Electioneering took a back seat to apologies and recriminations in the Alberta election campaign on Saturday culminating with the resignation of a Conservative staffer who mocked Wildrose leader Danielle Smith for not having children. The Tweet, sent by Amanda Wilkie, sac louis vuitton mode an assistant to the executive director in Premier Alison Redford's southern Alberta office, responded to a series of recent announcements by Smith promising more tax help and money for families with children in school. “If @elect Danielle likes young and growing families so much, why doesn’t she have children of her own? #wrp family pack = insincere #abvote,” read the tweet. When the Twitter outrage grew, Wilkie backed down, tweeting “Fine, I apologize.” Earlier Saturday, Smith responded in a news release of her own, saying she and husband David Moretta wanted to have kids when they married in 2006. “After a few years we sought help from the Calgary Regional Fertility Clinic. I appreciated the support and assistance of the caring staff as we went through tests and treatments,sacoche louis vuitton but in the end we were not successful,” said Smith in the release. “I consider myself very fortunate to have a terrific stepson, Jonathan, David’s son from a previous marriage. I am also blessed to have grown up in a large family with four siblings who have given me the opportunity to be the auntie of five terrific nieces and nephews. Wilkie resigned after speaking to Redford. The Alberta premier told reporters in Calgary Saturday afternoon she was offended by the attack on her chief rival and phoned to apologize. “I was appalled. I believe anyone who decides to put their name into public service and is able to articulate views needs to be respected. There were comments, as I understand it even last night from people who were supporters of our party saying this was not appropriate behaviour,” said Redford. “It was a comment I reacted to in quite a negative way. I was disappointed,” she added. “It is not the way I have conducted myself so far on this campaign and it's not the way I expect me, any of my candidates or any of our volunteers to do so in the future.” Smith said she was satisfied with Redford's apology and considers the matter closed. But she does acknowledge the leaders need to be more civil in the weeks to come. “I think everyone's kind of feeling like we need to set the reset button next week. Sometimes that happens. sacoche louis vuitton homme You get into a campaign, tempers flare, some volunteers end up saying things that they shouldn't. Sometimes politicians say things that they shouldn't,” Smith said at a news conference at a south Calgary recreational complex. I think we're at a point now where everybody wants to focus on the issues.” Alberta voters go to the polls on April 23 and recent surveys have Redford's team and Smith's party running in a dead heat. The issue also highlighted the growing power of social media, particularly Twitter, to dictate what matters and what gets covered in the provincial campaign. In this case, Twitter-fuelled outrage forced a premier to distance herself from comments made by someone who never had the authority or approval to speak for her or her party in the first place. It has been a bad week for Redford's Tories.

Thousands of Palestinians protested on Friday against Israeli policies of land seizure and control of Jerusalem, sac louis vuitton mode leading to clashes with Israeli troops in which a 20-year-old was killed and scores of others were injured. The annual protest, known as Land Day, drew demonstrators in groups of hundreds in locations within Israel as well as in the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza. There were also solidarity marches in neighboring Lebanon and Jordan. But weeks of organizing for a global march on Jerusalem produced fewer demonstrators than expected as Israel’s borders remained largely calm. Security troops in riot gear were out in large numbers, using rubber bullets, tear gas, water cannons filled with putrid green liquid and high-pitched noise machines. Land Day commemorates events in March 1976 when Israel confiscated land from Galilee Arab villages, leading to protests in which six Arabs were killed. This year, the focus was extended to Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem — which Palestinians want as the capital of a future state — and there were calls for protests and marches around the world. In Gaza, where the killing occurred, Hamas organized a rally more than a mile away from the crossing into Israel, sacoche louis vuitton with its forces deployed to keep the crowds from clashing with Israeli troops on the other side. But some demonstrators sneaked through the lines, throwing stones and empty bottles at the Israelis. The Israelis responded with live fire, wounding about a dozen people, one of whom, Mahmoud Zaqout, 20, died later at a hospital, a medical spokesman said. Another group of demonstrators reached the security fence in southeastern Gaza, where they were also met with gunfire. Officials said a total of 30 were hurt in the two demonstrations. In Bethlehem, Palestinians reported one person seriously hurt when an Israeli tear-gas canister hit him in the head. At the Qalandiya checkpoint between the West Bank and Jerusalem, masked youths threw stones at Israeli troops and set tires on fire. The troops responded with rubber bullets and tear gas. Mustafa Barghouti, a doctor and Palestinian politician, sacoche louis vuitton homme said one of the tear-gas canisters hit him, sending him to the hospital. “I was hit with a tear-gas bomb on the side of my head and my back,” Dr. Barghouti said in a telephone interview from his hospital bed. “My scalp is injured, my right ear has problems, and they are checking to see if I have any spinal injury.” The Israeli military spokesman’s office, in a set of Twitter messages and later over the telephone, said Dr. Barghouti had not been hit by an Israeli canister but had been attacked by other Palestinians. A few Palestinian witnesses offered a similar account. The Palestinian minister of social welfare, Majida al-Masri, was treated after collapsing from tear-gas inhalation. A participant in the Qalandiya rally, Walid Samara, an English teacher from the village of Salfit, said he took part because “we have many people, even children, in the Israeli prisons because they protested against the occupation. There is no city or village that doesn’t have a colony or settlement on their land.” Israeli troops were on high alert along the borders with Lebanon and Syria after marchers last year tried to cross, leading to a number of dead. But this year, with Syria’s own civil conflict continuing, that border was quiet. In Lebanon, hundreds took part at a small demonstration at the Crusader era castle of Beaufort overlooking the Israeli border. The Palestinians who took part, mostly from refugee camps in southern Lebanon, said they were surprised and disappointed at the low turnout.

As American and European diplomats prepare for crucial negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, the White House finds itself caught in a bind: for the diplomatic effort to work, sac louis vuitton mode American officials say, the Iranian government must believe that President Obama is ready and willing to take military action. Yet tough talk, necessary as it might be for successful diplomacy, contributes to a sense that war may be unavoidable. And it masks the fact that Mr. Obama, and his military commanders, remain deeply worried about the consequence of an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, either by Israel alone or a strike that could draw in the United States. “Obama had two main objectives — to deflect Israeli pressure to conduct or acquiesce in a premature war, and to neutralize Republican criticism that he is too soft on Iran and too hard on Israel,” said Robert Malley, program director for the Middle East and North Africa at the International Crisis Group. “On those fronts, mission accomplished.” But, Mr. Malley added, “victory came at a price.” By stating clearly that containment of a nuclear-armed Iran is off the table, sacoche louis vuitton Mr. Obama may have committed America to military action to halt Iran if other means fail to do so, Mr. Malley said. Some White House officials acknowledge that in an election year when Republican candidates are calling for tougher action against Iran, the misgivings expressed by the Pentagon — both publicly and privately — over a strike could provide the president with some political cover. A classified war simulation conducted by United States Central Command this month to assess the repercussions of an Israeli airstrike, for example, found that an Israeli attack could lead to a wider regional war, draw in the United States and leave hundreds of Americans dead, providing recent evidence to the skeptics — not only in the Pentagon but also in the White House and intelligence community as well — who have warned that any action by Israel against Iran could prove perilous. At the same time, some current and former administration officials worry that any hesitancy about considering military action that is expressed in the United States could lull the Iranians into thinking that they do not need to make concessions at the negotiating table, just at a time when the diplomatic effort has taken center stage. “For diplomacy to work there has to be a coercive side,” said Dennis B. Ross, a former senior official at the National Security Council who handled Iran policy. “If the Iranians think this is a bluff, you can’t be as effective. The message to the Iranians is: you’ve got an option.” And even Israeli officials who have pushed for tougher action from the United States say they would much rather see a diplomatic end to the crisis. “At the end of the day, sacoche louis vuitton homme Israel doesn’t want to strike Iran either,” one Western diplomat said. Added David Makovsky, an Israel expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy: “The next move on the chess board is diplomacy. It has to be diplomacy, and there has to be an effort to get diplomacy to work.” But some White House officials clearly feel that diplomatic options for resolving the crisis are being overlooked amid all the talk about force. The risk, they say, is that the debate will take on a momentum of its own. There is also a sense at the White House that the administration is not getting enough credit for putting together a global coalition to enforce economic sanctions against Iran that is also creating the conditions for a possible diplomatic solution to the problem — even as administration officials say the military option is never off the table.

A 20-year-old Tibetan monk in western China has become the latest to set himself on fire in protest against the authoritarian government, sac louis vuitton mode Tibetan exiles said on Thursday. More than 30 people have self-immolated, or attempted to, over the past year in ethnic Tibetan areas of China to protest Beijing's heavy-handed rule. Activists say China's crackdown is so oppressive Tibetans have no other way to voice their protests. A monk named Sherab who studied at the Kirti monastery in Aba county set himself ablaze on Wednesday, exiled Tibetan monks Kanyag Tsering and Losang Yeshe said in a statement. Sherab shouted slogans as he burned on the main street in his hometown of Jialuo, then died at the site, said the exiles who had belonged to the same monastery but now live in Dharmsala, India. They said police removed Sherab's body to prevent local residents from taking it to hold a funeral. Authorities have placed Aba county, a region of high-altitude valleys grazed by yaks on the Tibetan plateau,sacoche louis vuitton under a tight security clampdown after Tibetan communities across western China rose up in a 2008 rebellion that was quashed by massive force. Beijing has blamed the Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, who has lived in exile in India for decades, sacoche louis vuitton homme for inciting the self-immolations, and has called the protesters' actions a form of terrorism. The Tibetan self-declared government-in-exile has rejected the Chinese government's accusations and issued statements discouraging self-immolation. A Tibetan exile who set himself on fire in India earlier this week to protest a visit by China's president died on Wednesday.

Recorded by a gunman in southwestern France as he killed seven people at close range, sac louis vuitton mode and later sent to the satellite broadcaster Al Jazeera by mail, the video captured a ruthlessness that shocked even hardened journalists accustomed to such disturbing images. “Not like this — this is different,” said Salah Negm, a chief news director at Al Jazeera and among the ultimate arbiters for the news operation on broadcasting such footage. As the police surrounded him during a nearly 31-hour standoff, the killer, Mohammed Merah, boasted to the authorities that his grisly recordings would soon be seen by the public. But on Tuesday the Qatar-based network decided that it would not be showing the videotaped murders, a ruling that some saw as a big shift for a station that had once been viewed in the West as a conduit for propaganda from Al Qaeda. The decision, made at the very top of the sprawling international network, provided an opportunity for Al Jazeera to display its journalistic restraint at a time of management upheaval and accusations of a double standard in its coverage of uprisings in the Middle East. Experts said Mr. Merah’s video offered a possible hint of the broadcaster’s future editorial direction. “Al Jazeera is entering a new phase,” sacoche louis vuitton said Mohammed el-Nawawy, a professor of communication at Queens University of Charlotte in North Carolina, who has written widely on Al Jazeera. “It’s hard not to see the correlation between the new management and the decision on that story.” The network stressed that it had been guided by journalistic principles common to all news organizations, saying that the video did not provide any news value. The decision, Mr. Negm said, was not a result of intense pressure from the French government, including an urgent plea from President Nicolas Sarkozy and an impending court hearing to stop the broadcast. “The only factors are editorial,” Mr. Negm said. “Pressures, no, they don’t work. We don’t aspire to be politically correct; we aspire to be editorially correct.” But experts said that the murky calculus involved in such determinations was even more complex for Al Jazeera, which has sought to shed a negative image still held by many in the West, who have come to see it as a repository for inflammatory content, sacoche louis vuitton homme including raw video of hostages in the years immediately after Sept. 11, 2001. Mr. Merah, who was killed by the police in Toulouse, appeared to present his video as following in that lineage, giving it the title “Al Qaeda Attacks France.” Zied Tarrouche, Al Jazeera’s Paris bureau chief, said he reviewed Mr. Merah’s video after it was received late Monday, and that it showed the seven killings with music, religious chants and the reading of Koranic verses in the background. “You hear the gunshots and the cries of the victims,” he said. The video was sent to the bureau on a USB flash drive after the killings. It was accompanied by an unsigned letter in all capital letters written in “sometimes bad French” and purporting to be from Al Qaeda, Mr. Tarrouche said. It was immediately passed on to the police, he said. The letter was postmarked last Wednesday, from Castelnau-d’Estrétefonds, 15 miles from Toulouse, the French media reported. That was the day Mr. Merah barricaded himself into his apartment after a predawn police raid, and French officials have expressed strong doubt as to whether he sent it himself. Mr. Merah’s older brother, Abdelkader, is in police custody, suspected of complicity with the attacks. Both men were under surveillance before the raids. It is unclear whether the video was delivered elsewhere, but officials expressed fear that it could appear on jihadist Web sites.

A Shin Bet security service review has established that the French terrorist Mohamed Merah spent time in Israel and the territories about a year and a half ago. sac louis vuitton mode Merah entered Israel from Jordan, crossing the Allenby Bridge in September 2010. He was questioned by Shin Bet men at the bridge, but this check did not reveal any suspicious details and Merah was allowed to enter the country. Merah stayed in Israel for three days. He is not known to have taken up any sort of terror activity while in Israel. The Shin Bet inquiry has not corroborated a claim made by Bernard Squarcini, head of the Direction Centrale du Renseignement internal intelligence agency, who suggested that Merah was detained in Israel while in possession of a knife. Security sources told Haaretz that Merah visited Israel before stays in Afghanistan and Pakistan;sacoche louis vuitton there was thus no concrete information suggesting that he posed a security risk. Merah, a 23-year-old unemployed car mechanic, defined by the French intelligence chief as a "little failure from the suburbs," was responsible for the murder of seven people, including three children and an adult at the Jewish school in Toulouse, along with three soldiers a few days earlier. Merah died after falling off a balcony when trying to flee from French police special forces, who kept him pinned in his apartment for about a full day. Squarcini stated that "two years ago Merah toured around the Middle East, in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and even Israel. Later he traveled to Afghanistan. He traveled on irregular routes and was not on our radar screens, though he was monitored by foreign intelligence services, either American services or local services. He reached Kabul on November 13, 2010, and he returned to France on December 5." Squarcini was asked how French intelligence services related to Merah when he returned to France. "We checked information that had been collected about him, but it didn't amount to much. There wasn't indication of ideological activity. He didn't go to mosques," he said. Some French security officials have suspected that Merah and his brother, who is accused of aiding and abetting murders, acted as part of an international terror network. But French President Nicolas Sarkozy dispelled this theory on Monday, saying that sacoche louis vuitton homme "there was no terror network. To the best of our knowledge, there was no such network." Sarkozy described the attack as an isolated incident perpetrated by a deranged individual. Before he was killed, Merah told policemen that he had connections with Al-Qaida, and that he had visited Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he had weapons training. On Monday, indictments were submitted against Merah's brother, Abbad al-Kadr, on counts of involvement in murder, and he was kept behind bars. But no evidence has been uncovered implicating the brother in the Jewish school massacre.

As Syria's bloodshed deepens, the British-born first lady has become an object of contempt for many, sac louis vuitton mode a Marie Antoinette figure who shopped online for crystal-encrusted Christian Louboutin stilettos while her country burned. The European Union slapped sanctions Friday on Asma Assad, the 36-year-old wife of the president who for the past decade offered a veneer of respectability to one of the world's most opaque and ruthless dictatorships. The Syrian government's ferocious crackdown on a year-old uprising has shattered the image of her as a glamorous, reform-minded woman who could help bring progressive values to a country that has been ruled by the Assad family dynasty for more than 40 years. The European action — the latest punishment imposed by world leaders on Syria for its crackdown — bans her from traveling to EU countries and freezing any assets she may have there. "She is one of the regime's deceptions," said Amer Mattar, a 26-year-old Syrian who recently fled the country because of the violence that has killed 8,000 people in the past year. sacoche louis vuitton "She is definitely part of this ugly formula in Syria." A trove of emails — purported to be from the private accounts of Bashar and Asma Assad and published last month by London's Guardian newspaper — have helped unmask that deception. They appear to capture the first lady splurging on luxury goods as violence sweeps her country, placing orders for expensive jewelry, bespoke furniture, and a 2,650-pound ($4,200) vase from Harrods department store in London. Born Asma Akhras to a prominent Syrian family living in the U.K., the future first lady grew up in the west London suburbs, a generally affluent, quiet part of the city with comfortable houses, tree-lined streets and large parks. In a haunting twist, her family is originally from Homs, a city in central Syria that regime forces have besieged with tanks, snipers and relentless shelling to crush the resistance there. The bloodied city is now a symbol of the uprising. Known among childhood friends as "Emma," Asma studied at King's College London, graduating in 1996 with a degree in computer science and a diploma in French literature. sacoche louis vuitton homme She was working at JP Morgan in London when she met Bashar Assad, who was then the son of the Syrian president, reportedly during a family vacation to the country. Despite their divergent upbringings, the two could trade stories about life in London. Bashar had studied ophthalmology in London before returning to Syria to prepare for a life in politics. He was groomed for the presidency after his older brother, Basil, widely regarded as his father's chosen heir, died in a 1994 car crash. The couple married in 2000 — the same year Bashar inherited power from his father — and Asma quickly became a glamorous face of the new regime. With her honey-colored hair and designer clothes, Asma provided a charming counterpoint to Bashar's gawky, somewhat awkward demeanor. She was outspoken about humanitarian issues, a fact that many Syrian now point to as a sign of deep hypocrisy. In 2009, she decried an Israeli siege in Gaza as "barbaric," telling CNN that the world was "working against the clock" to save lives there. "This is the 21st century," she said in the interview. "Where in the world could this happen? ... As a mother and as a human being, we need to make sure that these atrocities stop." Before the Syrian uprising began in March 2011, the Assads often were spotted driving around town, even photographed in Damascus riding bicycles with their three children: Hafez, who is 10; Zein, 8, and Kareem, 7. They live in an apartment in the upscale Abu Rummaneh district of Damascus, as opposed to a palatial mansion like other Arab leaders. In the years after her husband ascended to the presidency, Asma played a key role in shoring up the image of the regime, gathering fawning headlines from feature writers and fluffy profiles in fashion magazines. "Du chic, du chic et encore du chic," gushed France's Elle magazine in 2008, which went on to name her the world's most stylish woman. In 2009, Britain's top-selling tabloid The Sun introduced its readers to the "sexy Brit" who was "bringing Syria in from the cold."

There are several sides to Terri-Lynne McClintic. There is the chatty young woman who told an investigator four days after killing Tori Stafford that “no way in hell”sac louis vuitton mode was that her in a surveillance video. There is the woman who calmly tried to implicate Tori’s parents, Tara McDonald and James Goris, in the little girl’s disappearance. Then there is the sobbing woman on the witness stand who says she couldn’t comprehend that she was capable of murdering a child so gruesomely. Tori, 8, was abducted on April 8 2009. McClintic and Michael Rafferty, then her boyfriend, were arrested a month later and charged with abduction and murder. McClintic pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment in April, 2010. Rafferty, 31, is accused of first-degree murder, sexual assault and abduction. His trial began on March 5. McClintic, 21, is the Crown’s star witness. On her fifth day on the witness stand, Rafferty’s lawyer, Dirk Derstine, presented yet another side of McClintic to the jury: the woman who has said different things at different times and drastically changed her testimony on Jan. 14, sacoche louis vuitton saying that it was she, not Rafferty, who first kicked Tori and then hit her on the head with a hammer. On Jan. 13, just weeks before Rafferty’s trial began, McClintic told a behavioural counsellor in prison that she had wielded the hammer that killed Tori. The counsellor called the police and McClintic gave new testimony. On stand, McClintic said she had come to terms with the fact that she had killed Tori. “You had finally come to accept that you killed Tori,” said Derstine. “When can we expect that you would able to tell us that you did more than just kill her ... that, in fact, I am going to suggest to you that you were the engine that drove the events of that day.” “That will never happen ’cause that is not the truth,” said McClintic. Minutes earlier, Derstine read out parts from an interview on May 19, 2009, where McClintic shared her “theory” of what happened to Tori with OPP Det. Sgt. Jim Smyth. McClintic says she heard that “James was a pedophile” and that “Tara’s got a large coke (cocaine) debt.” “I don’t think I consciously thought in my mind then ... that I tried to blame them for anything,”sacoche louis vuitton homme McClintic said on the stand. “I was simply saying things I had heard.” But it was McClintic’s calm and cool demeanour in an interview on April 12, 2009, that Derstine focused on for a while; a portion of that video interview was played for the jury. It was her first interview with investigators after Tori’s disappearance and McClintic was relaxed, laughed often and laughingly denied she was the woman in the white jacket the little walked away with. McClintic admitted to Det. Const. Sean Kelly that she was in the area of Tori’s school that day, was wearing a white coat, walking home after picking up drugs around the time school let out. But she maintained she didn’t seeing anything related to little girl’s abduction. “I can’t recall anything ... I can’t put anyone there,” McClintic tells Kelly in the video. “I`m going to do everything I can (to help).” She then goes on to describe a pair of sandals she says she wore that day, adding they don’t match with what the woman in the video is wearing. In court, she admitted she had lied repeatedly in that interview. “I sometimes laugh when I am uncomfortable or nervous,” McClintic said on the stand. “The lies came out so naturally, unprompted,” Derstine pointed out.

