Archive | April, 2008
VANCOUVER - A Salvadoran refugee claimant who admitted to killing at least four rival gangsters in gunfights and grenade attacks is not dangerous enough to be locked up pending his deportation, an Immigration and Refugee Board member ruled Tuesday.
In fact, adjudicator Daphne Shaw Dyck said she did not believe Jose Franciso Cardoza Quinteros killed several times for the notorious Mara Salvatrucha gang, despite his sensational admissions to the Canada Border Services Agency last September.
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For about a week now I've been using a new statcounter called "Sitemeter" and liked it because it pounds out a lot of really good information with no limitations. Today people started to contact me regarding Javascript errors they were encountering and I asked for help regarding timing when the problem began.
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I've never done this before. I usually choose the topic and then others weigh in. I've been thinking that this idea is a bit unfair. Others should get to choose the topic once in awhile.
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Strange, don't you think, that it took an American to once and for all put an end to Ontario's dominance of the federation. [...more]
Zimbabwe's ruling Zanu-PF party has signalled that it is willing to accept that the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai came first in the country’s presidential election.
But they insisted that, contrary to claims by his Movement for Democratic Change, he had falled short of the absolute majority required for victory.
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Global warming will stop until at least 2015 because of natural variations in the climate, scientists have said.
Researchers studying long-term changes in sea temperatures said they now expect a "lull" for up to a decade while natural variations in climate cancel out the increases caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions.
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TORONTO -- Canada's equalization program that helps poorer provinces is "perverse'' and Ontario -- struggling with the current economic slowdown -- is providing far too much to the federal coffers that fund it, Premier Dalton McGuinty said Wednesday.
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TORONTO - Police sealed off a Mississauga, Ont. industrial park on Wednesday after stumbling onto an enormous illicit drug lab described as "a meth amphetamine factory."
Dozens of officers from Toronto and Peel regional police swarmed into the nondescript rented unit on Sismet Road, in the Dixie Road and Highway 401 area, late Tuesday and quickly realized that they had uncovered an industrial-scale drug operation.
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With the prospect of a spring election not completely eliminated, today's CROP poll in LaPresse contains food for thought for all of the major federal political parties.
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Shares in Torstar Corp. fell to their lowest point in eight years Wednesday as the newspaper and book publisher reported a drop in earnings across all of its major divisions.
The stock experienced one of its biggest single-day drops this year, falling almost nine per cent in early afternoon trading, after the company reported first-quarter results that one analyst characterized as “significantly below expectations.”
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A male African lion is believed on Wednesday to be roaming near Maniwaki, Que., after escaping from its owner the night before.
Cpl. Gordon McGregor of the Kitigan Zibi reserve police force confirmed Wednesday that they are looking for the 150-pound, two-year-old lion, which was a pet to local resident Stanley Dumas-Whiteduck.
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OTTAWA -- The Conservatives don't like a Supreme Court judgment that restricts use of drug-sniffing dogs and are hinting they'll draft legislation to expand such searches.
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Canadians hoping to avoid the taxman's wrath are rushing to file their income taxes before Wednesday's midnight deadline.
But those experiencing delays with the Canadian Revenue Agency's overburdened online system have a six-day extension to get their taxes done without facing a penalty. This year's Netfile income tax submission deadline is Tuesday, May 6 at midnight.
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OTTAWA–Conservatives have launched an all-out assault on Elections Canada's credibility, voting against a motion to express confidence in the independent agency.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper yesterday charged that the agency "broke its own rules" with a raid two weeks ago on his party's headquarters, but was absent hours later when the entire Conservative caucus voted against a Bloc Québécois motion of confidence in Elections Canada – a move deputy Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff denounced as "shameful."
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Ezra Levant | CTV's Partisan panel
-- I was on Mike Duffy's partisan panel again today. I don't think I was particularly strong, but it was still fun to hold up the Conservative end of the argument. I was on the show last week and it was a lot spicier -- I'm going to try to find that clip and post it, too. In the meantime, here's today's.
