Free Republic

There is nothing that aspiring global governors love so much as recognition of their vast good intentions. Today, octogenarian citizen of the world Maurice Strong receives one of this year’s Four Freedoms Awards, established by the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute and the Roosevelt Stichting in the Netherlands......Mr. Strong has been central to reformulating socialism’s grand narrative in radical environmental terms. He was the mastermind of the seminal UN environmental conferences at Stockholm in 1972 and Rio in 1992. He is a key promoter of the subversive anti-market concepts of sustainable development and corporate social responsibility. He is the godfather...

Anthill:A novel is the tale of Wilson’s alter ego, a bug-loving Eagle Scout with the venerable Southern name of Raphael Semmes Cody, who grows up exploring nature in an old growth wilderness outside Mobile, Alabama. ....most first-time novelists aren’t octogenarians. Nor are they, typically, the world’s top expert on ants. They haven’t been famous / notorious since the 1975 publication of their scientific masterwork, Sociobiology, either. Nor are they the chief inventor of the influential cause of preserving biodiversity.

This isn't exactly the "pivot" the White House was looking for, but recent presidential attention to immigration has been driven in part by an immigration rally in D.C. today larger than the recent health care protests, and also pointedly addressed at Obama. Luis Gutierrez, chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Immigration Taskforce, per his prepared remarks, focused on the urgency of the issue: Justice for immigrants cannot wait. It cannot be delayed because of the fears of politicians......After Dr. King said “justice now,” in that building, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, and President Lyndon Johnson made equality real for...

...so with any luck we'll get this bill passed. OK, any questions.

The journey on which the world’s most famous fighter airplane [was recovered from beneath 268 feet of ice on Greenland's ice cap]. Great Britain was holding off Nazi Germany and the United States was rushing warplanes to British airfields. In 1942, Glacier Girl was a brand new Lockheed P-38F, one of hundreds of airplanes sent as part of U.S. Army Air Force had its pilots base-hop across the North Atlantic from Maine to Scotland. Not all squadrons made it across, and this particular one was forced down by weather to an emergency landing on an ice cap in Greenland. For...

Researchers in Texas say they have found a way of cutting the cost of producing gasoline by two thirds, taking advantage of the lowest grade of coal available - one that is abundant beneath the Canadian prairies. A new refining process being perfected at the University of Texas at Arlington can turn the low-cost lignite coal, also known as brown coal, into oil at a fraction of the cost of importing crude oil from abroad.

OTTAWA — Gun control advocates briefly hoped Prime Minister Stephen Harper's decision to prorogue Parliament would kill a controversial private member's bill to scrap the long gun registry. But their hopes have been shot down, thanks to procedural reforms introduced 15 years ago. The bill -- which was under examination by a parliamentary committee after winning first and second reading votes in the House of Commons -- will simply return at that stage once the new session of Parliament opens March 3.

It's a mildly encouraging sign of more temperate times that Christmas has taken less of a mauling this year. For a number of years, there was a predictable harvest of news stories featuring a school board, a municipality, some hypersensitive public servant calling for the banning of a Christmas tree or the elimination of certain traditional carols, or insisting on the neutral Happy Holidays. They were all essentially the same: some hypersensitive grinch complaining of being ground down, of being “offended” by the oppressive Christian cast of this most Christian of holidays.

'My country seems to be slipping away in front of my very eyes," former NDP campaign director Gerald Caplan wrote in a Dec. 4 op-ed for a Toronto area newspaper. "Our proud identity, our cherished core values ... are being turned upside down. Gun control advocates are out, gun apologists are in. Preventing war is out, killing scumbags is in. Demonstrations for peace are out, demonstrations of a martial spirit are in. Thoughtful, restrained Canadianism is out, hand-on-heart Yankee-style patriotism is in."

THE BOOB TUBE: .....Sharp introduced the first AQUOS liquid crystal television in 2001 (it came to Canada in 2002). I don’t know this offhand, by the way — I learned it in an information session I attended on Sharp’s new AQUOS LE700 series of LED backlit flatscreen televisions a few months ago......

For several years, Jude Stringfellow and her Lab-chow mix have toured the country with a simple message: Faith walks. Born without front legs to a junkyard dog around Christmas 2002, Faith the puppy was rejected and abused by her mother. She was rescued by Reuben Stringfellow, now an Army E-4 specialist, who had been asked to bury other puppies in the litter. "Can we fix her? Stringfellow, then 17, asked his mom. "No, but maybe we can help her," she said.

Dismay at the SMH: New car buyers appear oblivious to climate change concerns, with the latest sales figures showing people are flocking back to fuel-guzzling four-wheel-drives … While the growth in new car sales was remarkable, the real story was the type of vehicles being sold. While sales of the smallest cars on the market fell in November, four-wheel-drives and utes enjoyed a sales bonanza. The Toyota HiLux utility was the best selling vehicle in the country, outselling the Holden Commodore, while sales of 4WD-style SUVs were up a staggering 44 per cent. Toyota’s smallest car, the Yaris, saw sales...

When you think of Canada, which qualities come to mind? The world's peacekeeper, the friendly nation, a liberal counterweight to the harsher pieties of its southern neighbour, decent, civilised, fair, well-governed? Think again. This country's government is now behaving with all the sophistication of a chimpanzee's tea party. So amazingly destructive has Canada become, and so insistent have my Canadian friends been that I weigh into this fight, that I've broken my self-imposed ban on flying and come to Toronto.

The legally-binding referendum result had not been widely expected and was a huge embarrassment for the neutral government in Switzerland. In the run-up to the vote it had warned that a ban would "serve the interests of extremist circles" and damage economic ties with Muslim states. Anti-immigrant right-wing populists had championed the vote and led an emotive campaign. The Swiss People's Party (SVP), the country's largest in terms of popular support and membership in parliament, used posters depicting a woman in a burka in front of minarets shaped like missiles rising from a Swiss flag.

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based. It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years....In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”

Well, it was a very calm and totally unexceptional week, nothing to ruffle the nerves or agitate the conscience. Things rolled demurely along....Everything was normal, predictable and just so right...[then] Mr. Al Gore came to Toronto (there will be deep sales on winter parkas as a result, I am sure – as being no longer necessary, you understand) and was his ever and delightfully cheerful, buoyant self.

Acne, agricultural land increase, Afghan poppies destroyed, poppies more potent, Africa devastated, Africa in conflict, African aid threatened, African summer frost, aggressive weeds, Air France crash, air pressure changes, airport malaria, Agulhas current, Al Qaeda and Taliban Being Helped, Alaska reshaped, moves, allergy season longer....

HH: We begin today by going where no radio talk show host has ever gone before. We are going to discuss Canadian politics with none other than Columnist To the World

Bill Ayers Special to the Star Whew! What was all that mess? I'm still in a daze, sorting it all out, decompressing. For the past few years, I have gone about my business, hanging out with my kids and, now, my grandchildren, taking care of our elders (they moved in as the kids moved out), going to work, teaching and writing. And every day, I participate in the never-ending effort to build a powerful and irresistible movement for peace and social justice. In years past, I would now and then – and often unpredictably – appear in the newspapers or...