! How about some random AWESOMENESS !

How do I feel living in the most corrupt province ...

2010-11-18T19:00:00.000-08:00

Here's an article from McLean's magazine, one of the oldest publication in Canada. I think it sucks pretty bad because even though we clearly are on the bottom step of the country, politicians/journalist keep on trying to argue that it's all because our journalists are so much better than the rest of the world's journalists. The whole world is as screwed up as we are.

whats you take ?!

Marc Bellemare isn’t a particularly interesting man to look at, so you’d think the spectre of watching him sit behind a desk and answer questions for hours on end would have Quebecers switching the channel en masse. And yet, the province’s former justice minister has been must-see TV over the past few weeks, if only because of what has been flowing out of his mouth.
Bellemare, who has been testifying in an inquiry into the process by which judges are appointed in Quebec, has particularly bad memories of his brief stint in cabinet, from 2003 to 2004. The Liberal government, then as now under the leadership of Premier Jean Charest, was rife with collusion, graft and barely concealed favouritism, he says—the premier himself so beholden to Liberal party fundraisers that they had a say in which judges were appointed to the bench. “It happened in [Charest’s] office. He was relaxed, he served me a Perrier,” Bellemare testified. The two spoke about Franco Fava, a long-time Liberal fundraiser who, according to Bellemare, was lobbying for Marc Bisson (the son of another Liberal fundraiser) and Michel Simard to be promoted. “I said, ‘Who names the judges, me or Franco Fava?’ I was very annoyed. I found it unacceptable,” Bellemare recalls. He remembers Charest saying, “ ‘Franco is a personal friend. He’s an influential fundraiser for the party. We need men like this. We have to listen to them. If he says to nominate Bisson and Simard, nominate them.’ ”

