Twenty-three former Canadian ambassadors have condemned the Harper Government's treatment of diplomat Richard Colvin in a letter released to The Globe and Mail. The ambassadors singled out Peter MacKay, who accused Colvin of accepting the word of "people who throw acid in the faces of schoolchildren." "[MacKay] savaged [Colvin] in public, and ridiculed him, and that's not the way to treat a guy who's doing his job," Paul Durand, a former Canadian ambassador to the Organization of American States, to Chile and to Costa Rica, told the Globe. "He is not a whistleblower. He was hauled before a parliamentary committee and...

08 December, 2009

On World AIDS Day last week, UNAIDS published new estimates of the number of people living with AIDS around the world, and Xaquin G.V. turned the data into a cartogram, or a value-aread map: Click image for larger view. Hat tip: Flowingdata.com....

08 December, 2009

The UK Telegraph has a witty tee-up for the Copenhagen conference, where celebrity travel and other extravagances will produce the equivalent of 41,000 tonnes of CO2, an amount equal to that produced by a small British city over the same period. Among the nuggets: [T]his being Scandinavia, even the prostitutes are doing their bit for the planet. Outraged by a council postcard urging delegates to "be sustainable, don't buy sex," the local sex workers' union – they have unions here – has announced that all its 1,400 members will give free intercourse to anyone with a climate conference delegate's pass. The term...

08 December, 2009

James Fallows, the Atlantic writer who is a thoughtful observer of US foreign affairs and an admirer of President Obama, says the president's newly announced war strategy rests on two "judgment calls." 1) Whether Al Qaeda/related terrorist groups really do depend so heavily on a specific geographic base in Afghanistan that, if the U.S. can disrupt them there, we won't have to apply similar efforts later on in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, or anyplace else. 2) Whether a limited increase in U.S. troops, for a limited amount of time, really can make a decisive difference -- in the long-term stability of the Afghan...

08 December, 2009

Contrarian reader Dana Doiron offers a subtly different take on Elizabeth May's performance in the recent Munk debate on climate change: I suspect that May was uncomfortable with the black and white (not another crayon issue) framing of the proposition.  One can support individual and collective action in response to climate change without making it the end-all and be-all, just as one can support our soldiers while having reservations about the conflict to which they have been deployed....

08 December, 2009

At the Northside Tavern in Atlanta, Georgia, last night, bartender Cory Gillen was showing off his Atlanta Thrashers tattoo as the Trashers' game with the Florida Panthers played on the TV above. The Thrashers won, 2-1, on a Rich Peverley shootout goal, just in time for the tavern's main act, the gravelly voiced, 69(?)-year-old, Beverly "Guitar" Watkins (below), "a pyrotechnic guitar maven whose searing, ballistic attacks on the guitar have become allegorical tales within the blues community." In the late 'fifties, Watkins played with the band "Dr. Feelgood, The Interns, and The Nurse," who recorded the single called, Right String But The Wrong...

06 December, 2009

Contrarian reader and tech fixer Mike Targett points out that Guardian columnist George Monbiot, whose blistering denunciation of Canada's climate change policies appeared here yesterday, was in Toronto to take part in a Munk Debate Tuesday. One of a series sponsored by Aurea Foundation, the debate considered this proposition: "Be it resolved: climate change is mankind's defining crisis, and demands a commensurate response." Monbiot and Elizabeth May took the affirmative; Bjørn Lomborg and Lord Nigel Lawson the negative. Audience polls taken before and after the debate showed the con side to be slightly more persuasive. My reading is that Lomborg and Lawson...

03 December, 2009

The rhetoric is over the top, but the facts are only somewhat overstated in a UK Guardian column that foreshadows complaints Canadians can expect hear as the Copenhagen climate change summit approaches: After giving the finger to Kyoto, Canada then set out to prevent the other nations striking a successor agreement. At the end of 2007, it singlehandedly blocked a Commonwealth resolution to support binding targets for industrialised nations. After the climate talks in Poland in December 2008, it won the Fossil of the Year award, presented by environmental groups to the country that had done most to disrupt the talks....

02 December, 2009
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