statism watch

CBC News
Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Al-Qaeda has regained some of its pre-Sept. 11 strength based on support from within Pakistan, leading to a 16 per cent jump in the number of attacks in Afghanistan, a U.S. government report said Wednesday.

“Al-Qaeda and associated networks remained the greatest terrorist threat to the United States and its partners in 2007,” says the U.S. State Department’s annual Country Reports on Terrorism.

“It has reconstituted some of its pre-9/11 operational capabilities through the exploitation of Pakistan’s federally administered tribal areas, replacement of captured or killed operational lieutenants, and the restoration of some central control by its top leadership, in particular Ayman al-Zawahiri,” said the report.

Al-Zawahiri is considered to be al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man and the group’s main “strategic and operational planner.”

State Department counterterrorism co-ordinator Dell Dailey stressed to reporters Wednesday in Washington the group remains weaker overall than it was on Sept. 11.

The report suggests the main reason for the increase in al-Qaeda’s strength in the region was a ceasefire agreement the Pakistani government reached with tribal leaders last year. The agreement has since expired, but Pakistan’s government is negotiating a new truce.

“Instability along the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier appeared to have provided al-Qaeda leadership greater mobility and ability to conduct training and operational planning, particularly that targeting Western Europe and the United States,” said the report.

The report says al-Qaeda’s activity in the Afghan-Pakistan border zone is funded by “criminal networks and narcotics cultivation” in Afghanistan’s south and east.

More than 2,500 Canadian soldiers are stationed in Afghanistan’s southern Kandahar province as part of a NATO-led mission. Since the mission started in 2002, 82 Canadian soldiers and one diplomat have been killed. The report notes that is “the highest proportion of casualties to troops deployed for any NATO member.”

Full Story | See Also: CIA chief claims big gains against al-Qaeda

CBC News
Last Updated: Tuesday, April 29, 2008

The United Nations said Tuesday it would set up a high-level task force headed by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to tackle the global food crisis.

Ban said UN leaders will take a series of medium and long-term measures, with the first priority the $755-million US shortfall in funding for the World Food Program, much of it because of soaring world grain prices.

The secretary general told reporters in the Swiss capital, Berne, that the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization has a $1.7-billion plan to provide seeds for farmers in the world’s poorest countries.

“Without full funding of these emergency requirements, we risk again the spectre of widespread hunger, malnutrition and social unrest on an unprecedented scale,” Ban said. “We anticipate that additional funding will be required,” he said.

A UN statement released at the same time said the world’s poor were hardest hit by rising food costs and there was worse to come.

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The new task force will be made up of UN agency chiefs and the head of the World Bank, officials said.

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CBC News
Last Updated: Tuesday, April 29, 2008

The family of a Montreal man stranded in Sudan for five years because he’s on a no-fly list will make a public plea to the Canadian government Tuesday to help bring him home.

“The family just wants to deliver a very clear message … to our prime minister and minister of foreign affairs, simply to bring [him] back. The children want their father back in Canada,” his lawyer, Yavar Hameed told CBC News. “He has a life here, he has connections here, and they want him back.”

Abousfian Abdelrazik, who was detained by Sudanese authorities while visiting his mother in 2003, has since been released from jail, but remains under police surveillance. Abdelrazik, who is a dual citizen of Canada and Sudan, hasn’t been charged with any crime in either country.

Hameed said his client has been deemed a security threat over Canadian Security Intelligence Service suspicions that he’s an al-Qaeda agent, something he denies. CSIS documents suggest it was CSIS agents who asked the Sudanese government to arrest Abdelrazik, Hameed said.

Ottawa has been putting up roadblocks to thwart Abdelrazik’s attempts to return to Canada, Hameed said, adding that Canada has ignored Sudan’s offers to facilitate Abdelrazik’s return to Canada.

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PETER ZIMONJIC, Winnipeg Sun
April 29, 2008

Anticipated food shortages fuel NDP’s bid to reconsider bill

Food will be turned into fuel and people will go hungry if Parliament passes a new bill demanding greater use of corn fuels like ethanol, critics say.