Judicial selection may be a topic as dry as Bellemare’s own clipped monotone, yet the public inquiry currently under way has been a ratings success. It has veered into bizarro CSI territory, complete with testimony from an ink specialist who discerned that Bellemare had used at least two different pens when writing notes on a piece of cardboard. And despite his reputation as a bit of a crank, and the fact his supposedly airtight memory is prone to contradictions and convenient lapses, Quebecers believe Bellemare’s version of events over that of Jean Charest, the longest serving Quebec premier in 50 years—by as much as four to one, according to polls.
Part of the reason for this is the frankly disastrous state of Charest’s government. In the past two years, the government has lurched from one scandal to the next, from political financing to favouritism in the provincial daycare system to the matter of Charest’s own (long undisclosed) $75,000 stipend, paid to him by his own party, to corruption in the construction industry. Charest has stymied repeated opposition calls for an investigation into the latter, prompting many to wonder whether the Liberals, who have long-standing ties to Quebec’s construction companies, have something to hide. (Regardless, this much is true: it costs Quebec taxpayers roughly 30 per cent more to build a stretch of road than anywhere else in the country, according to Transport Canada figures.) Quebecers want to believe Bellemare, it seems, because what he says is closest to what they themselves believe about their government.
This slew of dodgy business is only the most recent in a long line of made-in-Quebec corruption that has affected the province’s political culture at every level. We all recall the sponsorship scandal, in which businessmen associated with the Liberal Party of Canada siphoned off roughly $100 million from a fund effectively designed to stamp the Canadian flag on all things Québécois, cost (or oversight) be damned. “I am deeply disturbed that such practices were allowed to happen,” wrote Auditor General Sheila Fraser in 2004. Fraser’s report and the subsequent commission by Justice John Gomery, which saw the testimony of Liberal prime ministers Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, wreaked havoc on Canada’s natural governing party from which it has yet to recover.
We remember Baie Comeau’s prodigal son, Brian Mulroney, and his reign in Ottawa, which saw 11 cabinet ministers resign under a cloud in one seven-year period—six of them from Quebec. Mulroney’s rise was solidified by an altogether dirty battle against Joe Clark in Quebec that saw provincial Conservative organizers solicit Montreal homeless shelters and welcome missions, promising free beer for anyone who voted for Mulroney in the leadership campaign. Clark’s Quebec organizers, meanwhile, signed up so-called “Tory Tots,” underage “supporters” lured by promises of booze and barbecue chicken. And in 2000, organizers for Canadian Alliance leadership hopeful Tom Long did Mulroney’s and Clark’s camps one better, signing up unwitting Gaspé residents both living and dead to pad the membership rolls.
The province’s dubious history stretches further back to the 1970s, and to the widespread corruption in the construction industry as Quebec rushed through one megaproject after another. Much of the industry at the time, according to a provincial commission, was “composed of tricksters, crooks and scum” whose ties to the Montreal mafia, and predilection for violence, was renowned.
As politicians and experts from every facet of the political spectrum told Maclean’s, the history of corruption is sufficiently long and deep in Quebec that it has bred a culture of mistrust of the political class. It raises an uncomfortable question: why is it that politics in Canada’s bête noire province seem perpetually rife with scandal?
Certainly, Quebec doesn’t have a monopoly on bad behaviour. It was in British Columbia that three premiers—Bill Vander Zalm, Mike Harcourt and Glen Clark—were punted from office in short order for a variety of shenanigans by their governments in the 1990s. In the mid-’90s, no less than 12 members of Saskatchewan Conservative premier Grant Devine’s government were charged in relation to an $837,000 expense account scheme. Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister—and the first to go down in scandal, with his government forced to resign—came from Ontario. And the East Coast? “The record of political chicanery is so overflowing in the Maritimes that they could likely teach Quebec a few tricks,” Montreal Gazette political writer Hubert Bauch once wrote.
Still, Quebec stands in a league of its own. Maurice Duplessis, its long-reigning premier (and certainly one of its more nationalistic), was a champion of patronage-driven government, showering favourable ridings with contracts and construction projects at the expense of those that dared vote against him. Duplessis typically kept $60,000 cash in his basement as part of an “electoral fund” to dole out to obliging constituents. His excesses sickened Quebec’s artistic and intellectual classes, and their revolt culminated in the Quiet Revolution, which brought in a large, stable (and, as far as its burgeoning civil service was concerned, faceless) government less prone to patronage in place of Duplessis’s virtual one-man show.
Yet corruption didn’t disappear; it just took another form. Under the Quiet Revolution, Quebec underwent an unprecedented modernization, both in mindset and of the bricks and-mortar variety. The latter occurred at a dizzying speed; over 3,000 km of major highway were built in the 1960s alone. But modernization came at the price of proper oversight: in 1968, referring to widespread government corruption, historian Samuel Huntington singled out the province as “perhaps the most corrupt area [in] Australia, Great Britain, United States and Canada.”
It got worse. The speed at which the province developed required a huge labour pool—and peace with Quebec’s powerful unions. Peace it did not get: the early ’70s were synonymous with union violence at many of Quebec’s megaprojects, particularly Mirabel airport and the James Bay hydroelectric project in Quebec’s north—where union representative Yvon Duhamel drove a bulldozer into a generator. As the Cliche commission, an investigation into the province’s construction industry, noted in 1974, the Quebec government under Bourassa knew of the violence and intimidation, and as author and Conservative insider L. Ian MacDonald later wrote, “permitted itself to be taken hostage by the disreputable elements of the trade union movement.”
A young lawyer named Brian Mulroney sat on the commission; he helped pen the report detailing “violence, sabotage, walkouts and blackmail” on the part of the unions. Another lawyer named Lucien Bouchard, who served as the commission’s chief prosecutor, noticed a large number of union cheques made out to the Liberal Party of Quebec, though this was never investigated.
RELATED: COYNE on what’s behind Quebec’s penchant for money politics

