An increasing number of frustrated Canadians are demanding that our politicians toughen this nation's notoriously soft criminal justice system.

At least that's what I've found the past few days after an avalanche of e-mail and phone calls followed a column I wrote urging tougher laws, sentences and prisons. And especially for those laws applying to youth crime -- defined by the super-soft Youth Criminal Justice Act for those under 18.

I urged that anyone committing a crime with a deadly weapon receive a mandatory 10-year sentence. That's in addition to anything they receive for the crime itself.

Besides guns, that should include any lethal weapon such as knives, tire irons, baseball bats, martial arts devices, etc. [. . . . ]

Canada's prisons are creating sophisticated new criminal networks among the country's top gangsters -- dubbed "supergroups" -- that are making current policies on organized crime obsolete, warns a federal position paper on the future of the mob.

"Prisons today are a 'melting pot' and we, unintentionally, are facilitating the overt networking of some of the most capable predators in our society," says a paper prepared for the RCMP and Criminal Intelligence Service Canada, which was obtained by the National Post.

The paper warns that senior members of diverse crime groups -- including the Mafia, the Hells Angels, Asian Triads and Russian gangs -- are emerging from prison as amiable associates, pooling specialized knowledge and international connections to embark on increasingly threatening criminal ventures. [. . . . ]

Many terrorist organizations -- from the Colombian FARC to the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka -- have used the drug trade to get the money they need to finance their campaigns of extremist violence.

VANCOUVER - Counter-terrorism authorities are investigating an alleged Afghani heroin ring based in Vancouver to determine whether it has been involved in the financing of terrorism, the National Post has learned.

The eight-month probe has resulted in the arrests of four men in British Columbia and Ontario. Search warrants were executed last week at several B.C. homes and a business. Police seized almost $2-million worth of drugs and cash.

The heroin originated in Afghanistan, and police are now trying to unravel the alleged trafficking scheme to see if it was financing a designated terrorist organization. So far only narcotics charges have been laid. [. . . . ]

A Tamil gang member wanted for allegedly chopping off the hand of a rival in Montreal has been arrested in Toronto after six months on the run, the Immigration Task Force announced yesterday. Police raided a Toronto home on Thursday after receiving a CrimeStoppers tip and arrested Helmut Thavaselvarajah, 24. . . . Police are still searching for Colin Sellathurai, 31. The VVT and AK Kannan, gangs composed of Sri Lankan Tamils, have been battling in Canada since the 1990s. A recent RCMP intelligence report said they are now present in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Their illicit activities include extortion, home invasions, kidnapping, theft, drug trafficking, fraud, money laundering, gold smuggling and migrant smuggling, the RCMP report says. [. . . . ]

Pardon me while I yawn at the announcement by Dalton McGuinty's Liberal government that it will spend $9 million on school safety.

A new "safe schools action team" led by MPP Liz Sandals will conduct safety audits in schools across the province, Education Minister Gerard Kennedy said last week.

I recall five years ago former Tory Education Minister Janet Ecker brought in tough anti-bullying legislation in the Safe Schools Act. What happened to that?

That law gave teachers the right to suspend and principals the right to expel students who were violent, were dealing drugs or who carried weapons.

[. . . . ] The real problem with violence and bullying is that school boards refuse to acknowledge that they may have a problem. School staff who have concerns about violence are often ignored, and all too often it is the child who is bullied who is forced out of the classroom. [. . . . ]

THE VIOLENCE involving teens continues unabated. Police report a mugging outside a school, a swarming, the arrest of a 17-year-old for three bank robberies, and the robbery of a North York variety store owner and a phone card salesman by two masked and gloved teens with a shotgun -- all in 48 hours this weekend.

This follows a bloody spree last weekend when two teens were killed in Toronto and another in Oshawa. On Thursday, six teens were attacked by up to 50 peers outside a Scarborough Catholic high school. [. . . . ]

A former Mountie and UN peacekeeper has been named the first ombudsman of the Internet. . . . The appointment of Frank Fowlie a 47-year-old conflict-resolution specialist from Ottawa, was announced by ICANN, the global Internet regulatory body -- at a conference in South Africa.

