Jack's Newswatch

I just came across this story and there is much in the western media concerning “robes and hiding” by Muslim women this day.

“A brave Saudi housewife has reached the final of the Arabic version of the X Factor after lashing out at hardline Muslim clerics on live TV.

Wearing a black burkha, mother-of-four Hissa Hilal delivered a blistering poem against Muslim preachers ‘who sit in the position of power’ but are ‘frightening’ people with their fatwas, or religious edicts, and ‘preying like a wolf’ on those seeking peace.

Her poem got loud cheers from the audience last week and won her a place in the competition’s final on April 7.

It also brought her death threats, posted on several Islamic militant websites.”

It seems to me that even here in Canada muslim women are in deep trouble if they go against the rabid Islamic movement they follow and in some cases they can and will be murdered for trying to adjust to their new way of life. A life of equality.

So I am “betwixt and between” on the issue of burkhas and niqabs. On the one hand I understand the western point of view and perhaps we should follow the example of Belgium and free them all. On the other hand, if we do we may be pronouncing their death sentence.  I don’t know but I suspect these women hide behind their robes as a means of survival in a very dangerous Muslim world and if so we need to look closely at this situation as we put their safety first and rethink everything we are doing.

Perhaps we should only accept Muslim women and children?

No men allowed.

It’s just a thought.

Popularity: 3% [?]

President Barack Obama faced a backlash from angry environmentalists after announcing he was opening up huge areas of American waters to oil and gas drilling.

The policy was welcomed by cries of “drill, baby, drill” from Republicans repeating a slogan from their 2008 election campaign. Their leaders on Capitol Hill claimed credit for encouraging the move and said they were ready to work with Mr Obama.

Exploration could lead to new oil and natural gas platforms in waters along the southern Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and part of Alaska. Proposed contracts in Alaska’s Bristol Bay, however, were cancelled over environmental concerns.

Drilling could take place as close as 125 miles from Florida. It is already occurring in western and central areas in the Gulf of Mexico.

“This is not a decision that I’ve made lightly,” Mr Obama said in anticipation of the outcry from environmentalists, stressing that it would be done “in ways that balance the need to harness domestic energy resources and the need to protect America’s natural resources”.

Brendan Cummings, senior counsel at the Center for Biological Diversity said that the announcement was “all too typical of what we have seen so far from President Obama – promises of change, a year of ‘deliberation,’ and ultimately, adoption of flawed and outdated Bush policies as his own”.

He added: “Rather than bring about the change we need, this plan will further our national addiction to oil and contribute to global warming, while at the same time directly despoiling the habitat of polar bears, endangered whales, and other imperilled wildlife.”

[More]

Related:

Analysis: Barack Obama’s oil drilling bargaining chip

Notes:

Is there anything Sarah Palin can’t do?

Popularity: 7% [?]

Canada

#1 — CBC | Skyservice charter airline goes under

The Skyservice charter airline filed for receivership and shut down its operations Wednesday.

[...]

#2 — CBC | First Nations University has uncertain future

The federal government announced Wednesday financial help to allow students of a beleaguered aboriginal university in Saskatchewan to finish their academic year, but future funding for the institution will depend on its ability to reform.

[...]

#3 — Globe | Ontario foot-dragging imperils Canada-EU trade pact, officials say

As a proposed large-scale free-trade and economic-integration pact between Canada and the 27 European Union countries enters a crucial stage of negotiations, Canadian and European officials say the deal’s biggest obstacle is the province of Ontario.

[...]

#4 — Globe | Remove the veil for mugshots or face further charges: police

Police forces in different parts of the country say charges will be laid against anyone who refuses to remove religious face-coverings such as Muslim niqabs when being booked after an arrest.

[...]

#5 — NP | FBI says Canadian behind online cancer drug scam

EDMONTON – The FBI believes an Edmonton man is behind an international online scam to sell counterfeit cancer drugs to dozens of desperate patients around the world.

[...]

#6 — NP | Senators call for changes to rights act

Senator Doug Finley led a call yesterday to scrap a section of Canada’s Human Rights Act that he and other Conservative senators say is being used to stifle free speech in Canada.

[...]

CH | No laughing matter

#7 — NP | Guergis wobbly after new misstep

The ministerial disaster they call Helena Guergis has attracted more controversy, this time having a local paper discover the junior minister’s executive assistant masquerading as a fawning letter-to-the-editor writer.

[...]

#8 — CH | Canada rejects idea of building new isotope reactor

OTTAWA — The federal government will not build a medical-isotope reactor to replace the Chalk River, Ont., facility that has been shut down since last spring.