Zynga has bought games developer OMGPOP for a rumoured $210m, sacoche louis vuitton just seven weeks after the latter's Draw Something game was released for iOS and Android. The New York-based developer will continue to develop the Pictionary-esque game, while also working on new mobile IP for Zynga, reporting to the publisher's chief mobile officer David Ko. In that first seven weeks, Draw Something was downloaded 35m times, and on the day the acquisition was announced (21 March) it had 13.3m daily active users, 4.8m more than Zynga's most popular social game Words With Friends. The game is a bona-fide craze, but OMGPOP has worked hard to become an overnight success. The company was founded in 2009, and released 35 social games before Draw Something. That's reminiscent of Rovio, which famously developed 51 mobile games before striking gold with Angry Birds. Neither Zynga nor OMGPOP has officially confirmed the $210m figure yet, but TechCrunch reports that it's $180m up front plus a potential $30m earnout payment, and GigaOm backs that up. The acquisition – sacoche louis vuitton homme and specifically that figure – has sent shockwaves through the mobile games industry. There are a lot of developers pouring scorn on Zynga for paying such a large sum for what they perceive to be a fortunate one-hit company. That said, every developer I've talked to admits they would have taken the money without a second thought if they were in OMGPOP's position. Many wonder why Zynga didn't simply clone the game and spend big (but not $200m big) on user acquisition. And there are a fair few developers fretting that this deal is a sign that the mobile games industry is locked in a freemium-fuelled bubble heading for an inevitable pop. No pun intended. There are some clear reasons why Zynga bought OMGPOP, and why it paid so much. Buying Draw Something so rivals couldn't is one of those. Japanese social games companies GREE and DeNA are both rich enough to hold wallet-waving matches against Zynga, and both are mustard-keen to beef up their presence in the West. DeNA acquired US social-mobile games company ngmoco for $403m (including earnout) in October 2010, while GREE paid $104m for rival OpenFeint in April 2011. Given those previous deals, Zynga's decision to bid high and early for OMGPOP is more understandable. Its job now is to ensure players don't get bored with Draw Something and melt away – sac louis vuitton mode or if they do, to ensure they melt away to Zynga's other mobile games. So what else now? OMGPOP will continue adding new features to Draw Something, including chat and the ability to save scribblings for posterity. "Zynga offered us a chance to focus on Draw Something. They know the power of the game and they planned with us how to let it keep rolling in the same fun, irreverent and social way that it has been," writes OMGPOP chief executive Dan Porter on Zynga's blog. "That was really important to us. And they are working with us on everything else – improving performance issues in the game, planning for new games, finding even more developers to work on the game and more… So to players of the game, don't worry. Nothing's changing and now all the features you want – chat and sharing and galleries and more – will come even faster." Other independent studios with a hit (or more) will be considering their own possible valuations, and hoping for DeNA, GREE and other big games companies to go on their own acquisition sprees to hoover up popular mobile titles and scale up their player networks. And if OMGPOP is worth $210m, what does that mean for the valuation of Rovio? Angry Birds is now well over 700m downloads in its various incarnations, with new title Angry Birds Space making its debut today (22 March). The Angry Birds games had 30m daily active users in October 2011, and likely more now, with a proven secondary revenue stream (25m plush toy sales so far) and all manner of other spin-offs on the way. Yet if its valuation is inflated further by OMGPOP's selling price, the pool of companies that could afford to buy Rovio shrinks further too, nudging it further towards an IPO, or a sale to an entertainment giant like Disney rather than a fellow games firm.

The Quebec government is banking on a royalty bonanza from its natural- sac louis vuitton mode resources sector to help Canada's most indebted province begin its long climb out of the red. In releasing its 2012-13 budget Tuesday, Quebec revealed that its path to prosperity hinges on whether it can cash in on its abundance of minerals, forests and hydroelectricity. The document calls for a $1.5-billion deficit in 2012-13, but says the government remains on track to fulfil its long-held pledge to balance the budget by 2013-14. The budget, possibly the last for an unpopular Premier Jean Charest before the next election, also tries to strike a positive populist tone for voters: no new tax hikes or user fees. In the next election, which must be called before the end of 2013, Charest will likely portray himself as a sound economic manager, while at the same time hammering away at the uncertainty of sovereignty. While this budget attempts to highlight economic improvements in Quebec under his watch,sacoche louis vuitton it also acknowledges the province remains Canada's most heavily indebted. A year ago, Quebec had a gross debt of $173 billion, which represented 54.3 per cent of gross domestic product. But Charest's Liberals predict things are turning around. The party is counting on the promise it sees in the province's natural resources sector and, in particular, the expansion of the province's mining industry under Quebec's sweeping northern development plan. "We're building the future and taking all the opportunities that lie before us," Finance Minister Raymond Bachand said in Quebec City before tabling the budget in the legislature. The government expects the mining sector alone to grow nearly 10-fold over a half-dozen years a€” sacoche louis vuitton homme from an average of $42 million in royalties per year between 2006-07 and 2009-10 to $415 million in 2016-17. Bachand estimates that existing mining operations, and those currently being built, will funnel $4 billion in royalties into public coffers over the next 10 years. Even though some mines are still being constructed, he's confident his forecast is a reliable one. "In finance, we usually don't count our eggs before they're hatched," Bachand said. "Of course, if the hen is there, the eggs are going to be laid tomorrow." He said cash from the province's natural-resources sectors has already started to flow. Bachand predicted total royalties in 2011-12 to hit nearly $1.2 billion, and climb to $1.5 billion by 2016-17. The province even wants to get in on some of the anticipated action. Bachand's budget announced the creation of a new government branch that will invest public money in mining, oil and gas initiatives. He said it will eventually manage an equity portfolio of up to $1.2 billion. He added that a team of financial experts will ensure the government makes only the soundest investments. "We want also to have a share, and invest in some cases where the risk is not too high, in the mining and oil companies," said Bachand.

Update: Air Canada announced on Monday evening that it will extend a $15 million line of credit to Aveos. "This stabilization should allow Aveos to reopen certain facilities and call back certain employees, sac louis vuitton mode giving Air Canada the confidence to add new maintenance work over the next days and weeks," the airline announced. Air Canada is once again facing disruptions and labour disputes, this time after a company that provides maintenance for the airline announced it was laying off 2,400 employees across Canada. Hundreds of Aveos employees rallied on Monday morning on Cote Vertu Blvd. near Trudeau Airport, blocking access to Air Canada headquarters. They were upset that Aveos abruptly announced on Sunday that it was shutting down plants in Vancouver, Winnipeg and Montreal. "I got called yesterday at 5 o'clock by my manager," said aircraft technician Rehan Sheikh. "He said Aveos has closed down, been shut down." Roughly 1,800 employees work at the Montreal aircraft maintenance plant, sacoche louis vuitton a thousand of whom protested in Montreal Monday morning. Aveos was created by Air Canada in 2007 when the airline restructured and decided to spin off its maintenance division into a standalone company. Union representatives say many employees were still being paid by Air Canada until just a few months ago. "The 18-hundred people that work here in Montreal and the 3,000 around the country, these employees were employees who built Air Canada," said Marcel St-Jean. "They were all Air Canada employees before the 31st of December 2011. It's not even three months that they're losing their jobs after that." Bankruptcy protection On Monday Air Canada issued a statement saying that Aveos had filed for bankruptcy protection, which caught employees by surprise. "It was pretty traumatising to get informed like that. At least give us a two-week notice," sacoche louis vuitton homme said Sheikh. The news outraged Liberal MP Denis Coderre. "I'm pissed off today that's for sure and I believe that Aveos should bring some answer to their employees," said the Montreal-area MP. "The savage way they have been treated is unacceptable." Air Canada said it has contingency plans in place in the event that Aveos is no longer able to perform maintenance on airplanes. That did not impress Aveos employees. "It's terrible what is happening. What is Air Canada doing to its employees," said St-Jean. Flights grounded over weekend The layoffs come after a weekend of when flights, mostly out of Montreal, were cancelled or delayed when several pilots called in sick. The airline appears to be back to business as usual Monday, although the departure schedule posted on the Greater Toronto Airport Authority website showed Air Canada flights to Ottawa, Montreal, Winnipeg and Seattle were all cancelled Monday. No other airline indicated cancellations. Just last week the federal government passed back-to-work legislation intended to prevent labour disruptions at the airline, after Air Canada threatened to lock out pilots and ground crew unions negotiated for a new contract. If the higher-than-normal number of pilots calling in sick was intended to send a message, aviation analyst Karl Moore says that's done. Now, he expects a cooling off period as the CIRB considers Air Canada's complaint. "My sense is it will calm down from this point on," said the McGill University business professor. "They've got to deliver good service," he said. "That will be the best calming thing." The CIRB can levy fines if it determines absences due to illness were in fact job action. Aveos employees worried in 2009 Workers at Aveos have worried for years that their jobs would be shipped overseas. In 2009 about 1,000 aircraft maintenance workers staged a one-day protest at Air Canada HQ out of worries the company would send more work to El Salvador. At that time time Aveos had three hangars in Canada and capacity at a fourth plant in El Salvador was being expanded to work on up to 16 planes at a time. Union executives at that time were also worried about their pension plan, saying it was billions of dollars in debt.

The weekend arrest of Moammar Gadhafi's fugitive former spy chief has kicked off an international row about which of his alleged crimes—ranging from terrorism to war crimes and mass murder—should take precedence in the pursuit of justice for the regime's victims. Mauritanian officials said Saturday they had detained Abdullah Senussi after he flew to the West African nation from Morocco. sac louis vuitton mode That ended a six-month manhunt started after Gadhafi lost control of his capital, Tripoli, in August and the internationally supported rebellion against his regime took over. In a short statement issued by the Mauritanian state news agency, officials said the 62-year-old ex-Libyan intelligence chief was carrying a fake Malian passport when he arrived in the country's capital, Nouakchott, on a Royal Air Maroc flight from Casablanca. Mauritanian authorities didn't say how they came to identify and arrest Mr. Senussi. Authorities from Libya, France and the International Criminal Court at The Hague quickly announced their resolve to have Mr. Senussi turned over to their jurisdictions. Each is focused on different prosecutions, making Mauritania's decision over extradition politically sensitive and legally significant. Mr. Senussi stands accused of a chilling list of crimes, dating back decades and underscoring the repressive policies that Gadhafi used to stay in power. sacoche louis vuitton Victims of alleged crimes include thousands of Libyans, as well as hundreds of French, American and British citizens. In the wake of the Middle East revolutions last year, Arabs are eager to see legal verdicts against their former dictators and the security officials responsible for repressing them for so long, and many victims despair of ever seeing justice. Since Gadhafi's death at the hands of Libyan militias last year, Mr. Senussi and Gadhafi's son Seif al-Islam represent the country's most-wanted criminals. The new government in Tripoli doesn't relish losing the right to try them first, despite concerns from human-rights groups that Libya doesn't have the resources or infrastructure to carry out impartial trials. Libya has sought help at Interpol, the international criminal police force, sacoche louis vuitton homme which on Sunday issued an arrest warrant for Mr. Senussi "for fraud offenses including embezzling public funds and misuse of power for personal benefit." Meanwhile, another senior member of Mr. Gadhafi's fallen regime, Bashir Saleh, surfaced in Niger, which shares a border with Libya. Niger had recently awarded Mr. Saleh—the former head of a Libyan sovereign-wealth fund—a diplomatic passport and a role as special adviser to the Niger president, a Niger government spokesman said Sunday. However, over the weekend, Mr. Saleh lost both his passport and his advisory job, the spokesman said, to "maintain good relations with Libya, France, and the United States." Libya has pressed its neighbors, including Niger and Algeria, to extradite members of the Gadhafi regime and his family members to their homeland for investigation. Mr. Senussi, known as the "black box" of the Gadhafi regime for his insider knowledge, has been at the top of Libya's most-wanted list. The brother-in-law of the former Libyan strongman, he was one of Gadhafi's closest advisers and served as the head of both internal and external security for Gadhafi throughout most of his 42-year rule. Within Libya, Mr. Senussi is suspected of ordering the deaths of about 1,200 prisoners in Tripoli's notorious Abu Salem prison in 1996, the country's worst single human-rights atrocity.

The Belgian authorities are preparing to fly home the bodies of 22 children and six adults killed in a coach crash in Switzerland. Two C-130 Hercules military planes are on standby. sac louis vuitton mode The Belgian cabinet is due to hold an urgent meeting shortly. The coach, carrying 52 people back to Belgium following a skiing trip, struck a wall head-on in a tunnel on Tuesday. Relatives of the victims were later flown to Switzerland, many still unsure about the fate of their children. Another 24 children were injured, some critically, in the late night accident near the town of Sierre, in the southern Swiss canton of Valais. It was the most serious traffic accident in Switzerland's history for decades. The Belgian foreign ministry said most of the children were aged about 12, and the bus was one of three hired by a Christian group. sacoche louis vuitton The other two reached Belgium safely. The children had spent a week skiing in Val d'Anniviers in the Swiss Alps. Those on board the bus that crashed were from the Stekske primary school in Lommel, near the Dutch border, and from St Lambertus in Heverlee, near Leuven (Louvain). Although most of the victims are Belgian, Swiss officials say the dead include seven Dutch children. Among those injured are three Dutch, one Pole and one German. 'Tragic day' Early on Wednesday, distraught relatives attended meetings at St Lambertus school, where they were given the names of pupils known to have survived. "Parents who know their child is alive are relieved, but for the others it's terrible," sacoche louis vuitton homme said parish priest Dirk De Gendt. Speaking outside the primary school in Lommel, local bishop Patrick Hoogmartens said the families were feeling powerless. "None of the parents knows what has happened exactly, if their child has been affected or not," he said. About 100 relatives later flew to Switzerland on board a government plane. Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo - who also travelled to Switzerland on Wednesday - told reporters in Sion that it was "an absolutely tragic day" for Belgium. Possible causes At a news conference on Wednesday, Swiss prosecutor Olivier Elsig said the bus was nearly new. It hit a concrete wall that forms part of an emergency access section head-on, in a tunnel where the speed limit is 100km/h (62 mph).

China will offer $2 million in humanitarian assistance to Syria through the Red Cross, state media said on Wednesday, sac louis vuitton mode another gesture aimed at repairing relationships in the Middle East, though its stance on Syria shows no sign of changing. Beijing wants to counter accusations from Western and Arab leaders that it, along with Russia, abetted expanding violence by President Bashar al-Assad's forces against civilians by vetoing two UN resolutions on the crisis. Assistant Foreign Minister Zhang Ming, who was sent by Beijing to Egypt this month as an envoy to discuss the crisis in Syria, made the offer of emergency humanitarian aid as a way of "expressing the sympathy and concern of the Chinese people". China and Russia have blocked moves in the United Nations to censure Assad, sacoche louis vuitton a position which met with international outrage. They have also welcomed the Syrian leader's reform pledges, including a promised election. Zhang urged members of the United Nations Security Council to adopt resolutions that are "generally accepted by all", reiterating China's stance that the "authorized use of force, or forced regime change ... are undesirable". "Zhang said the Chinese side believes that only the Syrian people have the right to decide their own fate," according to Xinhua. "External forces have no right to make a choice (for them)." "China is not shielding any person, any party or any regime." Zhang's visit, sacoche louis vuitton homme which will also take him to Saudi Arabia and France, comes as U.N.-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan kept up efforts to broker a halt to hostilities. Syrian government forces killed dozens of people in the northern city of Idlib, dumping their bodies in a mosque, opposition activists said. Another Chinese envoy, former ambassador to Syria Li Huaxin, last week told Assad's government and other parties to stop the violence and help the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross supply aid. China and other powers met behind closed doors at the United Nations Security Council last week to discuss a new draft resolution seeking an end to the bloodshed in Syria, and allow unhindered humanitarian access to needy areas there.

Last week, sac louis vuitton mode the opposition parties accused the government of denying a request from Elections Canada for the power to demand receipts for political parties' election spending. In his report on the 2008 federal election, Canada's chief electoral officer asked MPs to give him the power to request supporting documents from political parties for their expenses. Individual candidates are already required to provide their receipts, as are leadership contestants, Marc Mayrand told the procedure and House affairs committee. But opposition MPs say the Conservatives on the committee looking at the report overruled them last week, refusing to support Mayrand’s recommendation. Tom Lukiwski, the parliamentary secretary to the government House leader, sacoche louis vuitton said Mayrand suggested two options to deal with party spending, and the committee went with the option that cost the parties rather than taxpayers. The committee recommended the parties have their books audited to ensure they complied with the law. It's OK to swing for the fences and try to make a giant hit and establish a franchise. That is a worthy goal," said Harold Vogel, a veteran media analyst and president of Vogel Capital Management. "But still, you've got to wonder how the budgets get so out of control." One industry veteran said the fundamental problem with "John Carter" had less to do with budget than with cognitive dissonance: The action plays out on Mars (known as Barsoom in the books and the film), a planet that contemporary audiences know is barren and uninhabited. That creates a formidable, elephant-in-the-room challenge for the movie's marketers. "You're not able to sell that," noted the industry insider, who asked not to be quoted commenting on someone else's film. Posters that at one point had been adorned with a mysterious figure under the letters "JC" were replaced by ads that featured a shirtless man fleeing giant white apes and left prospective moviegoers scratching their heads. They have been confused,sacoche louis vuitton homme Sealey said: "What the hell is John Carter? What's the film about? I don't know who John Carter is. You've got to make that clear." "John Carter" still has the potential to earn some of its money back. The movie opened to just over $30 million in domestic box-office revenue and earned $70 million more worldwide — a pittance compared with the $600 million in global theatrical ticket sales that analysts have said the movie must generate just to break even. But it's not the "Star Wars" or "Star Trek"the studio was hoping, nor even the "Indiana Jones on Mars" that Stanton told Disney he hoped to make. The status of any "John Carter" sequels or theme park attractions is unclear. "It's not the first movie to cost a lot of money," said former Fox Studios Chairman Bill Mechanic, speaking about his own experience with big-budget movies — among them the high-stakes winner "Titanic" and the high-stakes loser animated film "Titan A.E." "With all the best intentions in the world — good script, great director, great cast — movies don't always perform. Sometimes they're just not interesting to the public."

The solar storm that seemed to be more fizzle than fury got much stronger early Friday before fading again. At its peak, it was the most potent solar storm since 2004, sac louis vuitton mode space weather forecasters said. No power outages or other technological disturbances were reported from the solar storm that started to peter out late Friday morning. Solar storms, which can't hurt people, can disturb electric grids, GPS systems, and satellites. They can also spread colourful Northern Lights further south than usual, as the latest storm did early Friday. And more storms are coming. The US federal government's Space Weather Prediction Centre says the same area of the sun erupted again Thursday night, with a milder storm expected to reach Earth early Sunday. The latest storm started with a flare on Tuesday, and had been forecast to be strong and direct, with one scientist predicting it would blast Earth directly like a punch in the nose. But it arrived Thursday morning at mild levels — at the bottom of the US government's 1-5 scale of severity. It strengthened to a level 3 for several hours early Friday as the storm neared its end.sacoche louis vuitton Scientists say that's because the magnetic part of the storm flipped direction. "We were watching the boxer, expecting the punch. It didn't come," said physicist Terry Onsager at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's space weather center in Boulder, Colorado. "It hit us with the back of the hand as it was retreating." Forecasters can predict a solar storm's speed and strength, but not the direction of its magnetic field. If it is northward, like Earth's, the jolt of energy flows harmlessly around the planet, Onsager said. A southerly direction can cause power outages and other problems. Thursday's storm came in northerly, but early Friday switched to the fierce southerly direction. The magnetic part of the storm spent several hours at that strong level, so combined with strong radiation and radio levels, it turned out to be the strongest solar storm since November 2004, said NOAA lead forecaster Bob Rutledge. Skywatchers reported to NOAA shimmering colourful auroras in Michigan, Wisconsin and Seattle — sacoche louis vuitton homme areas that don't normally see the Northern Lights — Rutledge said. Other space weather enthusiasts reported auroras in Alaska, Minnesota, and North Dakota and in the southern hemisphere in Australia and New Zealand. "Up north, they got a great display," said NASA solar physicist David Hathaway. By late Friday morning the storm was essentially over, forecasters said. But they had a new flare from the same sunspot region to watch. Preliminary forecasts show it to be slightly weaker than the one that just hit, arriving somewhere around 1am EST Sunday. The storms are part of the sun's normal 11-year cycle, which is supposed to reach a peak next year. "This is what we're expecting as we approach solar maximum,"" Onsager said. "We should be seeing this for the next few years now."

