Free Republic

With the just-completed hockey playoffs coinciding this year with the World Cup of soccer, as well as the overlapping basketball and baseball seasons -- also Canadian football, the U.S. Open of golf and, later this week, Wimbledon -- we are afforded a rare, eclipse-like opportunity to compare the major spectator sports at close range. Compare, and declare: There is one game that stands out as objectively, scientifically, mathematically superior to the rest. I am of course talking about "the best game you can name," le sport des glorieux, the gentlemanly sport of hockey. Let's break it down by category. The...

An Ottawa man is in serious condition and was airlifted to the burn unit at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto after accidentally setting himself on fire yesterday morning while trying to cut open a gas tank with a chainsaw....

Alexandre Trudeau said Friday he would chaperone a man with alleged links to Al Qaeda to make the suspect’s life easier, prompting questions about his late father’s crackdown on Quebec terrorists. “I wasn’t alive then," said Trudeau before declining to comment on any suggested similarities between the security certificate used to arrest Adil Charkaoui and the War Measures Act invoked by then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau in 1970 to lock up hundreds of Quebecers.

This is an astonishing webcam on Hornby Island, BC.

Canadians have chosen change. They want a government that treats their tax dollars with respect. A government that puts ordinary working people and their families first. A government that is accountable. This Government has been given a mandate to lead the change demanded by the Canadian people. Leading change in a minority Parliament means working together. To this end, the Government will look for shared goals and common ideas that will help Canadians build a stronger Canada. It is time to turn a new leaf.

....Thankfully, the Church had already developed a strategy, dubbed "CCC", specifically designed to deal with a potential Muslim Offence Emergency (MOE) situation. As it seems likely that MOE response will assume increasing importance for all organisations in the coming decades, use of the Y Llan events as a case study is invaluable - organisations which adopt a strategy modelled on that of the church may well be spared trouble, while those who do not risk having their products boycotted, their buildings burnt and their representatives beheaded. The recommended CCC response to an MOE or a potential MOE rests upon three...

Mines and Mining Development Minister Amos Midzi recently proposed that the government acquire a 51 percent shareholding, 25 percent of which would be non-contributory, in a bid to reduce foreign ownership in mines. Industry officials say "non-contributory" means the government would acquire shares without paying for them.

Pot crusader Marc Emery says his appearance on the news program 60 Minutes on Sunday will be an opportunity for Americans to see him as just an ordinary guy who regards himself as the Luke Skywalker against their government's Darth Vader tactics.

As the volatile polls shift back and forth between predicting a majority or minority Conservative government, the possibility exists that Paul Martin will remain prime minister after January 23. If the combined seat count for the Liberals and the NDP exceeds the seat count for the Conservatives, Paul Martin, who is still prime minister until he resigns, can go to the Governor-General and advise her that he retains the confidence of the house. Paul Martin can do that if he shows that Jack Layton and the NDP are committed to supporting the Liberals in a coalition of some kind. It...

The federal Tories are dumping a B.C. candidate who faces charges of attempting to smuggle a car and booze across the Canada-U.S. border. Conservative Leader Stephen Harper said on Thursday that it's too late to replace Derek Zeisman as a candidate, but that he wouldn't be allowed to join the caucus. Derek Zeisman (courtesy derekzeisman.com) "Mr. Zeisman will not be sitting as a Conservative should he be elected," Harper said. "He'll have to get this matter resolved." Zeisman is running to replace retiring Conservative MP Jim Gouk in the riding of British Columbia Southern Interior....

In 2002, Chinese officials admitted that 25% of the loans written by the state owned banks were non-performing. Standard and Poors and a number of others said it was closer to 50%, and possibly more. Within the space of four years, the Chinese administration has revised its estimation of the rate of non-performing loans down to an average of about 12%. How can this be done so fast? I'm not really sure. We are, of course, talking about the writing down or otherwise accounting for of many hundreds of billions of dollars of bad loans. I assume that it's due...

"....A pine cone shortage may have led the squirrels to seek other food sources, although scientists are sceptical...."

I was a bit disappointed in the toy’s lack of realism. There was only one passenger to be screened. Where were the long lines? The passenger’s clothing wasn’t removable for strip searching. The passenger’s shoes couldn’t be removed either. Her luggage fit easily inside the X-ray machine. There were no silly warning signs not to carry guns or bombs onto the plane. And there was no No Fly List or Selectee List included in the playset. Another oddity was that the toy came with two guns, one for the police officer and one that either belonged to the X-ray screener...

An 11-year-old sixth-grade girl was arrested Friday afternoon at Fox Chapel Middle School on a charge of possessing a weapon. The weapon? A butter knife. The girl, who won't turn 12 until March and whose name is being withheld by the Times because she is a minor, was handcuffed, taken to the Hernando County Jail and charged with the possession of a weapon on school property, a third-degree felony.

The vultures of the venomous left are attacking on two fronts, first that the president didn't do what the incompetent mayor of New Orleans and the pouty governor of Louisiana should have done, and didn't, in the early hours after Katrina loosed the deluge on the city that care and good judgment forgot. Ray Nagin, the mayor, ordered a "mandatory" evacuation a day late, but kept the city's 2,000 school buses parked and locked in neat rows when there was still time to take the refugees to higher ground. The bright-yellow buses sit ruined now in four feet of dirty...

DOES ANYONE DOUBT [Jonah Goldberg ] That if 1,2,3... a dozen looters had been shot the first day New Orleans would be a better place today? (And again, I'm talking about the actual thieves not the people trying to survive). One thing that confuses the objections to the "shoot on sight" policy is that it sounds like looters will be getting shot day after day after day. You don't have to shoot on sight very long before would-be looters realize "hey, I might get shot on sight." We've now heard of multiple outrages as a result of people being stranded...

Illiberal ideas are becoming to be formulated, spread and preached under the name of ideologies or “isms”, which have – at least formally and nominally – nothing in common with the old-styled, explicit socialism. These ideas are, however, in many respects similar to it. There is always a limiting (or constraining) of human freedom, there is always ambitious social engineering, there is always an immodest “enforcement of a good” by those who are anointed (T. Sowell) on others against their will, there is always the crowding out of standard democratic methods by alternative political procedures, and there is always the...

I have a very simple solution to the entire Cindy Sheehan affair. Let her meet with the President. That's right. I've finally changed my tune. Let her meet with the President who thwarted the United Nations Security Council and made the case for war. Let her meet with the President who hindered the progress of United Nations weapons inspectors.....

Many are hopeful the threat of an economic slowdown will force the party to speed up much-needed reforms, but others remain skeptical. The government is relatively untested when it comes to stick-handling delicate fiscal matters, and its ability to make quick, informed decisions is bogged down by a glacial adherence to consensus-building and a generation of leaders born of the immensely destructive Cultural Revolution. That raises many frightening possibilities, not just for China but for all those investors who've pumped billions into its rickety institutions. "If the Chinese banks collapse, the whole world economy collapses," Wilson warns. "The world economy...

A former Hollywood stunt man now living in the Netherlands launched his greatest project to date Tuesday: a 45-foot replica Viking ship made of millions of wooden ice cream sticks and more than a ton of glue. Rob McDonald named the ship the "Mjollnir" after the hammer of the mythic Norse god of thunder, Thor. After the 13 ton boat was lifted into the water by crane, "Captain Rob," as he is known, stood calmly on the stern as a team of volunteers rowed the apparently sturdy vessel ... "I have a dream to show children they can do anything,"...