The youth wing of the Catalan Socialist Party has a vivid take on the pleasures of voting: Via Salon's Tracy Clark-Flory, who reports that other Spanish political parties were not amused, calling the get-out-the-vote spot "crude," "misleading," "filth," and "as attack on the dignity of women."...

21 November, 2010

Contrarian reader Andrew Bourke is reconsidering a trip to Disney World after seeing this video of Transportation Safety Agency screeners in Chattanooga Tennessee manhandling an upset three-year-old. (If you can't see the video, try this link.) The San Francisco Chronicle explains: A TSA employee gave Mandy the pat down and she started screaming and kicking her legs...

17 November, 2010

Get ready for Opt Out Day: For those using Flash-impaired Apple products, try here. From the clever Taiwanese animators, Next Media. Hat tip: This week in Google....

17 November, 2010

Mary Cecilia "Bomber" LeBlanc, shown above with L'Arche assistant Mavis at the 2007 Cape Breton Island Film Series party for l'Arche Cape Breton, died peacefully Thursday morning in her home at The Vineyard, a L'Arche residence in Orangedale, surrounded by friends and caregivers. Death came six days before her 60th birthday, and, incredibly, hours before a provincial health bureaucrats were to meet to begin planning her involuntary removal from l'Arche, over protests of family, friends, and caregivers. Mary was a small woman with a steely will and an outsized capacity for getting her own way—and then leading a chorus of laughter about...

07 November, 2010

Transparency International rates Canada the sixth least corrupt nation in the world in a report featuring an interactive map and several interactive graphs. Founded by a former World Bank official, the NGO relies on business surveys of transparency in business process, rather than political corruption, for its guideposts....

27 October, 2010

Haligonian Warren Reed objects to the thoughtlessly patronizing word choices many journalists apply to wheelchair-users and those who discriminate them. In an email to two Chronicle-Herald reporters who recently wrote about separate cases of discrimination by Metro Transit and the Nova Scotia Justice Department against wheelchair users, he complained about three sentences in their stories: "The driver even called his supervisor, who confirmed that wheelchair-bound passengers are not allowed on [Bus No.] 60." "However, Sunday morning the driver said that he could get in a lot of trouble for letting wheelchair-bound passengers onto non-wheelchair routes." "Amy Paradis, 16, is quadriplegic and...

25 October, 2010

Growing discomfort with the military commission trial of Canadian child soldier Omar Khadr, the only western national still held in the US detention centre in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has apparently propelled the US government to seek a plea bargain in the case. The presiding military judge delayed the trial this week in anticipation of a possible deal. Why now? The Toronto Star's Michelle Sheppard reported Thursday that Omar Khadr's pending trial "has caused discomfort among some of Obama’s advisers, who are concerned about the fact that he was 15 at the time of the alleged offence." Friday's edition of the New York Times,...

14 October, 2010

That was the manifesto of my favorite Yippe, Abby Hoffman. Now you can steal it online....

12 September, 2010

The New York Times previews a play and a forthcoming children's book about a nearly forgotten travel guide that helped African Americans (and African Canadians) navigate the segregated accommodations that prevailed into the 1960s. A Harlem postal employee and civic leader named Victor H. Green conceived the guide in response to one too many accounts of humiliation or violence where discrimination continued to hold strong. These were facts of life not only in the Jim Crow South, but in all parts of the country, where black travelers never knew where they would be welcome...

23 August, 2010
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