Brian Mason leader of the Alberta NDP comes to the same conclusion I did about the purge of Lyle Oberg...........
"They're now resorting to extreme measures to shut up people who dare to criticize Ralph Klein," said NDP Leader Brian Mason. "This is Stalinesque, and I think that it is the beginning of a reign of terror in the Conservative party.
Half of Florida ends up underwater. So does much of Bangladesh and the Netherlands. Low-lying parts of British Columbia, the Maritimes and Canadian North would also be inundated, say scientists who warn in the journal Science today that the world appears headed for a catastrophic rise in sea level.They say temperatures are rising so fast and polar ice fields are melting so quickly, the planet is on track for inundation and flooding unlike anything seen on Earth for 130,000 years.
Lyle, Trotsky, Oberg dared to say the unspeakable against the Great Leader Joseph Klein err Ralph Stalin.S. P. Kolosov whose final fate is unknown expressed it in an anything but timid letter in 1937: "I am afraid to open my mouth. Whatever you say, if you say the wrong thing, you're an enemy of the people. Cowardice has become the norm."
Within the next 100 years, the growing human influence on earth's climate could lead to a long and irreversible rise in sea levels by eroding Earth's vast polar ice sheets, according to new observations and analysis by several teams of scientists.
One team, using computer models of climate and ice, found that by about 2100, average temperatures could be 4 degrees warmer than today and that over the coming centuries, the world's oceans could rise 13 to 20 feet — conditions last seen 129,000 years ago, between the last two ice ages.
The findings, being reported today in the journal Science, are consistent with other recent studies of melting and erosion at the poles. Many experts say there are still uncertainties about timing, extent and causes.
But Jonathan T. Overpeck of the University of Arizona, a lead author of one of the studies, said the new findings made a strong case for the danger of failing to curb emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases.
"If we don't like the idea of flooding out New Orleans, major portions of South Florida, and many other valued parts of the coastal U.S., we will have to commit soon to a major effort to stop most emissions of carbon to the atmosphere," he said.
Also see Climate Change
New York, October 11, 2005—The editor of a monthly magazine about women's rights went on trial today in Kabul's provincial court on blasphemy charges for publishing articles purported to offend Islam.
Editor Ali Mohaqiq Nasab gets two years in prison for blasphemyReporters Without Borders today called on President Hamid Karzai to intercede after a Kabul court sentenced Ali Mohaqiq Nasab, the editor of the monthly publication Haqoq-e-Zan (Women’s Rights), to two years in prison at the end of a summary trial on blasphemy charges on 22 October.
“A journalist has been given a stiff prison sentence for a press offence in violation of international treaties signed by Afghanistan,” the press freedom organisation said. “It is extremely disturbing to see a man sentenced to prison simply for reprinting articles condemning such archaic practices as stoning and corporal punishments.”
Reporters Without Borders added : “President Karzai must intercede to obtain Nasab’s release and have this miscarriage of justice corrected.”
Nasab was prosecuted for reprinting articles by an Iranian scholar criticising the stoning of Muslims who convert to another religion and the use of corporal punishment for persons accused of such offences as adultery.
Fate of ex-intelligence chief
-The former intelligence chief and deputy prime minister of the communist government, Asadullah Sarwary, was sentenced to death by a court in Kabul 11 days ago. Asadullah Sarwary was arrested in 1992 and spent nearly 14 years in prison without trial and the punishment that was given by the Kabul court was a completely unjust judgment because the court was not able to provide any strong document that shows the involvement of Asadullah Sarwary in killings of people. Only 16 people who missed their relatives during the communist government attended the court and gave testimony that their relatives or family members went missing during the communist government in 1979. In my opinion this was not a good judgment by the Kabul court and they took this decision so quick with out any investigation to prove if claims were true and the court was running like the courts during the Taliban regime where they were making decisions by their own choice. According to the news reports, no defense lawyers were ready to fight Mr Sarwary's case. But these reports were wrong because the defense lawyers were receiving threats from high Jihadi officials in the current government, so therefore Mr Sarwary was defending himself.
