All in a day’s work…
A group of protesters who had been blockading an
Enbridge pumping station in Ontario since last week has been charged
after police moved in Wednesday to remove them from the property.
Hamilton police said protesters were given 24-hours notice to leave
after Enbridge obtained a court injunction Tuesday, and 18 protesters
were arrested when they refused to leave the station.
Police spokeswoman Debbie McGreal-Dinning said 13 men and women,
between 19 and 25-years-old, were charged with trespassing. Four
protesters were charged with mischief and one other with breaking and
entering with intent to commit mischief.
She said all were being released after they were processed.
I insist they stand for their principles and block this pumping station in January.
The debate about a
gender-neutral national anthem has been on hiatus for the past couple of years
— at least in the public sphere.
But an Ottawa-based
non-profit group wants it back on the national agenda.
Informed Opinions — a social enterprise gender equity group —
has produced a new YouTube video promoting the idea.
In their 2010 throne
speech, the Harper Conservatives suggested the change to the national anthem: They wanted to amend the phrase "in all thy sons command."
The Prime Minister's Office quickly withdrew the idea citing that Canadians
overwhelmingly told them they like the anthem as is.
Shari Graydon, founder
of Informed Opinions, argues that the complaints came from a very vocal
minority.
"They got
backlash from the Conservative base and that was probably predictable,"
she told Yahoo! Canada News in
a telephone interview.
"But the
Conservative base is not the majority of the population of the country."
(Sidebar: and
neither are you.)
Some fast facts about “
O Canada”:
was composed by Calixa Lavallee with words written by Adolphe-Basile Routhier,
two French-Canadians, in 1880. It was first sung in Quebec before the more
popular English translation by Robert Stanley Weir was performed in 1908. It
was approved as the national anthem in the year of Canada’s centennial in 1967.
It was officially adopted on July 1
st, 1980.
Former Ontario premier
Dalton McGuinty returned to the political battlefield on Tuesday, tasked with
answering questions from a commission investigating the costly and politically
opportune gas plant cancellations.
He did that, sure.
Although maybe not to the degree the opposition-led commission would have
preferred.
But the real fireworks
came when McGuinty dismissed the affair as partisan gamesmanship, waxing poetic
about the state of politics in Canada and citing ancient Roman statesman Cato
the Elder for some reason.
"We need to
understand this exercise for what it truly is. It is not a genuine effort on
the part of the opposition to seek out the truth. They are partisan,"
McGuinty said of the commission during a post-appearance press conference.
He added later:
"I'm not looking for votes now. I think it is important to talk about
these things."
We saw the future of
the Obamacare death Panel when Kathleen Sebelius denied ten year old Sarah
Murnaghans a lung transplant before a Judge overturned the decision.
Sarah Palin’s observations about how the Independent Payment
Advisory Board would work as a death panel can no longer be debated.
Sarah Palin was right on Obamacare having a defacto death panel in 2009.
David Rivkin and
Elizabeth Foley in a recent Wall Street Journal article demonstrated how
this board will ration health and care but noted, “The ObamaCare law also
stipulates that there “shall be no administrative or judicial review” of the
board’s decisions. Its members will be nearly untouchable, too. They
will be Presidentialy nominated and Senate-confirmed, but after that they can
only be fired for “neglect of duty or malfeasance in office…. The IPAB’s
godlike powers are not accidental. Its goal, conspicuously proclaimed by
the Obama administration, is to control Medicare spending in ways that are
insulated from the political process.” Sarah Palin was right about the
Death Panel and I suspect as one pundit recently noted; we would be better off
with a President Sarah Palin.
Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard was ousted as Labor Party leader
Wednesday by her predecessor, Kevin Rudd, in a vote of party lawmakers
hoping to avoid a huge defeat in upcoming elections.
 |
| Whillickers! | |
The ballot took place three years and two days after Gillard ousted Rudd
in a similar internal government showdown to become the country’s first
female prime minister. She lacked Rudd’s charisma, and although many
Labor lawmakers preferred her style, her deepening unpopularity among
voters compelled a majority to seek a change ahead of elections that are
set for Sept. 14 but could be held in August.
 |
| Artist's rendition of the ousting. I believe Gillard is the one with the powerful tail. |
Several North and
South Korean websites that went offline on a war anniversary remained shut down
Wednesday, a day after what Seoul partly blamed on a hacking attack.
The shutdown appeared
to be less severe than one in March, and some government and private sector
sites were operating again.
The main page of the
presidential Blue House was restored, but websites for the prime minister's
office, the science ministry and South Korea's spy agency remained offline. The
conservative South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo was back online.
North Korea's national
airline, the Rodong Sinmun newspaper, the North's official Uriminzokkiri site
and Naenara, the country's state-run Internet portal, had been shut down
Tuesday, and all but Air Koryo were operational a few hours later.
Seoul blamed hacking
for the shutdown of the South Korean sites, and National Intelligence Service
officials said they were investigating what may have shut down the North Korean
websites. North Korea has not commented.
The shutdowns occurred
on the 63rd anniversary of the start of the Korean War, which both countries
commemorated. They also are preparing for the 60th anniversary of the end of
the fighting July 27, a day North Koreans call "Victory Day" even
though the Korean War ended in a truce, not a peace treaty.
Riots in a restive far western region of China on
Wednesday killed 27 people and left at least three injured, state media said.
The official Xinhua
news agency said knife-wielding mobs attacked police stations, a local
government building and a construction site Wednesday morning in a remote town
in the Turkic-speaking Xinjiang region.
The unrest in in
Lukqun, a township in Turpan prefecture, left 17 people dead, including nine
policemen, before police shot and killed 10 rioters, the agency reported.
Xinhua cited officials with the region's Communist Party committee.
Xinjiang is home to a large population of minority Muslim Uighurs but
is ruled by China's Han ethnic majority. It has been the scene of numerous
violent incidents in recent years, including ethnic riots in Urumqi in 2009
that left nearly 200 people dead.
As Egyptians of all
factions prepare to demonstrate in mass against the Muslim Brotherhood and
President Morsi’s rule on June 30, the latter has been trying to
reduce their numbers, which some predict will be in the millions and eclipse
the Tahrir protests that earlier ousted Mubarak. Among
other influential Egyptians, Morsi recently called on Coptic Christian
Pope Tawadros II to urge his flock, Egypt’s millions of Christians,
not to join the June 30 protests.
While that may be
expected, more troubling is that the U.S. ambassador to Egypt is also trying to
prevent Egyptians from protesting—including the Copts. The June 18th edition
of Sadi al-Balad reports
that lawyer Ramses Naggar, the Coptic Church’s legal counsel, said that
during Patterson’s June 17 meeting with Pope Tawadros, she “asked him to
urge the Copts not to participate” in the demonstrations
against Morsi and the Brotherhood. …
So why is the Obama
administration now asking Christians not to oppose their rulers—in this case,
Islamists—who have daily proven themselves corrupt and worse, to the point that
millions of Egyptians, most of them Muslims, are trying to oust them?
What’s worse is that
the human rights abuses Egypt’s Coptic Christians have been suffering under
Muslim Brotherhood rule are significantly worse than the human rights abuses
that the average Egyptian suffered under Mubarak—making the Copts’ right
to protest even more legitimate, and, if anything, more worthy of U.S support.