[. . . . ] The RCMP had cellphone receipts for the area; investigators believed that an alleged crackhouse operator named Kevin Simmonds had been around the crime scene when Bedford was murdered. Simmonds was questioned but denied any knowledge of Bedford's demise. The police investigation stalled, and the case soon went cold.

Four years later, Simmonds walked into an elaborate police sting, one of a series of controversial but increasingly common undercover operations developed by the RCMP in B.C.

The police call it role playing: they pretend to be criminals. Twenty to 25 times a year, with little notice, selected undercover operators are sent into the criminal netherworld to make friendly contact with a murder suspect, and then lure them into a fantasy world of cash, booze and crime.

Each meeting, called a scenario, is predetermined and planned. The ultimate goal is to elicit from the suspect a murder confession. [. . . . ]

The young people responsible for the wave of swarmings and violent attacks that have left three GTA teens dead in two weeks are "out of control and accountable to no one," Toronto's police chief said last night. "Counting the bodies as we do is simply not adequate," Julian Fantino said last night after a community meeting at East York Collegiate Institute, the school Drew Stewart attended before his death at the hands of a youth mob.

"We have to find out why, at the most minor confrontation, weapons are brought out. Why there's this pack mentality," Fantino said, stressing that the large majority of kids are still hardworking, upstanding citizens who do not deserve to be "blackballed."

"But there's an element of young people that are, in fact, out of control and accountable to no one," Fantino said.

"And there is a distorted value system among them that says coming forward (to police or their parents) is not cool." [. . . . ]

MONTREAL (CP) - The 19-year-old who gutted the library of a Jewish school with a firebomb should serve two years in prison for his act of "terrorism," the Crown recommended Friday.

The firebombing last April garnered headlines around the world and prompted Prime Minister Paul Martin to call it "cowardly and racist." It came on the heels of several anti-Semitic incidents in the Toronto area. [. . . . ]

[. . . . ] Casual, non-parental observers might assume that if Ottawa is preparing to spend billions on child care, then it must be a good thing for children. Eberstadt musters a deluge of facts, studies, observations and plain common sense to demolish that notion. While her focus may be American data, her results are fully applicable to Canada.

To begin, child care leads to a much greater incidence of illness in children and, in particular, ear infections. Statistical studies also show that children placed in daycare tend to be more aggressive and less happy. Other work shows that maternal attachment is very important for young children and that this is weakened by daycare use.

[. . . . ] From daycare, Eberstadt broadens her view to consider the farther-ranging effects of the erosion of at-home parenting. Child obesity, teen sex, the growth of sexually transmitted disease, the use of behavioural drugs to make children more manageable -- are all laid at the feet of parents who are no longer there for their children.

[. . . . She] does ask the uncomfortable question of whether we should deliberately pursue new policies that further disrupt traditional family life given how important the home is to children. Surely this should be the focus of any national daycare debate. If we really care about children, what will more child care mean? [. . . . ]

OTTAWA (CP) - Canada couldn't afford to defend its airspace without its 46-year-old NORAD partnership with the United States, says the chief of defence staff.

So regardless of Ottawa's decision on the Americans' new continental ballistic missile defence plan, Ottawa has no choice but to remain in the North American Aerospace Defence Command, says Gen. Ray Henault.

Henault strongly rejected critics' claims that NORAD will wither and die if Canada does not participate in missile defence. [. . . . ]

[. . . . ] Marin, never one to shy from publicity if it advances whatever the cause he espouses, is expected to activate what seemed a rather moribund [Ontario] ombudsman's office.

More significant is who will succeed Marin in the military ombudsman role, which he worked at diligently and raised its profile.

Throughout, his term he had to fend off resentment from the military police and the judge advocate general's office, which often seemed to stifle or undercut his work.

In his annual report he noted "within the chain of command a renewed defensiveness and an unwillingness to evaluate our criticisms with objectivity and introspection."

Why Prime Minister Paul Martin is going to Libya today to visit Moammar Khadaffy is one of those imponderables that defies justification. [. . . . ]

Martin's recent forays to Haiti, Brazil, Chile, Burkina Faso and, most recently Sudan as a self-styled mediator in the Darfur outrage, seem mostly for image purposes, not for solving anything.

[. . . . ] Martin would be justified if he were skeptical and raised questions about six Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor that the Libyan regime has sentenced to death by firing squad.