Bill C-33, an amendment to the Environmental Protection Act, has the support of both the Conservatives and Liberals and is poised to pass in the House of Commons. If passed, it will give the government the power to implement regulations requiring 5% of all fuel to come from biofuels, such as ethanol, by 2010.

Making the switch, says the government, would have the environmental effect of taking 1 million cars off the road.

But critics of ethanol say that the billions in subsidies given to producers in the U.S. and Canada is driving up the price of corn. They argue the rising price has made it almost impossible for the billion people living on less than a dollar a day to afford to eat.

“Demand for biofuels like ethanol are not only a major cause of increasing prices, but research suggests they may make climate change worse,” said Robert Fox, executive director of Oxfam Canada in a statement.

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Mike Adams, naturalnews.com
Monday, April 28, 2008 

A new law being pushed in Canada by Big Pharma seeks to outlaw up to 60 percent of natural health products currently sold in Canada, even while criminalizing parents who give herbs or supplements to their children. The law, known as C-51, was introduced by the Canadian Minister of Health on April 8th, 2008, and it proposes sweeping changes to Canada’s Food and Drugs Act that could have devastating consequences on the health products industry.

Among the changes proposed by the bill are radical alterations to key terminology, including replacing the word “drug” with “therapeutic product” throughout the Act, thereby giving the Canadian government broad-reaching powers to regulate the sale of all herbs, vitamins, supplements and other items. With this single language change, anything that is “therapeutic” automatically falls under the Food and Drug Act. This would include bottled water, blueberries, dandelion greens and essentially all plant-derived substances.

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At the same time that C-51 is outlawing herbs, supplements and vitamins, it would grant alarming new “enforcement” powers to the thugs enforcement agents who claim to be “protecting” the public from dangerous unapproved “therapeutic agents” like, say, dandelion greens. As explained on the www.Educate-Yourself.org website ((http://educate-yourself.org/cn/canadian…), the C-51 law would allow the Canadian government’s thugs enforcement agents to:

• Raid your home or business without a warrant
• Seize your bank accounts
• Levy fines up to $5 million and a jail terms up to 2 years for merely selling an herb
• Confiscate your property, then charge you storage fees for the expense involved in storing all the products they stole from you

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netnewsledger.com
April 27, 2008

… On April 8, 2008, the Minister of Health in Canada introduced Bill C-51 into the House of Commons. This Bill proposes significant changes to the current Food and Drugs Act that would allow our government to bypass parliamentary and senate approvals on new laws introduced in Canada. It also authorizes the enforcement without judicial review.

If we allow the sidestepping of elected officials, we are allowing our government to subject us to laws that are not the will of the people in Canada. The judicial system was built into our government to prevent abuse and protect us from individuals who may have an ulterior motive to enforcing actions against us.

Aside from the items above, this law is so broad as to warrant enforcement on the average person who grows a herb garden and shares it with his / her neighbors.

Another concern is enforcement of the new law. It would allow the government sweeping powers to seize bank accounts and property without a warrant and levy fines of up to $5,000,000,00 and 2 years in jail per offence.

Full Story | Read Bill C51 | StopBillC51.com | See Also: Codex Alimentarius — An Emerging Threat

John Nicol CBC News
Last Updated: Monday, April 28, 2008

In the worldwide manhunt for Martin Luther King’s assassin 40 years ago, the RCMP and Toronto police appear to have overlooked some important clues and never fully nailed down the killer’s Canadian connections, a CBC News investigation has found.

Based on unprecedented access to investigative documents in Canada and the U.S., the new material further points to the belief that James Earl Ray, a 40-year-old petty thief and drifter, had help in Canada during his month-long odyssey in Toronto immediately following the assassination as he secured at least three Canadian aliases and a passport and airline ticket to London in the name of a Torontonian.

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At Ossington, a small well-dressed man pretending to be a policeman showed up looking for Paul Bridgman shortly after Ray had moved to Dundas. And at Dundas Street, Yee Sun Loo answered the door to a man she described in her limited English as “the fat man.”

