“yeeeeeeaaaaaaarrrrhhhhh!!!”
update.

The jury in the Farah Khan trial was expected to begin its deliberations yesterday. Her mother and stepfather are accused of killing and dismembering the little girl in 1999.
Instead, the judge granted a jury request to delay deliberations until tomorrow, so that jurors could catch game seven between the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Ottawa Senators before they are sequestered.

The classic stereotype of the con man as smooth, crafty and clever just took a hit.

[the] former Harvard University instructor of medicine who was arrested on Tuesday for conning friends, colleagues and Internet acquaintances out of $600,000 was himself duped when he trusted other swindlers with the money, police said.
Weidong Xu, 38, quickly lost his ill-gotten loot by investing it in a dubious Nigerian business offer he received by e-mail. The spam message promised gains of $50 million, police said.

But, what does it tell us about Harvard professors?

Two members of Canada’s First Family of Al Qaeda are back in Toronto. The Canadian authorities issued them “emergency passports”.
Apparently, Pakistan has no doctors.

I trust this will help put to rest the stubborn fairytale of “First Nations stewardship” of natural resources.

More than 30 caribou were slaughtered in a protest that about 70 Quebec Innu hunters staged near Churchill Falls last week. Many of the animals are believed to be from the endangered Red Wine herd, which had fewer than 100 animals last year.
The hunters were protesting against the seizure of guns, equipment and 32 caribou carcasses by provincial conservation officers who said the natives had killed the animals in an area where hunting is banned to save the Red Wine herd.

No one familiar with Indian hunting and fishing practices in the Western provinces will be the least surprised.
Though, I’m sure there will be plenty of NDP and like types who will split the difference between defending First Nations and defending the environment, and weasel out a way to blame someone white and European.

Victor Li has backed out of talks to rescue Air Canada. I will be in Brazil at the World Show when the airline’s bankruptcy protection expires on the 15th, with an Air Canada return ticket for the 20th.
Just great. Just bloody great. And now, this

Vampire bats kill 13 people in Brazil

The dog has his shots. I don’t.

I spent an hour and a half in a dentists chair this afternoon, while two people in masks competed to see who could put the most metal instruments into my mouth at one time. They even had the worlds smallest hairdryer in there.
So, now that the freezing is gone (I always end up getting extra freezing), I have a toothache. And I can’t get my mouth closed. I’m not kidding. My mouth won’t close all the way, as the only points of contact between my upper and lower teeth are the ones that have the new fillings.
The ones that hurt.
It’s going to be a long, hungry weekend.

Choice tidbits from the Calgary Herald story:

About 25,000 passports lost or stolen each year never appear on border watch lists, and 4,500 airport employees with “possible criminal associations” have access to restricted areas, Fraser said.
…
“The government as a whole failed to adequately assess intelligence lessons learned from critical incidents such as Sept. 11 and systematically follow up on needed improvements,” Fraser wrote in the most stinging line of her report.

Well, hello? Who was in charge, again?

Chr�tien said the Western world is “looked upon as being arrogant, self-satisfied, greedy and with no limits. The 11th of September is an occasion for me to realize it even more.” Chr�tien said he told Wall Street business leaders last year the West mjust not exercise its power so as to humiliate other countries and peoples. “When you’re powerful like you are, you guys, this is the time to be nice.”

(“Western World”… wink wink, nudge nudge…)

Last week, McLellan announced additional measures to create a government-wide communications system in anticipation of the embarrassing accounts in Fraser’s report about gaps in intelligence-sharing.
There was the time, for example, when a federal agency failed to circulate a terror alert from a foreign ally.
And in another case the government’s top-secret messaging system sent a response to the wrong address, and the sending agency waited a month to follow up and check whether the message had ever been received.
“Fortunately, (that) alert turned out to be a false alarm,” Fraser wrote in her typically dry prose.

$7.7 billion just doesn’t buy what it used to.

Today a judge extended bankruptcy protection for Air Canada to April 15th.
On April 14th, I’ll be in Brazil, holding an Air Canada return ticket for the 20th.
I think I’ll pack extra underwear.

Greece, Turkey Join Crucial Cyprus Peace Talks

Old rivals Greece and Turkey locked horns Wednesday over a U.N. peace plan which aims to reunite the island of Cyprus before it joins the European Union on May 1.
Both countries are keen to secure a deal, but they also share some of the concerns aired by their respective proteges — the Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots — during the past four weeks of fruitless negotiations on the divided island.

