the Henan Provincial Higher People's Court said at a press conference on Sunday.
The suspended death sentence handed down in 2002 was rescinded; and the court als said Zhao Zuohai will be compensated. — Read the full article at China Daily, 699 words.
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By David A. Bell
Newsweek
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8 May 2010 — Of France's 62 million people, fewer than 5 million are old enough to have any memory of the horrifying weeks in May and June 1940, when the Nazi war machine crushed the country's armed forces, forced them to sign a humiliating surrender, and marched triumphantly into Paris. The blitzkrieg, and the traumatic occupation that began 70 years ago Monday, are rapidly sliding below the horizon of living memory.
That makes it easy to see the France of 1940 — which was poor, rural, homogenous, and overall quite religious — as a wholly different place from the wealthy, urbanized, multicultural, and deeply secular France of 2010. They appear, prima facie, to be radically different places. But look closer, and it's easy to see that, 70 years later, France is still very much, well, France. — Read the full article at Newsweek.com words.Reality Check
By John Lamperti
TruthOut.org
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The Pentagon "base budget" request for fiscal year 2011 (beginning on October 1) calls for about $549 billion, an increase of $18 billion over the appropriation for the current fiscal year. That's nowhere near the whole story.
The administration is also requesting about $160 billion for "Overseas Contingency Operations" (OCO) that goes to pay for wars and occupations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. There's also $25 billion or more in military spending outside the "Department of Defense," much of that for nuclear weapons included in the Department of Energy's budget. (This $25 billion could be much larger, depending on what is included.) The grand total — and it is grand — comes to at least $734 billion.
There is an additional $33 billion "emergency supplemental" appropriation to pay for the Afghanistan escalation; it's said to cost $1 million to maintain one soldier there for a year. That $33 billion would be counted as part of FY 2010 spending, and, of course, there may be a supplemental in 2011 as well. The total has more than doubled in the last decade and continues to rise. — 1,547 words.
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Associated Press/RawStory.com
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13 May 2010 — After 40 years, the United States' war on drugs has cost $1 trillion and hundreds of thousands of lives, and for what? Drug use is rampant and violence even more brutal and widespread.
Even U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske concedes the strategy hasn't worked.
"In the grand scheme, it has not been successful," Kerlikowske told The Associated Press. "Forty years later, the concern about drugs and drug problems is, if anything, magnified, intensified." — Read the full article at RawStory.com, 2,250 words.
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Annals of military intelligence
By Jeremy Scahill
TheNation.com
12 May 2010 — Obama administration, that expanded the U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan. Citing current and former counterterrorism officials, the paper reported that the CIA had received "secret permission to attack a wider range of targets" allowing the Agency to rely on "pattern of life" analysis.
"The information then is used to target suspected militants, even when their full identities are not known," according to the report. "Previously, the CIA was restricted in most cases to killing only individuals whose names were on an approved list. The new rules have transformed the program from a narrow effort aimed at killing top Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders into a large-scale campaign of airstrikes in which few militants are off-limits, as long as they are deemed to pose a threat to the U.S., the officials said."
There is no doubt that the Obama administration has dramatically expanded the use of drones in Pakistan and that the drone attacks are unpopular. It is far from a radical position to assert that the bombings are creating fresh enemies, inspiring militants and empowering the Taliban. — Read the full article at AlterNet.org, 1,230 words.
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By John Byrne
RawStory.com
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The amount of money the United States is spending on its war in Afghanistan has surpassed the cost of its war in Iraq for the first time.
US taxpayers shelled out $6.7 billion for the Afghan war in February, the most recent month for which statistics are available, as opposed to $5.5 billion for the war in Iraq. The total cost for the two wars is now approaching $1 trillion.
Maintaining the US presence in Afghanistan has grown in price since the US began redeploying some troops from Iraq. Keeping US forces in Afghanistan is also more expensive because the country is landlocked and it is harder to transport supplies. — Read the full article at RawStory.com, 307 words.
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By Jack Shafer
Slate
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5 May 2010 — The 30-year debate in the journalism reviews, among industry analysts, and over beers between reporters about the fate of the newsweekly category was settled today by Washington Post Co. Chairman Donald E. Graham, who announced that he wants to sell Newsweek.
If the infinitely patient and hideously rich Graham can't see a profitable future for the money-losing magazine, that future doesn't exist. The category has finally gone to mold and will, in another 30 months or 30 years, advance to putrefaction.
Newsweek isn't dead yet, so let's hold the eulogies until its owner or its next owner (Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham is forming a bid) folds the magazine. But once the death spiral grabs a magazine, it's almost impossible for it to escape, unless the magazine is Life, which Time-Life has killed and relaunched with such frequency that it makes the case for reincarnation. Today it's dead. Tomorrow it could be undead for a few months. — Read the full article at Slate Magazine, 937 words.
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Rear-view Mirror
By Andrew Osborn
Telegraph.co.uk
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The extraordinary assertion, made in a publication sanctioned by China's ruling Communist Party, suggests that the world came perilously close to nuclear war just seven years after the Cuban missile crisis.
Liu Chenshan, the author of a series of articles that chronicle the five times China has faced a nuclear threat since 1949, wrote that the most serious threat came in 1969 at the height of a bitter border dispute between Moscow and Beijing that left more than one thousand people dead on both sides.
He said Soviet diplomats warned Washington of Moscow's plans "to wipe out the Chinese threat and get rid of this modern adventurer," with a nuclear strike, asking the US to remain neutral.
But, he says, Washington told Moscow the United States would not stand idly by but launch its own nuclear attack against the Soviet Union if it attacked China, loosing nuclear missiles at 130 Soviet cities. — Read the full article at Telegraph.co.uk, 937 words.