It's so sad when the many criminals in high government posts are not being prosecuted - people who destroyed 70% of the capital Kabul and killed more than 70 thousand people just in Kabul from 1992-1996. Every single one of these Jihadi commanders were acting as a king in their area. Looting and killing was done on a daily basis. But now some of them are in the current government and parliament and they are not being prosecuted. People are scared to appeal against them but if the government put these criminals in jail and bring them to justice of course thousands of people will be eyewitnesses of their inhuman crimes. It is clear to everyone that all governments have their opponent. Like the Mujahideen were against the communist government which ran the country from 1979-1992. During this time people killed from both sides and its wrong to stand a former intelligence chief responsible for crimes carried out by others. Mr Sarwary was the intelligence chief for only 6 months and the job of intelligence chief is to investigate not to kill and after investigation if the person was found to be guilty, the intelligence department introduces the case to the ministry of interior and then the ministry of interior takes action against them. Or if any prisoners die in prison that is the responsibility of the Interior Minster and prison commander, not the intelligence chief.
In the vast corrugated-iron shanty town of Cité Soleil, home to quarter of a million people, all the schools are shut down and the one hospital closed. White armoured un personnel carriers patrol the perimeter, half a dozen blue-helmeted heads poking out of the turret, automatic weapons trained on the streets. It is the masked units of the Police Nationale d’Haïti, bolstered by heavily armed irregulars from the officially disbanded Haitian army, who take the lead in the brutal raids into working-class neighbourhoods, but the Mission des Nations Unies pour la Stabilisation en Haïti—minustah—who back them up, blocking off exits as the pnh spread out through the area and the gunfire begins. In the poor districts of Port-au-Prince—La Saline, Bel Air—a 2004 human-rights investigation reported, such raids leave ‘dead bodies in the streets almost daily, including innocent bystanders, women and children, with the un forces visibly acting as support for, rather than a check on, the official violence’. One Québécois police officer attached to the un force complained that all he had done since getting to the island was ‘engage in daily guerrilla warfare’.
Welcome to Kofi Annan’s Haiti. It is two years since the un-backed Multinational Interim Force headed by the us, France and Canada toppled the constitutionally elected Lavalas government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The case for military intervention was based on claims of a possible ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ in the making, and the mandate hurriedly bestowed by the un, as Marines and Légionnaires clomped into the National Palace, was to ‘promote the protection of human rights’. France, Haiti’s former colonial master, had been the moving force behind the invasion. The Bush Administration, bogged down in Iraq, burnt by the failed coup against Chávez in 2002, and counting down to the 2004 election, was chary of another military engagement. Chirac and Villepin, keen to ingratiate themselves after the contretemps over Operation Iraqi Freedom, offered a bespoke package: unsc backing for a multilateral invasion force with guaranteed withdrawal in three months, to be replaced by a broader un mission. Chirac’s advisers, searching for a formula with which to discount Aristide’s claim that Paris should repay the millions it had once extorted from Haiti, had suggested that the bicentenary of the demi-island’s 1804 independence offered France the opportunity to ‘shed the weight which servitude imposes on the master’. It was a burden eagerly shouldered by Lula’s Brazil, Lagos’s Chile, Kirchner’s Argentina and others as, from June 2004, they replaced the initial France–us–Canada force in order to assist the ‘peaceful and constitutional political process’.
Officially, the turning-point for the campaign against Aristide was supposed to come with the May 2000 legislative elections: minor irregularities were alleged in the tallying of votes for the lower-order parties, which might have averted some second-round run-offs, though these would have had scant impact on the overall outcome. But Deibert’s narrative, broadly chronological from 2000 on, inadvertently lets a cat out of the bag: Convergence Démocratique, the alliance of rich businessmen, Duvalierists, opl and ex-Lavalas supporters that would henceforth coordinate the campaign for us intervention against Aristide, had denounced the election results even before the count began. It was not vote-tallying anomalies, but the clear prospect that Aristide and his supporters would legitimately sweep both the legislative and the presidential elections that year, and thus be in a position to implement even the minute redistribution of wealth implied in Aristide’s meek promise to ‘lift people out of absolute misery into poverty with dignity’, that was the motivating factor.
A very multilateral coup. Franco-American harmony and unanimous blessings from the Security Council for the overthrow of a constitutional government and crushing of popular hope, in the Western hemisphere's poorest nation-state.
