Free Republic

By RICHARD GILBERT Thursday, May 19, 2005 Updated at 12:25 AM EDT Special to Globe and Mail Update A month ago, Ottawa reached an extraordinary agreement with the auto industry. The deal commits the industry to improving the fuel economy of cars, sport utility vehicles, vans and pickup trucks in operation in Canada by as much as 50 per cent by 2010. If implemented, the agreement could produce the most radical change in vehicles Canadians have seen - and perhaps some social changes, too. Here's why. According to the agreement (known as the Memorandum of Understanding between the Government of...

Montreal — Alfonso Gagliano is attempting to join former prime minister Jean Chretien's move to have Justice John Gomery removed from the sponsorship inquiry. Pierre Fournier, lawyer for the former public works minister, said Thursday his client filed papers in Federal Court asking to join Chretien's motion. The lawyer said Judge Gomery has created "concerns about partiality" but wouldn't cite specific comments. When you read the application by Mr. Chretien ... I think you'll find that most of the reproaches he makes against the commissioner are equally applicable to Mr. Gagliano," Mr. Fournier told reporters outside the inquiry hearing room....

Berkeley - The bizarre plates and spikes that lined the backbones of the long-extinct stegosaurs were probably extreme examples of the often elaborate and colorful displays developed by animals to recognize fellow members of their species, according to an international team of paleontologists. The team's analysis of stegosaur plates lends support to a growing consensus among paleontologists that the weird adornments of many dinosaurs - the horns of triceratops, the helmet-like domes of the pachycephalosaurs, and the crests of the duck-billed hadrosaurs - likely served no function other than to differentiate species, akin to birds' colorful feather ornamentation. "Our studies...

The Conservatives succeeded in a bid to adjourn the House of Commons for the day, in another move to paralyze the proceedings of government and force an immediate confidence vote in the government. The motion that the House be adjourned until Friday at 10 a.m. passed in the House of Commons before noon on Thursday, 152 to 144. It was supported by the Tories and the Bloc Québécois, part of a strategy to block or stall the activities of the government. After the vote, Conservative Leader Stephen Harper said the two parties will continue to take action to force Parliament...

Ottawa — A coalition of pharmacists, doctors and patients is warning that Canada could face a disastrous shortage of drugs if the United States allows unlimited imports of drugs from Canada. The coalition says legislation to be introduced in the U.S. Congress next month would overwhelm Canada's prescription-drug supply and price-control system. Medicines are cheaper in Canada because prices are regulated by the Patent Medicines Prices Review Board. This has led to a thriving cross-border trade mainly conducted on the Internet. The coalition says a survey it commissioned found that 55 per cent of Canadians are concerned about U.S. plans...

Washington — A civilian patrol group that has been monitoring the Mexican border for illegal immigrants wants to expand its mission to the Canadian border, organizers said Tuesday. Minuteman Project leaders said their volunteers alerted U.S. authorities to more than 330 cases this month of illegal immigrants crossing into the United States across a 37-kilometre stretch of Arizona's southern border. Now they plan to extend their patrol along the rest of the border with Mexico and are helping organize similar efforts in four states that neighbour Canada. “In the absence of the federal government doing its mandated duty to secure...

On a gray day in mid-January, Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard University, suggested that innate differences in the build of the male and female brain might be one factor underlying the relative scarcity of women in science. His remarks reignited a debate that has been smoldering for a century, ever since some scientists sizing up the brains of both sexes began using their main finding--that female brains tend to be smaller--to bolster the view that women are intellectually inferior to men. To date, no one has uncovered any evidence that anatomical disparities might render women incapable of achieving academic...

Prime Minister Paul Martin made a strong case last night for delaying a federal election, even if he doesn't succeed in fending one off. Canadians are angry, and rightly so, over the dramatic allegations about the sponsorship scandal that are emerging from the Gomery inquiry. But we won't know the full picture until Mr. JusticeJohn Gomery submits his final report later this year. At that time, Mr. Martin has promised to go to the people and face their judgment in a general election — an extraordinary pledge for a Canadian prime minister. “Let the facts come out,” he said. “And...

Russian Astrologist Sues NASA NASA has been taken to court in Russia over its plans to crack open a comet. Marina Bai, a Russian astrologist, filed a lawsuit last month with the Presnensky district court in Moscow, demanding that the U.S. space agency call off its $311 million Deep Impact mission. As reported in MosNews.com, Bai is also asking for 8.7 billion rubles ($311 million) in compensation for moral damages. “The actions of NASA infringe upon my system of spiritual and life values, in particular on the values of every element of creation, upon the unacceptability of barbarically interfering with...

Galaxy Observations Show No Change In Fundamental Physical Constant The results are being reported today (Monday, April 18) at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) by astronomer Jeffrey Newman, a Hubble Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory representing DEEP2, a collaboration led by the University of California, Berkeley, and UC Santa Cruz. Newman is presenting the data and an update on the DEEP2 project at a 1 p.m. EDT press conference at the Marriott Waterside Hotel in Tampa, Fla. The fine structure constant, one of a handful of pure numbers that occupy a central role in physics,...