Prime Minister Paul Martin said he "put the cards on the table" during his hour-and-a-half long talk with Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi in Tripoli Sunday.
The two leaders discussed trade, human rights issues and peace in Africa and the Middle East, in a tent on a military compound where camels and goats wandered freely, CTV's Roger Smith reported.

[. . . . ] During his trip, Martin also made a pitch for Canadian businesses such as SNC-Lavalin and Petro-Canada and met with Canadian business leaders who have an interest in developing trade with Libya. [. . . . ]

[. . . . ] "It sounds like there might be a phone call at some point and the meeting will happen, just like that. We checked with (French President Jacques) Chirac's people to see how they dealt with the situation, and it was the same story. Apparently this is how Gadhafi works."

Martin's whirlwind visit — marking Canada's turn in a continuing diplomatic thaw, as oil-rich but sanctions-sapped Libya emerges from a decade-plus winter of international isolation — comes with an intriguing clash of distinctly different diplomatic styles.

The Canadian habit of safe, ready-to-write photo opportunities, a style perfected by Martin during his decade of deftly rubbing global shoulders as Canada's finance minister, loses traction in Libya, where the wildcard of Arab pride trumps all. [. . . . ]

Police said the suspect was an electrical engineer employed by a Libyan oil company and had been studying in Britain for six months. He had a ticket for a connecting flight to the Libyan capital Tripoli, police said. [. . . . ]

Empathy these days is the greatest of the virtues, and he is best who empathises most. That is why pop singers and British politicians are the best people in the world: they can’t see the slightest suffering without empathising with it. Whether they behave better than anyone else is beside the point; it is what they feel, especially in public, that counts. [. . . . ]

[. . . . ] I rapidly came to realise that a quite staggering number of ordinary, law-abiding people had endured similar experiences.

It is worth remembering how new these powers are. It is only since the Terrorism Act of 2000 that the new community support officers, in the company of a constable, have been allowed to stop and search a car; and that is by no means all they can do. After a mere three weeks’ training, a CSO can give you a £30 fixed penalty ticket for such minor derelictions as riding your bike on a pavement, or dropping a crisps packet. He or she may take away your booze if you are drinking in public, or confiscate the fags of an underage smoker. These CSOs may detain you by force for 30 minutes, pending the arrival of a police officer, if they think you may be guilty of an arrestable offence. And who can doubt that they will soon be able to demand the production of an ID card, and detain you if you fail to produce it?

And on it goes. Last week Parliament passed the new Civil Contingencies Act, which gives the government astonishing powers to declare and prolong a state of emergency sine die. This week Her Majesty announced in the Gracious Address that there is to be a new Counter-Terrorism Bill, and among its provisions are rumoured to be judge-only Diplock courts for terrorist suspects. [. . . . ]

‘But why did you stop me in the first place: do I seriously look like a potential terrorist?’ I asked.

‘We stop one in every 25 cars on a random basis, and, let me tell you, sir, criminals and terrorists come in many different guises,’ replied the policeman.

‘Shouldn’t you be concentrating on men of Arab extraction?’ This seemed to me to be a sensible question, relevant to the current state of the world. The policeman said, ‘That is a racist comment, sir.’ Then the van appeared. I was locked in the back and ferried to Charing Cross. As we drove there, the policemen made small talk. They told me that they would be out for a pint tonight, whereas I was going to prison. They wondered what it would feel like for me not to be sleeping in my own bed. [. . . . ]

As one young woman awaits sentence and another faces death this week, Alasdair Palmer reveals the Iranian legal system's shocking barbarity towards children

[. . . . ] According to Amnesty International, Leila has a mental age of eight. What evidence there is of her life so far records an existence of unrelieved misery and brutality.

She was sold into prostitution at the age of eight by her parents. She recalls the experience of when her mother "first took me to a man's house" as "a horrible night. I cried a lot … but then my mum came the next day and took me home. She brought me chocolate and cheese curls."

