Asia: Screenshot (Malaysia, published in English)
Joint winner Africa and Middle East: Shared Pains (Afghanistan, Farsi)
Joint winner Africa and Middle East: Al Jinane (Morocco, French)
Europe: ICT lex (Italy, Italian)
Americas: Press Think (US, English)
Iran: Mojtaba Saminejad (Iran, Farsi)
International: Netzpolitik (Germany, German)
If the government does not have any money because it gave it all to the NDP, why does it not suspend trade with and foreign aid to China and do something with those resources to expel all these communist spies in our country?
If you say we're going to get there but we're not going to add a dollar until 2015 — and that is the commitment that some countries have made, entirely back-end loaded — well, it doesn't make for much help in the meantime.
Three-quarters of the $41.2 billion in new spending announced in the budget over the next five years will occur after April 1, 2007, with fully one-third of the overall spending in 2009-10, the last of the five years.
Seven of Canada's smaller political parties have launched a lawsuit, claiming they're not being given their fair share in electoral funds.
...
The Christian Heritage party is looking for its share. So, too, is the Marxist-Leninist party, the Communist party and the Marijuana party.
(Boisclair) said he will hold a referendum within a first mandate if the PQ defeats Premier Jean Charest's Liberals in an election likely to be held in 2007 or 2008.
One month after Stronach's departure sank their hopes of toppling the Liberals, her jilted former mates tabled a private member's bill Friday. The bill would force a byelection call within 35 days in any riding where an MP switched sides to join a new party.
There are serious issues that should be debated -- ones that affect the heartbeat of a democracy. What do the media cover? How do they cover it? What motivates their decisions? Are there tendencies that apply to all news organizations, or only certain ones? Are there hidden agendas that people should be aware of?
But they should be debated seriously, by serious people. This latest Fraser Institute "study," like yelling at the TV, adds nothing.
Gender Freedom Day - the September or October day when the average male will earn as much as a comparable female will earn in a full year.
Executive Freedom Day - the day in early January when the average corporate CEO earns as much the average employee for that company. (For added fun we can have two such times hours apart, reflecting before-tax and after-tax.)
Welcome to Canada Day (renamed from the thread) - Some day from late August to mid September, highlighting the lower wages first-gen immigrants earn.
Private Auto Insurance Freedom Day - For the New Democrats out West, this is self explanatory.
US Tuition Freedom Day - The difference between American and Canadian university tuitions.
Former Canadian ambassador to the UN Paul Heinbecker berated his colleague Franco Pillarella for comments made at the Maher Arar inquiry...
Heinbecker spent 40 years in the Department of Foreign Affairs. He says everybody knows Syria has a bad human rights record and for Pillarella to say otherwise, casts a pall over the entire foreign service.
"I think it puts the Department of Foreign Affairs and the foreign service in a bad light," he said...
He says it is the ambassador's job to know the situation in-country and act accordingly.
Despite a Liberal promise to close all of the province’s coal-burning generating stations by 2007, only three will close on schedule. The fourth, Nanticoke — the province’s worst polluter — will close in 2009.
As long as they’re importing power from the U.S. midwest that burns coal, I don’t think that they have a leg to stand on.
During the 1970s and 1980s, thousands of homes in Canada were insulated with zonolite. The federal government encouraged its use under the CHIP program. The Liberals have said they will remove the dangerous asbestos from military homes, but not from reserve housing or from hundreds of thousands of other homes across Canada...
(T)he Liberal government should be rightly recognized as the villain, willing to risk the lives of Canadians by ignoring the danger.
"There is no deal and there will be no deal between the government and the Conservatives to delay the civil marriage legislation until the fall. Period," Reid said.
"We can't guarantee that Bill C-38 will pass this session if the Conservatives are determined to obstruct and filibuster both it and the budget bill."
But backbench Liberals say it has become obvious in recent weeks that the beleaguered Martin government is not going to force a final vote on same-sex marriage before June 23, which will allow for more debate of the issue in the Commons when MPs return to Ottawa in the fall.