Renewed protests are due to be held in Moscow and other Russian cities following Vladimir Putin's victory in last weekend's presidential election. Authorities have given permission for up to 50,000 protesters to gather on one of central Moscow's large avenues. A wave of protests was sparked last December by evidence that parliamentary elections had been rigged. Similar allegations have surrounded the presidential vote, sacoche louis vuitton which saw Mr Putin win a third term. Foreign states have accepted Mr Putin's victory but observers said the poll had been skewed in his favour. The BBC's Richard Galpin in Moscow says some opposition leaders are playing down expectations of a huge turn-out on Saturday, partly because their movement has failed to stop Mr Putin securing another term. Saturday's demonstration will be an important test of the appetite for continuing the street protests, he adds. There are suggestions the opposition should change tactics and focus on setting up new political parties to try to challenge those in power. Arrests The Moscow protest will take place on Novy Arbat,sacoche louis vuitton homme a vast avenue lined by 1960s skyscrapers. "If we achieve a growth in the protests, if 100,000 people come out, it means we can quickly get results," said Sergei Udaltsov, one of the protest organisers. "If there won't be that number, it means that there will be longer-lasting work." He said the main slogan of Saturday's protest would be: "These were not elections. This is not a president." Last Monday, a day after the election, police arrested about 250 protesters in Moscow and another 300 in St Petersburg. Moscow officials say about 2,500 troops, police and civilian auxiliaries will be on duty in the city on Saturday, Itar-Tass news agency reported. Mr Putin was re-elected for six years, sac louis vuitton mode having served two previous terms as president between 2000 and 2008. On Friday, US President Barack Obama called Mr Putin from Air Force One "to congratulate him on his recent victory", a White House statement said. Mr Obama said he looked forward to hosting Mr Putin at the G8 Summit in May at Camp David.

As soon as he was caught, sac louis vuitton mode an influential computer hacker agreed to become a government informant and "literally worked around the clock" to help federal agents nab an elusive collective of alleged cyber criminals who have launched online attacks against companies, governments and individuals. The new details, revealed in court documents made public on Thursday, show how quickly investigators were able to turn 28-year-old Hector Xavier Monsegur against his fellow alleged hackers. Known as "Sabu" in hacking circles, he was placed under supervision by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents shortly after he was arrested at 10:15 p.m. on June 7 last year. His file was sealed by a judge. "Since literally the day he was arrested, the defendant has been cooperating with the government proactively," sometimes staying up all night engaging in conversations with co-conspirators to help the government build cases against them, Assistant U.S. Attorney James Pastore said at a secret bail hearing on Aug. 5, 2011, sacoche louis vuitton according to a transcript released on Thursday. The investigation led to the unveiling of criminal charges on Tuesday against a group of men allegedly behind Lulz Security, or LulzSec. The group, formed last May, claimed responsibility for a series of brazen online attacks including hacking computer servers of television network PBS in retaliation for a "Frontline" episode about WikiLeaks, and stealing personal information from about 100,000 customers of hacked Sony Pictures. In addition to the Sony and PBS attacks, LulzSec has claimed responsibility for attacks on the U.S. Senate and InfraGard, an affiliate of the Atlanta chapter of the FBI. Those attacks were all cited in Tuesday's charging documents. Mr. Monsegur, a few days after his bail hearing in August, pleaded guilty to 12 criminal charges, including three counts of conspiracy to engage in computer hacking, computer hacking in furtherance of fraud, conspiracy to commit access device fraud, conspiracy to commit bank fraud and aggravated identity theft. He faces up to 124 years in prison. A lawyer for Mr. Monsegur declined to comment Thursday. On Aug. 10, 2011, a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles who was working on the case asked that details for charges against Mr. Monsegur in Los Angeles remain secret.sacoche louis vuitton homme In a document, Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephanie S. Christensen said other hackers were aware of Mr. Monsegur's true identity, even though he often used a nickname or online personality while communicating with them. She said if news of his arrest were made public, he might be identified as a cooperator. She noted that the hackers monitored public court dockets. "The FBI has informed me that the hackers are known to take steps against those who cooperate with the government," Ms. Christensen said. She pointed to a practice known as "Doxing" where hackers post personal details about a person for public consumption online. "The publicly available information may then be used to harass the cooperator and the cooperator's family in a variety of ways," she said. "This obviously creates danger for the cooperator, the cooperator's family, and law enforcement."

On the 101st International Women’s Day, sac louis vuitton mode let’s skip across borders. Where are the best, safest places on the planet to be female? Where are the most frightening, miserable and hopeless? If you judge by what Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Tuesday, Afghanistan is proudly near the top in wretchedness. “Men are fundamental and women are secondary,” the Ulema Council of 150 top Muslim clerics officially declared in its code of conduct and Karzai posted it on his website. I’m surprised he didn’t Tweet it. I’m surprised it’s news. Nevertheless, Afghanistan is not the worst place to be a woman, according to political, educational, jobs and health indicators, the Independent concluded recently in a statistical study. Yemen is. Afghanistan is merely the most dangerous. One wonders why we went to war there. Did we really improve women’s lives? Was this ever our aim? Going solely by political representation, Rwanda does best with 56.3 per cent of its 80-seat lower house being female. But it’s not a balanced contest worldwide, with http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/mar/07/women-representation-in-politics-worldwide?INTCMP=SRCHDatablog research from the Interparliamentary Union and UN Women revealing that seven countries have no female representation whatsoever, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, nations we like to consider allies. Egypt has all of two women representatives, which suggests the so-called Arab Spring is still wintry for women. Canada does badly, sacoche louis vuitton 40th in the world for women political representatives — one place below little Luxembourg — with 76 of 308 Canadian House of Commons seats going to women. But it’s better than Britain at #54, tied with Malawi. And it is much better than the U.S. which stands at #78, tied with Turkmenistan, and far below many nations it professes to despise. “Less than one in five parliamentarians in the world today are women,” concludes IPU head Anders P. Johnsson. “It is a worrying statistic at this point of human development and impossible to justify. The political will to change this is simply lacking in most cases.” This is a fact. It hurts. Norway is the best place to become a mother, with maternal mortality at one in 7,600. Afghanistan is the worst, with the Independent reporting that a woman is at least 200 times more likely to die during childbirth than from warfare. Sweden comes first in abortion rights, with abortions available without restriction for the first 18 weeks. El Salvador, the Philippines and Nicaragua all ban abortion, sacoche louis vuitton homme as would the U.S. if a Republican defeated President Barack Obama, and one hopes he won’t. Canada doesn’t do too badly, unless you live in P.E.I. where no abortions are permitted, or New Brunswick, a province that ignores the national Health Care Act and where poor women cannot get an abortion. Women live longest in Japan, perhaps because life is comparatively restful without hope of great success. Only 8 per cent of upper management is female. Danish women only spend 57 more minutes a day on unpaid work than Danish men, but Mexican women spend a full four hours and 21 minutes more. Qatar is a great place for women to attend university. They outnumber men six to one, perhaps to fill the empty hours, because there are few jobs for them when they leave. Saudi Arabia is the only nation to ban women from driving, not that they could afford a car. Saudi women earn an average $7,157 U.S. a year, compared with men’s $36,727. It’s hard to draw specific lessons from these numbers but easy to draw wide conclusions. In most of the world, you drew the short straw when you were born female and the unfortunate consequences will range from being forced to live a tiny cramped life to suffering early death. In Canada, I try to take heart from the fact that we live amid a work in progress. Women only became legal “persons” in 1929, Dr. Henry Morgentaler only won us abortion rights in 1988 and we are still swimming on the surface of a massive sea change in human relations. Women have never had many rights. Now we have some. But I do not say that it can only get better. In Canada and the U.S., women’s rights are under attack every day. It can get much much worse. That said, I wave a distant greeting to the “secondary” women of Afghanistan, where the council also declares wife-beating just fine as long as a man has a good sharia reason. Much disgust comes your way, councillors!

On Monday, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao announced that the country was targeting a lower growth rate of 7.5 per cent, sac louis vuitton mode compared with eight per cent before. While that had been largely widely anticipated, it worried some traders who view strong Chinese growth as an important prop for a global economy still struggling to recover from the 2008 financial crisis, Yet another report showed that Brazil's economy expanded 2.7 per cent last year, well below the 7.5 per cent growth seen in 2010. Officials said the economic problems in Europe and the U..S are mostly to blame for the lower demand for Brazil's commodities. And, in a speech in Monday, Dallas Federal Reserve president Richard Fisher criticized investors for calling for a third round of stimulus spending by the Fed, accusing the financial sector of becoming "hooked on the monetary morphine." May copper closed down 12 cents at $3.74 US a pound on top of a four cent loss Monday. sacoche louis vuitton China is the biggest consumer of the metal. The April crude contract was down $2.02 cents to $104.70 US a barrel. Bullion also lost ground as the April contract lost $31.80 to $1,672.10 US an ounce. Monsegur also identified himself as a member of hacking group "Internet Feds" while Hammond said he was a member of another Anonymous affiliate, "AntiSec," officials said. A criminal complaint quotes one of Hammond's postings as saying, "We call upon all allied battleships, all armies from darkness, to use and abuse these password lists and credit card information to wreak unholy havoc upon systems and personal email accounts of these rich and powerful oppressors." Lawyers for Monsegur and Hammond did not immediately return calls seeking comment on the charges. U.S. authorities said the cyber attacks had affected more than 1 million people and the computer systems of foreign governments,sacoche louis vuitton homme such as Algeria, Yemen and Zimbabwe. Authorities said Monsegur and three of the charged men raided personal information about 70,000 potential contestants on Fox Television show "X-Factor." In another example of the hacking, officials said defendants and others broke into computer servers of HBGary company in California and Colorado, including about 60,000 emails and posted them on a file-sharing website. In a May 2011 hack on Sony Pictures, some of the defendants stole confidential information of about 100,000 users of the Sony Pictures website, including passwords, email addresses, home addresses and dates of birth. "I personally participated in cyber attacks on the systems of HBGary and Fox, resulting in a loss of more than $5,000, and I knew my conduct was illegal," Monsegur confessed in August at his plea proceeding. Last summer, as part of a coordinated law enforcement raid on the group, British police arrested Jake Davis, another suspected member of LulzSec who went by the nickname "Topiary." One of the cases announced on Tuesday was against Davis, a teenager accused of computer attacks on Sony, UK crime and health authorities, and Rupert Murdoch's UK newspaper arm News International, a unit of News Corp. Davis is believed to have controlled the main Twitter account of Lulz Security, which the group used to publish data obtained by hacking into corporate and government networks. LulzSec has more than 350,000 followers on Twitter. Last month, Anonymous published a recording of a confidential call on January 17 between the FBI and London detectives in which the agents discussed action against hackers. One of the six arrested on Tuesday was Donncha O'Cearrbhail, 19, of Ireland, who was charged over the telephone intercept.

Saudi Arabia has said that Syrians have a right to take up arms to defend themselves against the regime and accuses the Damascus government of “imposing itself by force,”sacoche louis vuitton as concerns mount over a humanitarian crisis there. In a rare televised news conference on Sunday, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal said the kingdom welcomed international efforts to broker a ceasefire in Syria but added that they have “failed to stop the massacres.” “Is there something greater than the right to defend oneself and to defend human rights?” he asked, adding that the Syrian people want to defend themselves. “The regime is not wanted by the people,” he said. “The regime is insisting on imposing itself by force on the Syrian people,” he said. Saudi Arabia and Qatar have been discussing military aid the to the Syrian opposition, but the U.S. sacoche louis vuitton homme and others have not advocated arming the rebels, in part out of fear it would create an even more bloody and prolonged conflict. Sunni Saudi Arabia is wary of the wave of Arab Spring uprisings, particularly in nearby Bahrain, where a Shiite majority is demanding greater rights from its Sunni rulers. However, the kingdom strongly backs the largely Sunni uprising in Syria. On Sunday Red Cross teams handed out food, blankets and medical kits in central Homs province, but the government blocked access to the worst-hit district of Baba Amr. The humanitarian group was trying to help families who fled Baba Amr after a monthlong siege and took shelter in nearby villages, ICRC spokesman Hicham Hassan said in Geneva. “The needs are so far mainly in the forms of food and also blankets because of the cold,” Hassan said. Government forces have blocked humanitarian access to Baba Amr since Friday, the day after troops seized it from rebels.sac louis vuitton mode Opposition fighters had been in control of the neighborhood for several months, and a regime offensive on Homs that began in early February aimed to retake rebel-held neighborhoods inside the city. Syrian troops managed to take control of Baba Amr after nearly a month of intense and relentless shelling, and activists say hundreds were killed in the daily bombardments that led up to the final battle on Thursday. Some Baba Amr residents were killed when, in desperation, they dared to venture out of their homes to forage for food. Activists have said residents face a humanitarian catastrophe in Baba Amr and other parts of Homs, Syria’s third-largest city with a population of 1 million. Electricity, water and communications have been cut off, and recent days have seen frigid temperatures and snowfall. Food was running low, and many are too scared to venture out. The government had said it would allow the Red Cross into Baba Amr on Friday but then blocked their access, citing security concerns. In the meantime, activists accused Syrian forces of killing dozens of residents execution-style and burning homes in revenge attacks against those believed to be supporting the rebels. As the brutal siege of Homs dragged on, Western pressure on President Bashar Assad intensified. The U.S. has called for Assad to step down, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said he could be considered a war criminal. The European Union committed itself to document war crimes in Syria to set the stage for a “day of reckoning” for the country’s leadership, in the way that former Yugoslav leaders were tried for war crimes in the 1990s by a special U.N. tribunal.

Roughly 2.4 billion light years from Earth,sac louis vuitton mode a massive blob of a mysterious, invisible substance known as dark matter is threatening to rewrite how scientists on this planet understand galaxies. Dark matter — which accounts for more than 80 per cent of all matter in the universe — has been described as the glue that holds galaxies together through gravity. It's invisible, but it surrounds galaxies and larger clusters of galaxies. To detect it, scientists study how the gravity from dark matter bends and distorts light passing through it. Currently, scientists believe that dark matter doesn't have much effect on the surrounding environment other than through its gravitational pull. In other words, if two galaxies collide, the dark matter from one galaxy would pass right through the dark matter from the other, as it if didn't exist. But researchers in Canada and the United States have detected what they are describing as a "dark core" —sacoche louis vuitton a large clump of dark matter that appears to have collided and stuck together, even as the galaxies the dark matter was attached to continued to move on. "It challenges conventional understanding of dark matter and how dark matter should behave," said Arif Babul of the University of Victoria. "It's potentially suggesting dark matter has a bit of stickiness to it that we hadn't expected before, and that stickiness could then change how galaxies like our own Milky Way come together." The scientists first made the discovery in 2007 using a telescope based in Hawaii. They were looking at Abell 520, a collection of several galaxy clusters that are colliding into one another other at high speed, sacoche louis vuitton homme which has been described as a "cosmic train wreck." It was in the centre of Abell 520 that they noticed a clump of dark matter that appeared to be left over from the colliding galaxy clusters, even though prevailing wisdom about dark matter suggested that should not happen. Babul said the results were quickly dismissed as a mistake, likely due to the limitations of using a ground-based telescope, which can be susceptible to artifacts from the atmosphere. That prompted Babul and his colleagues at the University of California Davis and San Francisco State University to turn to NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, expecting — hoping, in fact — to learn their initial discovery was incorrect. On the contrary, the Hubble data only strengthened their original findings. "It's left us completely flabbergasted," said Babul. "We're stuck. I am completely at a loss as to what's going on." Babul said the dark matter clump has recently been detected by other ground-based telescopes, leaving him confident that it does, in fact, exist. The next task will be attempting to figure out what happened — whether the phenomenon can still be explained using the existing theories about dark matter, or whether those theories need to be rewritten to explain how the dark core formed. If the current theories are wrong, Babul said it could change everything from how scientists explain the formation of galaxies — a process that depends entirely on the existence of dark matter — to where gamma rays come from. "There's this whole body of work, including my own, that's based on the old assumptions, so changing the picture completely would mean going back to scratch and starting again," he said. "But it's exciting in a way, because dark matter is not easy to get a handle on, and if this is really telling us something unique about dark matter, then it's really a breakthrough."

In another sign of warming relations, a senior North Korean nuclear negotiator will attend a security conference in the United States, an American official confirmed Thursday. Vice Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho, North Korea’s envoy to nuclear disarmament negotiations, will attend a forum held by the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs of Syracuse University. The State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said that Mr. Ri was coming for three days next week, starting Wednesday, to attend unofficial discussions sponsored by the university. She said there were no plans for official meetings with Mr. Ri during the trip. The United States and North Korea do not have formal diplomatic relations, but an agreement announced Wednesday,sacoche louis vuitton in which the United States will provide food aid to North Korea in exchange for a rollback of its nuclear programs, includes provisions for “people to people” exchanges. Former NDP MP Jim Maloway, who was the incumbent in the Manitoba riding of Elmwood—Transcona going into the last election, says robo-calls and harassing calls contributed to his loss by just 300 votes to Conservative Lawrence Toet. Absolutely it made a difference,” said Maloway, now a member of the Manitoba legislature for Elmwood. “The robo-calls were designed to get people to go on a wild goose chase and discourage them from going to the polls. I think that it would have an effect at least in some people’s minds causing them to drop into the non-voter category. I’ve had people tell me that.” Toet did not respond to a request for comment. Liberal MP Mark Eyking (Sydney—Victoria) managed to keep his seat in the last election but saw his support shrink to 39.9 per cent, down from 49.4 per cent in the 2008 election. He beat his main challenger for the Nova Scotia seat, Conservative Cecil Clarke, by 765 votes. “I know we lost Liberal supporters because they were so ticked off with how these calls were made,” said Eyking, referring to reports that callers purporting to be from the Liberal party harassed voters. “My Conservative challenger had a bit of machinery behind him, so there was no doubt we were going to take a hit. We knew we were in for a dog fight. But we never expected that kind of drop.” Elections Canada would not confirm whether any results in the ridings identified by the opposition parties or examined by the Star were being investigated. Political strategist and Carleton University professor Elly Alboim warns against reading too much into the election results.

Facebook has announced new ways for businesses to make money from the social network. The company unveiled Premium, which allows firms to place ads on mobiles for the first time and to advertise on the log out screen. It also added Offers, sacoche louis vuitton which lets businesses offer discounts to users that "like" their pages. Facebook is poised to raise at least $5bn (￡3.16bn) in a stock market float later this year. The social network - which has 845 million monthly users - will also let businesses have their own branded pages with timelines, just like individuals. Users will see the new premium adverts from brand in their newsfeeds if a friend has "liked" the brand's pages, for example. Facebook said that adverts on the right-hand side and in news feeds on Facebook's homepage have an average of five to 10 times more engagement than other adverts placed on the website. The changes will happen from April, Facebook announced in its first-ever marketing conference. Until now, Facebook has made no money from advertising on the mobile version of its site or its apps. Facebook has more than 400 million users that view it on their mobiles, and there has been much speculation about how it would seek to make money from them. "Facebook must be careful as it rolls out mobile advertising that it makes full use of the technology available to deliver messages which are compelling and intuitive for the consumer to receive on the unique mobile phone format," said Marco Veremis, president of Upstream, a marketing technology firm. "By the very nature of mobile as consumers' most personal and intimate device, it risks sparking a major backlash on privacy and user data grounds." Facebook makes most of its money from advertising sales, which accounted for 85% of its revenues of $3.7bn in 2011. The social network, just eight years old and started by Harvard University students, made a profit of $1bn last year.

A majority of Canadians think bullying should be considered a crime, according to a new poll. An Angus Reid online survey of 1,006 Canadian adults found that two-thirds of respondents believe bullying should be punishable by law, even if no physical violence is involved. One in five, or 19 per cent, sacoche louis vuitton said bullying should be labelled a crime only if someone is physically hurt. Only six per cent of respondents didn't think it was necessary to criminalize bullying, and 10 per cent said they weren't sure how they felt. The poll was released on National Pink Shirt Day, a campaign that encourages students across Canada to wear something pink on Wednesday and take a stand against bullying. Bullying is not an offence under the Criminal Code of Canada, but certain behaviours associated with it -- such as harassment and uttering threats -- are. The Angus Reid poll found overwhelming support for legislation specifically targeting cyber-bullying. Ninety per cent of those surveyed said it should be illegal to use electronic means to "coerce, intimidate, harass or cause other substantial emotional distress." A proposed federal law in the United States is aiming to do just that. "We were a bit surprised by the high level of support for cyber-bullying laws," Mario Canseco, vice-president of Angus Reid Public Opinion, told CTVNews.ca in a phone interview Wednesday. "It's very hard to get 90 per cent of Canadians to agree on anything." Most of the survey participants said bullying is a serious problem in Canada's elementary, middle and high schools. The majority felt that bullying gets more intense and dangerous as students get older. More than half said that bullying continues later in life, both at work and at home. Support for anti-bullying legislation was especially high in Quebec, as well as among women and people over the age of 55, the poll found. "There is a little bit of hesitance over this from a legislative point, but I think this survey shows Canadians are ready to accept (bullying) as a serious crime," Canseco said. Ontario's Liberal government has proposed legislation that would require school officials to report serious bullying incidents and allow them to suspend or expel students who harass their classmates. The Accepting Schools Act would also introduce new bullying prevention and intervention policies. Similar legislation was tabled in Quebec, where the government is also seeking to appoint anti-bullying guardians in schools.