Forced by beatings and threats to continue "visiting men" from that night onwards, she became pregnant and had twins when she was 14. She was punished with 100 lashes by the Iranian courts for giving birth to illegitimate children. [. . . . ]

Britain, France and Germany, acting on behalf of the EU, have already agreed to further trade links with Iran, after Tehran agreed to suspend its uranium-enrichment process, which could yield material suitable for nuclear bombs. [. . . . ]

Toronto, ON, Nov. 2 (UPI) -- Tuesday's slaying of Theo van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker who criticized Islamic practices, reminds all of a nagging truth: More than 15 years after the government of Iran issued a death warrant against novelist Salman Rushdie, challenging Muslims remains a risky business.

As a Muslim dissident, I speak from experience. My book, "The Trouble with Islam," has put me on the receiving end of anger, hatred and vitriol. That's because I'm asking questions that we Muslims can no longer hide from. Why, for example, are we squandering the talents of half of God's creation, women? What's with the stubborn streak of anti-Semitism in Islam today? Above all, how can even moderate Muslims view the Koran literally when it, like every holy text, abounds in contradictions and ambiguity? The trouble with Islam today is that literalism is going mainstream.

Muslims who take offense at these points often wind up reinforcing them in their responses to me. I regularly get death threats through my Web site. Some of my would-be assassins emphasize the virtues of martyrdom, wanting to hurl me into the "flames of hell" in exchange for 72 virgins. Others simply want to know what plane I'm next boarding, so they can hijack it. Somehow, I don't feel the urge to share my schedule. [. . . . ]

An Iranian man convicted of dangerous driving causing death -- who was at risk of being deported -- will be allowed to stay in Canada with his family after all.

[. . . . ] It's been close to four years since a black BMW crashed into the West Vancouver Memorial Library.

A passenger in the car, 17-year-old Payam Yaghoobi, was killed. The BMW was racing a black Acura that night.

Ali Arimi was the driver of the Acura. He was given a 16-month conditional sentence for his part in the street race -- to be served at his British Properties home -- for dangerous driving causing death. [. . . . ]

It was just a random statistic, but a telling one: Only 300 books were translated into Arabic last year. That is about one foreign title per million Arabs. For comparison's sake, Greece translated 1,500 foreign-language books, or about 150 titles per million Greeks. Why is the Arab world so far behind, not only in this but in practically all the arts and sciences?

The first-order answer is poverty and lack of education: Almost half of Arabic-speaking women are illiterate.

But the Arab world used to be the most literate part of the planet; what went wrong? Tyranny and economic failure, obviously. But why is tyranny such a problem in the Arab world? That brings us to the nub of the matter. [. . . . ]

After 9/11 the Koran became a bestseller in the West, as readers scoured the text for phrases that might explain the hijackers' actions. Some argued that violence is inherent in Islam; others said that Islam means peace. The 'understanding Islam' industry boomed, with debates, books and pamphlets professing to unearth the mysterious depths of Islamic culture, politics and history.

In Globalised Islam: The Search for a New Ummah, the French sociologist Olivier Roy criticises this 'confused' and 'sterile' debate. 'It is based on an essentialist view', he tells me, 'the idea that Islam is this or that. But you can find anything in Islam. The problem is not what is in the Koran, but what people think is in the Koran'. His concern is to look at the lived reality of Islam, rather than its canonical or historical background. For example, in the book he argues that the idea that Islamic suicide attacks are an attempt to win virgins in paradise is 'not very helpful. Why should Muslims have discovered only in 1983 that suicide attacks are a good way to enter paradise?'.

In a decade of research for the book, Roy travelled throughout the Middle East, searched Islamic websites on the internet, and studied Muslim immigrants in France. Far from having roots in the seventh century, he found that new religious forms are a response to Westernisation - to the modernisation of Muslim societies, and the migration of increasing numbers of Muslims to the West. [. . . .]

In an interview with the Jerusalem weekly Kol Hair on the occasion of the publication of his first book of poetry in Hebrew, Salman Masalha, an Israeli Arab intellectual and poet, speaks of what he sees as the problem of illiteracy, and thus thought, in the Arab world, of the fixation with the past in the Arab world, of the importance of educating women, and of the role of doubting and asking questions in the development of society and culture.

Masalha, who refused to serve in the Israeli military, holds an MA and Ph.D in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, and taught in the Arab Literature Department of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The following are excerpts from the interview : [1]

Illiteracy in the Arab World is Over 80%

"There's a serious problem today with the Arab youth, in expressing themselves in Arabic."

Question :"Why?"