[...]

World

#9 — Fox | Texas Town on High Alert

Residents of a small Mexican border town under siege by at least one of the country’s most notorious drug cartels are fleeing into a tiny Texas community, which is on high alert and preparing for a surge of illegal immigrants should a street battle break out with another cartel – or if gunmen begin carrying out a threat to start killing the town’s children.

[...]

#10 — LFP | Research: Tuna eat fish that eat plastic

If mercury levels are enough for you to question your tuna sandwich, the amount of plastic these fish might be consuming could turn you off your lunch for good.

[...]

#11 — Newsmax | Obamacare Sparks Death Threats Against IRS Agents

Radical anti-government, anti-tax protestors have lit up private message boards and e-mail lists with violent calls to action against IRS workers in response to the healthcare law, according to Fox News.

[...]

#12 — Newsmax | Forecasters at Odds about Warming Threat

Is climate change a serious threat to humanity or a scam trumped up by agenda-minded activists?

[...]

#13 — Telegraph | Belgium could be first country to ban the burka

Belgium is on course to become the first European country to ban the burka after a parliamentary committee backed proposals to make it illegal on the grounds of national security and women’s rights.

[...]

#14 — Times | ‘Hubble Bubble’ tower will be icon of Olympic legacy

Taller than Big Ben and resembling a curved and twisted Eiffel Tower, London’s most striking Olympic legacy was introduced today.

[...]

Notes: You have to see this monstrosity.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Pirate attacks off Somalia’s coast are close to returning to the record levels seen last year as attackers adapt to the international naval presence by striking further offshore and using more violence.

A surge of attacks in the past week has included the hijacking of the MV Frigia, a Maltese-flagged dry bulk carrier, 1,500 miles off Somalia’s coast – the longest-range operation that pirates have ever successfully mounted.

This incident was among five successful hijackings and 19 attacks off Somalia this month, according to the International Maritime Bureau. This compares with 32 attacks and five hijackings in March last year, when the piracy epidemic was close to its height.

The recent surge has disappointed observers, who had hoped that the naval presence off Somalia – particularly in the Gulf of Aden leading to the Red Sea – would begin to deter piracy. In January and February, there were only eight attacks and two hijackings, compared with 29 and four in the first two months of last year.

[More]

Popularity: 2% [?]

A far-Right party has emerged as a key winner in the Italian elections marking a continuing trend of support for Right wing parties across Europe.

The Northern League, an anti immigration party, which has now become pivotal in Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s ruling coalition, has seen it’s support more than double in the last five years.

Led by firebrand Umberto Bossi, who once called for the Italian navy to shell boats carrying illegal immigrants towards the country, his victory mirrors those recently by far right parties in Hungary, Holland and France.

In the last regional elections held in 2005 the League secured just 5.7 per cent of the vote but in subsequent polls they have seen their popularity grow and this time it was 12.7 per cent.

James Walston, a political commentator at the American University of Rome, said: “The League has done very well and they will be flexing their muscles for the remaining three years of government.

“They will push for further devolution and immigration and race will also be on top of their agenda and these two are issues which are of concern to many Italians.

“The League is very well organised and they have succeeded in taking a lot of the working class vote from the Communists and Democratic Left and they also appear to have taken votes from Berlusconi’s own party.”

[More]

Popularity: 4% [?]

Lawrence Cannon will be relieved that the G8 foreign ministers meeting has wrapped up and Hillary Clinton is back in Washington haranguing Bill. For the past two days, the Foreign Minister has worn the look of a man hosting a dinner party for his boss.

As was once said of Margaret Thatcher, Mrs, Clinton is democratic enough to talk down to anyone — and presumptuous enough to criticize her host for organizing an Arctic conference that didn’t include all countries in the region.

She told CTV that she wasn’t happy about Canadian troops pulling out of Afghanistan, and compounded Mr. Cannon’s misery at the closing press conference yesterday by contradicting the Conservative government’s policy on maternal health in the Third World, by saying any discussion had to address issues about abortion. It was clear to everyone by this time that Mr. Cannon was being smacked with the full weight of the Secretary of State’s purse.

The U.S. has not, by all accounts, formally asked Canada to keep its troops in Afghanistan post-2011, but it has made clear its displeasure at what some Americans see as Canada deserting the battlefield. As Charles Ritchie, the storied Canadian diplomat once noted, the Americans never listen — “the phrase ‘consulting with allies’ is apt to mean, in U.S. terms, briefing allies, lecturing allies and sometimes pressuring allies.”

