Harper vows to end CWB monopoly
National caucus chairman Rahim Jaffer defended the action, saying that spouses and children accompanying many of the 125 MPs and 24 senators may be intimidated by the reporters and cameras.
If he was so interested why wasn't he there?"I think there's definitely been a will inside caucus to explore the tax-cutting side. I think that's something we've been discussing, especially leading into this summer caucus," said Rahim Jaffer, chair of the parliamentary caucus.
"I know the minister of finance was particularly interested to hear what caucus was thinking on those particular issues ..." he told reporters.
Finance Minister Jim Flaherty was not at the meeting.
The U.S. Government has decided to do this; US drops Baghdad electricity reports
An Iraqi power plant rebuilt with tens of millions of U.S. dollars fell into disrepair once transferred to the Baghdad government, according to the U.S. office that tracks reconstruction spending.The Iraqis' failure to maintain the 320-megawatt Dora plant, considered an important source of power for electricity-starved Baghdad, is just one of the issues hindering attempts to rebuild the country, the latest audit report to Congress concludes.
See:The Bush administration has shown little progress - and in some cases backtracked - on its pledge to do a better job in awarding contracts to small, Gulf Coast businesses for Hurricane Katrina work, a congressional analysis shows.
The review of federal contracts from five government agencies, conducted by the House Small Business Committee, is the latest to document missteps in the award of billions of dollars of lucrative government work since the 2005 storm.
Laser printers could pose health risk: study
One of the printers released so much dust that it as at a rate comparable to emissions from cigarette smoking.
An octopus with ears like an elephant? Scallops that hang like bats? Yup, they're real and they live off the East Coast.
The creatures were found after Canadian marine scientists fitted the coast guard ship Hudson with Canada's most powerful deep-sea diving robot, and sent it to explore water too deep for humans.
The octopus was spotted on the second dive at 2,500 metres. When the robot got close enough, the researchers could see the metre-long octopus had fins near its eyes.
"It looks like Dumbo the elephant," Kenchington said, showing off some of the more than 3,000 digital images, hundreds of hours of videos and dozens of live samples taken during the research trip.
It was a creature that had never been seen in the Atlantic before, but Kenchington later found out one had been spotted in the Pacific Ocean.
The robot picked up images of many other creatures, including orange scallops hanging from underwater cliffs, and yellow and pink bubblegum-coloured coral.
More than half of the dives were below the 1,000-metre threshold, and they discovered "at least a dozen" species not previously found in Canadian waters. Particularly striking, she said, was the discovery of a type of bubblegum coral far from the nearest known colony of that species. The largest sea-floor invertebrate, bubblegum coral can live hundreds of years and grow at least a metre off of the bottom.
"How did it get there?" Dr. Kenchington mused. "How are they connected to the nearest neighbours, which are hundreds of miles away?"
SEE:
Fisher-Price recalls almost one million toys
Toy-maker Fisher-Price is recalling 83 types of toys — including the popular Big Bird, Elmo, Dora and Diego characters — because their paint contains excessive amounts of lead.
The worldwide recall being announced Thursday involves 967,000 plastic preschool toys made by a Chinese vendor and sold in the United States between May and August. It is the latest in a wave of recalls that has heightened global concern about the safety of Chinese-made products.
The recall is the first for Fisher-Price Inc. and parent company Mattel Inc. involving lead paint. It is the largest for Mattel since 1998 when Fisher-Price had to yank about 10 million Power Wheels from toy stores.
Chinese authorities are now daily rounding up companies suspected of faulty products. The safety crackdown on domestic producers has been accompanied by a public relations campaign aimed at international traders.
"The Chinese government pays great attention to addressing flaws in product quality, especially the quality of food products," Li Changjiang, minister in charge of the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, said at a specially convened press conference.
The government's acknowledgement of existing problems makes a remarkable departure for a bureaucratic system prone to cover-ups.
When a pet-food ingredient produced in China was linked to the deaths of cats and dogs in North America in April, Beijing's first reaction was to deny it. "The poisoning of American pets has nothing to do with China," claimed a report in the Communist Party's flagship newspaper, the People's Daily.
Export-control officials argued that food contamination occurred both within the United States and with US exports to China. "No food-inspection system is foolproof," Li Yuanping, director general of the Import and Export Food Safety Bureau, countered at the time.
But international worries about China's exports have continued to mount with more and more reports about substandard and fake products coming to light. Since April, a slew of exports - including toothpaste, tires, seafood and toys - have been recalled or rejected around the world. What is worse, mislabeled drug ingredients in Chinese exports have been blamed for killing and injuring people in Panama and Haiti.
As a result, China has come under political pressure from the US and the European Union, where politicians are demanding assurances about the quality and safety of Chinese exports.
The decline in New York City's violent crime rate can be tied into the theory of a Fairfax, Va. economist, who believes lead poisoning accounts for most of the violent crime in the United States, according to an article in today's Washington Post.
Economist Rick Nevin has argued in a series of papers that the "New York miracle" was caused by local and federal efforts decades earlier to reduce exposure to lead poisoning.
Nevin has spent more than a decade researching and writing about the relationship between early childhood lead exposure and criminal behavior later in life. His theory offers a unifying new neurochemical explanation for fluctuations in the crime rate.
"It is stunning how strong the association is," Nevin told the Washington Post. "Sixty-five to ninety percent or more of the substantial variation in violent crime in all these countries was explained by lead."
Mulroney was selected as the worst prime minister for 21 per cent of respondents, followed by Chrétien with 17 per cent, Harper and Trudeau with 14 per cent each, Campbell and Martin with eight per cent each, Clark with four per cent, and John Turner with two per cent.The Greatest Canadian of course was Tommy Douglas.
So much for success on the BBQ circuit.
Of course when you do this don't expect to get any respect.Fewer Canadians are satisfied with their prime minister, according to a poll by Angus Reid Strategies. 29 per cent of respondents approve of Stephen Harper’s performance, and 28 per cent say their opinion of the head of government worsened over the past month.
Do you approve or disapprove of Stephen Harper’s performance as prime minister?
Jul. 16
Jun. 16
May 23
Approve
29%
31%
33%
Disapprove
47%
47%
47%
Not sure
23%
23%
20%
Journalists booted from Tory retreat
Political stalemate continues, latest poll showsWright said the government should rethink its strategy of tightly controlling its message, agenda, and delivery, which is almost exclusively done by Prime Minister Harper, who has been widely criticized for running a one-man show.
“It will really take the prime minister to decide whether he is going to stick by this style of leadership or if he is going to try something different,” said Wright.