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Money and Markets
By William Rivers Pitt
TruthOut.org
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I found myself walking all over downtown Boston on Thursday to take care of some personal business. It was a beautiful day to walk the city. The sun was shining, everything was in full bloom, the air was warm with a cooling breeze, thousands of people were out and about, and the city was filled with unbelievably powerful and dangerous weapons of war.
Wait, what?
You heard me. I first got hip to what was going on a couple of days earlier. There were full-dress Marines all over the place, which at first made me think there was some kind of Fleet Week thing going on. On Tuesday, I was walking down Massachusetts Avenue to run an errand when the sky was suddenly filled with roaring thunder. I looked up, and what goes bellowing by at rooftop-level overhead but three gigantic gray Osprey helicopters flying in formation toward the center of the city. — 1,284 words.
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By David Suzuki and Faisal Moola
Source
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13 May 2010 — The financial crisis has unveiled a new set of public villains — corrupt corporate capitalists who leveraged their connections in government for their own personal profit.
During the Clinton and Bush administrations, many of these schemers were worshiped as geniuses, heroes or icons of American progress. But today we know these opportunists for what they are: Deregulatory hacks hellbent on making a profit at any cost.
Without further ado, here are the 10 most corrupt capitalists in the U.S. economy. — Read the full story at the AlterNet.org, 2,157 words.
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Annals of (political) Education
By Daniel Tencer
RawStory.com
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14 May 2010 — Teachers at a middle school in Portland, Maine, are upset with attendees of a Republican convention who rifled through teachers' materials in a classroom they were using and reportedly stole materials from the room, replacing it with GOP slogans.
Officials from the Maine Republican Party quickly apologized this week after local news sources reported on an incident at Portland's King Middle School. Eighth-grade social studies teacher Paul Clifford returned to his classroom following a meeting of the Knox County Republican caucus there to find that his teachers' materials had been rifled through and a poster outlining the history of the US labor movement was missing, replaced with a bumper sticker that reads, "Working People Vote Republican," reports the Portland Press-Herald.
What's more, according to the Bangor Daily News, the Republican operatives also rifled through a closed cardboard box containing copies of the US Constitution, donated by the American Civil Liberties Union. And Clifford found a note nearby that stated, "A Republican was here. What gives you the right to propagandize impressionable kids?" — Read the full article at RawStory.com, 559 words.
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Obituary
By Eugne Robinson
Washington Post Writers Group
 Lena Horne at age 80. |
11 May 2010 — WASHINGTON, D.C. — "Lena Horne is coming on!"
When I was growing up, those words were the signal to drop everything and rush to the family room, where Ed Sullivan or Perry Como or Dean Martin had just announced the next performer. At the time, I didn't understand why it was unthinkable to miss one of Horne's appearances.
I didn't yet realize that she was one of one of the most significant American entertainers of the 20th century — and certainly didn't realize how burdened she was by her trailblazing success.
Horne, who died Sunday at 92, was an infiltrator.
She strode confidently through doors that had been closed to African-American entertainers, and was able to do so because white audiences found her not just beautiful and talented, but also non-threatening. Late in her life, she gave a sense of how difficult that role had been to play. — Read the full article at TruthOut.org, 772 words.
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TORONTO — Canada's finest comics and graphic novels were celebrated last night as the 6th annual Doug Wright Awards touched down in Toronto's Bram & Bluma Appel Salon in a ceremony hosted by ReGenesis actor Peter Outerbridge. — 303 words.
The short story, The Old Man's Last Sauna, a groundbreaking love story, in the Friday, April 24 edition of True North Perspective, concludes the collection titled The Old Man's Last Sauna, written by Carl Dow. On Friday, April 17, you'll find O Ernie! ... What Have They Done To You! The series began Friday, February 20, with Deo Volente (God Willing). The second, The Quintessence of Mr. Flynn, Friday, February 27. The third, Sharing Lies, Friday, March 6. The fourth, Flying High, Friday, March 13. The fifth, The Richest Bitch in the Country or Ginny I Hardly Knows Ya, Friday, March 20. On Friday, March 27, One Lift Too Many, followed by The Model A Ford, Friday, April 3. The out-of-body chiller, Room For One Only, Friday, April 10. The series closed Friday, April 24, with the collection's namesake The Old Man's Last Sauna, a groundbreaking love story. All stories may also be found in the True North Perspective Archives.
Prolific best-selling Ottawa author and publicist Randy Ray has developed a website to promote his publicity services, which he offers to authors, publishers and companies. Mr. Ray has helped many clients get their message out across Canada on CTV, CBC Radio, CH-TV, A-Channel and Global TV, and in the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Ottawa Citizen, Ottawa Sun, Halifax Herald and many Ottawa-area weekly newspapers. Mr. Ray's web site is: www.randyray.ca. He can be contacted at: (613) 731-3873 or rocket@intranet.ca.
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If you have any problems with accessing the newsletter or problems with your computer, send an email to Carl Hall chall2k5@gmail.com , and he will be more than happy to assist you.
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Archives
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Yvette Pigeon, 1934-2010, National Editor, 2006-2010
Carl Dow, Editor and Publisher
Geoffrey Dow, Managing Editor
Dennis Carr, Sustainable Development Editor
Benoit Jolicoeur, Art Director
Ian Covey, Director of Photography
Carl Hall, Technical Analyst and Web Editor
Randy Ray, Publicity
Contributing Editors
Anita Chan, Australia
Canada
Alex Binkley, Ottawa
Dennis Carr, Vancouver
Tom Dow, Sudbury
Bob Kay, Montréal
Randy Ray, Ottawa
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David Ward, Ottawa
Harold Wright, Ottawa
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