Apart from the arguably ironic casting of Mulroney as an anti-corruption crusader, the legacy of the Cliche commission was twofold. It spelled the end of Bourassa’s first stint as premier and ushered in the sovereignist Parti Québécois, which promptly enacted the strictest campaign financing laws in the country, banning donations from unions and corporations and limiting annual individual donations to $3,000. These laws have effectively been rendered toothless since then. According to a study by the progressive
party Québec Solidaire, the senior management at four of Quebec’s big construction and engineering firms each donated the maximum or near the maximum allowable amount to the Quebec Liberal party, to the collective tune of $400,000 in 2008 alone. The Parti Québécois and the Action démocratique du Québec (ADQ), too, benefited from certain firms’ largesse, though on a much smaller scale.
The province’s construction industry, meanwhile, remains as wild and woolly as ever. According to La Presse, a long-standing price-fixing scheme on the part of 14 construction companies drove up construction prices across the province. In several cases, according to a Radio-Canada investigation last year, these companies used Hells Angels muscle to intimidate rival firms. A fundraising official with the Union Montréal, the party of Montreal Mayor Gérald Tremblay, was found to have led a scheme in which three per cent of the value of contracts was distributed to political parties, councillors and city bureaucrats. And the industry is well connected: until 2007, Liberal fundraiser Franco Fava was president of Neilson Inc., one of Quebec’s largest construction and excavation firms.
There are some who posit that government corruption is inevitable in part because government is so omnipresent in the province’s economic life. According to Statistics Canada, Quebec’s provincial and municipal government spending is equivalent to 32 per cent of its GDP, seven percentage points higher than the national average. The province is frequently home to giant projects: consider Montreal, with its two ongoing mega-hospital projects, or Hydro-Québec’s massive development of the Romaine River in the north shore region. So there is a temptation (even necessity) to curry favour with power. “In Quebec, it’s usually a case of old-fashioned graft,” says Andrew Stark, a business ethics professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Business. “The state occupies a more prominent role, and people in the private sector rely on the state for appointments or contracts, so they make political contributions to do so. In the rest of the country it’s reversed: it’s people in public office using public money to give themselves private-sector-style perks.”
These links between private business and the public sector notably led to Shawinigate, when it emerged that then-prime minister Jean Chrétien had called the president of the government-run, and ostensibly arms-length, Business Development Corp. to discuss a loan application from businessman Yvon Duhaime to spruce up the Auberge Grand-Mère in Chrétien’s Shawinigan riding. The loan was granted. “I work for my electors, that’s my job,” Chrétien said at the time–even though he still stood to gain from his share of the neighbouring golf course. As several critics noted at the time, the golf course would have likely increased in value following the renovations.
But the factor most important to this history of corrupton may be Quebec’s nagging existential question of whether to remain part of the country. That 40-year threat of separation has been a boon for provincial coffers. As a “have-not” province, Quebec is entitled to equalization payments. In the past five years, according to federal Department of Finance data, Quebec’s share of the equalization pie has nearly doubled, to $8.6 billion, far and away the biggest increase of any province. This is due in large part to aggressive lobbying by the Bloc Québécois.
According to many on both the left and right, obsessing over Quebec’s existential question has come at the expense of proper transparency and accountability. “I don’t think corruption is in our genes any more than it is anywhere else on the planet, but the beginning of an explanation would be the fact that we have focused for so long on the constitutional question,” says Éric Duhaime, a former ADQ candidate who recently helped launch the right-of-centre Réseau Liberté-Québec. “We are so obsessed by the referendum debate that we forget what a good government is, regardless if that government is for or against the independence of Quebec.”
