Thursday, July 31st, 2008
thinkprogress.org
July 31, 2008
Speaking at the Campus Progress journalism conference earlier this month, Seymour Hersh — a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist for The New Yorker — revealed that Bush administration officials held a meeting recently in the Vice President’s office to discuss ways to provoke a war with Iran.
Thursday, July 31st, 2008
Canadian Press
July 31, 2008
The governments of Ontario and Manitoba have agreed on the establishment of an interprovincial wilderness area along the border of the two provinces, but environmental groups say the move doesn’t do enough to protect endangered species.
The region covers more than 9,400 square km, including Ontario’s Woodland Caribou Provincial Park and the Atikaki and Nopiming provincial parks in Manitoba.
Establishing the area is a step toward achieving a bid to have 40,000 square km of boreal forest in the two provinces declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Thursday, July 31st, 2008
Peter Nowak, CBC News
July 31, 2008
Bell Canada Inc. is moving to impose download limits on customers of independent internet service providers, an act the smaller firms say is designed to eliminate broadband competition.
The Montreal-based company, which cut its own Sympatico customers off from unlimited downloading last year, has proposed extending that plan to firms renting portions of its network in order to provide their own services. That would include a number of smaller wholesale ISP customers such as Chatham, Ont.-based TekSavvy Solutions Inc., Cobourg, Ont.-based Eagle.ca and Mississauga-based Acanac Inc.
The limits would range from two gigabytes per month for customers with slower connections of 512 kilobits per second up to 60 GB for those with the faster speeds of five megabits per second, according to Acanac president Paul Louro. Customers who exceed those limits would incur extra charges, much like cellphone subscribers do when they surpass their monthly minutes.
Rocky Gaudreault, president of TekSavvy, said Bell’s proposal was unacceptable because it would eliminate the last way in which the smaller wholesale ISPs can differentiate their services.
Thursday, July 31st, 2008
Sharon Gaudin, Computerworld
July 31, 2008
Ever try to remember who you bumped into at the store a few days back? Or exactly what the company president said at the morning meeting?Well, you’re not alone. And IBM researchers are working on software that just may help you better recollect all the forgotten pieces of your life.
Thursday, July 31st, 2008
Steve Lambert, Canadian Press
July 31, 2008
Winnipeg RCMP say they don’t know what prompted vicious attack on Greyhound bus
PORTAGE LA PRAIRIE, Man. – Police said this afternoon that they don’t know what prompted a passenger on a Greyhound bus heading to Winnipeg to viciously attack the man sitting next to him.
Passengers said the man repeatedly stabbed his seat-mate before beheading him and carrying the victim’s head around the bus.
RCMP Staff Sgt. Steve Colwell wouldn’t confirm those details but did say a 40-year-old suspect was in RCMP custody and police were planning to interview him.
No charges were immediately laid.
Colwell said the behaviour of the passengers and driver probably prevented anyone else from being hurt.
“It’s not something that happens regularly on a bus,” he said. “You’re sitting there enjoying your trip and then all of a sudden somebody gets stabbed. I imagine it would be pretty traumatic … the way they (the passengers) acted was extraordinary.”
Colwell said they “were very brave. They reacted swiftly, calmly in exiting the bus and as a result nobody else was injured.”
Shocked passengers described the horrific attack as something incomprehensible.
One moment, the quiet man near the back of the bus was minding his own business. The man hadn’t talked to anyone around him, and seemed to pay no attention to the younger fellow sitting next to him, who was listening to music on headphones.
The next moment, witnesses said, the older man stood up, still quiet, and repeatedly stabbed, then beheaded his younger victim.
“We heard this blood-curdling scream and turned around, and the guy was standing up, stabbing this guy repeatedly, like 40 or 50 times,” Garnet Caton said today from a hotel in Brandon, Man., where he and other passengers had been taken to rest.
“There was no rage or anything. He was like a robot, stabbing the guy.”
Caton said the bus stopped and everyone scrambled to get out while the attacker started methodically carving up the victim’s body, not paying attention to anyone else.
Caton and the driver shut the bus door from the outside while they waited for police to arrive.
“We put our bodies up against the door, waiting for him to come out … and he went back and brought the head to the front and pretty much displayed it … and dropped it on the ground in front of us,” Caton said.
“All very calmly. He was wearing sunglasses. It was no big deal to him.”
Fellow passenger Cody Olmstead from Kentville, N.S., also recalled the chilling scene.
“The guy came to the front of the door with buddy’s head in his hands, decapitated. He dropped the head and went back and started cutting the body back up,” Olmstead said.
When police arrived, the victim and his attacker were the only ones left on the bus, Colwell said.
“When attempts were made to have him exit and surrender to police were unsuccessful, additional resources including the RCMP emergency response team and negotiator team were called in to assist.”