Washington — Mandatory limits on all U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse" gases would not significantly affect average economic growth rates across the country through 2025, the government said. That finding by the Energy Information Administration, an independent arm of the Energy Department, runs counter to President George W. Bush's repeated pronouncements that limits on carbon dioxide and other gases that warm the atmosphere like a greenhouse would seriously harm the U.S. economy. Mr. Bush has proposed ways of slowing the growth rate in U.S.-produced greenhouse gases and methods to reduce emissions of methane internationally. But he rejected...

OTTAWA — The Conservatives are edging toward a majority as anger with the Liberals become more firmly entrenched and Stephen Harper begins to earn the trust of Canadians, even in wary Ontario, a new poll suggests. An Ipsos-Reid survey conducted for The Globe and Mail and CTV between Tuesday and Thursday of this week — as damning testimony from the Gomery inquiry into the sponsorship scandal made headlines and election speculation heated to a boil — put the Conservatives at levels of support they have not seen since the election of 1988, when they swept the country. The Tories' popularity...

Reproductive Riddle Unscrambled A pair of fossilized eggs found inside pelvis of dinosaur supports a link with birds Friday, April 15, 2005 Updated at 8:30 AM EST From Friday's Globe and Mail Calgary — Scientists have for the first time discovered fossilized eggs inside the body of a dinosaur, which provides concrete clues about ancient reproduction and supports the theory that birds evolved from dinosaurs, according to research published today. The pair of hard-shelled eggs about the size of large, long yams were found inside the pelvis of a female oviraptorid, a meat-eating bipedal dinosaur that lived about 80 million...

$10-billion Kyoto plan tabled in Parliament Wednesday, April 13, 2005 Updated at 4:37 PM EST Canadian Press and Globe and Mail Update The Liberal government finally revealed Wednesday its plan to meet Kyoto targets -- spending approximately $10-billion over the next seven years. The plan requires annual reductions of 270 million tonnes a year within the next seven years, as reported by The Globe and Mail last month. However, it does not specify how much of that will be obtained by cutting actual pollution and how much by purchasing emissions credits from poor countries. The plan calls on large emitters...

Membraneless Fuel Cell Is Tiny, Versatile CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A fuel cell designed by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign can operate without a solid membrane separating fuel and oxidant, and functions with alkaline chemistry in addition to the more common acidic chemistry. Like a battery, a fuel cell changes chemical energy into electrical energy. While most fuel cells employ a physical barrier to separate the fuel and oxidant, the microfluidic fuel cell developed at Illinois utilizes multi-stream laminar flow to accomplish the same task. “The system uses a Y-shaped microfluidic channel in which two liquid streams containing...

Explosions In Space May Have Initiated Ancient Extinction On Earth Scientists at NASA and the University of Kansas say that a mass extinction on Earth hundreds of millions of years ago could have been triggered by a star explosion called a gamma-ray burst. The scientists do not have direct evidence that such a burst activated the ancient extinction. The strength of their work is their atmospheric modeling -- essentially a "what if" scenario. The scientists calculated that gamma-ray radiation from a relatively nearby star explosion, hitting the Earth for only ten seconds, could deplete up to half of the atmosphere's...

Top court spurns Wal-Mart bid Thursday, April 7, 2005 Updated at 11:18 AM EST Canadian Press Ottawa — A Saskatchewan Wal-Mart store where workers are trying to unionize won't be allowed to challenge union efforts to get hold of internal company documents. The Supreme Court of Canada on Thursday rejected the Weyburn store's application to appeal an order to hand over the papers to the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1400. The Saskatchewan Court of Appeal last November overturned a lower court ruling and ordered Wal-Mart to turn over to the union company documents, including one called Wal-Mart —...

On-line journal provokes a firestorm By JANE TABER Tuesday, April 5, 2005 Page A1 SENIOR POLITICAL WRITER OTTAWA -- An unassuming 42-year-old call-centre manager and Star Trek fan from Minneapolis, Minn., has provoked a political firestorm in Canada. Ed Morrissey -- Captain Ed to his friends -- published on the weekend what no Canadian is allowed to print or broadcast. On his Internet blog, he posted testimony before the Gomery commission that is subject to a publication ban. Yesterday, after the story of his blogging exploits broke in the Canadian media, Mr. Morrissey saw the traffic on his website increase...

Ottawa's Kyoto plan under fire on all sides By BILL CURRY Tuesday, March 29, 2005 Updated at 2:25 AM EST From Tuesday's Globe and Mail OTTAWA - Canada's major environmental groups have turned against the federal government over a controversial Kyoto budget measure, increasing the pressure on the Liberals to back down and avoid a showdown with the Conservatives that could lead to a spring election. The NDP and Bloc Québécois have already pledged to vote against the budget bill. Last week, Conservative Leader Stephen Harper also vowed to vote against it unless the environmental provision is removed. Yesterday, eight...

The NCAA has asked the University of North Carolina (search) at Pembroke to stop calling its sports teams the "Braves,“ saying the nickname is racially offensive to Native Americans. But it turns out the university was founded exclusively for American Indians, who called themselves the Braves.