A Canadian human rights group is accusing the University of Ottawa of "spying" and attempting to stifle free speech after top university administrators considered preventing a well-known Burmese activist from speaking on campus.
Canadian Friends of Burma says it will ask the Ontario government to grant provincial ombudsman Andre Marin power to investigate the conduct of the University of Ottawa administrators in relation to the event.
More than a dozen internal emails, reaching as high as the university's former president and obtained through freedom of information requests by the Canadian Friends of Burma, show that the school was concerned about a speech by human rights activist Ka Hsa Wa at a December 2007 campus event discussing alleged human rights abuses by a French oil company in Burma....
The revelations contained in the emails come just a month after Francois Houle, the university's vice-president academic and provost, sent a letter to U.S. conservative pundit Ann Coulter urging her to use "restraint, respect and consideration" when speaking at the school during a Canadian tour.The cascade of email exchanges related to the Burma event began on Nov. 30, 2007, at 7:49 a.m., when Bruce Feldthusen, then vice-president of university relations, sent his colleagues a copy of an advertisement for a speech by Burmese rights activist Ka Hsaw Wa scheduled to take place five days later at the university's Desmarais Building, named for Canadian billionaire Paul G. Desmarais.
The topic of the speech was alleged human rights abuses by French oil conglomerate Total SA during the construction of the Yadana natural gas pipeline through Burma in the 1990s.
Mr. Desmarais was a Total SA board member from 1999 to 2002. In 2006, he donated $15-million to the University of Ottawa, his alma mater.
The advertisement for the event read, "Burma Blood Profits: Was the Desmarais building paid for with cash tainted by the blood of innocent Burmese citizens?"
"I assume you received this? Nice of us to let them use the Desmarais building," Mr. Feldthusen wrote.
Four minutes later, Gilles Patry, the University of Ottawa's then president and vice-chancellor, replied: "Can't believe this. Might be a bit too late to do anything about it. We should monitor to see if they are exposing themselves with libellous comments."
Half an hour after Mr. Feldthusen's initial email, Victor Simon, the university's vice-president resources, responded to his two colleagues by saying the use of the school's facilities should be prohibited on grounds that the "program material includes allegations and accusations that may be libellous."
It's nice to see nothing gets in the way of free dialogue- not politics, not thuggery, not wealthy businessmen.
Speaking of silencing people:
Russia has published top-secret documents that prove Josef Stalin personally approved one of the Second World War's worst massacres, in which nearly 22,000 Polish officers were murdered.
Although the documents have been available to a few researchers since 1992, it is the first time the general public has been given access to the files concerning the 1940 Katyn massacre.
The sight of Stalin's signature on what amounts to a collective death warrant quells decades of debate on the massacre and gives the lie to claims by die-hard Stalinists their idol did not personally sanction the killings.
The disclosure is also a blow to Stalin's grandson, Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, who has tried to sue media that have said Stalin personally signed the death warrants of innocent people.
Only some may be greedy (hat tip ABC):
We’re not, we’re not trying to push financial reform because we begrudge success that’s fairly earned. I mean, I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money. But, you know, part of the American way is, you know, you can just keep on making it if you’re providing a good product or providing good service. We don’t want people to stop, ah, fulfilling the core responsibilities of the financial system to help grow our economy.
Khadr is screwing his own chances at trial:
Omar Khadr provoked a delay in the pre-trial hearings of his war crimes case Thursday after refusing to wear blinder goggles and sound-blocking earmuffs for transport to court -- saying the security accessories were intended to "humiliate" detainees.U.S. army Col. Patrick Parrish, the military judge in the case, said Mr. Khadr needed to be informed of the consequences of exercising his right to stay away, after he discovered that court officials had failed to do so when the Canadian-born terror suspect was arraigned in 2007.
That discovery was made during a separate snafu in which microphones suddenly stopped working in the courtroom, one of two at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The drama unfolded as Dennis Edney, one of Mr. Khadr's Canadian lawyers, went public from Toronto with terms of a plea deal he says the prosecution had made to the defence team. According to Mr. Edney, the deal would involve Mr. Khadr serving a five-year sentence in a maximum-security prison in the United States in addition to the eight he has already spent in U.S. custody since his 2002 capture following a firefight in Afghanistan.
But Barry Coburn, Mr. Khadr's lead U.S. lawyer, has said the prosecution has offered "no firm" deal. He has also said his "understanding" is that prosecutors have invariably insisted any agreement would include a requirement for Mr. Khadr to admit in open court that he threw the hand grenade that killed a U.S. soldier during the 2002 firefight.
He'll be out of the country longer. How refreshing!
Why not? It's not like this information will be passed on by people making money off of the pre-aborted.
Further:
Areader emailed recently to suggest I must be a religious fanatic, because I don't support abortion.
He explained that the vast majority of people who oppose abortion are fundamentalist religious wackos who believe there's a "spirit" in the fetus, and that's why they object to aborting it.
News to me. I told him I hadn't been to church in years, and religion had nothing to do with it. I just think it's wrong to take someone else's life without their consent. And I can't convince myself that the roundish tendency you'll notice among pregnant women results from something other than a life growing inside them. You don't have to be the Pope to believe a person's life is his own, and the rest of us should keep our hands off.
He wasn't buying. He'd convinced himself anyone opposed to abortion is a religious nut, and that's all there was to it.
I got the same sense from reading John Moore's Tuesday column on the recent Ontario climb-down on sex education ( "Hide your kids. The liberals are coming").
The Ontario government was planning to introduce a program that would expose grade school pupils to more explicit sexual references. Grade 1 students would be taught the correct names for body parts; Grade 3 students would learn about sexual identity and orientation, while kids in Grades 6 and 7 would deal with terms like "anal intercourse" and "vaginal lubrication."
The changes had been available on a government website for several months, but no one noticed until recently. When a sudden outcry resulted, Premier Dalton McGuinty quickly reversed course, embarrassing some of his Cabinet members who had been dutifully defending the changes. Now he's being attacked from the opposite direction, for caving in to fundamentalist nutbars. Because if you get a bit queasy at the notion of Grade 6 kids being tutored on masturbation, you must be a fundamentalist nutbar, right?
"Religious conservatives came out swinging," wrote Moore.
"The message was ... that the policy had been developed by activists with an agenda and with no consultation. None of this was true, but that doesn't matter in a political world that now runs not on a daily news cycle but on one that goes hour by hour.... The premier was defeated by talk radio, sound bites, Twitter and Facebook."
I'm a bit puzzled by that last line. Mr. Moore makes his living as a talk radio host, so why is he disparaging opinions formed from listening to talk radio? Is he saying that if we hear him on the radio we should disregard anything he has to say, but if he writes it in the paper, that makes it legit?
But mainly what bothers me is the notion that, once again, anyone who opposes programs favoured by liberals and their friends must be religious extremists bent on imposing fundamentalist views on the nation. The Canadian Taliban, in action. It's true that opposition to the sex program originated with some conservative religious groups that were first to notice it, but why assume every parent who subsequently expressed alarm must therefore be a card-carrying member of the lunatic fringe?
It's simple: putting down someone makes a self-loathing person feel better. Painting someone as an obnoxious sort obscures the matter at hand. It also obscures the fact that the insolent party has no substantive argument for or against something.
In conclusion, well.. nothing right now.
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