The man eventually tried to flee by breaking a bus window and jumping out, Colwell said.
“He was immediately subdued and arrested without incident and is currently in RCMP custody.”
Both Olmstead and Caton said the attacker and the victim appeared not to know each other.
They said the attacker boarded the bus in Brandon last night. The victim, who Caton said appeared to be about 19, had been on the bus since Edmonton.
Police would not confirm the victim’s age and said his name would not be released until his family had been notified. The suspect’s name wasn’t released either.
Federal Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day said the full weight of the law must be brought to bear on the perpetrator.
“We want to make sure the process is followed as aggressively as possible, the full legal process ….” Day said from Levis, Que., where Conservative MPs are gathered for a summer planning session.
“This particular incident, as horrific as it is, is obviously extremely rare. Certainly the horrific nature of it is probably one-of-a-kind in Canadian history.”
Greyhound called the event tragic but isolated.
A company spokeswoman said bus travel is the safest mode of transportation, despite the fact bus stations do not have metal detectors and other security measures used at airports.
“Due to the rural nature of our network, airport-type security is not practical. It’s a very different type of system,” Abby Wambaugh said from Greyhound’s corporate offices in Texas.
The bus was carrying 37 passengers and the driver to Winnipeg from Edmonton.
A portion of the east-bound Trans-Canada Highway was closed overnight as officers remained on the scene.
Passengers had no explanation as to what might have prompted the attack. The suspect had been on the bus for only about an hour and didn’t even sit near his victim, at first.
“He sat in the front at first, everything was normal,” Caton said.
“We went to the next stop and he got off and had a smoke with another young lady there. When he got on the bus again, he came to the back near where I was sitting.
“He put his bags in the overhead compartment. He didn’t say a word to anybody. He seemed totally normal. About a half an hour later, we heard this blood-curdling scream.”
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
Don Martin, National Post
July 30, 2008
It was, after all, Kandahar — now more than ever an incubator for most of the world’s opium supply.
Raked into metre-high piles, the empty pods were the residue of a largest-ever poppy crop in a country that feeds 92% of the planet’s heroin addictions, according to the latest United Nations World Drug Report.
The volume of Afghan poppy sap in 2008 is expected to crest 9,000 tonnes, increasingly concentrated in the southwestern Helmand province, where British forces dominate, and the Kandahar region under Canadian military supervision.
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
Jenny Wagler, National Post
July 30, 2008
Raw milk farmer Michael Schmidt goes to court tomorrow on contempt of court charges, but says his unpasteurized milk operations will continue even if he’s jailed.
Mr. Schmidt admits his “cow-share” co-operation has continued producing unpasteurized milk for its clients despite a court order prohibiting it until his January, 2009, trial on charges of violating health laws.
“[Health authorities] don’t realize that the whole thing is a cooperative structure so even if they jail me the whole thing keeps going anyhow – the milk keeps flowing,” Mr. Schmidt said today. “I don’t think [a potential sentence] will do anything unless they want to bulldoze the farm down.”
Owning a cow and drinking its unpasteurized milk is legal in Ontario, but selling that “raw” milk is banned under the Health Protection and Promotion Act.
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
CBC News
July 30, 2008
New high-tech identification cards to help Saskatchewan people cross the United States border will be introduced next year, the provincial government says.
Special driver’s licences that can be used instead of passports at land border crossings will be introduced by June.
Beginning June 1, the U.S government will require all visitors to prove their citizenship at the border. People who fly to the U.S. will still need passports.
The new cards for land border crossings will be more convenient for people who don’t want to carry a passport and a driver’s licence, Saskatchewan Government Insurance says.
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
James Slack, Daily Mail UK
July 30, 2008
The national DNA database is being used by ministers to ‘criminalise the innocent’, it was claimed yesterday.
A Citizens’ Inquiry set up by a Government watchdog has demanded that the samples of a million innocent people stored on the files for life be removed.
Meanwhile, the Home Office should be stripped of responsibility for managing the library – because it has a ‘hidden agenda’ and ‘cannot be trusted’, the panel argued.
The database was originally a register of those convicted of a crime. But under laws quietly passed by Labour, anybody arrested for a serious offence and later cleared can have their genetic data stored for life.
Panel member Javed Aslam said: ‘For me, that is the first step towards a totalitarian state.’
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
Christopher Conkey, WSJ
July 30, 2008
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration unveiled a plan to impose new tolls on freeways and encourage more private investment to finance road and mass-transit projects, a move aimed at stirring debate as lawmakers prepare for a major overhaul of transportation policy.
The White House says more tolls and public-private partnerships can solve perhaps the biggest problem confronting the nation’s aging infrastructure: There are limited funds available to upgrade transportation networks and too many federal funds are doled out inefficiently through earmarks and pet projects that do little to improve mobility or reduce congestion.
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