This man handed her an envelope for Sneyd on the same day Ray paid $352 for his flight and passport to England.

This news set off a city-wide hunt for “the fat man.” Within a week, a stout salesman, requesting anonymity, showed up at the police station saying he was the one being sought. He said he had merely found an envelope at a phone booth near the address on the envelope and was dropping it off as a Good Samaritan.

That man, who is now in his 80s and living in Pickering, refuses to discuss his role in the incident. However, when reached by an American professor in 1984, he panicked. “‘You can’t tell anybody you found me,” he told Philip Melanson, who has written a few books on the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination. “You’ve got to protect my anonymity or they’ll kill me.”

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By MATTHEW HICKLEY
Last updated at 22:03pm on 27th April 2008

Surveillance powers designed to track terrorists are being deployed by councils to crack down on littering, dog fouling and planning law breaches, a survey reveals.

Its findings expose the vast scale of Big Brother spying by town halls and brought urgent demands for “root and branch” reforms to curb the fast-growing snooping culture.

Some councils have used the sweeping powers granted by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) more than 100 times in the last year to follow and watch residents or monitor their calls – often while dealing with the most minor of suspected offences.

Their activities emerged weeks after the Daily Mail revealed Poole council in Dorset had spied on a family because it wrongly suspected the parents of abusing rules on school catchment areas.

Computer programmer Tim Joyce, 37, Jenny Paton, 39, and their three daughters were subject to an extraordinary operation which saw them tailed round the clock by officials who described the family car as a “target vehicle”.

The couple discovered they had been under surveillance for three weeks only when called to a meeting with council officials.

According to the survey, they may not have been alone in being watched over such minor matters.

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Ripa powers, which are available to hundreds of local authorities and other agencies, permit checking private phone or internet records, secretly recording meetings inside suspects’ homes and recruiting “spies” to watch their neighbours.

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techdirt.com
Monday April 28, @12:03AM

US entertainment industry interests have been pushing for quite some time to get stronger copyright laws in Canada, despite plenty of questions about why they’re needed. Thanks to folks like Michael Geist, who has repeatedly shined light on attempts to rush these efforts through, some of these efforts have been set aside until there can be more public debate. But, of course, the industry never rests, and as it’s looking to get stricter copyright laws in place in Canada, it doesn’t much want to hear from critics who have facts on their side. Geist points us to the rather ridiculous news that a supposedly non-partisan, independent organization called the Public Policy Forum has uninvited a well known expert, Howard Knopf, on Canadian copyright from a symposium being held today. Knopf was going to do a presentation explaining why Canadian copyright law is already stronger and better than US copyright law, and why the US ought to be copying Canada’s law, rather than the other way around. However, Knopf believes that PPF was pressured to remove him from the schedule, including removing him from a panel where he planned to debate these issues with a registered lobbyist of the entertainment industry. It’s a lot easier to get questionable laws passed when you silence the critics.

Original Story

Michael Geist
Apr 28, 2008 04:30 AM

Earlier this month, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, the agency that manages the dot-ca domain, celebrated its one-millionth domain name registration. While that represents an important milestone, a far more noteworthy development is that CIRA also quietly announced the implementation of a new “whois” policy that will better protect the privacy of hundreds of thousands of Canadians and serve as a model for domain name registries around the world.

The whois issue has attracted little public attention, yet it has been the subject of heated debate within the domain name community for many years. It revolves around the whois database, a publicly accessible, searchable list of domain name registrant information (as in “who is” the registrant of a particular domain name).

When CIRA was first established, its whois policy permitted detailed disclosures about domain name registrants. A typical whois entry included the domain name itself, the name of the registrant and comprehensive contact information including postal address, phone and fax numbers, as well as email addresses.

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Under the new policy, CIRA will continue to collect the same contact information from registrants as under its current policy. However, it will no longer require that such information be publicly available through its whois directory. In its place, CIRA will only require the public disclosure of limited technical information, though individual registrants may voluntarily “opt-in” to providing more personal information.

Full Story