I know a retired colonel who was a peacekeeper in Cyrus in the 1970’s. He also tested parachute designs[1] for the Canadian military and served in the US Special Forces. I was in their home on the first night of bombing in Baghdad during the first Gulf War. Gil’s voiceover was pretty amusing, and radically different from the ‘expert analysis’ on CNN – and accurate, as it turned out.

The U.N.-brokered talks have now moved to the Swiss Alpine resort of Buergenstock, where mediators hope Athens and Ankara can exert greater pressure on the feuding Cypriot sides. They end next week.

You know, if I were in charge of these things, talks wouldn’t be held in resorts. They’d be over wooden picnic tables under a leaky tent in Wood Buffalo park. Give them all the time they need – and one can of bug repellent. The float plane would return when the papers were signed.

“I would say the chances (for agreement) are better than even,” U.N. envoy Alvaro de Soto said in comments to U.N. television.

The UN has been in Cyprus since 1964. (Timeline). Food for thought for those who clamour for UN involvement in Iraq. Or anywhere, for that matter – Cyrus isn’t Somalia, for crying out loud.
Footnote:
[1] Not a typo

Today at the “Adscam” hearings, Miriam B�dard has testified she was told by Via Rail boss, Marc LeFrancois, that Formula One driver, Jacques Villeneuve, was paid $12 million US to wear a “Canada” patch on his race suit.
Out of a secret fund. [This secret fund?]
And that favoured-ad-agency-cash-clearing-house Groupaction was involved in drug trafficking.
(Who is Miriam B�dard?)
update – denials and skeptcism all around – from the head of Groupaction, obviously, and from Villeneuve – though, it’s hard to dismiss B�dard is an outright liar – a language problem?

Over at Command Post Michelle has a bio for the newly promoted Abdel Aziz Rantissi, as he rises the ladder of the Terrorist Who’s Who.

[H]e has consistently argued that Palestinians have a right to resist Israel by any and all means, including the suicide bombing of civilians.
“They are not terrorism,” he told the Arabic newspaper Kut al-Arab in 1998.
“They are a response to Israeli terrorism, individuals and governmental, against Palestinian civilians.”
Vowing to keep fighting on till “our homeland is liberated”, Rantissi offered a reciprocal initiative, whereby “we will stop hunting for Israelis in return for allowing them to get out of our homeland safely”.

Reload.

What happens when an ATM crashes and reboots into a regular copy of Windows XP on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University? The world’s first Diebold Brand Media Player. Using the touch screen and the character mapper in Windows, the ATM was reprogrammed to play various looping songs (including Talking Heads) while occasionally belching out ‘What, am I made of money?’ via text-to-speech.

Diebold – also known for their eVoting machines.
Via Franksworld

Europe is not at war against terrorists, the EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana has said, warning against a hysterical reaction to the threat of attacks in the wake of the Madrid bombings.

You don’t say….

“We have to energetically oppose terrorism, but we mustn’t change the way we live,” Solana has told the German weekly Bild am Sonntag in an interview to appear on Sunday, adding “Europe is not at war.”

Of course they’re not. He considers this whole unfortunate Madrid business an accident. Someone grabbed the wrong map, that’s all.
No, really.
The EU has been funding terrorism. Why would terrorists bite the hands that feed them? Ilka Schroeder – 25-year-old member of the European Parliament and former member of the German Green Party;

“The Europeans,” Ilka Schroeder said at Ben-Gurion University, “supported the Palestinian Authority with the aim of becoming its main sponsor, and through this, challenge the U.S. and present themselves as the future global power. Therefore, the Al-Aksa Intifada should be understood as a proxy war between Europe and the United States.”
In an earlier address in New York, she said it is “an open secret within the European Parliament that EU aid to the Palestinian Authority has not been spent correctly. The European Parliament does not intend to verify whether European taxpayers’ money could have been used to finance anti-Semitic murderous attacks.”

