EYE ON A CRAZY PLANET
...Forget about mediocre ethnic food served up in cafeterias, claiming that "America is the land of opportunity," or saying yoga is yoga, rather than "mindful stretching."
It's Beatlemania that is culturally insensitive and intolerant...
How would that carpenter and his pregnant wife have circumnavigated the Kafkaesque network of Israeli settlements, roadblocks and closed military zones in the occupied West Bank? Would Mary have had to experience labour or childbirth at a checkpoint, as one in ten pregnant Palestinian women did between 2000 and 2007?
Did you know that someone dies of malaria every 60 seconds? You may do, if you’ve seen one of the latest Christian Aid posters picturing an African girl staring fearfully at the camera, or a young boy lying on what seems to be his deathbed. They send a powerful Christmas message: while we celebrate in comfort, children are dying for want of a £3 mosquito net. And we could change this, if only we chose to help.
What these adverts don’t tell you, though, is the remarkable extent to which we are helping – and, more importantly, the way in which Africans are helping themselves. Malaria, mankind’s biggest killer, is now retreating faster than at any time since records began.
Earlier this month, the United Nations announced that malaria’s global death toll has more than halved since the turn of the century, saving six million lives. It’s the greatest success story of modern times, yet no one seems interested in telling it...
A Facebook post by an Arab journalist comparing the wretched condition of Syrian prisoners with that of well-fed Palestinians serving time in Israel has gone viral, eliciting surprising praise of Israeli practices from across the Arab world.
The side by side photos of an emaciated Syrian in an Assad-regime prison next to the paunchy looking Samir Kuntar leaving an Israeli jail after nearly 30 years were posted by al-Jazeera journalist Faisal al-Qassem following an alleged Israeli airstrike that killed Kuntar in his Lebanon home on Saturday.
“Samir Kuntar left an Israeli prison with a beer belly and a doctorate. At the other extreme, this is how Syrians leave Assad’s prisons,” read the text accompanying the photo...
“When Glenn Greenwald castigates the dead Charlie Hebdo cartoonists for racism,” the writer Sam Harris observed recently, “he’s not only proving that he’s a moral imbecile; he’s participating in a global war of ideas over free speech – and he’s on the wrong side of it.”
Back in April, the short story writer Deborah Eisenberg took a rather different view. In her letter to PEN’s executive director Suzanne Nossel, Eisenberg included Greenwald on a shortlist of people she considered worthier of PEN’s annual Freedom of Expression Award for Courage than the dead and surviving Charlie Hebdo staff. Unlike the slain cartoonists, she wrote of her recommendations, “their courage has been fastidiously exercised for the good of humanity.”
All things considered, this was an extravagant claim to make on behalf of Greenwald’s valour and integrity, particularly at Charlie Hebdo’s expense. Greenwald – formerly of Salon and the Guardian and now co-founding editor at Pierre Omidyar’s campaigning blog, the Intercept – is most famous as the journalist to whom rogue NSA employee Edward Snowden leaked a vast cache of national security information before finding sanctuary in Putin’s Russia...
Would you donate your tax refund or write a cheque to defray Ontario’s $298.9 billion net debt?
...“It’s an unusual thing for someone to do, but I would encourage any Ontarian who wants to make a contribution to feel free to do so,” said Deb Matthews, deputy premier to Kathleen Wynne and chair of the government’s treasury board...
German Chancellor Angela Merkel's refugee policy has attracted praise from all over the world. Time magazine and the Financial Times newspaper recently named her Person of the Year, and delegates applauded her for so long at her party's convention on Monday that she had to stop them.
The speech that followed, however, may have surprised supporters of her policies: "Multiculturalism leads to parallel societies and therefore remains a ‘life lie,’ ” or a sham, she said, before adding that Germany may be reaching its limits in terms of accepting more refugees. "The challenge is immense," she said. "We want and we will reduce the number of refugees noticeably."