Salman Masalha: "Because of the language, that great rift between colloquial and literary Arabic. In order to explain a complex idea, you need high language, not the language of the souq. You can't express a complicated idea using the language of the souq. If you take young people, let's say eighth-grade Arab [children], and their French, or Jewish Israeli, counterparts, you will discover the discrepancy in self-expression. Because he does not know the language of thought, the Arab pupil runs into a big problem. Thus it is in the entire Arab world.

"The Arab world does not read. According to various reports, the Arab world is largely illiterate. Illiteracy in the Arab world is not 50% like it says in the reports. I say that it is over 80%. Practically speaking, even those defined as not illiterate because they completed eight years of schooling, I consider illiterate. In this century, anyone who finishes elementary school can't really read. [. . . . ]

A state tribunal in Australia yesterday found two evangelical Christian pastors who conducted a church seminar on Islam guilty of inciting hatred against Muslims

Daniel Nalliah and Daniel Scot of Catch the Fire Ministries were tried under Victoria's new race and religion hate laws after the the Islamic Council of Victoria filed legal action, charging Scot called Muslims demons, liars and terrorists
Transcripts of the seminar in Melbourne show Scot, born in Pakistan, was quoting verses from the Quran to make his points, but three Australian converts to Islam who attended part of the seminar brought their notes to the Islamic Council. [. . . . ]

The law refers to "lawful religion," which disqualifies Islam, because it preaches violence, Perkins emphasized.

"The Quran contradicts Christian doctrine in a number of places and, under the blasphemy law, is therefore illegal," he said.

If you think celebrations in Britain are becoming too politically correct then don't go to the US. Philip Sherwell reports.

For her son's school "holiday party" last week, Julie West baked a birthday cake for the baby Jesus - a gesture of defiance both against his teachers and the growing campaign in America to remove any trace of Christmas from public life.

Six-year-old Aaron had brought home a note from his school, in Washington state, that asked parents to provide food that their family traditionally enjoyed during the holiday season.

"He asked for the cake I make at Christmas with the words 'Happy Birthday Jesus'," said Ms West. "I called the school to let them know, but a few days later the teacher phoned back to say that I couldn't bring the cake as the party was not a religious event." [. . . . ]

Professor David Schindler wants Canadians to trust scientists on the global warming science, but does not mention which scientists are more trustworthy and which are not. Prof. Schindler is unfortunately unaware of several peer-reviewed studies in recent literature which have seriously questioned several aspects of the science. [. . . . ]

The science of global warming is far from settled, as Prof. Schindler and his ardent supporters would like to claim. In a review paper soon to be published in the International Journal PAGEOPH (Pure & Applied Geophysics), I have concluded that the dissenting view offered by climate skeptics is more credible than the IPCC scientists’ view of the global warming science.

Dr. Madhav L. Khandekar, research scientist (ret’d), Environment Canada, Unionville, Ont.

[. . . . ] Canadians should be encouraged to think for themselves and journalists such as Terence Corcoran are doing important work publicizing what those of us who are actually specialized in the field find most troubling about Kyoto and the politically correct view of climate change.

That the National Post is prepared to publish op-eds, columns, letters and news stories that give points of view for and against the need for severe greenhouse gas restriction is highly commendable. It is something the CBC, The Globe and Mail and other media who have acted as merely a communications arm for the environmental movement would do well to emulate.

Dr. Tim Ball, environmental consultant, Victoria.

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) - In a U.N. conference's final hours, the United States and the European Union worked out a modest deal early Saturday to inch ahead in the international effort to put a cap on global warming.

The Americans avoided any commitment to negotiate mandatory reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, something President Bush rejected in 2001 when he renounced the Kyoto Protocol, which requires rollbacks in other industrial nations by 2012.

On their side, the Europeans won a new forum for discussing just that -a "seminar" next May at which governments can informally raise a range of climate issues, including next steps on emissions control after 2012. [. . . . ]

[. . . . ] Noranda announced last month that it has ended "exclusive" negotiations with Minmet. Derek Pannell, CEO of Noranda, acknowledged at a Montreal investing conference this week that talks may be kaput.

"We haven't closed the door on Minmetals, they may indeed come back; they may not come back," he said.[. . . . ]

The ice-cloaked Arctic Ocean was once apparently a warm, biologically brewing basin so rich in sinking organic material that some scientists examining fresh evidence pulled from a submerged ridge near the North Pole say the seabed may now hold significant oil and gas deposits.