After nearly losing the referendum in 1995, the federal Liberals under Chrétien devised what amounted to a branding effort whose aim was to increase the visibility of the federal government in Quebec. The result: a $100-million scandal that saw several Liberal-friendly firms charge exorbitant amounts for work they often never did. The stench of the sponsorship scandal has yet to dissipate, so damaging was it to Quebec’s collective psyche. “Canada basically thinks . . . [Quebecers] can be bought off by some idiotic ad campaign,” wrote Le Devoir’s Jean Dion in 2004.
Or a new hockey arena, it seems. Earlier this month, eight Quebec Conservative MPs donned Nordiques jerseys and, through wide smiles, essentially said Quebec City deserved $175 million worth of public funding for a new arena. “As MPs, we cannot ignore the wishes of the population that wants the Nordiques to return,” Jonquiere-Alma MP Jean-Pierre Blackburn told the Globe and Mail. “In addition, our political formation, the Conservative party, has received important support in Quebec City.”
It won’t be the Conservatives’ first foray into patronage in the province. According to a recent Canadian Press investigation, a disproportionate percentage of federal stimulus money reserved for rural areas went to two hotly contested ridings in which the Conservatives barely edged out the Bloc. Now, as always, keeping the sovereignists out seems to be priority number one for the feds, and the favoured way is through the public purse strings.
The federalist-sovereignist debate has effectively entrenched the province’s politicians, says Québec Solidaire MNA Amir Khadir. “Today’s PQ and the Liberals are of the same political class that has governed Quebec for 40 years. The more they stay in power, the more vulnerable to corruption they become. There hasn’t been any sort of renewal in decades,” he says. “We are caught in the prison of the national question.” If so, it’s quite a prison. Crossing the federalist-sovereignist divide is something of a sport for politicians. Lucien Bouchard went from sovereignist to federalist and back again. Raymond Bachand started his political career as a senior organizer for René Lévesque’s Yes campaign in 1980; today, he is the minister of finance in Charest’s staunchly federalist government. Liberal Jean Lapierre was a founding member of the Bloc Québécois, only to return to Martin’s Liberal cabinet in 2004. Many Quebec politicians never seem to leave. They just change sides.
Veteran Liberal MNA Geoff Kelley says all the bad headlines are proof, in fact, of the system’s efficacy at weeding out corruption. Yes, two prominent former Liberal ministers, David Whissell and Tony Tomassi, have left cabinet amidst conflict-of-interest allegations. (A construction ﬁrm Whissell co-owned received several no-tender government contracts, while Tomassi used a credit card belonging to BCIA, a private security ﬁrm that received government contracts and government-backed loans.) No, it “doesn’t look good” when five Charest friends and former advisers join oil-and-gas interests just as the province is considering an enormous shale gas project. How about the nearly $400,000 in campaign financing from various engineering and construction companies? No one has shown any evidence of a fraudulent fundraising scheme, he counters. “I’m not saying it didn’t happen, I’m just saying it hasn’t been proven.” Kelley blames much of the government’s ailments on an overheated Péquiste opposition. As for Bellemare’s allegations, Kelley rightly points out that they are just that: allegations.
He thinks the system is working. Far from being kept quiet, Bellemare has the ear of the province, thanks to the commission Charest himself called. The Charest government, Kelley notes, will institute Quebec’s first code of conduct for MNAs in the coming months. “I’m not saying everything’s perfect, [or] everything’s lily white,” Kelley says. “Obviously these things raise concerns, they raise doubts, and I think mechanisms have been put in place to try and tighten up the rules.”
For many Quebecers, though, talk of renewal is cheap. As they know all too well, rules in the bête noire province have a habit of being broken.