Although those remarks may seem uncharacteristic of Merkel, she probably would insist that she was not contradicting herself. In fact, she was only repeating a sentiment she first voiced several years ago when she said multiculturalism in Germany had "utterly failed."...
...Toronto District School Board trustees appointed John Malloy as interim education director on Wednesday. Mr. Malloy, an assistant deputy education minister and former director of the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board, replaces Donna Quan, who is stepping down after a rocky tenure.
Ms. Sandals described Ms. Quan’s departure as “transformative” for the school board, saying the institution has the new, external leadership it needs...
...the Trudeau government’s approach displays unprecedented arrogance. Over the past decade, three provincial governments tried to change the voting system in their jurisdiction, but committed to put the question to the people. In Ontario (2007) and British Columbia (2005 and 2009), relatively few citizens participated in the referenda and those who did rejected the proposals. A plebiscite on electoral reform in New Brunswick had been promised for 2008, but was never held as the Progressive Conservative government was defeated. It is worth noting too that the citizens of Great Britain were also asked to consider important changes to their electoral system in 2011. The Labour government’s proposals were also flatly rejected by enormous margins. Why should it be different for the government of Canada?...
At least now it must be seen as official: Ontario’s electricity regime is a gargantuan fiasco, a dysfunctional, overpriced, mismanaged system that for most of the last decade has been abandoned to the provincial Liberals’ gross incompetence and deliberate abuse of governance.
In strong language and clear analysis leading to straight-shooting conclusions, Ontario Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk has delivered one of the most devastating audit reports on government bungling and malpractice in Canadian history.
Ontario consumers and small business owners already know the hard fact: the cost of electricity has almost doubled under the McGuinty/Wynne regimes, from 5.32 cents per kilowatt hour to 10.10 cents, with many more increases to come...
...Khaldi was about 10 minutes into his presentation when the protest began.
“He didn’t get into anything political. He started off by saying that protesting an event like his is a waste of time, saying, ‘I’m not a politician, I’m just here to share my experience and my story.’ He gave a few examples of the things he’s trying to do to foster peace between Israelis and Palestinians,” Sher said.
In a video uploaded to the Palestinian Solidarity Group’s Facebook page, the protesters can be seen interrupting Khaldi by standing in their seats and taking turns shouting slogans at Khaldi...
"...He came to our campus to speak about minority rights in Israel (as if those exist), and we as pro-Palestinians refused to allow a Zionist to lead the discussion on such a topic. After we left we held a talk outside the room to dicuss what is really happening in Israel, and opened the floor to intersolidarity. The pro-Palestinian voice is in charge of leading the discussions on Palestinian human rights on our campus, not Zionists."
Posted by University of Windsor Palestinian Solidarity Group on Wednesday, October 21, 2015
Russia’s defense ministry said on Wednesday it had proof that Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and his family were benefiting from the illegal smuggling of oil from Islamic State-held territory in Syria and Iraq.
Moscow and Ankara have been locked in a war of words since last week when a Turkish air force jet shot down a Russian warplane near the Syrian-Turkish border, the most serious incident between Russia and a NATO state in half a century.
Erdogan ressponded by saying no one had the right to “slander” Turkey by accusing it of buying oil from Islamic State, and that he would stand down if such allegations were proven to be true. But speaking during a visit to Qatar, he also said he did not want relations with Moscow to worsen further.
At a briefing in Moscow, defense ministry officials displayed satellite images which they said showed columns of tanker trucks loading with oil at installations controlled by Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, and then crossing the border into neighboring Turkey.
The officials did not specify what direct evidence they had of the involvement of Erdogan and his family, an allegation that the Turkish president has vehemently denied...
Jeremy Corbyn is seen as an unpopular leader across almost all demographic groups and leads a party whose voters are increasingly out of step with majority opinion in the country.
Since the election, Labour has attracted voters from two main sources: the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, many of whom hold views on immigration, defence, welfare and patriotism that are at odds with public opinion.
At the same time, Labour has retained only two-thirds of its own voters, according to a YouGov poll...