Louis Bernard, a chief of staff to then-Parti Quebecois premier Rene Levesque in the 1970s, announced Wednesday he will run for the party's leadership.
Bernard, 68, who also served as a top-ranking civil servant, is the second candidate to officially seek the top job.
"I really have the intention to win the (leadership) race, win the election and make Quebec independent," he said. "That's my goal."
He also said he wants the province to be a country to allow it to assume its destiny and assert itself on the international stage.
If this is the path (Tory leader) Stephen Harper selects, we will let him explain to Canadians why affordable housing, environmental protection and aid for the world’s poorest should be hostage to his unwillingness to allow a free vote on civil marriage take place.
This isn’t about what Canadians are concerned about. The reality is it’s about trying to make Parliament work.
(T)he former Canadian ambassador to Damascus...testified Wednesday that the offer was made to him by Gen. Hassan Khalil, head of Syrian military intelligence...
Pillarella did not explain, in his public testimony, why the Syrian offer was rejected. He has testified at length in camera, but that evidence remains secret for national security reasons.
Pillarella acknowledged that prison conditions were likely "appalling" and that Arar was "probably subject to some form of abuse."
But the ambassador, who has since been posted to Romania, insisted for a second straight day that he had no conclusive proof of torture.
Hundreds of people could be charged with torture, disappearances and kidnapping babies during Argentina's so-called Dirty War against dissidents after the Supreme Court today struck down amnesties passed in the 1980s.
In a 7-1 vote, with one abstention, the Supreme Court voided laws passed in 1986 and 1987 to forbid charges involved in disappearances, torture and other crimes during the dictatorship. The court said the bans were contrary to today's international norms requiring the state to protect human rights and punish abuses.
The polls also say that the sponsorship scandal is dropping down the list of concerns -- replaced by traditional issues such as health care, child poverty and the environment. Canadians have got it right.
Pillarella was asked repeatedly about the first meeting Canadian officials had with Arar at a Syrian jail in October of 2002.
At that time, Arar told a consular official that he had been in custody in secret for two weeks.
But Pillarella chose to believe a Syrian official who assured him Arar had been there for only 24 hours...
"I believe facts," Pillarella replied.
"When [the consular official] met with Mr. Arar, there was no evidence, no evidence that Mr. Arar had been physically tortured.
"Because I can tell you one thing: If that evidence had been there, that evidence would have been reported to Ottawa."
I'm afraid to say the present guys who are running the big countries aren't the guys to do it. They fail to see beyond their own political, national self-interest. They've been running against Europe, against Brussels, for so long now, and bargaining with each other for advantage for so long, that they really can't mobilize people in favour of Europe. The European idea has lost its mobilizing credibility.
More than 5,800 Ontario residents are expected to die prematurely this year because they are breathing dirty air, warns a new report from the Ontario Medical Association...
"The impact polluted air is having on the health of Ontarians is dramatically worse than we had initially estimated," said Dr. Greg Flynn, president of the OMA. "We are paying the price for poor air quality with our lives and if we don't take action immediately, the cost will continue to rise significantly."...
The report estimates the cost of lost workdays from illnesses related to air pollution — including caregivers' time — at $374 million this year, rising to almost $467 million by 2026.
Health care for air pollution related illnesses, including hospital stays and medications, will cost about $507 million this year, and nearly $702 million by 2026.
In spite of US charges of softness, the IAEA head has repeatedly criticised Iran for its lack of openness with the agency's inspectors. But his team has found no firm proof of Washington's suspicions that Tehran is preparing the ground to make nuclear weapons.
Gov. Bill Owens said Monday it is "hypocrisy" for the United States to pressure Japan to lift a ban on U.S. beef over mad cow concerns while banning Canadian beef for the same reason.
"It's this sort of hypocrisy that makes it very difficult for the U.S. to win any sort of trade war."
Canada's ambassador to Washington, Frank McKenna, said Monday Ottawa will not close its border to imports of U.S. beef.