Billy Crystal may be nearly old enough for Medicare, but when it comes to Oscar ratings he can outrun hosts half his age. Sunday's Academy Awards telecast — an old-fashioned (and sometimes critically savaged) paean to moviemaking hosted by the 63-year-old Crystal — delivered a total of 39.3 million viewers, according to Nielsen. That was up 4% compared with last year, when organizers made a largely unsuccessful bid to woo young crowds with the emcee duo of Anne Hathaway (born 1982) and her slightly older colleague, James Franco. However, sacoche louis vuitton the show underperformed compared with CBS' Grammys telecast (39.9 million) earlier this month — only the second time that the Grammys has been more watched than the Oscars. Typically, the Oscars are the second biggest TV event of the year, behind the Super Bowl. In the demographic advertisers care about most, adults ages 18 to 49, Crystal's telecast was flat, with an 11.7 rating. Those comparisons might not sound like something that will give AARP magazine editors a major cover story, but it counts as a notable victory for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which risked looking as dated as a Monica Lewinsky joke by bringing Crystal back for his ninth stint as host. The comic and "City Slickers" star agreed to step in after Eddie Murphy, the originally designated host, pulled out in November. The reviews were generally unimpressed, and at times quite scathing. Times TV critic Mary McNamara criticized Crystal's show as slow-moving and found the theme of saluting cinema's past "very, very familiar." The Hollywood Reporter's Tim Goodman wrote: "If the academy wanted safe, it got safe, but it also got what seemed like a lounge act that was entirely too chummy and self-satisfied." And Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times compared the show to an "AARP pep rally." The academy has been struggling for years with an exodus of young viewers from the annual awards telecast, which it counts on for crucial licensing income. Critics said that hiring a sexagenarian host didn't exactly help project an image of youthfulness. In a filmed bit that opened the show, Crystal joked about the dilemma by greeting teen idol Justin Bieber, who said he was there to help capture "the 18 to 24 demographic."

Canada's main stock index finished lower on Monday as energy issues fell in tandem with oil prices after G20 officials warned about the risks to global growth from the rising cost of crude. Energy issues, which represent some 20 percent of the Toronto index, dropped 1.2 percent as oil prices pulled back after a string of higher settlements. [ID:nL2E8DQ1OA] Suncor Energy (SU.TO: Quote) fell 2.2 percent to C$36.16, while Nexen NYX.TO sank 2.9 percent to C$20.56. The sector was pressured in part by comments by the Group of 20 finance ministers and central bankers on Sunday. They said they were "alert to the risks of higher oil prices" and discussed at length the impact that sanctions on Iran would have on crude supplies and global growth. "The fact that you now have crude oil prices in the triple digits that's causing some concern about the impact high oil prices might have on the world economy," sacoche louis vuitton said Elvis Picardo, strategist and vice-president of research at Global Securities in Vancouver. "Renewed concern about global growth is offsetting any risk premium from the situation from the Middle East, specifically Iran." Higher prices at the gas pump could undercut the U.S. economic recovery, push Europe deeper into recession and stoke already-high inflation in many emerging economies. One of the worst performing stocks in the energy sector and the broader index included Petrominerales Ltd (PMG.TO: Quote), which tumbled 19.6 percent to C$19.05, after it said initial results from a test well in Colombia fell short of expectations and the oil and gas producer failed to replace its depleted reserves. The Toronto Stock Exchange's S&P/TSX composite index .GSPTSE finished the day down 25.39 points, or 0.2 percent, at 12,700.38. Five of its 10 main sectors were lower.

Because it’s a little difficult to find on the Web, I’ve uploaded a PDF copy of the Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench decision on the former CWB directors’ application for an injunction against the demise of single-desk wheat and barley marketing. It contains setbacks within setbacks for the directors’ case: their constitutional argument that the dismantling of the single desk violated the rule of law isn’t serious enough to be considered, sacoche louis vuitton says Justice Shane Perlmutter, and even if it were, it doesn’t meet the urgency test for injunctive relief. Perlmutter’s take is, needless to say, very different from Federal Court Justice Douglas Campbell’s. “There’s a lot of growth going on and a lot of talk, a lot of excitement in the air,” Ms. Ulvstal says as she stands in her new pink work boots in a dusty pit on the outskirts of town. Ms. Ulvstal and a handful of men are learning to drive bulldozers and rock haulers, with the goal of securing well-paying jobs at the new Detour gold mine. From a helicopter high in the sky, the sea of green trees between Cochrane and Detour Lake appears endless. Small farms cut into the woods here and there. The railway's completion in the early 1900s drew farmers to the northern clay belt's rich soils, but the growing season proved too short to support significant crop production. While RIM has tinkered with improvements to its product, Apple has gone and usurped its dominant position in business--at least in the tablet area. More small businesses, large corporations, and even retail outlets are using iPads for work, leaving little room for the PlayBook to break back in. The PlayBook, meanwhile, has largely been moving on its competitive price. A 16-gigabyte version sells for $199.99 at Best Buy. That isn't a bad deal, but it becomes less attractive, when you consider that Amazon.com's Kindle Fire sells at the same price. The Kindle Fire is working on its own library of apps, but it has the advantage of content available to Amazon Prime customers. Yes, the Kindle Fire offers lower-end specs, but you can do more with it. Barnes & Noble today introduced a new version of its Nook Tablet for $199. Consumers who want a bit more horsepower and access to the latest version of Android can wait a bit for a $250 tablet from Asus, which packs a Tegra 3 quad-core chip. While still speculation, a smaller iPad could also change what consumers view as a good value, as it would already come with Apple's massive app library.

Israel’s prime minister is instructing his Cabinet ministers not to speak publicly about Iran, in an apparent attempt to prevent provocative statements ahead of his trip to the White House in early March. An Israeli official says Benjamin Netanyahu’s office sent text messages asking the ministers not to speak to the media without his express permission. The official says Netanyahu had issued similar instructions before, especially after assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, sacoche louis vuitton which Tehran has blamed on Israel. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity. Both Israel and the U.S. believe Iran seeks to develop nuclear weapons. But the U.S. has become increasingly vocal in its opposition to an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear sites. Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Reminded of false calls the Conservative Party made last fall into Liberal MP Irwin Cotler’s riding, and the 2006 “in-and-out” scandal that saw the Conservative Party plead guilty to exceeding national election advertising limits, Prime Minister Stephen Harper was asked Thursday what he’s done as party leader to ensure the party conducts itself ethically. Harper responded they were “different instances” and said the “regional media buys” of the 2006 campaign were believed to be within the law. “We based our judgments on what we thought were the rules were at the time. In this case, our party has no knowledge of these calls, they’re not part of our campaign.” However it wasn’t good enough for the NDP’s Manitoba MP Pat Martin, dispatched by the official Opposition to deliver a blistering attack on the Conservatives. He dismissed any talk of “rogue” Tories. He said the “facts would indicate a well orchestrated widespread conspiracy orchestrated from top.” Martin suggested the governing party effectively stole the election. Martin questioned “the legitimacy of the Conservatives’ 39 per cent majority mandate.” “Did they really win that last federal election? Or did they achieve their razor thin majority by cheating?” The Liberals also condemned the activities outlined Thursday, although MP John McCallum said there is “no smoking gun” even as he suggested only the Conservatives stood to politically gain from such a scheme.

Apple, bowing to pressure from the California Public Employees' Retirement System and other shareholders, agreed to start electing its directors by majority votes rather than a plurality. CEO Tim Cook, speaking Thursday at an annual investor meeting, also said Apple was continuing sacoche louis vuitton "active discussions" about what to do with its $97.6 billion in cash and investments, saying the cash hoard was "more than we need to run a company." Investors at the meeting passed a nonbinding measure in favor of the board-election change. A similar initiative was approved at the gathering last year, though it wasn't adopted by Apple. The company changed its stance after previously saying that the change would cause board members to lose their seats in cases where too few shareholders cast votes. Some investors also are demanding that Apple return cash to investors in the form of a dividend or stock buybacks. The money pile, which includes short- and long-term investments, has risen more than 63 percent since last year's annual meeting of shareholders. "The board and management team are thinking about this very deeply," Cook said. Apple last paid a dividend in 1995, before co-founder Steve Jobs returned as CEO and revived the struggling company. Dividends provide a recurring payment to shareholders, typically each quarter. The move would provide a long-term boost to Apple's stock price by bringing in a new class of investors who only buy shares in companies with a dividend, according to Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. In the years since Apple last offered a dividend, the introduction of the iPod, iPhone and iPad has turned the company into a profit engine, letting it accumulate a stockpile of cash and investments that exceeds the market value of Citigroup Inc. Jobs had long spurned calls to return the money to investors. Shares of the Cupertino company rose less than 1 percent to close at $516.39. The shares have climbed 27 percent this year.

Italian prosecutors have placed seven further employees of Costa Crociere SpA, operator of the shipwrecked Concordia cruise ship, under formal investigation in connection with the ship's ill-fated journey, the company and investigators said. Three company officials who were placed under investigation weren't aboard the giant ship when it ran aground off the coast of Tuscany, according to a statement by Costa Crociere, which is a unit of the U.S.-based Carnival Corp. The seven were added to a group of people—including the ship's captain—whom prosecutors are already investigating as part of their probe into why the ship struck a rock off the island of Giglio, sacoche louis vuitton causing it to founder with more than 4,000 people aboard. That collision and sinking caused the death of at least 25 people. Prosecutors are also investigating whether there were any unnecessary delays in the ship's evacuation. The move by prosecutors in the Tuscan town of Grosseto allows the seven people, who haven't been charged, to retain legal counsel before a special court hearing is held in early March to review the contents of the ship's black-box recorder for the first time. "We believe that placing other Costa personnel under investigation is simply due to the necessity for the authorities to provide such individuals with the guarantees afforded to everybody under Italian law," a statement from Costa Crociere said. A spokesman for Costa Crociere declined to disclose the names of the employees under investigation. The move came as Italian authorities found eight more bodies, including that of a young girl, inside the overturned Concordia on Wednesday, bringing the number of confirmed dead to 25 people. Seven more people remain missing but are presumed dead. The ship's captain, Francesco Schettino, has been under house arrest for several weeks on preliminary charges of multiple manslaughter and abandonment of ship as the Grosseto prosecutors continue their investigation. Mr. Schettino has told prosecutors the ship struck a rock after he deviated from the its traditional route, steering the vessel close to Gilgio's shore. He has also testified to a judge that he didn't abandon the ship, but instead tumbled off the Concordia, into a life boat, while passengers were still aboard. Costa Crociere's CEO, Pier Luigi Foschi, has testified before the Italian Senate that Mr. Schettino phoned the company moments after the ship struck the rock and an hour before the evacuation alarm was sounded. That delay led to a disorderly evacuation with passengers jumping from the ship's decks into the cold sea. In its statement, Costa Crociere said it maintained "complete trust and solidarity" in the seven employees under investigation, adding that the firm was "absolutely confident in their professional competence and ethical correctness."

Two Canadian climate change scientists from the University of Victoria say the public reaction to their recently published commentary has missed their key message: that all forms of fossil fuels, including the oilsands and coal, must be regulated for the world to avoid dangerous global warming. "Much of the way this has been reported is (through) a type of view that oilsands are good and coal is bad," said climate scientist Neil Swart, who co-authored the study with fellow climatologist Andrew Weaver. "From my perspective, that was not the point. . . . sacoche louis vuitton The point here is, we need a rapid transition to renewable (energy), and avoid committing to long-term fossil fuel use if we are to get within the limits (of reducing global warming to less than 2 C)." The commentary, published in the British scientific journal, Nature Climate Change, estimated the impact of consuming the fuel from oilsands deposits — without factoring in greenhouse gas emissions associated with extraction and production — would be far less harmful to the planet's atmosphere than consuming all of the world's coal resources. "The conclusions of a credible climate scientist with access to good data are very different than some of the rhetoric we've heard from Hollywood celebrities of late," said Travis Davies, a spokesman from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. "However, it clearly doesn't absolve industry from what it needs to do: (To) continue to improve environmental performance broadly, and demonstrate that improvement to Canadians and our customers . . . in terms of GHG emissions, as well as water, land and tailings facilities." Swart and Weaver also note that growth in Alberta's oilsands sector and recent debates over a major pipeline expansion project in the United States represent a symptom of the planet's unhealthy dependence on fossil fuels. The commentary said policymakers in North America and Europe must avoid major infrastructure of this nature since it is pushing the planet dangerously close to more than 2 C of average global temperatures above pre-industrial levels, which is considered to be a threshold of dramatic changes in the Earth's ecosystems. Swart also said their estimates revealed that the relative impact of the oilsands on the climate, per unit of production, would push the average Canadian to 75 per cent of what would be considered their maximum allowable carbon dioxide footprint for an entire lifetime. In other words, this would mean that after factoring in oilsands emissions, the average Canadian would not have much room left to consume fossil fuels for their other energy needs if he or she wanted to do their fair share of reductions when compared with citizens from other countries, Swart explained. "If we go down this path, the amount of warming will be massive," Swart said. Governments from around the world have agreed that scientific evidence shows that humans are causing global warming through land-use changes and the burning of fossil fuels, but that it is possible to avoid dangerous impacts of climate change by dramatically cutting levels of greenhouse gas emissions that are trapping heat in the atmosphere. Davies said his association disputes a new estimate released by the top department in the federal government, the Privy Council Office, that warned an emerging form of on-site oilsands extraction, using the injection of steam into the ground, is producing three times the emissions as the conventional form of mining bitumen and separating synthetic crude from the clay in the ground with heated water.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency is warning people not to eat certain packages of Country Morning Beef Burgers and No Name Club Pack Beef Steakettes because of fears the products may be contaminated with E. coli. The manufacturer New Food Classics of Ontario is conducting a voluntary recall of the products from stores across Western Canada, sacoche louis vuitton Manitoba, Ontario and the Northwest Territories. So far there is one reported case of illness associated with the beef burgers and steakettes. For store information visit the Canadian Food Inspection Agency website. He cautioned Hussien not to question him on his desire. He changed his mind a week later, saying he wanted to blow himself up inside the Capitol on Feb. 17 as an act of martyrdom, prosecutors say. He went on something of a test run that same day, using a cell phone to successfully detonate a test bomb at a West Virginia quarry. But instead of being satisfied with the explosion, the FBI says, he said he wanted a bigger bomb. Court papers show the last two weeks were consumed with the planned attack on the Capitol as a seemingly emboldened El Khalifi selected a location where he'd be dropped off. He asked that even more explosives be strapped to his body. He wanted to make sure the bomb in his vest could be remotely detonated in case he faced security problems, authorities say. Final planning occurred in an Alexandria hotel room on Valentine's Day, when authorities say the undercover officer handed El Khalifi an automatic machine gun and showed him a jacket the suspect thought contained a bomb. El Khalifi studied himself in the mirror with the weapon. He practiced shooting it. He discussed how he'd be identified in a video al-Qaeda would release after the attack, according to court papers. On Friday, a sunny and unseasonably warm winter day, El Khalifi got into a van in northern Virginia with Yusuf and Hussien. The gun and vest he had asked for were inside, authorities say. The van pulled into a parking garage near the Capitol. El Khalifi got out alone. Before he could leave the garage, he was arrested.

Rupert Murdoch has taken seven months to recover from the “most humble day” of his life at the peak of a phone-hacking scandal in the U.K. to announce a new tabloid in a trademark defiant move by the 80-year-old. News Corp.’s chief executive officer, whose U.K. operations have been inundated with lawsuits from hacking victims, police investigations and government inquiries into ethical and legal misdeeds, yesterday said he will start a Sunday edition of the Sun tabloid to replace the News of the World.sacoche louis vuitton He said an influential newspaper is the key to prevailing. “Having a winning paper is the best answer to our critics,” Murdoch told Sun employees, according to a memo obtained by Bloomberg News. Staff had requested an audience with him after a second round of arrests a week ago into bribery sparked outrage among journalists at Britain’s best-selling daily newspaper. Murdoch’s announcement may soothe anger in the newsroom after the company’s Management and Standards Committee, formed by News Corp. to assist police in their investigations of phone- hacking and bribery, handed over information to police. It may also spark more clashes with U.K. politicians, with Murdoch announcing the decision before legislators publish a report into why News Corp. executives didn’t stop illegal activities. “This is very much like him,” said Edward Wasserman, a professor of Journalism Ethics at Washington & Lee University, said in an interview. “He decided he wants to fill up the hole in the market that he left. ‘It also shows a certain amount of defiance, he’s not going to allow questions to be raised about the wisdom of News Corp.’s management.” Stubborn Streak Murdoch has a track record of stubbornness. In 2007, when he was bidding for Dow Jones & Co. and the family-owned Wall Street Journal, he offered $60 a share, a 65 percent premium to the company’s stock price, cornering the Bancrofts into selling. The family, who had fought the takeover for three months with some members expressing concern about Murdoch’s influence on coverage, had controlled the paper for more than a century. The News of the World was the best-selling Sunday paper in Britain when it was closed and its readers have dispersed to competing tabloids or stopped buying Sunday papers altogether. Advertisers would be glad to see the popular tabloid replaced, said Marc Mendoza, the head of the media-buying arm of advertising agency Havas SA.

Does Sears Canada Inc. have a Target on its back? The retailer announced a revamped pricing strategy on Thursday, lowering day-to-day prices by an average of 20 to 30 per cent on a wide range of popular items, taking a page from rival Wal-Mart Canada Corp.'s book. The move comes as Sears Canada faces increasing pressure to boost years of sales declines, part of a strategy from new chief executive Calvin McDonald to compete in a fierce retail market that is girding for the arrival of mass merchant Target next year. The company said Thursday it will cut prices on more than 5,000 items across all departments. ``The department store model is changing and what worked before is less relevant today,'' sacoche louis vuitton said McDonald, adding the strategy is aimed at forging a more trusting relationship with customers. ``Trust starts with value in pricing. . . . I think Canadian customers expect good value every day and that's what we are ensuring we are doing, and that is what other retailers choose to do as well.'' The program applies to about 15 per cent of the items in the store, McDonald said, primarily to a range of goods that are bought most frequently by consumers. Wal-Mart grew to become the world's biggest retailer while following an ``everyday low price'' strategy (EDLP), selling a wide range of frequently purchased goods at a low margin rather than pricing goods at a traditional retail markup and slashing prices for special sale events. In recent years it enhanced its strategy by offering deeper but limited-time sales known as price ``rollbacks.'' Ten years ago under prior ownership, Zellers put 95 per cent of its store merchandise on EDLP in response to Wal-Mart, which entered Canada aggressively in the mid-90s. Sears Canada has introduced everyday value items over the years, but never before on this scale. The company said in addition to the broad value-based pricing strategy, Sears will introduce a weekly price-cutting program, ``WOW'' items. In-store merchandising will align more directly to what is promoted in the flyers. ``It's not an EDLP pure-pricing proposition, in the sense that we are still going to offer great deals,'' McDonald said. McDonald, a former Loblaw Cos. executive who joined Sears Canada in the middle of last year, has outlined a three-year plan to turn around the flagging retailer that includes eliminating excess inventory, refurbishing older stores and reworking its pricing strategy. The company has laid off about 470 employees since December, and like most retailers, is feeling the heat from Target's impending arrival. Analyst Keith Howlett of Desjardins Securities has esimtated Target will add an incremental $1.25 billion in annual sales per square foot above that of the current Zellers chain, which generates about $3.9 billion in sales per year. Sears Canada, 96 per cent owned by U.S. retailer Sears Holdings Corp., has seen its revenue, net earnings and same-store sales sink every year since 2006. It is set to announce its fourth-quarter and full-year fiscal 2011 results next week. McDonald said reworking prices is the first of many changes he has planned. The new pricing program will be marketed in radio ads and the company's weekly flyer. Will it work for Sears Canada? Richard Talbot, president of retail consulting firm Talbot Consultants International Inc., is dubious about whether a new pricing format will draw in more consumers. ``I think it is probably too little, too late,'' he said. ``Really they should have adopted a policy like that years ago back when Wal-Mart came in and they did nothing effective to compete with Wal-Mart. Certainly (Sears Canada's) cachet has eroded since Wal-Mart came in, and it is tough to get customers back once you have lost them.''