Nearly a dozen wooden boats carrying decomposing bodies have been found in the waters off the coast of Japan over the past two months.
Inside the 11 vessels were at least 25 bodies, according to Japanese broadcaster NHK. Two bodies were headless, and one boat contained six skulls, Singapore's Straits Times newspaper reported, citing the Japanese Coast Guard. The poor condition of the remains suggested that the boats had been adrift for some time, the paper said.
One of the boats had a tattered banner that looked like it could have been part of a North Korean flag. The boat also had a board with Hangul words that said "Korean People's Army," which is the name of the armed forces in North Korea.
A maritime expert said the ships looked like those used by defectors from North Korea...
This attentive, magnificently written, and profoundly researched biography of Henry Kissinger before he took office is stunningly good, and stuns as much for what it does not say as what it does. Earlier Kissinger biographers have tried to comprehend him, not quite in order to forgive his crimes but to share with others—usually Adolf Hitler—the blame for them. Hitler stung Kissinger at a tender age into his amoral realism, and caused him to lure us into a foreign policy that history has proved was unnecessary. Walter Isaacson’s 1992 biography ends with the triumph of the West in the Cold War in spite of realpolitik. Kissinger’s machinations came to naught because the Cold War was more like a TED conference than a life-and-death struggle: Victory came to us because our values “eventually proved more attractive.”...
Niall Ferguson is 15 years younger than the midcentury baby boomers like Isaacson, Christopher Hitchens, and me, whose fathers were Kissinger’s contemporaries. Facing not an effortless Cold War victory but a victory squandered, Ferguson is free of the presupposition that both he and his reader are Kissinger’s moral superiors. Instead, using Kissinger’s thought and early career as his vantage point, Ferguson writes a marvelously capacious and dramatic history of American foreign policy during the Cold War’s first generation...
Rep. Mike Pompeo (R – Kan.) and Sen. Tom Cotton (R – Ark.) have a lot in common. Both are army veterans and both are graduates of Harvard Law School. And both have been doing a great job of exposing aspects of the nuclear deal with Iran that the administration would rather keep quiet.
This week it was reported that an inquiry from Pompeo got the State Department to admit that the nuclear deal was never signed and is not “legally binding.”...
IN SEPTEMBER, a forensic-psychiatry patient at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health absconded during a scheduled outing. Thomas Brailsford had been found not criminally responsible for cutting off his mother’s head in 2010, so the news of his escape created, to put it mildly, some apprehension among the public.
During the twenty-four hours or so Brailsford was on the loose, media sensationalizing transformed Toronto into a modern-day Sleepy Hollow, with panicked Ichabod Cranes trying to evade a ghoulish headhunter. Quite naturally, many people wondered why Brailsford was left in a position where he could so easily vanish—it was the second time he’d gone AWOL from the centre within twelve months.
In the decade I worked at CAMH and its predecessor, the Queen Street Mental Health Centre, up until 2004, I saw some of the workings and causes of this type of dilemma...
Headland made this fall’s ‘‘Sleeping With Other People,’’ a raunchy rom-com starring Jason Sudeikis and Alison Brie, in 25 days for $5 million from a script she drafted in two weeks, chronicling her obsession with a ‘‘lame’’ ex-boyfriend. ‘‘Quentin Tarantino can make ‘Pulp Fiction’ for $8 million and you can slap him on any magazine,’’ Headland said. ‘‘He’s the poster boy. He was for me. I want to be that guy even though he looks like a foot. God bless him, and he can do whatever he wants to my feet. But with a female director, you’re just not celebrated the same way.’’Pulp Fiction was a huge hit that revitalized the careers of Bruce Willis and John Travolta, made stars out of Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman, and inspired dozens of imitations and iconic cultural touchstones, like Jackson and Travolta's conversation about "the Royale with Cheese, " and "bring up the Gimp." Most people have never heard of Sleeping With Other People, and fewer still have seen it or could name anything memorable about it.