This is just one of many findings from a pioneering expedition that in late summer sent dozens of scientists and technicians on three icebreakers - one with a drilling rig nine stories tall - into the drifting, crunching plates of sea ice to retrieve the first long-term record of climate and ocean conditions there. The expedition drilled 1,400 feet deep, retrieving cores of sediment that, with some gaps, span 56 million years. Scientists from around the world gathered in Bremen, Germany, this month to analyze the samples.

[. . . . ] "Everyone thought this ocean basin was starved of sediment," said Dr. Kathryn Moran, an oceanographer at the University of Rhode Island who was a co-leader of the 14-nation project. "We've already knocked that ball out of the park."

So far, the coring project has mainly garnered the attention of climate experts, but word is slowly spreading among geologists focused on oil as well.

[. . . . ] Samples from the cores are heading to laboratories around the world for months of additional, detailed analysis of their chemistry, fossil contents and even signatures of past shifts in the earth's magnetic field, which provide a precise clock for dating different layers.

The initial success has already bred half a dozen ambitious new proposals to drill in new places around the basin.

"This is a huge leap forward," said Dr. Martin Jakobsson, a geologist at Stockholm University who worked on the project. "We have shown that we can master the ice."

This week Parliament began to debate Bill C-14, the Tlicho Land Claims and Self-Government Act. If you haven't heard of it, you're not alone. It is extremely important, however, for Canadians to learn more about this and other land claims agreements.

If passed, becoming an Act of Parliament, the bill will be the first combined land claims and self-government agreement completed since the Nisga'a Treaty. It will give less [sic] than 2,600 people $152-million over 14 years, year-round hunting and fishing rights and control over 39,000 square kilometres that are currently part of the North West Territories, an area almost the size of Switzerland. In addition, the Tlicho will be able to assess royalties on any mining or oil and gas activity within the newly created region and will have powers previously held by the territorial government, including education and healthcare.

This agreement will see the creation of a Tlicho Government. This government will have the power to enact laws over such things as: fishing; spiritual and cultural beliefs and practices; traditional medicine; heritage resources on Tlicho lands; training; social assistance; child and family services; adoption; education (except post-secondary); wills, intestacy and administration of estates; and marriage. [. . . . ]

[. . . . ] Jan Peter Balkenende, the Dutch Prime Minister, who currently holds the EU's rotating presidency. "There was a clear support for the [UN] Secretary General, because we all realize that he is very aware of the fact that we need an effective multilateral system." Mr. Annan has been under pressure over the scandal-plagued UN oil-for-food program for Iraq, in which his son was involved, with some U.S. politicians calling for him to step down.

[. . . . ] On Thursday, the RCMP charged a senior Immigration Canada manager and four others in an alleged scheme in which Arab immigrants paid up to $25,000 to have their claims fast-tracked and approved. [. . . . ]

"They are afraid of the guys that bring in the strippers because they are not nice guys," added the high-level official, who played a role in Mr. Volpe's decision to cancel the stripper exemption on Dec. 15.

[. . . . ] "A guy walks into your office and says, 'Look, you know I'd like you to facilitate this and if you don't, you are going to start having problems with your car' or whatever. Are you going to call the cops? What are you going to do? The cops are going to come and say, 'Do you have any witnesses?' and they'll say, 'Well, if he does anything, let us know and we'll come back.' " [. . . . ]

Most of the foreign exotic dancers are young women from Romania who work mainly at strip clubs in Toronto, where there appears to be a greater shortage of nude dancers. Of 661 temporary work visas granted to strippers last year, more than 80% -- 552 -- were Romanian.

In 2000, the RCMP, Toronto police and immigration authorities raided more than a dozen clubs in Toronto where the owners were charged with running brothels. Most of the women were from Eastern Europe and many of their entrance visas were fraudulently obtained.

"Most of the contracts submitted by dancers and agents are bogus; they claim to pay the girls, but no money has changed hands. The girls are paid by patrons to the bars and prostitution is being done in small VIP rooms," Immigration enforcement officer Dorothy Christie wrote in one memo obtained under the Access to Information Act. [. . . . ]

OTTAWA (CP) - Acknowledging the multicultural face of modern Canada, the federal broadcast regulator says it's bringing its regulations up to date by opening the door to more foreign-language television.