Love is in the air in Iowa — or at least the diplomatic equivalent of it. When Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping arrived in this small town late Wednesday, carefully chosen welcoming gifts were on hand, nostalgic remembrances were on everyone’s lips and hearts all around were ready for the wooing. Officially speaking,sacoche louis vuitton Xi, who is expected to become China’s president next year, picked Iowa as the centerpiece of his U.S. tour because he visited here as a lowly provincial official in 1985 to learn about American agriculture. But, more broadly, the town of Muscatine provides a convenient backdrop for Chinese officials hoping to emphasize the idea of an enduring U.S.-Chinese friendship at a time when the two nations are fierce economic competitors, policy opponents and military rivals. The Chinese want to remind Americans — and their audience back home — that the two nations are also intimately intertwined as trading partners and stakeholders in global affairs. “The relationship is like some magnetic field where there’s powerful attraction and repulsion. It’s what makes these exchanges so hard,” said Orville Schell, director of the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations. “The Chinese are extremely sensitive to any sign of disrespect even as they do things that are clearly not worthy of respect. Meanwhile, you have Americans who are used to being the wealthy, dominant one, evangelizing their ways and thinking.” To say that U.S.-Chinese relations have changed since Xi was last here would be a gross understatement. Many in Muscatine — population 23,000, 87 percent white, 0.8 percent Asian — who hosted him back then remember the exotic nature of his visit nearly three decades ago. China was just opening up, and Xi was a vaguely congenial though serious leader of a small agricultural delegation, residents here recall. “It was difficult to really get beyond that superficial level. They didn’t speak English; we didn’t speak Chinese, and there was only one interpreter,” said Sarah Lande, who helped plan Xi’s two-night stay.

A thief snatched two archaeological pieces worth hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts last October during opening hours, steps from security guards. The theft is only the second heist in the MMFA’s 152-year history and the incident is testing the facility’s policy of not encasing many of its items as well as the decades-long bond of trust it has with visitors – now numbering 500,000 a year. A Persian sandstone bas-relief and a marble head dating from the Roman Empire were taken from the Mediterranean archeological exhibit room on the first floor of the Hornstein Pavilion on or about Oct. 26. sacoche louis vuitton The theft wasn’t made public until now so as not to compromise the investigation, the MMFA said. Montreal police said Tuesday the investigation is continuing. One suspect – believed to be in his 30s and 5-feet, 7-inches tall – can be seen wandering the museum halls in surveillance video. The Persian piece – donated to the MMFA by Cleveland Morgan in 1950 – is worth “hundreds of thousands of dollars,” said Mark Dalrymple, representing AXA Art, a global insurance company insuring the items for the Montreal museum. The second piece – on loan since 2003 from the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec – is worth “tens of thousands,” Dalrymple said. “We’re interested in seeing if anybody could possibly recognize this man and point the finger at him and help the police,” he said about the security video. The insurance company is offering a “substantial” reward for the return of the stolen objects and a $10,000 reward for anyone who can identify the suspect. Danielle Champagne, a spokesperson for the MMFA, said security has been tightened in some areas of the museum since the theft. But the museum does not plan any major changes to its policy of keeping many of its objects in open-air displays – anchored or attached, but not in cases – “so people get a better sense of the texture of the objects. “We are blessed to live in a country where people are generally honest and we’ve had very few problems,” she added. The only other theft at the museum was in 1972, when 18 paintings were stolen, including a Rembrandt. Only one of the paintings was recovered. Cecily Hilsdale, a professor of art history at McGill University, said the Persian object’s theft is “huge” news in the art world. The piece was part of the Apadana, a grand audience hall in Persepolis, the ancient city centre of the Persian empire. The object is well-known, she added. Anyone purchasing it would lprobably want to know where it came from. Anyone with information about the theft is urged to call police at 1-800-659-4264 or the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts at 1-855-471-1800.

Stephen Harper’s senior bureaucrats have been racking up some hefty airfares at a time of government restraint and controversy over travel. Travel expenses recently posted for the final quarter of 2011 show executives at the Privy Council Office, the prime minister’s own department, paid costly fares last year on some of the most competitive routes to Europe and elsewhere. Return airfare to Great Britain cost taxpayers $6,855 for Rennie Marcoux, assistant secretary to cabinet, to attend a week-long “cyber” conference in London last October. The clerk of the Privy Council, sacoche louis vuitton Wayne Wouters, paid almost as much for a round-trip flight to London – $6,625 – for a public-service summit in November. William Pentney, deputy secretary to cabinet, spent $3,566 on airfare to attend another international summit in London last June. Paris, another popular European destination with plenty of airline competition, was also a favoured spot for Privy Council bureaucrats, who paid sky-high prices to get there. Yvan Roy, legal counsel to Mr. Wouters, billed taxpayers $4,607 for a round-trip flight to Paris last October. The posted expense report does not explain the purpose of the trip or provide related costs, but a spokesman said it was for a conference hosted by the French government. Another senior public servant in Mr. Harper’s department – Joseph Wild, assistant secretary to cabinet – spent $4,367 on airfare to an OECD conference in Paris. The Irish capital of Dublin was also the destination for another hefty fare – $5,117, paid by Kristina Namiesniowski, assistant secretary to the cabinet. She was there to learn about “e-government.” The jetsetters at Privy Council Office racked up other pricey airfares for several multi-stop trips overseas, making it difficult to compare prices directly. Ward Elcock billed a whopping $15,278 to fly to four cities in Australia and New Zealand last October for two weeks of “meetings.” Elcock was travelling as the prime minister’s special adviser on human smuggling. Mr. Harper’s national security adviser, Stephen Rigby, was a frequent flyer last year – a five-day visit to Singapore in June set taxpayers back $10,719 in airfare alone. And Mr. Rigby’s week-long visit to Munich and London cost the treasury $6,733 in airline tickets. All these travellers were public servants flying commercial, rather than the political staff who work inside the Prime Minister’s Office, which is part of the Privy Council Office. Mr. Harper and his political staff typically fly on government-owned aircraft, rather than commercial airlines, largely for security and logistical reasons. The Harper government was embroiled in several travel-related controversies in 2011. CTV News reported in September that the chief of defence staff, Gen. Walter Natynczyk, spent almost $1.5-million since 2008 flying on government-owned Challenger aircraft, once to a Caribbean holiday.

Fed up with expensive cellphone bills, Brian Wilson cut off his wireless service with Rogers Communications Inc. more than a year ago. Today, he’s thinking of going back. Every time he walks into a building, he worries about losing the signal on his Samsung smartphone. As he travels between his home in Vancouver and the University of British Columbia, sacoche louis vuitton where he works, his phone sometimes kicks into “roaming” mode – meaning he’d have to pay extra fees to make a call or use data services – even though he’s still within the coverage area of his new cell provider, Mobilicity. He’s not thrilled with the customer service, either: Mr. Wilson says the company gave him the runaround when he tried to have some roaming charges reversed. So while he doesn’t want to give the industry giants any more of his money, he’s having second thoughts about his decision to go with one of the Canadian wireless industry’s newest players. “If I could get better pricing and support a competitive startup, it seemed like a chance worth taking,” says Mr. Wilson, 46, who designs online courses at UBC. “I’m willing to put up with a bit [of hassle]. ... But at some point, you’re thinking, ‘Well, it is really not worth it.’ “ Mr. Wilson is one of hundreds of thousands of Canadians who signed up with the upstart competitors in a Canadian wireless industry overwhelmingly dominated by the troika of BCE Inc. , Telus Corp. and Rogers. But more than four years after the federal government unveiled an ambitious plan to boost competition in the $17-billion sector, new companies such as Mobilicity, Wind Mobile and Public Mobile are still struggling to gain a foothold against the goliaths. The Harper government’s attempt to engineer more competition for the benefit of Canada’s 27 million wireless users has been successful in a couple of ways: Prices have fallen for the average customer, and service plans are now more flexible. The question is, for how much longer? The upstarts’ networks are still poor – both in quality and scope – and there is constant talk of consolidation among players that may be too financially weak to go it alone. Many believe the endgame will see the Big Three eventually consolidate their grip on the market by buying up their smaller rivals, returning the wireless industry to its former state as a cozy oligopoly. “There is a fundamental difference between competition and sustainable competition,” says Alek Krstajic, chief executive officer of Public Mobile. “I think what this country needs is sustainable competition.” The upstarts say that for all their success in driving prices lower, they will die off without further help – or without foreign funding, which is currently restricted by Ottawa’s foreign ownership rules in the telecom sector. Some of them are already pointing fingers at the government that encouraged them to launch in the first place, arguing that Industry Canada has failed to enforce the sector’s rules of fair play, such as forcing BCE, Telus and Rogers to share their wireless towers. The incumbents, meanwhile, argue that Canadians simply prefer the major players’ higher-quality service as well as the higher-end devices they offer such as the iPhone, which the upstarts lack. If the government wants to score political points by lowering prices for consumers, and the big wireless companies say, they will further fragment the relatively small Canadian market and make it more difficult for carriers to afford the latest, greatest wireless technology. All of this has put the Harper government in a difficult spot. Ottawa is set to auction off valuable wireless licences, probably later this year or next. It must soon decide what the rules for that auction will be – whether to tilt them in favour of new wireless companies by setting aside licences that only they can purchase, as the government did in 2008 to stimulate more competition. Its decision on that question and on foreign ownership will shape the industry’s future, and will help determine whether the new entrants can survive for the long haul, or are doomed to disappear.

CHINESE authorities say they are preparing themselves for "war" in Tibet as a spate of self-immolations and related street protests against Beijing's rule continues. The latest in a run of 21 self-immolations happened on Thursday in the county town of Aba in the Tibetan part of the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan amid reports of more troops being sent to the area. And protests among Tibetans have now spread from Sichuan to the neighbouring province of Qinghai, where there were up to 1000 Tibetans in each of two protests, sacoche louis vuitton some carrying banners supporting "Free Tibet", according to US-based Radio Free Asia. Chinese media yesterday widely reported that the Tibetan government had been ordered to recognise the "grave situation" in maintaining stability and to ready itself for "a war against secessionist sabotage". Tibet's Communist Party chief Chen Quanguo was quoted by the Tibet Daily yesterday as saying the fight against the Dalai Lama clique is a "long-term, complicated and sometimes even acute" one. "Irresponsible officials who walk away from their duties, fail to implement policies or are found guilty of dereliction of duty in maintaining stability shall be immediately removed from their posts, pending punishment, regardless of how great the contributions they made in the past or what kind of position they held," Mr Chen said. China has long accused the Dalai Lama, who fled in 1959, of orchestrating a "separatist" movement in Tibet. At least 20 Tibetans have set themselves on fire in China in the past 13 months. State media last week said officials had ordered monasteries near Lhasa to tighten security and urged police checkpoints to guard against "separatists". Tibetan Prime Minister in exile, Lobsang Sangay, said: "The Tibetans in Tibet are giving up their lives because the occupation of Tibet and repressive policies of the Chinese government are unacceptable."

Western telecom providers continued their contest for the wallets of Canadians this week. Telus launches an upgraded wireless network Friday, while on Monday Shaw rolled out its new Exo fibre optic network. Telus’s new Long Term Evolution wireless system allows next-generation mobile electronics faster online access than the company’s current 4G network. sacoche louis vuitton LTE-enabled devices will enjoy download speeds between 12 and 25 megabytes per second — twice the speed of the current system, according to Monty Carter, senior vice-president with Telus. The new network will operate in 14 urban centres across Canada, including Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. Bell and Rogers, major competitors for Telus in the cellphone market, began offering LTE networks in mid-2011. To access these new networks, users need a compatible device. Currently, three devices available through Telus can make use of an LTE network: a Samsung tablet PC, the Optimus smartphone from LG and a mobile Internet key for laptops made by NovAtel. Carter acknowledged not all Telus customers will benefit immediately from the new network, but predicted long-term demand for more data will push most users beyond 4G eventually. “It’s insatiable,” he said of the consumer appetite for bandwidth. “If I look back four years ago, you had an 80 per cent voice, 20 per cent data mixture. Today, it’s the exact opposite — we’re loading 80 per cent data, 20 per cent voice.” According to the most recent CRTC statistics, Canadian cellphone firms draw a quarter of their mobile operations revenue from data charges. Meanwhile, Shaw, which last fall decided not to enter the cellphone business, announced improvements to its cable network earlier this week. The upgrade, dubbed “Exo,” lets customers watch television at 1,080p resolution and boosts maximum Internet speeds from 100 megabytes per second to 250 megabytes per second. Exo also adds an on-demand streaming service for certain television shows. Shaw’s move came one day before Telus added motion-control and mobile streaming services to its Optik TV service. Dvai Ghose, a telecom analyst with Canaccord Genuity, praised Telus’s recent moves. “I think they’re doing exceptionally well,” he said. “They are leaps and bounds above Shaw.” Ghose describes a string of Telus successes against its chief telecom rival in Western Canada dating back to the summer of 2010, when Telus re-launched its Telus TV service under the name Optik. “Telus has the advantage of being able to offer wire-line and wireless,” he said. “Telus can attack Shaw really hard in cable, which is where Shaw makes the vast majority of its money. Telus makes the majority of its money in wireless, and Shaw can’t attack Telus in wireless.” Shaw generated 61 per cent of its first-quarter 2012 revenue through cable services. It also lost nearly 23,000 basic cable customers. Telus’s wireless operations, according to its most recent quarterly report, generate 54 per cent of its revenue. The report claims 453,000 Optik TV customers, up 70 per cent from the same time last year.

Greek PM Lucas Papademos has failed to secure the support of his coalition for a raft of new austerity measures, after more than seven hours of talks. He had met officials from three parties to try to secure a deal leading to a fresh bailout package. The main stumbling block in the crunch talks was proposed cuts to supplementary pensions, reports said. Mr Papademos was said to be going directly to discuss the problem with EU and IMF officials. They are representing the so-called "troika" of bailout creditors - sacoche louis vuitton the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund - who had earlier agreed the draft proposals with the prime minister. They are thought to include a 20% minimum wage reduction, pension cuts and the sacking of 15,000 public sector workers - and have prompted further mass protests. Officials from Pasok, New Democracy and the far-right Laos party only received the 50-page text on Wednesday morning, reports said, after Mr Papademos agreed the deal with the troika on Tuesday night. According to Laos leader George Karatzaferis, the bulk of Wednesday's meeting was spent discussing the issue of supplementary pensions, which had reportedly been in line for a 15% cut. Mr Papademos's office said Mr Karatzaferis had expressed "serious reservations" during the meeting. As he left, Mr Karatzaferis told reporters: "I made my positions clear from the beginning... I wanted to support Mr Samaras (New Democracy leader) on that issue (pensions)." Eurozone finance ministers are to discuss the bailout on Thursday and observers say there is huge pressure for the Greek political leaders to agree a deal prior to that meeting. But the BBC's Mark Lowen, in Athens, says the package of cuts and reforms would go down very badly with an austerity weary Greek nation. According to unconfirmed reports in the Greek media, the measures were aimed at trimming 3.2bn euros (￡2.7bn; $4.2bn)

Early results put social conservative Mr Santorum in the lead in Minnesota and Missouri, though Mr Romney was expected to win Colorado comfortably. Mr Romney, whose credentials are distrusted by some conservatives, was trying to lower expectations. The eventual nominee will go on to face Barack Obama in November's election. Newt Gingrich, still Mr Romney's main challenger, sacoche louis vuitton has campaigned lightly in the three states voting on Tuesday, and does not even appear on Missouri's ballot. In Minnesota, Mr Santorum was on just over 45% with 4% of the vote counted, while Texas Congressman Ron Paul was on nearly 24% and Mr Romney third on almost 19%. In Missouri, Mr Santorum was in the lead with almost 52%, well ahead of former Massachusetts Governor Romney at 27%, and Congressman Paul at 12%, with 20% of the vote counted. Mr Santorum performed well in opinion polls ahead of the vote in Minnesota and Missouri - states with significant blocs of Tea Party and evangelical Christian voters respectively. Pitching himself as the only true conservative in the presidential race, Mr Santorum made a last-minute flurry of campaign appearances on Tuesday. The former Pennsylvania senator, who has not won a contest since grinding out a narrow win in Iowa's caucuses back in January, is still considered a long-shot candidate. Mr Romney, meanwhile, has been campaigning hard on abortion, religious freedom and gay marriage in an intensified effort to win over social conservatives ahead of Minnesota and Colorado's caucuses. During his first run for the Republican presidential nomination back in 2008, Mr Romney was victorious in both Colorado and Minnesota. But both states are perceived to have moved to the right since then, so doubts over his Mormon faith and political record as governor of a liberal state could cost him votes. Playing down the significance of Tuesday's votes, Romney campaign political director Rich Beeson said: "Mitt Romney is not going to win every contest. John McCain [the 2008 Republican nominee] lost 19 states in 2008, and we expect our opponents will notch a few wins, too."

Pakistan’s government on Thursday bowed to a long-standing Supreme Court demand to debate whether the president enjoys immunity from a past corruption case, a concession that could help defuse a crisis threatening the U.S.-backed administration. The government agreed to the demand after the court threatened Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani with contempt charges for failing to reopen a decade-old case against his boss, sacoche louis vuitton President Asif Ali Zardari, and forced the premier to make a rare appearance before the judges. The court gave Gilani’s attorney two weeks to prepare his argument. The period could further reduce heightened tension between the Supreme Court and the beleaguered government, which is also battling the judges and the powerful army over a secret memo sent to Washington last year seeking help in stopping a supposed military coup. Speculation has been rampant that the combined assault could cause the government’s downfall by forcing it to accept calls for early elections. But the government may be heartened by the Supreme Court’s decision not to make any immediate moves to hold Gilani in contempt, a charge that could land him in prison for up to six months and disqualify him from holding office. The government has long defied a 2009 Supreme Court order to write a letter to Swiss authorities asking them to reopen a corruption case against Zardari that dates back to the 1990s, claiming he enjoys immunity from prosecution while in office. It has also ignored a demand to go before the court to argue the immunity claim, probably because members of the ruling party viewed the court’s actions as a partisan campaign to take down Zardari, who has clashed with Supreme Court Chief Justice Mohammad Iftikhar Chaudhry.

In recent years, we've heard a lot of good news about smoking rates. Most recently, for example, we heard that, in 2010, Canada reached its lowest ever rate of smoking, and that B.C. had the lowest rate in the country, with just 14 per cent of British Columbians lighting up. These are, indeed, optimistic figures, and the decline in smoking across Canada is certainly something to celebrate. But, at the risk of sounding pessimistic,sacoche louis vuitton one can look at the figures the other way around: Approximately one out of every six Canadians and one out of every seven British Columbians still smokes, putting their health - and the health of their loved ones - in jeopardy. The risks associated with smoking hardly need rehearsing, but since this is National Non-Smoking Week (NNSW), it's worth highlighting them. According to the Canadian Council for Tobacco Control, which runs NNSW, tobacco is a leading risk factor for lung cancer, as about 85 per cent of all lung cancers are caused by smoking cigarettes. Tobacco is also one of the primary avoidable causes of cardiovascular disease, and it doubles the risk of stroke. Aside from those well-known dangers, cigarette smoking increases the risk of developing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease by an astonishing 10 times. And it has also been linked to cancer of the bladder, cervix, kidney, pancreas, stomach, esophagus, larynx, mouth and throat. In fact, tobacco use is the single most important cause of preventable, early cancer deaths. All of this means that smokers are likely to die young. On average, men who smoke lose approximately 6.5 years of their life and women, approximately nine years. But these are only averages - just as some smokers will live to a ripe old age, many others will lose decades. Furthermore, smoking has many unpleasant effects people don't necessarily think about. For example, smokers expose their loved ones, including their children, to serious health problems such as breathing difficulties, asthma and ear infections. And exposure to second-hand smoke can lead to nicotine dependence in children who have never smoked, thereby making it more likely they will pick up the habit. Even pets are affected, as dogs in smoking households have a greater risk of developing cancer, and smoke can cause leukemia in cats. If that weren't enough, anyone who lives in a smoking household is at risk of dying today rather than 20 years from now, since cigarettes are the No. 1 cause of fire-related deaths in Canada and around the world. But it is not only those who live with smokers that suffer. Rather, according to the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse, we all do: Direct health care costs from tobacco exceed $4.4 billion a year in Canada, while total economic costs are more than $17 billion a year. And these costs are entirely avoidable.