On February 15, 2003, 15 million people around the world protested the illegal American invasion of Iraq. That impressive organizing effort convinced Jay and others that independent world television, supported by its viewers, was possible. They would use the Internet -- which allows millions of people to band together – to raise the money. Jay has brought on board key strategists from the Howard Dean presidential campaign who were astonishingly successful in raising millions of dollars in small amounts over the Internet.
The 98-member IWT advisory committee reads like a who’s who of progressive left activism and journalism, especially from the US. The list includes Lewis Lapham of Harper’s Magazine, Gore Vidal, Jeff Cohen, Laura Flanders and Janine Jackson from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, and Janeane Garofalo of Air America.
Among the 35 Canadians on the committee are familiar names like Patrick Watson, Bill Roberts of Vision TV, Naomi Klein, Avi Lewis, Stephen Lewis and filmmaker Alan King. From other countries the advisory board contains people like investigative journalist Greg Palast, anti-nuclear armaments activist Helen Calidicott, and former U.K. Labour Minister Tony Benn.
Sample programming consists of six hours of programs five days a week. These include one hour of citizen journalism from around the world, the evening news, an issue-focused debate show, a show in which journalists and experts analyze the day’s major stories, an investigative program, feature-length documentaries, a show on the global political economy, political satire, issues from the south, environmental issues and a show profiling how people have organized their campaigns.
Money from business, advertisers and government will be prohibited.
A retiring Supreme Court of Canada judge says his potential replacements would not be scared off if the Martin government allowed MPs to publicly question them before being named to the High Court.
"Taking the ordinary qualified candidate, I don't think anyone would say 'no' simply because there is going to be an interview," Justice Jack Major said.
Chairman Don Boudria, a Liberal, said a report could be issued by Wednesday. "We're making tremendous progress. Not that many days ago I would have said the chance that we'll ever report anything is remote. But it isn't that way now. I'm optimistic," he said.
The improved collegiality among the MPs reportedly came after New Democrat Ed Broadbent put forward a motion -- which is expected to form the basis of the panel's report -- urging the creation of two separate committees. One would consult Canadians and report to the other committee, which would consult with experts and make final recommendations.
(M)ost reform proposals out there - even proposals from liberal groups like the Century Foundation and the Center for American Progress - reject a simple single-payer approach. Instead, they call for some combination of mandates and subsidies to help everyone buy insurance from private insurers.
Some people, not all of them right-wingers, fear that a single-payer system would hurt innovation. But the main reason these proposals give private insurers a big role is the belief that the insurers must be appeased...
But I think that's the wrong lesson. The Clinton plan actually preserved a big role for private insurers; the industry attacked it all the same. And the plan's complexity, which was largely a result of attempts to placate interest groups, made it hard to sell to the public. So I would argue that good economics is also good politics: reformers will do best with a straightforward single-payer plan, which offers maximum savings and, unlike the Clinton plan, can easily be explained.
As of March 31 this year, the federal government was owed $18 billion in overdue tax accounts, compared with just $9.6 billion in 1997. Put another way, about 5.5 per cent of all the money owed in federal taxes as of March 31 this year is overdue, compared with about 4.3 per cent in 1997. About $8 billion of the outstanding taxes are owed by individuals; the rest are due from companies.
(I)t's a mistake for those who support single payor health care to dwell on the subject of so-called judicial activism. It shifts the debate away from where it needs to be. It shifts the focus away from governments and politicians who are responsible for the current state of affairs and who are the only ones who can do anything about it. Of course that means they'll have to stop playing politics with the issue and get down to the admittedly difficult job of actually doing something about it. But that's what we pay them for.
Canada may send 100 Grizzly armoured personnel carriers to Sudan...They would be used by the African Union, which has a 7,500-soldier force that is trying to stop Arab militias from killing the local population in the Darfur area.
But sending the vehicles is not a sure thing because the U.S. State Department has a veto. The Grizzlies contain U.S. equipment, and cannot be sent to a third country without U.S. permission...