And that could allow popular Italian state broadcaster RAI to try once again to obtain permission to broadcast its programming by satellite into Canada. New policies announced Thursday by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission will make it easier for broadcasters from other countries to offer their programming to digital subscribers in Canada in languages other than French and English.

"For third-language Canadian communities which have grown - census after census has shown this - we were somehow applying a (policy) that was resulting in them not getting the additional diversity," commission chairman Charles Dalfen said in an interview. [. . . . ]

WASHINGTON (AP) - Microsoft Corp. disclosed plans Thursday to offer frustrated users of its Windows software new tools within 30 days to remove spyware programs secretly running on computers. But it might cost extra in coming months.

In a shift from past practice, the world's largest software manufacturer said it may charge consumers for future versions of the new protective technology, which Microsoft acquired by buying a small New York software firm. Terms of the sale of Giant Company Software Inc. weren't disclosed.

Spyware is a category of irritating programs that secretly monitor the online activities of Internet users and can cause sluggish computer performance or popup ads. [. . . . ]

This country has rarely seemed smaller than this week. In the few minutes it took to grasp the discordant facts that Paul Tellier is out at Bombardier and that taxpayers are again being positioned to bankroll the company, the distance between Ottawa and Quebec shrank from short to nothing.

More telling still, that sudden movement occurred silently. Not a whimper of protest came from an Opposition that in the past raised the alarm whenever the federal government tilted too precariously toward favoured industries or toward a province that consumes a disproportionate share of the nation's attention and, many believe, its money.

The reasons are as old as Confederation and as new as the June election. Quebec's problems are Canada's problems, and when an iconic company headquartered in Montreal is in trouble, no political party with power on its mind is willing to stand aloof while market forces do their dirty work. [. . . . ]

The federal government is poised to award a billion-dollar contract to either Bombardier Inc. or a British Columbia-based consortium in a hotly contested program to provide military pilots with training for the next 20 years.

The decision could give Paul Martin's government a major political headache. A massive controversy erupted in 1986 when Brian Mulroney awarded Canadair of Montreal a CF-18 maintenance contract even though Bristol Aerospace of Winnipeg had a lower bid.

Kelowna Flightcraft of Kelowna, B.C., is going head-to-head against Bombardier of Montreal for a contract to build a pilot training centre at Portage La Prairie, Man., and provide ground training there on helicopters and multi-engine fixed-wing aircraft for Canadian Forces pilots. The contract, expected to be worth slightly over $1-billion, is seen as a key program in the military's privatization efforts. [. . . . ]

MONTREAL - Two top recruits of Paul Tellier, who was Bombardier Inc.'s chief executive, have left the transportation giant in the wake of his abrupt dismissal this week.

William Fox, Bombardier's senior vice-president of public affairs, and Moya Greene, senior vice-president of operational effectiveness, stepped down, the company said.
Mr. Fox, a former journalist and press secretary to former prime minister Brian Mulroney in the 1980s, followed Mr. Tellier from Canadian National Railway Co. in early 2003. [. . . . ]

On Nov. 9, 2004, affiliates of Bain Capital, a Boston-based global private investment firm, purchased Verizon Communications Inc.'s directory operations in Canada for $1.985-billion. The directory operations, SuperPages Canada, is Canada's second-largest directories publisher and is the official Telus directory publisher in Western Canada. Online directory operations were also included in the transaction. [. . . . ]

[. . . . ] In an interview Thursday, Tolusso said the CFIA was aware of the DNA tests, but decided not to use them.

"We knew that these tests were out there and we also knew that they, too, had their limitations," said Tolusso.

One of those limitations, said Tolusso, is that certain types of cattle protein are permitted in cattle feed -- such as blood and milk.

As a result, said Tolusso, determining that cattle DNA was in feed would not have proven the ban had been violated.[. . . . ]

"Undeclared animal materials can mean many things -- rodent contamination, birds," she said. "It's highly unlikely that someone was dropping a cow's brain into a load of canola."

