#1 — BBC | Thousands freed from Channel Tunnel after trains fail
More than 2,000 people spent hours trapped inside the Channel Tunnel after four Eurostar trains broke down due to cold weather.
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#2 — CNN | Wintry storm causing havoc, churning toward Northeast
(CNN) — Virginia’s governor declared a state of emergency Friday as a winter storm expected to pummel the East Coast this weekend began dumping snow in Virginia and North Carolina.
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#3 — Fox | Moment of Truth for Health Care in Senate After Deadline Bargaining
WASHINGTON – Senate Democrats appear within reach of the 60 votes necessary to pass President Barack Obama’s health care legislation after a long year of struggle and a final burst of deadline bargaining with holdout Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska.
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#4 — NY Times | Iraq Says Iran Occupied a Border Oil Field
BAGHDAD — The Iraqi government said Friday that Iranian troops had crossed the border and occupied a portion of an oil field situated on disputed land between the two countries, but Iranian officials immediately and vehemently contested the account.
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#5 — Times | Three-day strike at BA looming after union vows to reopen ballot
British Airways faces the prospect of a three-day strike in the new year after the union representing cabin crew told the company that it was to reopen a ballot of its members.
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#6 — Times | Scientists spot tantalising clues to mystery of dark matter
Tantalising hints of dark matter — the mysterious substance thought to make up a quarter of the Universe — have been picked up for the first time, in an American laboratory buried half a mile underground.
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#7 — Times | Neo-Nazis suspected of raid on Auschwitz ‘to rewrite history’
The slickly organised theft of one of the most potent symbols of the Holocaust sent a wave of outrage around the world yesterday.
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#8 — Times | Pakistani corruption court stops ministers leaving country
President Zardari’s shaky Government was thrown into disarray yesterday after a Pakistani anti-corruption court renewed charges against scores of senior officials.
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#9 — Times | Jacques Chirac faces new financial inquiry over time as Mayor of Paris
Jacques Chirac was placed under formal investigation on suspicion of using Paris City Hall funds to pay for staff at his political party when he was Mayor of the capital yesterday.
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#10 — Telegraph | Brazil needle boy: operation successful
Surgeons in Brazil have successfully removed four of the 20 metal sewing needles allegedly embedded inside the body of a toddler by his step-father in a series of bizarre rituals.
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Sometimes common sense prevails as ‘Unilingual Pakenham, Ontario postmistress to keep job – for now.’
Canada Post announced late Friday that it will not replace Jeanne Barr at the beginning of January after all and try to clarify whether staff in its smaller, rural operations have to be bilingual.
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/life/Unilingual+Pakenham+postmistress+keep/2333028/story.html
Liberals under Truedough started this whole language mess which continues to this day.
Time to end it.
The government of Canada spends more than a billion dollars each year on “official languages” and that’s not counting things that don’t show up… costs of compliance which are pushed onto other departments… and the net result for all of this investment is nothing more than an institutionalized program of dumbing down of the bureaucracy as higher qualified unilingual candidates are passed over for less qualified bilingual ones.
Personally, I don’t have a problem with providing services in both official languages. That does not mean, however, that every federal employee needs to be bilingual.