Now Do You Know Why We Shoot Them?
Now is the time at SDA when we told you so!
White City, SK – 2005 – A Saskatchewan town has asked hunters for help amid reports that unusually aggressive coyotes bit at a small girl’s pants and carried off a pet.
Cape Breton Highlands National Park – 2009 – “Taylor Mitchell, an up-and-coming singer-songwriter from Toronto, died this morning after she was attacked by two coyotes while hiking….
When the White City incidents occurred, we know nothing prairie bumpkins were treated to media-borne fingerwagging lectures about no-kill strategies from a Toronto Humane Society “coyote management expert”. (I will continue to search for his name).
I trust he’s had the good sense today to keep his trap firmly shut.
In The Immortal Words Of Tasnim Aslam*
“Anyone who describes Islam as a religion as intolerant encourages violence“.
Two Chicago men have been charged in what officials said was a plot to attack employees of a Danish newspaper that in 2005 published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that offended many Muslims, according to criminal complaints unsealed Tuesday in federal court in Chicago.
The most serious charges, conspiracy to murder and maim in a foreign country, were filed against David Coleman Headley, who was born in the United States, lived in Pakistan and now resides in Chicago.
The federal authorities said Mr. Headley told agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation that he had initially targeted a building occupied by the Danish newspaper, Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten in Copenhagen, but later proposed killing the paper’s cartoonist and cultural editor instead.
The arrests were the latest in what federal officials acknowledged was a surprising surge of unrelated terrorism arrests in recent weeks, highlighted by last month’s indictment of Najibullah Zazi, a Denver airport shuttle bus driver who has been accused of conspiring to detonate improvised explosives in an attack against an undetermined target, possibly in New York.
The officials offered no specific reason for the increased arrests, though they said some cases involved young men in the United States inspired to militancy by fiery religious appeals on the Internet and in other media outlets rather than by direct contact with terrorist groups.
In contrast, Mr. Headley, 49, who changed his name from Daood Gilani in 2006, and another man, Tahawwur Hussain Rana, 48, are older with seemingly more substantial ties to their communities. Mr. Rana is a businessman who was born in Pakistan and is now a Canadian citizen living legally in Chicago.
Mr. Rana, who is accused of providing material support to terrorism, has known Mr. Headley since they attended the same military school in the Pakistani town of Hasan Abdal, federal officials said. Mr. Rana is accused of using a travel agency to help Mr. Headley arrange visits to Pakistan and two trips this year to Denmark.
h/t Robert W.
*
The Sound Of Settled Science
Official NOAA Climate Station of Record, Fillmore, Utah.
News Anchor Jeopardy
They are smart. It’s the button that got stupid.
Where’s John Bolton* When He’s Really Needed?
The United Nations has assigned an official, “a special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing,” to check the city’s affordable housing. The rapporteur, Raquel Rolnik, is to tour [New York City] for the next three days with housing advocates and city officials to “hear the voices of those who are suffering on the ground,”
Bonus Trivia: Raquel Rolnik is from Sao Paulo, Brazil.
*
Reader Tips
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite
Radio. Tonight, for your delectation, here are Stéphane Grappelli
and Yehudi Menuhin performing Tango Tzigane Jalousie ¤
(3:54), by the Danish composer Jacob Thune Hansen Gade.
Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.
Barbara Frum Would Have Been Proud
About That Jeh Custer
(click image)
Another sustainability activist saving the planet through intercontinental jet travel.
h/t Stephen J.
Ontario: Not Have-Not Enough!
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
CBC – Ontario to hit record $14.1B deficit in 2009
Lorrie Goldstein – [McGuinty] is using taxpayers’ money to massively subsidize wind — paying 13.5 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity generated from wind turbines (19 cents for offshore projects) compared to the normal cost of generation of four to five cents. […] The province has been flooded with so many applications for offshore wind farms that Natural Resources Minister Donna Cansfield announced last week it won’t consider any more until next year, just so it can catch up on the paperwork.
Update: National Post – “Ontario deficit to hit $25-billion”
Trouble In Hopeychangeyland
“…even the promise of free pizza can’t lure faithful Democrats to a rally.”
Y2Kyoto: Canada, We Can Do Better
Australia? Where the average daily temperature is “room”???
Not Watching For The Asteroid
A funny thing happened on the way to insulting the audience….
Standing Committee Review Of Sec.13
“Look who took time off work!” and more – just keep scrolling. My God, that man must type fast.
For a summarized version, see Miss Marprelate’s event blog.
Youtube videos of Lynch and other testimony, courtesy Mississauga Matt.
Drop any related links or reports you may have in the comments.
Reader Tips
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite
Radio. Tonight, for your delectation & courtesy of LNR listener
Exetaz’s mail, here are Harry James and his Orchestra performing
A Taste of Honey ¤ on the Ed Sullivan Show, in 1966 (2:46).
Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.
Going, Going…
Blaming the failed auto industry is easy;
On the auction block in Detroit: almost 9,000 homes and lots in various states of abandonment and decay from the tidy owner-occupied to the burned-out shell claimed by squatters.
Taken together, the properties seized by tax collectors for arrears and put up for sale last week represented an area the size of New York’s Central Park. Total vacant land in Detroit now occupies an area almost the size of Boston, according to a Detroit Free Press estimate.
The tax foreclosure auction by Wayne County authorities also stood as one of the most ambitious one-stop attempts to sell off urban property since the real-estate market collapse. Despite a minimum bid of $500, less than a fifth of the Detroit land was sold after four days. The unsold parcels add to an expanding ghost town within the once-vibrant town known worldwide as the Motor City.
But you know, lots of cities manage to function without an auto industry.
Many potential homeowners that Detroit desperately needs said they felt penalized by the auction process. They mostly found themselves outbid by deeper-pocketed investors from California and New York who were in a race to claim the auction book’s relatively few livable properties. Dozens of potential bidders, mostly local residents, were turned away on the first day of the auction by deputies after they failed to meet the morning deadline for registration.
[…]
Schumack, who runs a community garden near her home that employs 14 neighborhood children, said she had been battling through a maze of bureaucracy for years to try to buy an abandoned lot nearby to expand and plant fruit trees. She learned the lot had been taken back from its previous owner — an absentee investor with more than 100 abandoned lots in Brightmoor — only because of her constant calls to city and county officials, she said.
When officials told her she would have to wait for a fourth day to bid on the property, Schumack broke down into tears.
How come nobody ever notices that?
h/t Ed S.
The poppy
I’ve always found it surprising that the impetus to maintain the poppy as an annual symbol of remembrance came from an American woman and a French woman, inspired by the poetry of a Canadian man:
The adoption of the poppy as a symbol of remembrance has international origins. The first person to use it this way was Moina Michael, a member of the staff of the American Overseas YMCA in the last year of the war. Michael read McCrae’s poem and was so moved that she composed one of her own in response. She recalled later: “In a high moment of white resolve, I pledged to keep the faith and always to wear a red poppy of Flanders Fields as a sign of remembrance and the emblem of ‘keeping the faith with all who died.'”
Consequently, she led a successful campaign to have the American Legion recognize the poppy as the official symbol of remembrance in April 1920. At the same time, Madame Anne Guerin, of France, inspired both by McCrae’s poem and by Moina Michael’s example, also became a vigorous advocate of the poppy as the symbol of remembrance for war dead. Her own organization, the American and French Children’s League, sold cloth copies of the flower to help raise money to re-establish war-devastated areas in Europe.
In 1921, Guerin travelled to Britain and Canada on behalf of the poppy and convinced both the recently formed British Legion and the Canadian Great War Veterans Association (a predecessor of the Canadian Legion) to adopt the poppy as their symbol of remembrance as well. The first ‘Poppy Day’ in both countries occurred on 11 November 1921. The Returned Soldiers League in Australia adopted the poppy as its symbol of remembrance the same year.
More trivia about the poppy – including how and when to wear it, as well as the key difference between wearing a poppy and “supporting the troops” – can be found at The Torch.
“due to a lack of long-term funding commitment from governments”
An “independent” think tank closes its doors.
“It is with sadness that I must announce that after 15 years of quality public policy research, Canadian Policy Research Networks [CPRN] is no longer financially viable and will cease operations,” announced Dr. Sharon Manson Singer, President of CPRN.
Among the CPRN policy research areas now left orphan: “Diversity”, “Labour Market / Vulnerable Workers”, “Social Protection”.
You’d think all those “our values are Canadian values” folks would have stepped forward with their chequebooks before now, what with them vastly outnumbering us knuckledraggers and all.
Update. This is just plain cruelty.
We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans
Saskatchewan is sitting on a massive energy source that could fuel our vehicles and power our homes and businesses for centuries to come, without contaminating the environment with harmful emissions, including greenhouse gases.
[…]
Cruickshank, NuCoal’s president and CEO, and Burns, its managing director, are proposing to a build coal gasification plant that will turn 6,000 tonnes of coal a day into 150,000 barrels of gasoline a day for about $650 million.
If you think that sounds ambitious, they plan to build 10 such plants, turning 60,000 tonnes of coal a day into 150,000 barrels of gasoline per day, for a cool $6.5 billion.
h/t Eric A.
Good catch by Atlantic Jim in the comments – “Good to see that the editors were wide awake on this one. 6000 tonnes for 150,000 barrels a day or 60,000 tonnes for 150,000 barrels a day?”
Not Waiting For The Asteroid
“The first double-digit circulation decline in history means only 12.9% of the U.S. population buys a daily newspaper.”