Chris Christie under Obama's spectacle

2010-11-12T00:17:00.000-08:00

[What’s $2,000 in travel costs, assuming they really are unjustified, next to the government’s two-year spending binge?

But to ask the question is to miss the point. On President Obama’s watch, the priorities of the Justice Department seem to be dictated more by politics than merit. Thus, in 2009 the department famously dropped a clear-cut case of voter intimidation by the New Black Panther Party. Yet the department is bent on pursuing a long-settled, and far more trivial matter, against a popular Republican governor.]

http://frontpagemag.com/2010/11/12/coming-for-christie/

credit: @patlepresdespp on twitter

FDA Approves Egrifta, First Treatment for HIV-Related Abdominal Fat

2010-11-11T13:26:00.000-08:00

On Wednesday, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) health regulators announced the approval of Egrifta (tesamorelin), a first-of-its-kind treatment for HIV-associated lipodystrophy, a common side effect of antiretroviral medications characterized by abnormal fat distribution within the body.
Egrifta is a growth hormone-releasing factor, given as a once-daily injection, that works to reduce abdominal fat in patients who experience lipodystrophy while undergoing treatment with certain antiretroviral medications to treat HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
Patients taking HIV-1 protease inhibitors such as indinavir (Crixivan), nelfinavir (Viracept), ritonavir (Norvir) and saquinavir (Invirase), commonly experience an increase in fat deposits that can accumulate around the liver, the stomach and abdominal organs. Fat deposits can also form at the base of the neck, resulting in a bulge known as a "buffalo hump."
"The FDA recognizes the need for therapies to treat patients with HIV-lipodystrophy," said Dr. Curtis Rosebraugh, director of the FDA's Office of Drug Evaluation II. "The presence of excess fat with this condition may contribute to other health problems as well as affect a patient’s quality of life, so treatments that demonstrate they are safe and effective at treating these symptoms are important."
In clinical trials involving more than 800 HIV-positive patients who took Egrifta daily for 26 weeks, patients reported improvements in self-image, as well as a reduction in abdominal fat deposits as shown by a CT scan.
It is not yet known if Egrifta additionally helps to lower the risk of heart disease in patients with excess abdominal fat.
Common side effects reported with Egrifta treatment include joint and muscle pain, injection site rash and redness, stomach pain and changes in blood sugar levels.
Additional information about drugs and drug side effects may be found on DrugWatch.com.

2010-11-10T18:05:00.000-08:00

Here's the first of what I think is the beggining of a new genre. People with political agenda are starting to figure out that videogames have a tremendous influence on the people who play them.

By that, I mean that people are willing to put thousands of hours towards a VIRTUAL goal in a video game while they wouldn't put a 10th of that effort to reach REAL goals in life itself.

Fate of the world is a "simulation" game where the player gets appointed director of the International Environmental Organisation and is tasked with decisions ranging from restriction of the cutting of the Amazonian forest to extending the single child policy from china to the whole Asian continent.

The main goal of the game in itself is good. Where I think it is wrong is that consequences are based on today's projections based on models that cannot even predict the weather two days from now, let alone 20 years.

It will end up brainwashing the next generation on accepting everything the Ecommunists are going to throw at them which in my opinion could have catastrophic consequences.

What's your take on it !?

2010-11-09T17:55:00.000-08:00

Here they go again ! Someone is going to have to take a stand against those people. Instead of ajusting the industry to fit the new evolving social situation, the keep on enforcing the same old crap over and over again. Are they going to bring out Eliott Ness and his untouchables to enforce the internet prohibition !?

Need I remind you how the prohibition of alcohol ended about a CENTURY ago !?

More film studios in the porn industry are beginning to take a tough stance toward piracy of their work by filing lawsuits against alleged file-sharers and subpoenaing ISPs for the personal information of “John Doe” defendants.

This month, Los Angeles porn studio Third World Media filed suit in the U.S. District for the Northern District of California against 1,568 defendants accused of illegally sharing the film “Miss Big Ass Brazil #4”. The case came just two weeks after the same studio filed a similar complaint against 1,243 John Does in the U.S. District Court in West Virginia.

So far, the Adult Copyright Company, an antipiracy company owned by attorney Kenneth Ford, has lodged complaints against over 5,000 alleged porn file-sharers in courts across the US. And they’re not done yet. “My intention is to file suit against several thousand more illegal downloaders in the next week or two,” Ford recently said in an interview with CNET. “The coming lawsuits will name in the neighborhood of 10,000 Doe defendants.”

The most recent complaint included 64 pages of information about the defendants including IP addresses, ISP names, and dates and times they allegedly shared the files. Now the courts will begin the process of subpoenaing the ISPs to force them to hand over customer names associated with the IP addresses.

Third World Media’s cases join those filed by Millennium TGA, Lightspeed Media Corporation and Hard Drive Productions against 300 defendants last month.