Three months after most of York Region’s transit drivers went on strike, riders and labour groups are trying to figure out who is being served by the region’s privatized transit model. Some 45,000 displaced bus riders and 600 transit workers are looking for someone to blame. With no resolution in sight for the complicated labour dispute, which involves three employers and two locals of the Amalgamated Transit Union, sacoche louis vuitton some frustrated residents were relieved to see the region finally make a move Monday. York announced it was terminating its contract with one of its three embattled bus providers, First Canada, for failing to do enough to resolve the strike. It also expects the other employers, Miller and Veolia, to present on Friday their ideas for restoring service on their routes. By Tuesday afternoon, however, it was clear the message wasn’t enough to scare other strikers into settling. Veolia workers rejected their latest offer in a 133-43 vote. Earlier this month, 84 per cent of Miller workers rejected that company’s offer. Veolia issued a statement saying the vote was disappointing but that it intends to work with the region to restore service as soon as possible. Local 113, which represents the Veolia workers, has filed a claim of unfair labour practices against the region for making the First Canada announcement hours before its vote. Meantime, 90 First Canada drivers are employed by a company that presumably no longer has any work for them. “It shows this private scheme (Region chair) Bill Fisch has cooked up is a failure,” said Toronto and York District Labour Council president John Cartwright. “The (First Canada) workers are in shock. There’s a lot of unanswered questions,” said Ray Doyle, president of Local 1587. The union will use every legal tool available to compel the new contractor to hire those employees, he said. “They will need experienced drivers who know the routes, who know the riders, who know the issues,” said Doyle. Riders, however, expressed relief that York might hire restore at least one route by Feb. 5.

A suggestion to change the rules of prenatal screening for all women in an attempt to possibly limit sex-selection abortions in Canada has caused an uproar across the country. And the controversial issue is about so much more than how soon a young couple can paint the nursery pink or blue. Does a pregnant woman have a right to medical information that may not be considered pertinent to her health or her baby’s? Should a physician choose to limit the information he provides a patient if there is an even remote possibility that information could be used to abort an unwanted female fetus - sacoche louis vuitton a practice that is rampant in China and India but reviled here? An editorial in the Canadian Medical Association Journal saying that sex-selection abortions are an issue in Canda and urging doctors to conceal the gender of a fetus until at least 30 weeks to prevent those abortions has stirred up a roaring cross-country debate. Over all, physicians scoffed at the idea while some conservative women’s groups welcomed it. The only thing everyone agrees on is that female feticide is unacceptable. The doctor who wrote the editorial, interim CMAJ editor-in-chief Rajendra Kale, said that “female feticide happens in India and China by the millions, but it also happens in North America in numbers large enough to distort the male to female ratio in some ethnic groups.” Delaying the information until 30 weeks, he said, makes it much more difficult to get an abortion unless there’s a medical reason. Citing several studies, he argued that some couples who already have two girls and no son selectively get rid of female fetuses until they can ensure their third-born child is a boy. While this may be small numbers in Canada, he said in an interview - perhaps a few hundred cases a year - he doesn’t believe it’s so small it can be ignored. And he said because the information is “medically irrelevant,” there should be no problem for doctors to delay providing it. Doctors, in fact, seemed to have a big problem with it. Dr. Charles Bernard, head of the Collège des Médecins du Québec, said most young couples want to know the sex in advance - and he vehemently defended their right to know. “It is not acceptable to withhold information from patients,” said Bernard. “It’s a right here. That doctor (who wrote the editorial) doesn’t represent the opinion of the majority of doctors in Canada.” The Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada agreed. In a statement, it said Kale’s proposal was “inconsistent” with their own policy of disclosure and that “providing patients with results of diagnostic imaging procedures is part of the Canadian standard of care, and fetal sex determination and disclosure should not be exempt.”

“Nervous? Don’t be,” Ricky Gervais assured the glamorous Hollywood crowd at Sunday’s 69th annual Golden Globes with a sly grin — and immediately took swipes at Kim Kardashian, Eddie Murphy, Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster, Canadian pop prince Justin Bieber and even his employer for the evening — The Hollywood Foreign Press — in his opening monologue. Who knows what he said about Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek before they gave out the Best Television Series: Comedy to Modern Family? It was bleeped out by network censors. Meryl Streep was bleeped out, too. And Uggie the lovable dog star of The Artist ran off with the show. It was that kind of night. Gervais said he assumed Banderas and Hayek are interesting people, “but I can’t understand a (expletive) thing they were saying.” It left Banderas with a face like thunder as he responded in rapid-fire Spanish. A relaxed Meryl Streep was censored midway through her speech for her magnificent Best Actress performance as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady. She then thanked her agent “and God, Harvey Weinstein.” And George Clooney made the inevitable Michael Fassbender (Shame) full-frontal joke. “Do you play golf with your hands behind your back?” he quipped, swinging from side to side. Gervais joked that the awards “are just like the Oscars, but without all that esteem. The Globes are to the Oscars what Kim Kardashian is to Kate Middleton.sacoche louis vuitton A bit louder, a bit trashier, a bit drunker and more easily bought. Allegedly. Nothing’s been proved.” The Globes seemed to be wobbling on the Oscar track this year, supporting movies and performances that appear to be long shots for Academy Award love, including Martin Scorsese’s win for Best Director for Hugo and Best Screenplay to Woody Allen for Midnight in Paris. But Best Picture (Drama) honours for The Descendants, Best Picture (Comedy or Musical) for The Artist, Best Actor awards for George Clooney, also for The Descendants, Best Foreign Language Film award for A Separation and Best Animated Feature to The Adventures of Tintin are in line with Oscar oddsmakers. Oscar nominations will be announced Jan. 24 and the telecast is set for Feb. 26, with Billy Crystal returning as host for the first time in eight years. It was Gervais’s third time as host but his podium time seemed limited and some of the funniest bits and sharpest jabs came from the stars, perhaps emboldened by the open bar. Canadian actor Seth Rogen, star of 50/50, walked out to announce the winner of Best Actress, Comedy (the prize went to Michelle Williams the for her portrayal of Marilyn Monroe in My Week With Marilyn) and declared he was trying to hide his “massive erection.” And when Gervias pulled a face while introducing Madonna as one who is still “Like a Virgin,” Madge strode to the mic and quipped: “Ricky, if I’m still just like a virgin why don’t you come over here and do something about it. I haven’t kissed a girl in a few years.” Gervais could be seen sprinting off the stage behind her. Octavia Spencer seemed surprised she won Best Supporting Actress for The Help but picked up her statuette with a heartfelt acknowledgement that included a quote from Martin Luther King’s “All Labor Has Dignity” speech. Speaking of classy, Peter Dinklage wrapped up his acceptance speech for TV miniseries Game of Thrones with a mention of “a gentleman I’m thinking about in England,” actor Martin Henderson. The little person and Harry Potter extra was badly injured in October after he was picked up and tossed outside a pub. “I am going to lower the tone somewhat,” threatened Helen Mirren in introducing the Cecil B. DeMille Award tribute to Morgan Freeman, prior to his being handed the by Sidney Poitier. “I’ve had a couple of glasses of wine.” The wine confession applied to the rest of the room, which got more raucous as the evening wore on, but Mirren was class personified. The first award of the evening went to Canadian actor Christopher Plummer. The 82-year-old has won the Best Supporting Actor Golden Globe for playing a widower who comes out as gay in the father-son drama Beginners. Plummer is almost certain to be nominated for the Oscar in the same category and this could be his year to win. He has only been nominated once before, for The Last Station in 2009. It was a good night for TV newcomers. Post-9/11 terrorism drama Homeland won Best Television Series: Drama and Claire Danes for Best Actress in a Television Series: Drama.

Any film by David Cronenberg is an event. One that usually takes you by surprise When I saw A Dangerous Method amid a welter of pre-screenings for TIFF, I was shocked. . . shocked that I wasn’t shocked by a Cronenberg film. From the opening frames, a classic period sequence of a -carriage hurtling down a country road, I felt we on a strangely un-alien planet for this filmmaker. Then as the narrative unfolded with the elegant cadence of a Viennese waltz, I realized we were in a genre, but not one that Cronenberg had tried before: the period biopic. Though “biopic” seems not quite right; sacoche louis vuitton it’smore like a bi-biopic, a portrait of the galvanic relationship between Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen). The film triangulates the birth of psychoanalysis via their intersection with a fierce Russian named Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), a volatile patient of Jung’s who who seduces both of them as she herself graduates from paranoid case study to headstrong psychologist. The film is based on a book and a play—The Talking Cure by screenwriter Christopher Hampton (best known for another dangerous title, Dangerous Liasons). And much of the script is lifted directly from Speilrein’s writings, which lends the dialogue an unusually literate, essayish intelligence. This is disconcerting from a filmmaker who has specialized in serving up flesh, with sashimi acuity, as a metaphor for the unconscious—rather than engaging in direct discourse about the id, the ego, and the cold war between death and sex in the human psyche. When I saw A Dangerous Method, I found much of it seductive, fascinating, and often funny (Viggo’s droll, cigar-savouring Freud is priceless). But I wasn’t sure the drama worked. I began to daydream in places, as if I were in a classroom, and wasn’t blown away—something I’ve come to expect from Cronenberg. But now, months later I’m dying to see it again. Films, like wine, tend to ripen in the unconscious, or go off. And this one is still beckoning. Besides, I’ve always felt a need to see Cronenberg’s films twice. On a second viewing, they inevitably get richer. In the case of the more bizarre movies such as Naked Lunch, Crash, and eXistenZ, that’s partly because you don’t know what to think when you walk out. The WTF effect. But even the more mainstream work, such as A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, deepen on second viewing. As if Cronenberg is shooting in his own version of 3D, creating a stereoscopic view of ego and id. Then again, his films often deal with dualism, most literally in Dead Ringers. And his first feature, after all, was called Stereo.

Owning a car or television set could be injurious to health. A new study mapping people's possessions and physical activity against their risk for heart problems found a 27% increase in heart attacks among people who had a car and/or TV in comparison to those who didn't. But the Interheart study spanning 52 nations and 25,000 people holds out the heartiest promise ever: the risk of heart attack can be neutralized with the mildest of physical activity. The study was published in the European Heart Journal on Wednesday. Said Dr Aashish Contractor, sacoche louis vuitton a preventive cardiologist who is medical in-charge of Sunday's marathon, "The study is heartening because it makes it clear that people don't need strenuous exercises to reduce the risk of a heart attack. Even mild physical activity can be useful.'' The INTERHEART study is a long-running global study (from February 1999 onwards) on heart attacks that includes data from India as well. A couple of years back it showed that Indians got heart-attacks a decade before their Caucasian counterparts; part of this study was done at Parel's KEM Hospital. The new study was undertaken for obvious reasons: rising urbanization has led to a sedentary lifestyle across the world. "A sedentary lifestyle has become increasingly common in many developing countries, and with it, the incidence of metabolic syndrome, diabetes and CV (cardiovascular) disease has also risen,'' said the study's main author, Claes Held of Uppsala University in Sweden. The team identified various factors leading to ill-health: increasing urbanization, mechanization at work, more motorized transportation, "a societal structure that discourages walking but encourages the use of physical activity limiting devices (cars, escalators, and elevators), and the widespread availability of appliances that promote sedentary behaviour such as the television (TV) and computers''. The researchers then began mapping possessions-a TV at home or car to work-versus the risk of a heart attack among people. After comparing the possessions of people who have undergone a heart attack against those who hadn't, the association was clear: while people with a TV or car or both had a 27% greater risk of a heart attack, people who had none of these machines or owned cattle had the lowest risk. Incidentally, a Mumbai-centric study done by Lilavati Hospital's endocrinologist Dr Shashank Joshi, who is the editor emeritus of the Journal of Association of Physicians of India, had shown a similar association. "This study ties in with our study that showed that for every gadget a family acquired it also put on eight kilos,'' said Dr Joshi. "People put on ectopic fat (fat that gets deposited in cells and tissues that are not meant to store it). Considering that Indians have more body fat and less muscle than their Caucasian or African counterparts, this results in obesity that could lead to development of heart problems,'' added Dr Joshi.

Environmental hearings into a proposed pipeline that would move oil from Alberta to British Columbia's coast began with heated words Tuesday, as critics charged that Ottawa is trying to bully the project's opponents. The hearings,sacoche louis vuitton which are expected to last for 18 months, got underway in Kitimat, B.C. Haisla dancers and drummers led a procession in to the aboriginal community's meeting hall, after which Haisla Chief Sammy Robinson opened the proceedings with a warm greeting: "Walk softly on our road," he said. "We are very happy to have you in our territory. Good luck." However, Haida leader Art Sterritt, who represents 10 First Nations communities opposed to the project, lashed out at the pipeline as proceedings got underway, saying it is local residents who must live with the potentially devastating environmental impacts of a spill. Sterritt also criticized Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver, who warned in an open letter released Monday that environmentalists and other "radical" groups would hijack the regulatory panel hearings. "We've got an Alberta prime minister trying to bully British Columbians," Sterritt said. The anticipated $5.5-billion pipeline calls for the Alberta bitumen to be loaded onto supertankers for eventual export to Asia. In his letter, Oliver wrote of opponents of the project: "Their goal is to stop any major project no matter what the cost to Canadian families in lost jobs and economic growth. No forestry. No mining. No oil. No gas. No more hydro-electric dams." The minister subsequently clarified his position in an interview with CTV News Channel on Tuesday, saying that he wasn't referring to all environmentalists. In particular, Oliver called out organizations that are "injecting money into Canada with the express purpose of delaying and ultimately defeating these big infrastructure projects." Proponents of Northern Gateway have long argued the economic values of the proposed venture, which Oliver estimated will add billions to government coffers. The twin pipeline, he added, would diversify Canada's resources to the Asia Pacific area. "We need to diversify our markets and that's the strategic objective that a pipeline from Northern Alberta to the West Coast of British Columbia could achieve," he said. The NDP's Associate Critic for Natural Resources has shot back at Oliver, accusing him of "bullying Canadians" with a letter on the eve of the hearings. Speaking with CTV News Channel on Tuesday, Kennedy Stewart said the minister's letter suggests that he doesn't respect the hearing process. "He doesn't really have any plan for moving forward," said Stewart. "His only plan seems to be for China to stick a big straw into Alberta and suck all the oil out." More than 4,300 groups and individuals have signed up to speak at the hearings designed to weigh potential impacts of the proposed 1,177-kilometre twin pipeline project.

If you made a new year’s resolution to quit smoking and you’re counting on nicotine patches or gum to help you, you may want to reconsider: A new study finds that these and other nicotine replacement products aren’t much good at preventing former smokers from relapsing. In a sample of 787 adults who had quit smoking within the previous two years, nearly one-third reported having gone back to using cigarettes. In the first wave of the study, 30.6% of recent quitters had gone back to smoking, sacoche louis vuitton and in the second wave of the study the figure was 31.3%. Those who had used nicotine patches, gum, inhalers or nasal sprays were just as likely to relapse as those who had quit without them. The findings, set to be published online Monday by the journal Tobacco Control, run counter to the results of several randomized clinical trials that were conducted before the Food and Drug Administration gave the thumbs-up to these nicotine replacement products. In those trials, volunteers using such products were as much as three times more likely than volunteers who didn’t to kick the smoking habit. However, the latest results are in line with other studies that have found little – if any – benefit for the products in real-world scenarios. In some cases, studies have found that people who use products like nicotine patches and gums are more likely – sometimes much more likely – to relapse. “This may indicate that some heavily dependent smokers perceive NRT [nicotine replacement therapy] as a sort of ‘magic’ pill, and upon realizing it is not, they find themselves without support in their quitting efforts, doomed to failure,” the researchers wrote. Clearly, American smokers have high hopes for the gum, patches and related products – they spend more than $1.5 billion on them each year, according to the study. Much of that money came from public health programs, which are facing further rounds of budget cuts. Policymakers ought to rethink their willingness to pay for nicotine replacement therapy, given its poor track record, and consider shifting that money to initiatives aimed at discouraging smoking in general, such as anti-smoking campaigns and efforts to raise tobacco taxes, the researchers wrote. Not so fast, according to GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare, the company that makes Nicorette, Nicoderm and Commit lozenges, among other smoking cessation products. The company noted that most of the adults in the study who used nicotine replacement products didn't use them for the full eight weeks that are recommended. Had those people followed those directions, they might have had more success.

The Defence Department is prepared to go to Federal Court and spend whatever it takes to prevent the public from seeing government photos of Taliban hairdos because it believes the captured insurgents have a right to their privacy. The department’s decision, outlined in newly released documents obtained by the Citizen, is the result of a test of the Access to Information law by two Ottawa lawyers, Paul Champ and Amir Attaran. To see how far DND would go to prevent the release of information about captured Afghan insurgents, Attaran requested copies of photographs the military took of such individuals but asked that the faces of the prisoners be completely blacked out and that only the hairdos of the detainees shown. Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault, the government watchdog for the Access law, also recommended DND release the heavily censored photos. But the DND documents obtained by the Citizen through the Access law outline the department’s view: releasing the photographs of the hairdos of captured insurgents would violate their privacy rights and could hurt national security. “National Defence will not follow the recommendation made by the Information Commissioner of Canada regarding disclosure of photographs covered by this file and is prepared to defend the decision in court if necessary,” Julie Jansen, sacoche louis vuitton head of DND’s Access to Information branch, wrote in the October 2010 briefing note. Jansen argued the photographs constituted “personal information” of the insurgents and releasing images of their hairdos would “probably cause injuries related to national security.” She didn’t explain how the hairdo photos would harm Canada’s security. In an attempt to determine if detainees had been tortured, Attaran had originally requested through the access law copies of photographs that DND had of captured individuals. The department, however, refused to release those. That’s when he resorted to the request for just the images of the insurgent hairdos. Attaran said DND’s claim it can’t release photos of hairdos because it must protect the privacy of the alleged insurgents is ludicrous. “The same government that says those detainees have no rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms now embraces the idea that detainees have rights under the Privacy Act,” he explained. “The government’s position is that these persons have privacy rights but no constitutional right to avoid torture.” An email sent Friday by DND noted the decision to withhold the 28 photographs was based entirely on enforcing the privacy issue. It did not mention the earlier claim by Jansen that releasing photos of detainee hairdos would harm national security. The email noted the Privacy Act protects the privacy of individuals with respect to the information held by the Canadian government about them. Some legal specialists, however, have noted that Canada’s Privacy law applies only to Canadians and permanent residents. Attaran pointed out the U.S. government released through that country’s Freedom of Information law the photos of Iraqis being tortured and abused at the Abu Ghraib prison, while in contrast the Canadian government and military have only put roadblocks in the way of releasing information on the detainee file. The fact that DND is willing to spend unlimited amounts of money preventing the release of censored photos reveals the lack of transparency, he noted. “We were proving the point about this paranoid secrecy of don’t reveal or disclose anything,” added Champ. The detainee issue has dogged the federal government for years after allegations that some prisoners had been tortured. Hearings were also held by the Military Police Complaints Commission into how investigations into such issues were handled by Canadian military police. After diplomats and human rights groups raised such concerns the government altered its detainee transfer policies and worked to improve conditions at the Afghan prison in Kandahar. But various Conservative government ministers also accused those who raised questions about the alleged torture as being unpatriotic or Taliban sympathizers. Attaran and Champ initially launched a legal challenge against DND’s refusal in the hairdo issue after the information commissioner declined to go to court on the matter. But Attaran said that challenge will not proceed because of the cost and the fact he and Champ are involved in a more important legal challenge against excessive government secrecy.

“I’m so glad that it’s finally over,” says Brandon Firla dryly, on the phone from his new home in Los Angeles. “I’ve been trying to end this show for three seasons, and I’ve finally succeeded.” The lanky actor is talking about Little Mosque on the Prairie, the gentle CBC satire about a Muslim community in the fictional small town of Mercy, Sask., that will be entering its sixth and final season on Monday. He is, of course, sacoche louis vuitton joking, continuing, perhaps, to channel the spirit of his aptly named character, Rev. William Thorne. Thorne is the Anglican priest who spent much of Season 4 attempting to bully the Muslims out of town. When Firla debuted in the role in 2009, he predicted the character would ruffle a few feathers among the show’s fan base. And he was right. Some of them, in fact, seemed to have trouble separating the actor from the character. One TV-centred blog that featured an interview with Firla at the time received numerous comments from viewers who appeared to possess a curious lack of understanding about the role of a TV antagonist. They didn’t like Thorne and wished he would leave. “When the first episode of the season premiered, it set a record for comments on the site from people who were upset,” he says with a laugh. “It hit three digits. It was crazy.” But, as with any long-running comedies, the villains cannot stay completely villainous, or they become rather stale. After three seasons spent reluctantly morphing into a three-dimensional character, the good reverend will forge an unlikely friendship with fellow hardliner Baber Siddiqui in Season 6. As played by Manoj Sood, Baber is the extreme Islamic yin to Thorne’s fundamentalist Christian yang. Coincidentally, these bookends of religious intolerance are played by Calgary actors who grew up in the same northwest neighbourhood. It turns out, they also have similar philosophical views about Mosque coming to an end. “We all know, in this industry, that every show has a life span,” says Sood. “For a show to last six seasons in the current business of television, that’s a really great thing. Not to mention that the show, depending on the time of year, is airing in about 70 different countries.” Like Thorne, Baber is a bit of a “buffoon” who is meant to be the unyielding conservative thorn in the side of Mercy’s liberal iman, Amaar Rashid (Zaib Shaikh). But while Baber and Rev. Thorne may represent the hardened edge of their respective religions, it’s unlikely Little Mosque will go down in history as an edgy comedy. At a time when even bland sitcoms like Two and a Half Men have racy content, Mosque often seemed quintessentially Canadian in its ability to gently skewer stereotypes without the use of melodrama or dark humour.