How long are we going to tolerate senators and congressmen who divulge our most closely-held secrets to the public in search of cheap political gain? We have laws that make those leaks serious federal crimes. We're spending enormous resources on finding out who leaked Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA agent to the press. Leaks that are vastly more important -- and which should be pursued with no less determination and resources -- are regularly ignored because the culprits are sitting members of Congress. These leakers should be thrown out of office and prosecuted.

It's been about two years since Sen. Richard Shelby blew one of our most important secrets -- that we were bugging Osama bin Laden's cell phone, a fact that could have led to the capture of America's most wanted terrorist -- by bragging about it to a reporter. [. . . . ]

If the laws that require our secrets be kept secret aren't taken seriously by those who hold the public's trust -- such as Shelby and the "Misty Three" -- and if serious violations of these laws are also taken lightly as Sen. Frist seems to be doing now -- our system of government will not be able to function as the Constitution says it must. If Congress cannot be trusted with secrets such as these, it cannot provide the essential checks and balances on the Executive we rely on it to perform in order to protect us from a runaway president. Right now, we apparently have a runaway Senate. The Justice Department, and Sen. Frist's office, should be working day and night until this problem is solved, and cooperate to ensure the leakers are punished to the full extent of the law.

Neoconservatism” is the name of a robust strain in American intellectual life and American politics, a strain with a very rich history. But although even some of its leading figures over the years have pronounced the end of neoconservatism usually on grounds of its merger with (or perhaps takeover of) the conservative mainstream, the term remains very much alive. This is especially true when used to describe a certain group of people who have sought to influence American public policy, most notably foreign policy in the post-Cold War era, and who, in the administration of George W. Bush, obtained that influence.

One might, therefore, begin a consideration of neoconservatism with its rich history — or, in the alternative, with its contemporary influence. I propose to do neither (though I will indeed touch upon the past and the present). Instead, I want to explore its future — specifically, the ways in which neoconservatism has evolved according to its own premises in the direction of a current and future politics dedicated to the preservation and extension of liberal order, properly understood. To get to neoconservatism’s liberal legacy, however, it is necessary to begin with liberalism’s origins in the nature of politics itself. [. . . . ]

Britain produces an extraordinary amount of commentary, in print, on television and on radio; so much that the production of opinion can seem to be our dominant industry, the thing we are best at and most take to. For the most part, it isn't bad commentary. If the broadsheets were badly written, if the sermonisers and pundits couldn't speak in coherent sentences, if you routinely turned the radio on to hear people not making any sense, it would all be much easier to dismiss. That, though, is not the problem with what passes for intellectual and political life in Britain. The problem with our public culture is not that it is low-grade: it is that it is fluent, clear, coherent, often vividly expressed, and more or less entirely free of fresh intellectual content. You can go whole weeks reading the broadsheet press without encountering a new idea; you can listen to hundreds of hours of broadcast debate and encounter nothing but received wisdoms. The void gapes at its widest when there is a conspicuous attempt at pretending to fill it: the frowning politico miming thought as he makes a 'big' speech to set out policy; the extensively press-released think-tank paper whose main purpose is to draw attention to itself; the utterly formulaic broadcast debate. You witness these performances (which is what they are) and you think: I wish somebody would say something. Because this is the feeling you get about British public life, a bizarre feeling given how astonishingly much talk there is, but one which even so goes very deep: you get the feeling that nobody ever says anything. You watch the television, read the paper, and wait for somebody to say something . . . and wait . . . and wait . . .

It is in this context that Ferdinand Mount's book Mind the Gap is so welcome. He has written an essay about class in which it is possible to disagree with almost every assertion and produce counter-examples for almost every fact, but which gives the strange, giddy-making sensation that there is a source of oxygen somewhere in the room. This is in considerable part because Mount is writing about a real subject - and one of the ways one can tell it is a real subject is from the general reluctance to discuss it in public. His brilliant but depressing book offers an analysis of the ways the working class has been consistently denigrated, disempowered, and 'subjected to a sustained programme of social contempt and institutional erosion which has persisted through many different governments and several political fashions'. This has caused a 'kind of cultural impoverishment', accompanied by a 'hollowing out' of what Mount unflinchingly calls 'lower-class' life, leading to 'the sense that the worst-off in this country live impoverished lives, more so than the worst-off on the Continent or in the United States'. [. . . . ]