Still, if we accept that the main business of Canadian foreign policy is maintaining good relations with the U.S. while preserving our self-respect, how do we retrieve the situation?

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Popularity: 6% [?]

The late, splendid Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once famously asserted, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.” The senator was wrong. (Of course, for those of us who still believe that objectivity is objective, a fact is still a fact, though the heavens may fall.)

The key word here is “entitled.” In today’s entitlement-crazy Washington, not only do folks believe that about half the country is entitled to other people’s money and health insurance policies, they feel they are entitled to their own facts to support their claim to their own entitlement to other people’s money and health insurance policies.

Not only that, they believe they are entitled to their own facts to describe the character and conduct of their political opponents. The Democratic Party collectively smeared scores of millions of American Tea Party participants as racist, homophobic, violent terrorists in the absence of a single verified fact in support of even one such incident being attributable to a single individual. Nor did their media pals even bother with the word “alleged.”

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Popularity: 2% [?]

The leader of a Michigan militia group charged this week with conspiring to kill law-enforcement officers was described Tuesday as a private, family-oriented man who nurtured a festering mistrust of governmental authority, according to people close to the family.

“On the inside of this man’s brain, something evil lurks, and until you get to know him, you don’t know it,” said Andrea Harsh, who was engaged to David Brian Stone Sr. until the couple broke up last year.

She described Mr. Stone, a trim 45-year-old man who wears his whitish hair cropped short over spectacles and a bushy gray mustache, as having a “bubbly personality.” But he became consumed by the Hutaree, she said, a southeastern Michigan militia group that described its members as “Christian warriors.”

In an indictment Monday, federal authorities named Mr. Stone as leader of the Hutaree and accused him and eight members with plotting to spark an uprising against the U.S. government by killing police. Along with Mr. Stone, seven other men and one woman from Michigan, Ohio and Indiana are in being held without bond on weapons and sedition charges.

The indictment said Hutaree had practiced attacks and other military maneuvers for more than a year, and had planned to kill a law-enforcement officer, then use homemade bombs to attack officers who attended the funeral.

[More]

Related:

Feds: Christian militia needed to be ‘taken down’

Popularity: 2% [?]

LONDON — The first of several British investigations into the e-mails leaked from one of the world’s leading climate research centers has largely vindicated the scientists involved.

The House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee said Wednesday that they’d seen no evidence to support charges that the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit or its director, Phil Jones, had tampered with data or perverted the peer review process to exaggerate the threat of global warming — two of the most serious criticisms levied against the climatologist and his colleagues.

In their report, the committee said that, as far as it was able to ascertain, “the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact,” adding that nothing in the more than 1,000 stolen e-mails, or the controversy kicked up by their publication, challenged scientific consensus that “global warming is happening and that it is induced by human activity.”

The 14-member committee’s investigation is one of three launched after the dissemination, in November, of e-mails and data stolen from the research unit. The e-mails appeared to show scientists berating skeptics in sometimes intensely personal attacks, discussing ways to shield their data from public records laws, and discussing ways to keep skeptics’ research out of peer-reviewed journals. One that attracted particular media attention was Jones’ reference to a “trick” that could be used to “hide the decline” of temperatures.

[More]

See Also:

NASA Data Worse Than Climate-Gate Data, Space Agency Admits

Popularity: 4% [?]

Our daughter, aetat 2 and a bit, has been talking up a storm lately. The world, she has discovered, is a surprising place. When something happens that she doesn’t understand, her usual query is: “What just happened?” There’s an unexpected noise: “What just happened?” Her mother exclaims over a dropped stitch: “What just happened?” I scan the latest news out of Washington and mutter: “What just happened?”

It’s hard to know how to respond. One thing that happened is that she is already nearly $40,000 in debt: how precocious the young are today! A week ago, the Obama administration, aided by its Democratic allies in the House, passed one of the most unpopular and radical pieces of legislation in the history of the Republic. What just happened? The United States suddenly became poorer. How much poorer? It will take years, maybe decades, to tabulate. AT&T acknowledged the obvious by taking a billion-dollar charge in its first quarter to help pay for the anticipated cost of Obama’s experiment with socialized medicine. Caterpillar, 3M, Deere & Company, and AK Steel Corporation also announced that they would be taking huge charges in order to prepare for the government’s intrusion into their businesses. What just happened? The recession just got longer. Adding tens or hundreds of billions of dollars of liabilities to your balance sheet isn’t exactly a prescription for growth, is it?

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Popularity: 2% [?]