Free Republic

The thing to understand about the 12-day UN meeting on climate change starting in Copenhagen today, is it's not an environmental conference. It's an economic mugging. That it's not about saving the planet. It's about making you poorer. And finally, that the "solutions" it proposes to "fix" the climate, far from being intended to succeed, are guaranteed to fail. How do we know? Because they've already failed. The two major initiatives that emerged out of the UN process that created the Kyoto accord, were the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which is a multi-billion-dollar European cap-and-trade market in carbon dioxide emissions,...

SEOUL -- In the last three weeks, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has touched down in India, China, Singapore, Hong Kong and, on Monday, South Korea, parts of the world his government paid scant attention to since taking office early in 2006. But on the eve of the beginning of his fifth year as prime minister, Asia is the priority in his government's foreign policy. "I would not characterize this as a shift but I would characterize it as a highlighting of an important foreign policy priority," Mr. Harper said at a joint press conference here with South Korean President Lee...

Within minutes, six-year-old Rubjit Thindal went from happily chatting in the back seat of the car to collapsing and dying in her father's arms. "If we had known it was so serious, we would have called 911,'' Kuldip Thindal, Rubjit's distraught mother, said in Punjabi yesterday. "She just had a stomach ache -- she wasn't even crying.'' Rubjit was pronounced dead at hospital barely 24 hours after showing signs of a fever. Later, doctors told her parents she had the H1N1 influenza virus. She is believed to be the youngest person in Canada with the virus to have died.

There's been a SWAT raid in Toronto over a gun scare, and designer Jeremy Bell was temporarily held at gunpoint. Per the Toronto Sun: The partner at digital marketing company Teehan+Lax was surrounded by heavily armed tactical officers, cuffed and held against the wall of his Richmond St. W. office -- until, that is, the cops found the gun he had been holding in front of the window about 90 minutes earlier was a pile of blocks. The BrickGun Semi-Automatic gun (purchased online from BrickGun, "designers and builders of the world's most realistic custom Lego weapon models") arrived at Bell's...

On the surface it might seem that Switzerland's law-binding vote to ban new minarets in mosques is petty, vindictive and unnecessary. And in a sense it is, but in another way it is understandable. It's pretty hard to depict Switzerland as a red-necked, xenophobic society. It is one of the few countries in the world that demands no passport for visitors entering, and it's famous for being a meeting place of cultures. It is a functioning society that manages to exist without wars, nasty linguistic or ethnic feuds. It is a society that flourishes peacefully in times of war in...