Hollywood heavyweights may want the curtain drawn on the Northern Gateway pipeline, but a new poll suggests B.C. residents are giving the project good reviews. Resistance to the oilsands pipeline through B.C. has been undermined by a poll showing support for the project trumping opposition among the province's residents, sacoche louis vuitton says the company that commissioned the survey. But a group opposing Calgary-based Enbridge's Northern Gateway questioned the poll's validity and insisted their movement remains undaunted. The Ipsos poll of 1,000 British Columbians conducted in mid-December shows 48% support for the pipeline meant to carry oil from Alberta to West Coast tankers, while 32% voiced opposition. Those results demolish the insistence of pipeline opponents -- including the likes of Robert Redford, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kevin Bacon -- that they have public opinion on their side, said Todd Nogier, spokesman for Enbridge. "Their findings are quite strikingly different from what our opponents have been saying for some time -- it's nice to have this information to refute claims there's a groundswell of opposition," he said. Poll results, he said, are important in setting the tone for public hearings into the project that begin next week in Kitimat, B.C. "It is the proper context to be heading into public hearings," Nogier said. However, the poll plays down the risky role of seagoing tankers that would ship the oil through B.C. coastal waters on their way to Asia, said Emma Gilchrist, spokeswoman for the Victoria-based environmental group Dogwood Initiative. "People who are more familiar with the project and connect it to the threat of tanker spills oppose the project." When tankers were part of an actual question in their own polls, opposition to the pipeline was close to 80%, said Gilchrist. But the Enbridge survey's intro does state oil would be transported to Kitimat "for export by tanker to China and other Asian markets." Nogier noted the poll found support for the pipeline higher in B.C.'s north, which the pipeline would traverse, with 55% embracing it. "Familiarity with the project is highest in the north," he said. Gilchrist said the poll won't alter the reality of solid opposition to a pipeline that would create no more than 100 permanent jobs. Most passionate, she said, are coastal dwellers dependent on the ocean fearful of an oil spill."They've told us they'll be waiting for the day their community dies," said Gilchrist. With Washington's delay in approving the Keystone XL pipeline to the U.S. Gulf Coast, attention has shifted to the Northern Gateway route, which would move 525,000 barrels of oil a day along 1,177 km of pipeline.

Shrinking sea ice cover in the North Atlantic over the past three decades due to warming has led to a ``dramatic'' spike in deaths among seal pups, a new U.S. study says, offering a glimpse into a population issue while numbers are still abundant. The study from Duke University in North Carolina warns climate change and disappearing sea ice off Canada's east coast could prove to be a more dire challenge for the animals going forward, with entire year-classes of seal pups dying as a result of diminished breeding spaces. The study said a look at the Gulf of St. Lawrence shows that population fluctuation - for better or worse - sacoche louis vuitton is dependent on a climatic phenomenon known as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), which controls the strength and path of westerly winds and affects the volume of sea ice in the region. The Gulf region serves as a breeding zone for many harp seals. ``When you account for the good-ice years vs. bad-ice years . . . the result is a long-term decline in sea ice . . . of about six per cent per decade,'' said David Johnston, a research scientist at the Duke University Marine Lab. ``You'll still have good-ice years and you'll have bad-ice years, but it seems over time, the number of bad ice years overwhelms the number of good ice years. ``Harp seals aren't endangered right now, so we're not worried they're going to disappear off the face of the earth . . . but we're all concerned about what's happening with climate change, so it's important to try and anticipate what's in store for these animals over time.'' Some years the NAO results in less sea ice, thus reducing population growth, while other years - such as the period between 1973 and 2000 - resulted in a period of ``steady recovery.'' Johnston said a major question remains surrounding the breeding habits of harp seals and how willing they would be to seek refuge elsewhere to breed should ice levels in more southern regions continue to decline. Longtime sealer Jack Troake, of Twillingate, N.L., has taken part in the commercial seal hunt since 1952 and has witnessed his share of ice conditions and seal populations. He admits there are issues affecting harp seals of Canada's east coast, but isn't convinced it's exclusive to sea ice. ``It's not that I don't give a rat's ass (about ice levels),'' Troake said Wednesday. ``There is something drastically wrong with the harp seals, I can tell you that, but I don't think it's because of ice conditions. These animals are pretty smart and cagey and they'll go off until they find the proper ice.'' Johnston, however, said it remains unclear how dedicated the seals are to breeding in specific areas, even if the conditions don't always allow for population growth. ``The places they breed, they come back to relatively faithfully,'' said Johnston, who works with the research team on the study - the third in a series on the issue. It was published in the peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE.

Although most British Columbians are confident they will save enough for retirement, nearly three-quarters are worried about the stability of their investments, a BMO financial group study found. Sixty per cent of B.C. residents said they are on the right path to realize their ideal retirement lifestyle, while 72 per cent said they are growing increasingly nervous about the impact of market volatility on their retirement savings. “It’s good to see that most British Columbians feel confident about saving for retirement, sacoche louis vuitton but it’s not surprising that they are feeling a little uneasy about their RRSPs given the past year’s turmoil,” said Mark Breakspear, regional sales manager, Vancouver, BMO Bank of Montreal. B.C. residents were the most likely in Canada to say they will contribute less to their Registered Retirement Savings Plan than they did last year, the study found. Thirty-eight per cent of British Columbians have made or plan to make a contribution to their RRSP for the 2011 tax year, but just 68 per cent will contribute the same or more as last year. Just half of British Columbians have RRSPs, while 61 per cent of Canadians have them, BMO said in a news release. During the 2010 tax year, Canadians contributed an average of $4,700 to their RRSPs. The BMO online survey was conducted by Leger Marketing from Nov. 21 to 24, 2011, with a sample of 1,520 Canadians, 18 years of age or older. Meanwhile, another poll shows that B.C. residents are generally confident about their financial situation, but less so than one year ago. The CIBC poll found that 70 per cent of B.C. residents say they are confident they will reach their financial goals, compared to 79 per cent a year ago. The number of B.C. residents feeling positive about their financial situation plummeted 18 per cent from a year ago to 54 per cent, the lowest in the country. “B.C. residents are entering 2012 with a generally confident outlook on their future finances, although they are somewhat less positive about their current financial situation than they were a year ago,” said Christina Kramer, executive vice-president, Retail Distribution and Channel Strategy, CIBC. This lack of confidence may be related to 74 per cent of British Columbians saying it’s more important today to set financial goals than it was five years ago. “It’s encouraging to see more B.C. residents recognizing the importance of setting financial goals for themselves, and a good level of confidence in achieving those goals,” Kramer said. Nationally, Canadians are feeling slightly less optimistic about their financial situations at the dawn of 2012 than they were a year ago — and they’re less confident the older they get, according to the poll. While respondents in all age groups expressed confidence that they would achieve their financial goals, the numbers fall as the age of the respondents rises. “For example, among Canadians 18-34 78 per cent say they are confident they will reach their financial goals, however Canadians nearer to retirement in ages 55 to 64 were less likely to be confident, at 68 per cent,” CIBC said in a news release.

Most paramedics see verbal abuse as one of the pitfalls of the job. They try not to be hurt by it. Many don't even report it. A new study found that more than two-thirds of paramedics surveyed have experienced verbal, physical or sexual abuse on the job. The majority — 67.4% — reported being verbally abused. "They do encounter verbal abuse and sometimes it can be physical abuse," said Niagara EMS community education and awareness officer Steve Malone. While physical assault isn't commonplace for paramedics in Niagara, sacoche louis vuitton he said it's not unheard of. "We deal with people who are under so much stress, sometimes they lash out because they don't know how to handle it." He said in his 26 years in the field, in four different provinces, he was verbally abused repeatedly and punched at least twice. Malone recalled an intoxicated patient who punched him in the face, giving him a bloody nose. It happened while he was working in northern Manitoba. In another incident, a man he was trying to help hit him in the chest. Later, the man made a point to apologize for his actions. "We understand it's not that the individual wants to hurt us, it's the medical condition," he said. "(But) in my book, that doesn't make it right." Not all incidents of violence are perpetrated by patients. Sometimes family members, friends or bystanders lash out against paramedics, the study found. Blair Bigham, an associate scientist at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto and the study's lead investigator, said the survey identified the violence problem and he's encouraging paramedics to always report incidents of abuse. "Paramedics tend not to report, they tend to consider it part of their job. We need to change that culture," he said. "We need to understand what's going on in the field before we can target intervention to change that." The study, which is published in the January issue of Prehospital Emergency Care, was done following a survey of 1,381 EMS workers in Ontario and Nova Scotia in 2011. "We knew that paramedics are sometimes the victims of violence, but we were surprised by how many paramedics have experienced violence," Bigham said. "It really sheds light on just how big a problem this is." Verbal abuse was reported by 67.4% of EMS workers surveyed and intimidation was reported by 41.5%. Twenty-six per cent reported physical abuse, 13.6% had been sexually harassed and 2.7% had been sexually assaulted, the study found. "More research is needed to understand the impact of this workplace violence," Bigham said. Malone said local paramedics are trained to handle violence and there are protocols in place to protect them. But he admitted that not all incidents — mostly verbal — are reported. He said when the organization learns about incidents, they can be investigated and logged. Knowing a patient's history of abuse can help protect paramedics on subsequent calls, he said. Malone said at the end of the day, he hopes the public knows that paramedics aren't there to judge. "We're there to help," he said.

A former girlfriend of Jonathan Duhamel is amoung four people who have been arrested in connection with the home invasion robbery of the poker champion last week near Montreal. Three people were arrested earlier in the week, and Longueuil police made the latest arrest of a 20-year-old man on Thursday morning. Duhamel's agent confirmed to The Canadian Press that the woman was someone the poker player dated over a short period and is the only person among the accused his client actually knew. Duhamel was the first Canadian to win the World Series of Poker’s main event in Las Vegas in 2010, earning him $8.9 million US. On Dec. 21, sacoche louis vuitton police say Duhamel was beaten and robbed after the suspects rang the doorbell of his home in Boucherville, Que. Police say the suspects pushed their way in and later fled with money, a Rolex watch and Duhamel’s World Series of Poker championship bracelet. The watch has now been recovered, police said, but the bracelet is still missing. They did not comment on if any cash was recovered. “Investigators received information from the public and with this information they were able to arrest a 20-year-old woman Saturday night,” said Const. Mark David of the Longueuil police. She was charged with five offences including conspiracy. Then on Monday a 22-year-old man and a 26-year-old man were arrested in Pointe-Claire in connection to the case. They appeared in court Wednesday charged with breaking and entering, robbery, assault and forcible confinement. As of Thursday morning, no charges had been laid against the 20-year-old. “Investigators are still questioning the fourth suspect to find out who did what in this case,” David said. Duhamel was treated in hospital for minor injuries after the brazen robbery. In a statement released last week, he said he feared for his life during the ordeal. The poker champ offered up a reward of up to $10,000 for the arrest of those responsible and the return of his property. David said he couldn’t comment on if that reward has been claimed. The investigation is still ongoing and investigators are asking anyone with information to contact the Longueuil police.

CBC reporter Robert Jones is predicting that gasoline prices will increase by about 3.5 cents a litre on Thursday morning. The Energy and Utilities Board will reset gas prices at 12:01 a.m. on Thursday. Jones said gas prices are expected to increase by between 3.5 to four cents per litre. Diesel and heating oil are also expected to increase by about one cent a litre. Those aged 65 to 69 will have the option to continue contributing to the CPP — to be matched by their employer — as a way to increase pension payments down the road. If they do not want to contribute after they turn 65, sacoche louis vuitton they will need to give notice to their employers and the Canada Revenue Agency. There are other tax changes worth noting, too. Stamps will soon cost 2 cents more, with the price of mailing a basic letter within Canada rising to 61 cents on Jan. 16. Elections Canada is increasing the annual limit for total contributions to any particular registered political party to $1,200 on Jan. 1. The same annual limit will now apply to contributions to any combination of candidates, nomination candidates and ridings of any one political party. The Local Coordination Committees of Syria, an opposition group with a network of contacts across the country, said security forces tear-gassed demonstrators in Hama and 7,000 demonstrators in Homs turned out to mourn two slain people. The group said demonstrations also took place in Damascus and its suburbs, as well as in Idlib, Aleppo and Deir Ezzor. The LCC said at least 14 people died Wednesday elsewhere in the country: five in Homs, two in Aleppo, two in Hama, two in the Damascus suburbs and one each in Daraa, Idlib and Latakia. Bernard Valero, the French Foreign Ministry's spokesman, said the observers hadn't yet grasped the "reality of the situation in Homs." "Their presence did not prevent the ongoing bloodshed of repression in this city where large demonstrations were violently repressed causing approximately 10 deaths," he said. The monitors must be permitted "to circulate freely and have full access to the population" and world powers "will be vigilant against any attempt of concealment or manipulation," he said.

Police here say they fear a man who broke into a house and abducted a four-year-old girl may strike again, and are giving top priority to finding him. "It's very gutsy for someone to enter a house and carry out a crime of this nature, so we're taking this very seriously and we need the assistance of the public," Sex Crimes Unit Det. Dan Luff said at a news conference Tuesday afternoon. sacoche louis vuitton "We don't leave these kinds of people wandering the streets." The four-year-old, reportedly visiting Toronto from the United States for Hanukkah, was hospitalized but has since been released and is with her family. "Under the circumstances, she's doing as good as can be expected," Luff said. Police allege the girl was abducted from the room she was staying in sometime between 3 a.m. and 3:30 a.m. on Dec. 26. A family member woke up to find she was no longer in her bed and immediately called police. Family members found her a short time later on a neighbour's lawn, and saw a man fleeing the scene. The whole incident lasted "minutes" according to a Toronto police news release. Police said they believe the man is not known to the family. "If he's breaking into this person's house . . . what other houses may he be looking at in the future?" Luff said. "It is a concern, and that's what we have to deal with, sooner better than later." The attack took place in a quiet residential area, where neighbours told Global News the girl and her family have been visiting from Connecticut. On Tuesday, multiple police cars were seen door-to-door canvassing the area where the attack happened. Residents would not comment to a reporter, saying they wanted to respect the family's privacy. But the man who abducted and sexually assaulted the four-year-old girl didn't just shatter one child's innocence, he also destroyed the trust of a neighbourhood, said the head of the Canadian Centre for Child Protection. The head of the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, Lianna McDonald, said parents fearful of such random attacks should know they are amazingly rare. "When something like this happens, there's such fear involved," McDonald said. "It's really important people appreciate how rare this is." Lianna McDonald said rebuilding that trust will not be easy, but parents fearful such random attacks could befall their children should know such cases are amazingly rare. "When something like this happens, there's such fear involved," McDonald said. "It's really important people appreciate how rare this is." The typical case of child abduction usually involves someone who knows the child, according to research. Statistics Canada, in a 2005 study, found that the risk of sexual victimization increases with age. Despite its rarity, if someone decides to abduct a child, there's little anyone can do to stop it, McDonald said. "These types of crimes are often sexually motivated," McDonald said.

As part of a Christmas tradition for many, families joined the Community Church of Durham on Saturday evening, for an hour of service reminding locals of the true message of Christmas. Over 300 people participated in singing carols, making offerings, and watching the retelling of the Christmas story, acted out by children ages one year old through 13 years old. David Sietz, of Durham, sacoche louis vuitton said comes to the family service with his wife and two children each Christmas Eve, and every Sunday. He said he values the church's sense of community. "It's the one place you can come to without being concerned about being yourself," said Sietz. Lee resident Marilyn Winslow came to the Community Church of Durham Saturday evening with her husband Eric and 22-year-old daughter Megan. On Saturday, the family enjoyed singing carols and watching the Christmas pageant that retold the story of Jesus. "I like how it was traditional," said Winslow. The "Tell the Good News" Christmas Pageant, acted out by over 30 children, told Jesus's story — through a combination of storytelling and songs. "It's really nice to be able to have the story told this way," said Rev. Mary Westfall. She said in a culture where much of December is swallowed up by shopping and advertisements, educational pageants like these make children feel love, beauty, and the message of coming together — what Christmas is all about. "And boy, they get it," said Westfall. The pageant, directed by Brenda LaForce, included songs such as "Oh Little Town of Bethlehem," "Silent Night," and "Joy to the World." On Saturday evening, Kyra Langley played the role of Mary, and Jake Zamansky played the role of Joseph. Madison Hillyard, who played the angel narrator, enjoyed singing as part of the pageant. Her favorite part, however, was working with younger children. "It's fun — they're so cute," said 13-year-old Madison. Madison's sister, 11-year-old Jordan, was one of five narrators in the play. After watching his daughters practice for the play at home, "It's lovely to see them up there," said their father, Ben Hillyard. Ten-year-old Emma Hillary Gould, another narrator, said she has participated in church plays ever since she began attending the Community Church of Durham in kindergarten. She said practicing for the play over the past month has been her favorite part. "It was cute to see all the kids in costumes," said 38-year-old Greg Leaf, who came to Durham from Colorado to visit his family for the holidays.

A woman is recovering in hospital after being shot in a Surrey, B.C., parking lot early Christmas morning. Police arrived at an apartment building located near the intersection of King George Boulevard and University Drive around 3 a.m. sacoche louis vuitton homme and discovered the victim suffering from a single gunshot wound. "She was taken to the hospital, where I've been told she's in stable condition right now," RCMP Sgt. Alex Bodden told CTV News. Bodden said two males who were likely involved in the shooting fled the scene quickly after the woman was hurt. "It does not seem to be anything associated to gangs or anything of that nature," he added. This is the second shooting in Surrey in less than 24 hours. A 28-year-old man was killed after being shot at a house party on Saturday morning. Syrian authorities blamed al-Qaida for the attacks, which came a day after the arrival of an advance team making preparations for Arab League observers to oversee a plan to end the violence. The Syrian government claims that more than 2,000 security force personnel have been killed in attacks by armed rebels since March, but the regime’s behaviour has received considerable condemnation from both Arab and Western countries. So far, though, the UN Security Council has failed to agree on any formal resolution on Syria. Russia and China have already vetoed one resolution proposed by European countries condemning the Assad regime. They accused the West of engaging in regime change in Syria. For their part, the European countries say a proposed Russian resolution on Syria is not tough enough. Baird, meanwhile, questioned the credibility of claims that al-Qaeda was behind Friday’s bombings, citing previous Assad denials that any violence was taking place within the country. “If it wasn’t so serious it would almost be comical,” he said.

The Leafs built some momentum after a three-game losing skid with their win over Buffalo — do they keep it going or do they let down against one of the worst teams in the conference? A. They kept it going. They shot off to a 3-0 lead and held on for a 5-3 win, with Tim Connolly’s line getting five points. That’s two wins in a row, and five of the last six points. Solidly in sixth, a great way to head into Christmas. 2. So what’s the playoff ladder look like after tonight for the Leafs? How much of a points cushion — if any — do they have heading into the Christmas break? A. Solidly in sixth and gaining on fifth, the Leafs are one point up on Ottawa and New Jersey and three up on ninth-place Winnipeg. 3. Is it James Reimer or Jonas Gustavsson on Friday night? Reimer on Thursday picked up his second win in seven starts since returning from injury. Is he ready for back-to-back games, or is it Monster time? A. Reimer picked up his third win (3-3-2) since coming back from injury. He stopped 30 Islander shots, and has stopped 110 shots in his last three games.sacoche louis vuitton homme He says he was fighting the puck a bit against New York, but he’s looking sharp, like he did before he got hurt. 4. Nazem Kadri turned in a brilliant debut Thursday after being called up from the Marlies, and Darryl Boyce was his usual gritty self. They both provided much-needed energy — does that trend continue? A. Kadri picked up a nice power-play goal, the second Leaf goal of the game. He played solid hockey. No turnovers. He’s added some spark to that second line. With Tim Connolly and Clarke MacArthur, they combined for five points. Boyce makes the fourth line play like a real fourth line with aggressive, in-your-face hockey. They don’t hurt the team out there. 5. Joey Crabb played his 100th game as a Leaf on Thursday. He’s an unsung hero for the most part. What does he bring to the Leafs on Friday night and what’s his future if Matt Lombardi is back from injury after Christmas? A. Crabb picked up a huge goal — shorthanded — that turned out to be the winner. He was a bit of a goat — pylon, actually — as the Islanders got into the game after the Leafs opened up a 3-0 lead. But Crabb’s goal was timely. The Islanders played their way back in the game, the crowd was into it, and with another power play, they might have evened the score. Crabb, on a give-and-go with Tyler Bozak, helped snuff out that comeback.