While the tactics used here are nearly identical to those used in the recent Hurt Locker file-sharing case, the negative stigma associated with porn is getting the attention of advocacy groups. The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently spoke out against the cases, and criticized the industry for filing lawsuits against innocent people.

“I think for these porn cases it’s especially troubling, even having your name associated. People have a very good interest in [not just avoiding being sued] but not having their name associated here if they have been wrongly accused,” said Cindy Cohn, who is in charge of the EFF’s opposition to the suits. “We’ve heard about a lot of people say they are wrongly accused with some pretty good stories about how it couldn’t have been them. So, it does appear to us that whatever investigative techniques that plaintiffs are using here, they are not very good.”

Of course it’s never good to be accused of a crime, but the stakes are a lot higher for some once pornography is involved. These cases have the potential to damage both personal relationships and business reputations of the defendants if the ISPs agree to turn over names of the alleged porno-pirates.

2010-11-06T18:46:00.000-07:00

Formula 1 world champ Jenson Button was last night threatened by robbers with machine guns - forcing his driver to ram through traffic to escape.

The shaken driver has beefed up his security after the attack, which happened as he left the Interlagos race track in Sao Paulo last night before today's Grand Prix.

Button, 30, was being driven in a specially armoured car with his father, manager, trainer and an armed guard when a gang including a man brandishing a pistol tried to hold up the car.

His driver, who is specially trained in emergency avoidance techniques, rammed his way past five cars and sped off to safety.

Button said last night: "I was terrified. I saw a man with a truncheon and a pistol. I didn't know what was going to happen.

"The driver just floored it. We must have hit five cars but we got out of there. He was a legend."

With Button in the car were his trainer, Mike Collier, father John, manager Richard Goddard and an armed security guard plus the driver.

Mr Goddard said: "It was the quick thinking of the driver and the strength of the Mercedes that saved us.

"This gang came out of the falavellas (slums) and he just floored it. He saved us."

Earlier in the day Button, who drives for McLaren, had qualified in 11th place, effectively ending his chances of defending his world title.

The penultimate round of the World Grand Prix Championship is held every year in Brazil under massive security, ringed by hundreds of armed police and in the past grand prix team cars have been shot at.

Grand Prix teams regularly order their teams not to wear uniforms in Brazil so they cannot be recognised and become potential targets for robbers.

A team spokemsan said: "Neither Jensen nor the other occupants were hurt.

"McLaren had provided both Jensen and teammate Lewis Hamilton with reinforced armoured vehicles driven by police drivers, who had been trained in avoidance techniques and were armed.

"The police driver of Jenson's vehicle reacted swiftly and, using avoidance techniques, rapidly forced his way through the traffic taking Jensen and the other occupants of the car immediately away from any danger and back to their hotel."

Police have stepped up additional security to transfer Jensen to the Interlagos track.

I've taken that article from sundaymirror.co.uk

Can you believe it ? I guess that's what happens when you host multi million races in such a hell hole...

RIAA is fucking ridiculous

2010-11-05T16:11:00.000-07:00

MINNEAPOLIS, Nov. 5 (UPI) -- A Minnesota mother was ordered by a jury to pay $1.5 million to the Recording Industry Association of America for illegally downloading and sharing 24 songs. Jammie Thomas-Rasset was ordered to pay the sum, $62,500 for each illegally downloaded song, by a Minneapolis court after two previous convictions were thrown out on appeal, the New York Daily News reported Friday. Thomas-Rasset was ordered to pay $222,000 following a 2007 trial but the decision was declared a mistrial upon appeal. She was next ordered to pay $1.92 million in a June 2009 trial, but the judge lowered the amount to $54,000. The RIAA offered to settle for $25 million, but Thomas-Rasset instead appealed the decision and ended up on trial a third time.
Experts said Thomas-Rasset, who makes less than $40,000 per year, is likely to file another appeal, claiming the decision was unconstitutional.