Globalization comes to Haiti
Predictably, the imf cure for Haiti’s desperate poverty involved further reductions in wages that had already sunk to starvation levels, privatization of the state sector, reorientation of domestic production in favour of cash crops popular in North American supermarkets and the elimination of import tariffs. It was the last of these, easiest to implement, that had the most immediate impact. With the tariff on rice cut from 50 per cent to the imf-decreed 3 per cent, Haiti—previously self-sufficient in the crop—was flooded with subsidized American grain, and rice imports rose from just 7,000 tonnes in 1985 to 220,000 tonnes in 2002. Domestic rice production has all but disappeared. A similar sequence eliminated Haiti’s poultry sector, at the cost of around 10,000 jobs. Haitian farmers tend to associate these developments with the most bitterly resented of all the international community’s many aggressive interventions in their domestic economy—the 1982 extermination, to allay the fears of American importers concerned by an outbreak of swine fever, of Haiti’s entire native pig population, and their subsequent replacement with animals from Iowa that required living conditions rather better than those enjoyed by most of the island’s human population.
As a result of these and related economic ‘reforms’, agricultural production fell from around 50 per cent of gdp in the late 1970s to just 25 per cent in the late 1990s. Structural adjustment was supposed to compensate for agrarian collapse with an expansion of the light manufacturing and assembly sector. The lowest wages in the hemisphere, backed by a virtual ban on trade unions, had encouraged mainly American companies or contractors to employ around 60,000 people in this sector in the late 1970s, and through to the mid-90s companies like Kmart and Walt Disney continued to pay Haitians around 11 cents an hour to make pyjamas and T-shirts. The companies benefit from tax exemptions lasting for up to 15 years, are free to repatriate all profits and obliged to make only minimal investments in equipment and infrastructure. By 1999, Haitians fortunate enough to work in the country’s small manufacturing and assembly sector were earning wages estimated at less than 20 per cent of 1981 levels. Nevertheless, still more dramatic rates of exploitation encouraged many of these companies to relocate to places like China and Bangladesh, and only around 20,000 people were still employed in the Port-au-Prince sweatshops by the end of the millennium. Real gdp per capita in 1999–2000 was estimated to be ‘substantially below’ the 1990 level.
It would be wrong to think that these reforms were implemented with anything approaching Third Way zeal. On the contrary, the Lavalas government was continually criticized for its ‘lack of vigour’ by international financial institutions: ‘Policies imposed as conditions by international lenders have been at best half-heartedly supported by the domestic authorities, and at worst violently rejected by the public’ With its back to the wall, Lavalas resorted to what James Scott has famously dubbed the ‘weapons of the weak’: a mixture of prevarication and evasive non-cooperation. This proved partially successful as a way of deflecting at least one of the main blows of structural adjustment, the privatization of Haiti’s few remaining public assets. Lavalas had good reason to drag its feet. When the state-run sugar mill was privatized in 1987, for example, it was bought by a single family who promptly closed it, laid off its staff and began importing cheaper sugar from the us so as to sell it on at prices that undercut the domestic market. Once the world’s most profitable sugar exporter, by 1995 Haiti was importing 25,000 tons of American sugar and most peasants could no longer afford to buy it. By contrast, in September 1995 Aristide dismissed his prime minister for preparing to sell the state-owned flour and cement mills without insisting on any of the progressive terms the imf had promised to honour—opening the sale to middle-class and diaspora participation, and ensuring that some of the money it earned was to go towards literacy, education and compensation for victims of the 1991 coup. Aristide could only delay the process for two years, however. In 1997 the flour mill was duly sold for just $9 million, at a time when its yearly profits were estimated at around $25 million per year.
The Lavalas government never yielded, however, to us pressure to privatize Haiti’s public utilities. At the same time, and with drastically limited resources, it oversaw the creation of more schools than in all the previous 190 years. It printed millions of literacy booklets and established hundreds of literacy centres, offering classes to more than 300,000 people; between 1990 and 2002 illiteracy fell from 61 to 48 per cent. With Cuban assistance, a new medical school was built and the rate of hiv infection—a legacy from the sex tourism industry of the 1970s and 80s—was frozen, with clinics and training programmes opened as part of a growing public campaign against aids. Significant steps were taken to limit the widespread exploitation of children. Aristide’s government increased tax contributions from the elite, and in 2003 it announced the doubling of a desperately inadequate minimum wage.
I received the following just a while ago from one of my contacts in the government. It's the transcript of Stephen Harper's comments that preceded his speech on accountibility. The original speech on accountibility (prepared before the hostages were released)... Stephen Taylor - Conservative Party of Canada Pundit
RCMP, Canadian military involved?
Straw said the military operation that led to the release of the hostages occurred after "weeks and weeks" of careful preparation and involved military and civilian personnel, including the RCMP.
"The operation included representatives from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, other agencies from Canada – and they did a terrific job – as well as the Americans and British staff and those from Iraq," said Straw.
