News on the Net

Democracy

It's surprising how many Canadians and Americans continue to believe they live in Democracies. Canada and the U.S. are not, nor do they claim to be, Democracies, and the schools are remiss in not emphasizing this.

“It’s who you know”

Chris Hanson was on MSNBC Sunday night with the "raw footage" of his popular program To Catch a Predator. Some half dozen men were lured by the promise of sex with an underage girl, entrapped in a house wired for sight and sound, and then exposed to the glare of TV lights as wannabe predators. Men who arrived drooling over the prospect of a tryst were quickly reduced to slobbering remorsefully over their conduct. With the Roman Polanski case, we move far beyond the sleaze of bad intentions, of course, to actual deeds. Polanski also had the benefit of scores of eminent personalities offering the film director their moral support.

Saving face

One reason the Harper government is trying to put their positive spin is that a number of people are challenging the government for their involvement with the US war machine Lockheed Martin being part of the Canadian Census and within one court case against one Sandra Findley (1) it became quite clear that the long form never was compulsory, even though Census staff acted as if it was and coerced, threatened even intimidated citizens with prosecutions if they refused to fill it out.

Black conservative brow-beaten into silence by Chicago Machine

By Robert Moon, Conservative Examiner The same mafia-style Chicago thugocracy that got Obama into his state senate seat (by elbowing all his opponents off the ballot with an army of lawyers seizing on bogus technicalities) is now using the same brutal gutter tactics to silence an electrifying black conservative.

Mugabe: diamonds are Zimbabwe’s best friend

By Sherilee L Lakmidas, Times Live Zimbabwe's vast resource wealth holds the key to its economic recovery but the ongoing debate over whether its diamonds are tainted threatens to hold the country back.

Ontario is now an official Corporatocracy

You might notice on your next trip to the store an “Eco-Fee” added on to various items. This is not optional, this is now mandatory. Call it what you will, it is a tax.

Hundreds rescued from overheated trains in Germany

By VERENA SCHMITT-ROSCHMANN, Associated Press BERLIN – A grueling heat wave shut down the air conditioning in three high-tech trains in Germany, leaving dozens of passengers near collapse trapped in temperatures of up to 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit), authorities said Sunday.

Russian Is UN Crime Fighter

(AP) UNITED NATIONS, Veteran Russian diplomat Yury Fedotov has been named the United Nation’s top drug and crime fighter and will also head the UN office in Vienna.

Tarred by the same brush

Seem like this old phrase is taking on more prominence with the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, however, the Canadian Political environment has many of the same symptoms.

Reopen Climategate hearings, says UK parliamentarian

Lawrence Solomon, National Post The UK Parliament was misled by East Anglia University when it conducted hearings into Climategate earlier this year, charges Graham Stringer, a scientist and prominent Labour Member of Parliament, in an article published yesterday in The Register, a UK science and technology journal.

Bread and circuses

In the early years of Saturday Night Live Chevy Chase played an inept, sometimes fatuous news anchor, who would blithely flit from a report on "four million die in China earthquake" to a segment on "Arlene visits the zoo."

Pearls for the orient

Eric Ellis, Business Day WHAT is ''The String of Pearls?'' If you are a mainland Chinese ''bizoid'', it is your toil for the motherland in joining strategic points of the globe, including Australia, to secure China's imminent dominance of the world economy. And in doing so, you'll be ably assisted by compliant locals wherever you labour, all eager to help if there's some quick yuan to be made.