P. David Hornik makes these points in the Jan 12, 2004 article;

As for her notion of the Al-Aksa Intifada as a proxy war between Europe and the United States, it’s both compelling and questionable- more compelling in regard to countries like France and Germany, less so in regard to countries like Britain and Spain. It’s easy to adduce other reasons for the EU’s overall willingness to fund anti-Israeli terror, from traditional anti-Semitism (which Schroeder acknowledges as a factor), to the desire to deflect terror from Europe itself and keep it safely to the south, to the desire to appease local European Muslim voting blocs, to the desire to stay in the good graces of oil-rich Arab regimes. What’s clear is that, one way or another, Europe is addicted to Jew-killing; if today, amid its high-flown human rights rhetoric, it no longer engages in it directly, it’s able to do so by proxy, and it’s not about to stop.

No surprise that the EU response to the Spain bombing would be a beaurocratic one. Spain’s “learned her lesson”. No need to worry, now that that’s taken care of.

The measures include appointing a new “coordinator” to oversee the fields involved in the anti- terrorism fight — including police and judicial work, intelligence-sharing and cracking down on extremists’ financing.

Meaning, Solana plans to cut some allowances until these people remember who they’re being paid to bomb.

Thought mad cow was yesterday’s news?

Yesterday, Hunking tried to buy a frame for the $1.57 cheque he received from the Ontario Stockyards for the two cows that weighed about 400 kilograms each when they were sold Feb. 20 at auction for an average price of about 10 cents per kilogram.
…
Levinoff Meat Products Ltd. of Montreal paid $83.05 for Hunking’s two cows, but by the time the $45 trucking cost, $29 commission fee, $2.20 insurance, $5.18 GST and other incidentals were deducted, Hunking’s net from the sale was $1.57.

Certainly, these were cull cows, not fat steers from which steaks and choice cuts are made. But the food products they were turned into will sell for about the same price as they did before BSE. Someone is making some money.

New York Post

While much has been made about intelligence failures in the West, it seems that Saddam’s own senior officials, diplomats and spies offered him such a warped vision of the outside world that warnings went unheeded and the power of France and Russia to prevent the conflict took on mythical proportions.
…
On instructions from Saddam, Lt. Gen. Abed Hamid Hamoud, the head of the presidential office, ordered Naji Sabri, the foreign minister, to contact the French and Russian governments and tell them that Iraq would accept only an “unconditional withdrawal” of U.S. forces.
“Tell them that Iraq is now winning and that the U.S. has sunk in the mud of defeat,” said the letter, written on March 30 – 10 days into the war and less than two weeks before U.S. tanks entered the capital.
The letter was in response to a message the day before from Sabri, who had met the Russian ambassador to Baghdad and reported that Moscow believed “U.S. aggression has no future.”
“The conflict could continue for months, a year or two years,” the Russian envoy is quoted as saying.
…
Some of the intelligence fed back to Baghdad may explain why its analysis was so off the mark. One clumsy drawing from an intelligence officer at the Iraqi Embassy in Syria sent on March 22, two days after the start of the war, showed the location of 20,000 Israeli troops equipped with Patriot surface-to-air missiles allegedly camped in the western desert of Iraq.

Via Kathy Kinsley

Via Andrew Coyne
Federal Liberal appointee among those charged.

The RCMP accused Yves Bourbonnais, formerly of the Immigration and Refugee Board, and 10 others Thursday of forming a “very well structured criminal organization.” “The offences committed in the matter strike at the heart of the administration of justice,” said Staff Sgt. Sergio Pasin, lead investigator during a three-year probe of the activities.
…
The Mounties said the investigation revealed that between 50 and 60 people facing hearings were offered positive judgments from the board in exchange for cash bribes of $8,000 to $15,000 per person.
The people allegedly approached for bribes were from the Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern and Italian communities in Montreal and Ottawa, said RCMP Sgt. Jocelyn Mimeault, a force spokesman.
“Obviously what we’re talking about is corruption.”
He declined to say whether any rigged hearings actually took place.

More background info here

so are the Days Of Their Lies…

In his opening statement to the Commons committee investigating the mess, the defiant former public works minister painted himself as the victim and said that the public accusations and innuendo has all but ended his long political career.
“I feel that I am the one who has paid the greatest price for this scandal so far,” he said. “I have lived up to my part of the bargain. In return, I now learn that I should be considered responsible for a fiasco that was not of my doing.”

[cue violins]

Gagliano was in charge of the department when it funneled millions of dollars to Quebec advertising agencies for little or no work.
As minister, Gagliano said he did everything in his power to fulfill his cabinet obligations. Management was not his responsibility, though. As such, holding him accountable for every department employee is unfair.
“I never had the control or power over my department that would have given me the ability to answer for all that went open with them.”