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National Post | John Ivison: Oil prices turning equalization on its head
-- OTTAWA: So the poor cousins of Confederation are impoverished no more, while the rich uncle has fallen on hard times and may have to tap the rest of the family for a hand-out.
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London Free Press | China facing public relations disaster
-- BEIJING: Shimmering stadiums and billions of dollars spent to remake Beijing into a modern city have been overshadowed by pro-Tibet protests, chaos on the Olympic torch relay and an anti-Western backlash by angry Chinese who sense their coming-out party is being spoiled.
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CBC | Tories oppose Bloc motion supporting Elections Canada
-- A Bloc Québécois motion calling on parliamentarians to reiterate their "full and complete confidence" in Elections Canada passed Tuesday in a House of Commons vote, despite opposition from Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservatives.
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I've watched as more than a few people have commented about the music that plays as Stephen Harper walks into a room. Most of it is "dumb rock". Here's the one I would choose if I were in charge... [...more]
In this article the CBC goes out of its way to Brenda Martinize the case of terrorist suspect and Sudanese hyphenated Canadian Abousfian Abdelrazik. He has been apparently languishing for years in his home country of Sudan:
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.
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OTTAWA -Nye Bevan, the British politician, once lamented that it took a certain kind of organizational genius to produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time, given the British Isles are made of the former and surrounded by the latter.
The same thought struck during a cursory examination of Canada's doctor shortage. The Canadian Medical Association launched a publicity campaign pointing out that almost five million Canadians do not have a family physician and that the country would need 26,000 more doctors to meet the OECD average of physicians per family.
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KABUL - A fresh deadline seeking compliance with a ban on the five Indian TV serials being broadcast by private Afghan TV channels was due to end on Tuesday. The ban, ordered by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, has caused public controversy and a strident clash between conservatives and liberals. The truth is more multi-layered: not all those who oppose the serials are doing so out of conservative values, nor are the reasons for their defense uniformly liberal. [...more]
While Beijing started last weekend to rein in nationalistic outbursts against Western media and governments, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has upped the ante in its "people's war" against separatists who are allegedly in cahoots with "anti-China elements overseas" to undermine Chinese rule and disrupt the Beijing Summer Olympic Games.
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TORONTO — — Despite the latest round of General Motors Corp. layoffs and slumping North American car sales, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty predicted Tuesday the province will get a new auto assembly plant and the high-paying jobs that go with it.
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OTTAWA — Ontario will soon be a have-not province, and is poised to start collecting equalization payments in two years, economists at Toronto-Dominion Bank say.
Ontario's economy is struggling to deal with the compounding effects of high energy costs, a strong loonie, and now a U.S. downturn, the economists note in a paper published Tuesday morning. But it's the rising prosperity of the energy-rich provinces, and not Ontario's actions, that have turned Ontario into a have-not, their paper argues.
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Newfoundland and Labrador used a gusher of oil-based revenues Tuesday to slash its debt, cut taxes and bolster spending on health, roads and other public services.
Premier Danny Williams called the budget, which forecasts a surplus of $544 million for the coming fiscal year, "unprecedented" and said it represents "an outstanding turnaround in four short years."
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TORONTO — The province's aboriginal affairs minister says peace is being restored in the southern Ontario community of Caledonia.
Michael Bryant says both the road barricade of a local highway and the recent blockade of a rail line are being dismantled.
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Public terrorism trials are changing the way government spies operate, says Canada's spymaster, Jim Judd.
As a consequence of the fight against global Islamic terrorism, an increasing number of open-court criminal prosecutions in Canada, the U.S. and Europe have, at their genesis, information collected by shadowy secret agents rather than police officers.
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The Bank of Canada will aggressively cut interest rates to bring down the Canadian dollar that is being held aloft by Canada's relatively high interest rates and world oil prices, which hit a new record high of nearly $120 U.S. a barrel yesterday, a U.S.- based economic think-tank says.
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