Can you fucking believe it !? I mean, $62 500 per downloaded song ? seriously, you're telling me that an artist that gets his 12 track album downloaded looses 3/4 of a fricking million dollars ?! This is getting out of hand and has to stop. The buisness model of the big record comppany no longer suits the market. THEY ARE GOING TO DISAPEAR. The question is are we going to let them censor the internet before they do.

What do you guys think ^

2010-10-28T15:24:00.000-07:00

In a semi related way,

As you can see if you've been reading my blog since the beggining, I've been at a presentation by Ezra Levant.

This guy is AMAZING ! He has been picked on by the HRC (Human "rights" commission) for over 900 hundred years as he tells in his book named "

Shakedown: How Our Government Is Undermining Democracy In The Name Of Human Rights

I promptly bought it after the conference and read right through it .

You can get it dirt cheap in the kobo store at http://bit.ly/9PPzTZ. Kobo format is compatible with kobo reader in most smartphones as well as the kobo reader itself.

It shattered me to find out how fragile our freedom is. and I commited myself to make that book come across as much people as I can !

He also has a more recent book called "ethical oil" that I will comment on after reading it.

For more information until then, you can head to : http://www.ezralevant.com/

2010-10-28T15:07:00.001-07:00

Here is what's saind in canadian media about the Khadr saga, I don't know how to feel !

GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVY BASE, Cuba — Omar Khadr is an admitted murderer and al-Qaida terrorist who manufactured and planted roadside bombs in Afghanistan.
And Khadr very likely will be returning to Canada in a year to serve out most of his still secret sentence.
He pleaded guilty to all five of the charges facing him here Monday as part of a plea bargain that will see him return to Canada after serving one more year in U.S. custody.
Canada’s diplomatic note — delivered here Sunday and included as part of the deal — was a key factor for Khadr agreeing to the deal and convinced one of Harper’s most skeptical critics Canada will let him serve his time in Canada.
“Mr. Khadr pleaded guilty this morning ... in exchange for the Canadian government agreeing to repatriate him back to Canada after one year,” said Dennis Edney, one of Khadr’s Canadian lawyers. “Canada’s language (in the diplomatic note) is sufficiently satisfactory to hold Canada to its position.”
The diplomatic note and the details of the deal will be released publicly later this week, although reports suggest the agreed-to sentence is for eight years, with the last seven to be served in Canada.

The prosecution in Khadr’s case said his admission of guilt puts to rest criticisms of the U.S. government for trying Khadr as a war criminal, and a guilty plea was more important than putting Khadr behind bars for life.
“Omar Khadr stands convicted of being a murderer, and also an al-Qaida terrorist. The evidence ... came from a source that the law recognizes as the most powerful evidence known to the law, and that is his own words,” said U.S. Navy Capt. John Murphy, chief prosecutor for the office of military commissions. “What you saw puts a lie to the long-standing argument by some that Omar Khadr is a victim.
“He’s not. He’s a murderer, and he is convicted by the strength of his own words.”
Khadr, wearing a dark suit and sporting a trimmed but full beard, hung his head low in the military courtroom and softly repeated “yes” as military judge Col. Pat Parrish painstakingly read off Khadr’s crimes and asked the Canadian to agree.
Parrish accepted Khadr’s guilty pleas to murder, attempted murder, supporting terrorism, spying and conspiracy.
The specifics of the deal and the sentence won’t be released until after the seven-member military jury hands down a sentence of their own following a hearing that’s expected to last several days.
Whichever sentence is less — the plea bargain’s or the jury’s — will apply.
Tabitha Speer, the widow of the U.S. Special Forces soldier Khadr fatally wounded with a grenade in a July 2002 firefight in Afghanistan, was in court Monday for Khadr’s guilty plea and, while sometimes tearing up, clutched her sister’s hand throughout the proceedings.
She will read a victim impact statement during the sentencing hearing, at which mental-health experts will debate Khadr’s age at the time of his crimes as a factor in sentencing.
Edney said pleading guilty was a “very, very difficult” decision for Khadr.
“Mr. Khadr was put into a hellish conflict ... whether to subject himself to a process that is not legal or go home,” Edney said, adding he and Khadr’s other Canadian lawyer Nathan Whitling think Khadr’s guilt is “fiction.
“In our view, Mr. Khadr is innocent.”
Khadr, now 24, was taken into U.S. custody when he was 15, following the 2002 firefight. He’s been held here since October of the same year.