“I am just a patsy!”

Gagliano acknowledged he met with Guite three or four times per year and had signed off on some seven-figure spending increases without reviewing any documentation.
“I assumed all the paperwork … was in the file,” he said. “I didn’t see it, I didn’t ask for it.”

While his life trickled away waiting for a bone marrow transplant from his long lost brother, his ex-wife secretly plotted to steal the family firm…

In his questions for the former minister, Conservative Party MP Peter MacKay communicated his disbelief.
“You’re telling us today that you were just essentially a finger puppet of your own department, that you had no control over the sponsorship program?” he asked.

Hard to believe, but true. And the story doesn’t end there…. lost and presumed dead for these past two years, in reality, Gagliano was being held captive in a fortress in Denmark.
to be continued…
Andrew Coyne has the Hogan’s Heroes version.

Another scathing Auditor General’s report – this time, national security.

The Office of Critical Infrastructure Protection and Emergency Preparedness — which has a budget of $52 million per year — will come under particularly heavy criticism.
It faced a big test last August 14 when most of Ontario was hit with a power blackout and was found wanting.
For example, OCIPEP lost telephone, electricity and computer services at its own building.

Just great. 52 million bucks a year, and the brain trust at the command center for Emergency Preparedness never thought to pick up a couple of generators.

CTV’s Craig Oliver says unlike the auditor general’s�sponsorship scandal report, which came out February 10 and is still causing political reverberations, no wrongdoing will be suggested.

I see. If Liberal hacks skim off public money that was destined to be pissed away in unnecessary advertising schemes anyway – that’s “wrongdoing”.
But if Liberal negligence and incompetence exposes living breathing Canadians to terrorism, death, destruction and chaos – it’s not?

A New York Post article today The French War For Oil is all about France. Kenneth Timmerman forgot to mention another anti-war country with oil interests in Iraq – Canada.

… the French interest in maintaining Saddam Hussein in power was spelled out in excruciating detail. The price tag: close to $100 billion. That was what French oil companies stood to profit in the first seven years of their exclusive oil arrangements – had Saddam remained in power.
…
Almost as soon as the guns went silent after the first Gulf war in 1991, French oil giants Total SA and Elf Aquitaine – who have now merged and expanded to become TotalFinaElf – sought a competitive advantage over their rivals in Iraq by negotiating exclusive production-sharing contracts with Saddam’s regime that were intended to give them a stranglehold on Iraq’s future oil production for decades to come.
…
The Total contract, a copy of which I obtained, was “very one-sided,” says Hillman. (Hillman, a political economist and a managing partner at Trireme Investments in New York, did a detailed analysis of the contract.) An ordinary production agreement typically grants the foreign partner a maximum of 50 percent of the gross proceeds of the oil produced at the field they develop. But this deal gave Total 75 percent of the total production. “This is highly unusual,” he said. Indeed, it was extortion.
But Saddam willingly agreed: He saw the Total deal, and a similar one with Elf, as the price he had to pay to secure French political support at the United Nations.

What is the Canadian connection ?
Paul Desmarais Sr. His sons, Andr� and Paul Desmarais Jr. are the current co-CEO’s of Power Corporation of Canada, the majority shareholder in France’s TotalFinaElf.
Andr� is married to former PM Jean Chretien’s daughter, France.
Stockwell Day (Alliance) – during Question Period:

“I do not fault the Prime Minister’s family ties with his nephew, our Ambassador to France,” said Day “or with Paul Desmarais Sr. who is the largest individual shareholder of France’s largest corporation, TotalFinaElf, which has billions of dollars of contracts with Saddam’s former regime. With this valuable source of information and experience at his fingertips, has the Prime Minister ever discussed Iraq or France with his family or friends in the Desmarais empire?”

This link lists the prominant Canadian politicians who include PowerCorp on their resume – they include Trudeau, Mulroney – and current Prime Minister Paul Martin.
With the revelations about the UN Oil-for-food kickback scandal finally breaking the surface, and the depth of corruption in the Chretien government emerging via Adscam, the Chirac-TotalFinaElf-PowerCorp-Chretien connections are just hanging there for the picking, like rotten fruit from a tree.
That is, if the anti-American leftists in the Canadian media can bring themselves to face the possibility that Canada’s “principled” position on Iraq was all about oil.