It is now official, I hate my iPhone,

2010-10-28T15:04:00.000-07:00

Here's something I found when I searched : Why iPhone sucks in google.

Figured it's funny enough :D

What will Apple "invent" next

Its well known that your typical iphone owner believes apple invented a lot of the features the iphone possesses like apps, a touch screen, web browsers on mobile phones etc. Apple really don’t mind this, in fact they want you to think they are cutting edge, even if they are not. When MMS and copy and paste finally came to the iphone many people were convinced Apple had invented them.
It’s also well known by those of us who have been using decent phones for a while now that these features have been available on plenty of smart phones years before the iphone came out. So to celebrate Apple’s ability to pull the wool over Joe Sixpack’s eyes here’s a list of features we believe will be in the next generation iphone. A list the iphone fan boys will no doubt have a great time claiming apple came up with all on their lonesome:
A bigger screen
480×320 AKA HVGA is so 2002 which makes the iphone look like a dinosaur compared to some of the latest phones coming out. Here’s betting that Apple will adopt the WVGA standard and claim some sort of new era in high resolution wide screen mobile video. Even though all the other touchscreen phones are already using it.
Wireless syncing
No longer will you need to dig around for your iphone cable to plug into your computer to sync your phone. Apple will invent the wireless connection. If only everyone else hadn’t been using it long before the iphone
Front facing camera
Video calling on mobile phones never really took off due to interoperability issues between carriers and the exhorbitant prices charged for calls but if done right Apple could reinvigorate this area with the power of the internet. What’s more likely to happen though is they’ll introduce it on the iphone and keep it proprietary but still tell everyone it’s totally revolutionary.
Multitasking
This one is still a maybe but if they do finally catch up you can bet they’ll make it look like they came up with it. Even if jailbroken iphones have been able to do it since the beginning
What do you think will be in the next generation iphone and do you think Apple will try and con us into thinking they invented it again? ( a bit old, but it still took them more than 2 years to catch up to Android)

Politics

2010-10-26T13:51:00.000-07:00

Today is the court hearing regarding sentence of "child soldier" Omar Kadr after he agreed to a plea bargain for 1 year in US jail before being released to Canada for the rest of his sentence

He admitted to building explosive devices meant to blow up Americans and Jews and showed happiness knowing an American soldier had been killed by his grenade.

Knowing that Canadian Supreme Court has already stated that the process at Gitmo is flawed, Chances are any judgment will not stand to an appeal in Canada. Meaning that whatever the outcome is in the current procedure, Omar Kadr will be walking the streets of Canada a free man by Christmas 2011

What's your take on It ?

Picture below related :P

Terrorists .

2010-10-25T16:43:00.000-07:00

.. so full of win !

TV guide

2010-10-25T16:40:00.000-07:00

Today's randomness is going to be about TVs. I had to buy a TV recently and the most useful review I found is this one

http://bit.ly/9n8YB2

2010-10-23T08:20:00.001-07:00

Currently listening to an Ezra levant presentation... Buy his book shakedown!!!

For all the times you had to refrain from using it...

2010-10-21T18:32:00.000-07:00

http://capslockday.com/

2010-10-21T17:27:00.000-07:00

http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Operation_Payback

o0ps :S

He might want to think before he speaks next time!

2010-10-21T17:23:00.000-07:00

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20019993-71.html

RandoM awesomity of the day #1

2010-10-21T15:52:00.000-07:00

Yes that's right... 1st Awesomity (yeah I just created that awesome word) is an actual table of awesomity.... (read with a barney Stinson voice)