Stephen Harper says the most fun he had in 2011 was winning his majority government. louis vuitton mode And now Canadians are seeing just how much fun he is having as he pushes through his long-promised agenda of political and justice reforms. Canadians are seeing something else, too – how the Prime Minister is beginning to reshape the way Canada is governed. Those who have worked with Mr. Harper and are close to him are not surprised by his approach to federalism. Tom Flanagan, the Prime Minister’s former mentor who is now a political science professor at the University of Calgary, sees Mr. Harper moving away from “executive federalism” – constant negotiations with the provinces – to a “more classical view” of federalism, in which constitutional jurisdictions are respected. The first hint of that came this week with the take-it-or-leave-it health-care accord with the provinces. Standing in the living room of 24 Sussex, where he was playing host to reporters at a Christmas reception Monday night just hours after the health deal became public, Mr. Harper was in an engaging mood. He talked about the accord and the style in which it was presented to the provinces, suggesting that he was not one for first ministers’ meetings and long, protracted negotiations. In addition, sacoche louis vuitton he was adamant that the provinces not be the ones deciding how much the federal government should spend. His deal is generous, by most accounts. The new funding formula guarantees a 6-per-cent annual increase until 2017, then it is tied to the increase in the gross domestic product until 2024. But what the deal doesn’t do is try to impose standards or make provinces accountable for the funding. Mr. Harper also spoke about former Liberal prime minister Paul Martin’s marathon session with the premiers that resulted in the 2004 health accord. Mr. Martin had no agenda going in to the meeting, said Mr. Harper, who was dismissive of its results. “He’s just not one for those kind of large meetings,” says Doug Finley, who served as the Conservative campaign manager in the 2006 and 2008 elections in which the Tories won their first two governments. Mr. Harper then appointed him to the Senate. “Stephen likes to take things on in a very direct way,” he says. “He’s very focused.” So direct that Mr. Harper is putting the onus on the provinces to find a fix for health care. louis vuitton outlet In fact, he told reporters Monday night that he doesn’t know what the answer is. But that’s not his problem. The provinces have expertise and operational responsibility for health and the federal government is nothing but a financial partner, others have pointed out. By dealing swiftly with his election promises and now the health-care issue – there were expectations that it would dominate the parliamentary agenda in 2012 – political observers are now looking for what may be the Prime Minister’s “big idea.” Mr. Finley says, however, don’t expect “anything big or sweeping” in 2012. “He’s never really talked about grand visions.” Instead, 2012 will be all about dealing with the world economic situation, Mr. Finley says. A large part of next year, he says, will be defined by the budget and the strategic review that is trying to find $4-billion in annual cuts from government spending. “The thing that’s obviously overarching is still the economic situation around the world,” Mr. Finley says. “I think everything of a financial nature ... will be formulated with that very much in mind. He [the Prime Minister] and the caucus are both extraordinarily targeted to a sound fiscal system in Canada.” The government’s proposed national security regulator had been part of that plan, Mr. Finley notes. But it was rejected this week by the Supreme Court.

The rocket carrying Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko,sacoche louis vuitton Nasa astronaut Don Pettit and the European Space Agency's Andre Kuipers lifted off under freezing conditions at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The crew, who will stay at the International Space Station until March, are on a mission to bring the station back up to full manpower after an August cargo launch accident disrupted flights. The all-veteran crew is scheduled to reach the orbital outpost at 1522 GMT on Friday. They will join station commander Dan Burbank and two Russian cosmonauts who arrived last month, bringing the complex back to its full staff of six. With the space shuttles' retirement, Nasa is dependent on Russia to fly crews to the station, a service that currently costs the United States about $350 million (￡222 million) a year. The station, a $100 billion project of the United States, Russia, Europe, louis vuitton outlet Japan and Canada, is a multi-purpose research laboratory for biology, physics, astronomy and other studies that orbits about 240 miles above .Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu summoned more than 20 local executives last week from French companies including Credit Agricole SA and Groupama SA to lobby against the bill. The Turkish government says mass killings of Armenians took place as part of clashes in which thousands of Turks and Armenians died after Armenian groups sided with the invading Russian army. Armenians say 1.5 million ethnic Armenians were killed from 1915 to 1923 in a deliberate campaign of genocide. About 20 countries including Greece, Canada and Russia, Turkey’s second-biggest trading partner behind Germany, recognize the events as genocide. “Turkey should make a gesture toward its history, as France has done to its past,” French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said in an e-mailed statement after meeting the Turkish delegation. He said Turkey and France have a louis vuitton mode “close enough relationship to overcome any difficulties.” Bernard Accoyer, the president of the National Assembly, has opposed the bill on the grounds that parliament shouldn’t legislate about history. Defense Minister Gerard Longuet, in an interview today with France2 television, said parliament was independent from the government, but added that “lawmakers don’t make the best historians.”

The Lotus Light Charity Society donated about 500 sleeping bags to the Vancouver Police Department Sunday afternoon in support of VPD’s homeless outreach program, which is in its fourth year. Const. Jodyne Keller, sacoche louis vuitton VPD’s Homeless Outreach Coordinator said in a press release that it sends out the message that the community cares. “Many people who experience homelessness are not connected to the DTES and when they were given one of these sleeping bags, you could see the hope in their eyes, ” she said with regard to last year’s drive. Lotus Light has been running a winter charity drive for the past 16 years, distributing sleeping bags and emergency care packages in partnership with local shelters and family service agencies through the Lower Mainland, it said in a press release. Last Saturday (Dec. 10), in a similar drive, the registered charity handed out sleeping bags to the BC Ambulance Service to help with its outreach program. “Our charity’s donation of sleeping bags can mean a world of difference this winter to someone on the streets, at a time when they need the most help,” said Lian Tzi, of Lotus Light. Even some broadcasters from state television and radio expressed anger at state news coverage of the violence, using the Internet to urge listeners to call their shows to counter what they called a “campaign of distortions.” louis vuitton outlet At least three radio announcers have been banned from the airwaves for criticizing the military council or its media management, said Ahmed Montaser, one of the state-radio dissidents. “All the young radio broadcasters don’t approve the policies of the senior officials, putting down a red line that they tell us we can’t cross,” he said. By Sunday the street fighting had become almost ritualized. Hundreds of protesters threw rocks and occasionally a firebomb across a barbed-wire barrier at rows of security officers and military police. louis vuitton mode The security forces there and on rooftops fired back with rocks and water hoses. Downtown streets were bisected in several places by stone walls and barbed wire barriers that the military had erected to keep protesters from security forces and government buildings.

Caption Jason Trawick and Britney Spears celebrate their engagement at Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino in Las Vegas on December 16, sacoche louis vuitton 2011Britney Spears and Jason Trawick jetted to Las Vegas on Friday to celebrate their engagement, as well as Jason’s 40th birthday. The couple checked in at Planet Hollywood, where the “I Wanna Go” singer soon emerged from her suite for a congratulatory welcome on the hotel’s mezzanine wearing a short, nude Herve Leger dress, with her soon-to-be husband by her side. Brit and Jason then kicked off their evening with a dinner and sweet treats at Sugar Factory American Brasserie before heading to Chateau Nightclub, where the couple relaxed in their own VIP area and Britney posed for photos showing off her dazzling 3-carat Neil Lane sparkler. The pop princess seemed to thoroughly enjoy the Sin City festivities, Tweeting, “Tonight was one of the most magical nights of my life” early Saturday morning. “Such an amazing time with my new fiance and our closest friends and family,” she added. “#Blessed.” As previously reported on AccessHollywood.com, on Friday, louis vuitton outlet Jason confirmed to Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush that he and Britney will soon be headed down the aisle. “Yes, we are engaged,” Jason told Billy on Friday. The 40-year-old added that he is “over the moon, as [is] she.” Jason revealed he popped the question in a very traditional manner (down one on knee), and added that Britney’s sons, 6-year-old Sean Preston and Jayden James, 5,louis vuitton mode were on hand to witness the proposal. Jason initially began working with Britney as her TV manager (while the star was still married to Kevin Federline), a job he gave up in 2009 after their relationship became romantic.

Florida Gov. sacoche louis vuitton Rick Scott met late Thursday with a group of several hundred Florida A&M students upset over his recommendation that trustees suspend the school's president in the wake of alleged hazing and "financial irregularities." Chanting "We've got questions. You've got answers," the students marched to the governor's mansion, promising to stay until Scott changed his mind. "We are not going to leave," said Breyon Love, the FAMU student body president. "Mr. Governor, with all due respect, we will be here all night, all day tomorrow until you apologize or rescind that recommendation." Appearing in a gray sweatshirt, Scott addressed the crowd through a megaphone outside the mansion, thanking them for caring and coming out. "I want the best thing for FAMU. I want the best thing for the FAMU family. I want the best thing for the great state of Florida," the governor told students, although not conceding to their wishes. Earlier, Scott had told the chairman of FAMU's board of trustees, Solomon L. Badger III, that he felt the board should take further action against university President James Ammons when it meets Monday, the statement said. The governor also louis vuitton outlet "placed a call" to Ammons to notify him of these conversations. "I think it's in his best interests (to) make sure that there is no question that this university is doing the right thing and cooperating," Scott said Thursday. The discussions came after Scott returned Thursday from a trade mission to Israel and was briefed by staffers on recent developments out of the Tallahassee university, according to the governor's office. Ammons responded Thursday that he was "sure that this investigation will determine that, under my leadership, the administration acted appropriately." At the same time, he said he was prepared to accept his fate. "I serve at the pleasure of the FAMU board of trustees, and I will abide by whatever decision the board reaches," he said. Badger also released a statement in which he acknowledged "a communication with the governor." He said he hadn't talked with other trustees, promising that "we will make a decision about how we move forward Monday." "This is a very difficult decision that we are facing," Badger said. The band's director, Julian White, has been placed on administrative leave. One trustee, Rufus Montgomery, advocated a week ago that the university president should likewise be suspended -- but, instead, the board voted then to reprimand him. "If you can place ... Julian White on administrative leave pending an investigation outcome,louis vuitton mode then we as a board can place James Ammons on administrative leave, procedure-wise," Montgomery said December 8. The school president had pledged Wednesday to "root out this culture of hazing," though he declined to offer details about what specifically might change. Band drum major Robert Champion Jr., 26, died after a November 19 football game following a suspected hazing incident. He "reportedly threw up in the parking lot and started complaining of not being able to breathe," authorities said in a statement. He was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead. No cause of death has been released.

Budget uncertainties have led NASA to change its policy on funding the development of commercial spaceships, sacoche louis vuitton shifting to a process that provides more flexibility but also more risk for the space agency. More than $365 million has already been devoted to NASA's commercial crew development program, or CCDev. Congress has approved another $406 million to be paid to would-be spaceship builders, with the aim of having U.S.-made, crew-capable successors to the space shuttle fleet flying to the International Space Station by 2017. During the first two phases of the program, the effort has been managed through a set of Space Act Agreements, which award money to the companies in stages as they reach agreed-upon milestones. For the third phase, known as CCDev3, NASA had planned to switch to a different fixed-price contracting system that would give the space agency more control over the management of the companies' development efforts. NASA was scheduled to issue a request for proposals under that system on Monday. But because of the uncertainties surrounding the federal budget for the next couple of years, NASA has decided to stick with the Space Act arrangement, said Bill Gerstenmaier, the agency's associate administrator for human exploration and operations. "It's really tough to lock into a fixed-price contract with the number of providers that can keep us moving forward," louis vuitton outlet Gerstenmaier explained during a teleconference with journalists. The shift means NASA will have to delay its announcement for proposals until the first quarter of next year, but Gerstenmaier said he still hoped agreements could be made in mid-2012 to cover a 21-month period lasting into early 2014. Two potential spaceship providers, and perhaps more, should be able to get close to a critical design review on that timetable with NASA funding, Gerstenmaier said. In a statement, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said the space agency is "committed to ensuring that U.S. companies are sending American astronauts into space." advertisement"This new acquisition strategy will allow us to preserve competition as we maintain our momentum to provide a U.S.-based commercial crew launch capability at the earliest possible time," he said. The crucial distinction has to do with how much control NASA will have over the designs that are produced. "We can't actually approve their designs, we can't say we're needing a service or getting a service," but the companies at least will be able to keep making progress,louis vuitton mode Gerstenmaier said. He used the rocket-science term for "change" to describe how the process could go: "There's going to be some potential delta that has to occur when we complete this phase." The companies involved in CCDev had initially voiced reservations about the fixed-price contract plan, out of concern that NASA could exert too much control or even cancel the program altogether in midstream. One of the CCDev companies, California-based SpaceX, issued a statement in support of today's shift. "Given budget realities, NASA and domestic space companies need to innovate more than ever," SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell was quoted as saying. "Space Act Agreements yield amazing results — we need only look at the Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket, both highly advanced, all-American vehicles designed using 21st-century technology. We applaud NASA's decision to use Space Act Agreements for the next round of commercial crew and look forward to the competition." However, U.S. Rep. Ralph Hall, the Texas Republican who heads the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, questioned the move. "The disadvantage of using Space Act Agreements is that NASA cannot impose its safety requirements as would be possible under a normal acquisition," Hall said in a statement. "Therefore, it is vitally important that NASA and its industry partners work cooperatively to ensure the highest level of crew safety, even in the absence of safety requirements."

Texting, emailing or chatting on a cellphone while driving simply is too dangerous to be allowed,louis vuitton mode federal safety investigators said Tuesday, urging all states to impose total bans except for emergencies. Inspired by recent deadly crashes -- including one in which a teenager sent or received 11 text messages in 11 minutes before an accident -- the recommendation would apply even to hands-free devices, a much stricter rule than any current state law. The unanimous recommendation by the five-member National Transportation Safety Board would make an exception for devices deemed to aid driver safety, such as GPS navigation systems. A group representing state highway safety offices called the recommendation "a game-changer." "States aren't ready to support a total ban yet, but this may start the discussion," Jonathan Adkins, a spokesman for the Governors Highway Safety Association, said. NTSB chairman Deborah Hersman acknowledged the recommendation would be unpopular with many people and that complying would involve changing what has become ingrained behavior for many Americans. While the NTSB doesn't have the power to impose national restrictions, sacoche louis vuitton its recommendations do carry significant weight with federal regulators as well as congressional and state lawmakers. Another recommendation issued Tuesday urges states to aggressively enforce current bans on text messaging and the use of cellphones and other portable electronic devices while driving. "We're not here to win a popularity contest," she said. "No email, no text, no update, no call is worth a human life." Currently, 35 states and the District of Columbia ban texting while driving, while nine states and D.C. bar hand-held cellphone use. Thirty states ban all cellphone use for beginning drivers. But enforcement generally is not a high priority, and no states ban the use of hands-free devices for all drivers. A total cellphone ban would be the hardest to accept for many people. Leila Noelliste, 26, a Chicago blogger and business owner, said being able to talk on the cellphone "when I'm running around town" is important to self-employed people like herself. "I don't think they should ban cellphones because I don't think you're really distracted when you're talking, it's when you're texting," she said. When you're driving and talking, louis vuitton outlet "your eyes are still on the road." The immediate impetus for the recommendation of state bans was a deadly highway pileup near Gray Summit, Mo., in 2010 in which a 19-year-old pickup driver sent and received 11 texts in 11 minutes just before the crash.

Accusers had undergone the stress of preparing to testify publicly about what they had kept secret for years. sacoche louis vuitton A judge had been brought in from western Pennsylvania to assure objectivity. This small town had closed off its downtown square to accommodate parking for hundreds of members of the media. Then, as Jerry Sandusky, the disgraced former Penn State assistant coach, was about to face some of his accusers on charges that he had sexually abused them as boys, he unexpectedly waived his right to a preliminary hearing just as it began in a packed courtroom. Sandusky's accusers were left to guess at his motives, and some of their lawyers were furious. Local officials moved to take apart what they had scrambled to put together — a safe location for a case that had made headlines across the nation. Sandusky's lawyer, Joseph Amendola, who for weeks had said he looked forward to facing the accusers, instead disparaged the young men as liars who were out to get money. Sandusky, accused of sexually assaulting 10 boys, again asserted his innocence and used a football metaphor as he shouted at reporters: "We're going to stay the course and fight for four quarters." Sandusky is now scheduled to be arraigned on Jan. 11, two weeks before his 68th birthday. Meanwhile, louis vuitton outlet he will remain under house arrest and must wear an ankle monitor. Lawyers for one of Sandusky's accusers said they believed the waiver increased the likelihood of a plea arrangement. A law professor who attended the hearing said Amendola had most likely received a signal from prosecutors they were willing to offer an acceptable plea deal.Many mobile phone companies dropped their opposition over the last decade to any restrictions on the use of phones in cars, and have in recent years joined calls to ban texting while driving. In a statement, CTIA, the cellular telephone industry trade group, said it deferred to states about whether to enforce such bans. A complete ban on phone use by drivers would have enormous impact on many car makers that are offering integrated hands-free, voice-activated systems that allow drivers to talk and do other tasks, like calling up their phone directory. The Alliance for Automobile Manufacturers, a trade group for the industry, said in a statement that it was reviewing the N.T.S.B. recommendations. But it also defended the integrated systems, saying they allow drivers to keep their hands on the wheel and eyes on the road while they remain connected. “What we do know is that digital technology has created a connected culture in the United States and it’s forever changed our society: consumers always expect to have access to technology; so managing technology is the solution,” louis vuitton mode the alliance said in a statement. Ms. Hersman, the chairwoman of the N.T.S.B., said the safety concerns were not just about keeping hands on the wheel and eyes on the road, but also about making sure people focus on the act of driving.

President Obama said on Monday that the United States had asked Iran to return an American surveillance drone that the Iranians say they captured on Dec. 4.louis vuitton mode It was Mr. Obama’s first public comment about the drone, a remote-controlled spying aircraft, in a case that has raised American tensions with Iran. “We have asked for it back — we’ll see how the Iranians respond,” Mr. Obama said of the drone in a short session with reporters at the White House. Mr. Obama appeared with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq, with whom he discussed issues including American concerns about Iran’s influence in the region. Mr. Obama was answering this question: “And speaking of Iran, are you concerned that it will be able to weaken America’s national security by discovering intelligence from the fallen drone that it captured?” Mr. Obama did not elaborate on the episode or on Iranian assertions that its forces had captured the drone through a digital attack on the aircraft’s avionics, which they say caused it to land safely inside northern Iran. American officials have attributed the loss of the drone to a technical malfunction. Just how the drone, which was managed by C.I.A. controllers in neighboring Afghanistan, ended up on the ground in Iran, apparently nearly intact, remains unclear. Last Thursday, the Iranian authorities staged an elaborate televised video presentation of what they said was the captured drone, an RQ-170 Sentinel. The RQ-170, sacoche louis vuitton a batwing aircraft with radar-evading technology, is capable of lingering for hours at 50,000 feet and monitoring developments on the ground. American officials have said the aircraft was part of an intensified effort to monitor suspect nuclear sites in Iran. On Monday, Iranian military officials were quoted in the state-run press saying they were extracting intelligence data from the drone and would reverse-engineer it to learn how it works. The semiofficial Fars News Agency said Iran’s armed forces had captured a prize that “can blunt the U.S. technological edge over its adversaries.” Iran lodged formal complaints last week about what they called the drone incursion, protesting to both the United Nations Security Council and Switzerland’s ambassador to Tehran, who is responsible for American interests in Iran. louis vuitton outlet Iran also complained to Afghanistan for allowing the Americans to use it as a surveillance base, the Afghanistan Foreign Ministry said Sunday. Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta described efforts to seek the return of the drone from Iran as “an appropriate request.” But he cast doubt on chances that Iran would agree.

If you were trying to explain Canada to an extraterrestrial,louis vuitton mode the alliance last Friday between rival telecommunications companies Bell and Rogers to buy Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment would serve the purpose. Faced with the intractable and costly business problem of which company would possess Canada’s most valuable broadcast property, the Toronto Maple Leafs, the two sides chose a distinctly Canadian solution. They split the baby 50/50, each buying an equal share. Not only that, the telecom giants also divided the radio rights for the team in the same fashion between Rogers’ Sportsnet 590 The Fan and Bell’s TSN Radio. Now what could be a more Canadian solution than that? Bloodshed avoided, witty savants foiled, and hockey fans content that the blue-and-white will be available (for the time being) on their current cable and satellite systems. The two sides then vowed to resume hostilities when they came back from the commercial break. Even more remarkable was the response from CBC. Back in the day, this marriage of Canadian corporate compatibilities might have sent the national broadcaster into paroxysms over monopoly and media concentration. sacoche louis vuitton As a party left out of this MLSE deal – CBC currently owns national NHL TV rights – you could have presumed some cautionary language about concentration and so on. Guess again. “I would like to congratulate Bell, Rogers and [MLSE minority shareholder] Larry Tanenbaum on their deal,” wrote Kirstine Stewart, executive vice-president CBC English Services. “Increasingly, sports rights deals are dependent on strong partnerships. We are proud of our partnerships with Rogers on the upcoming FIFA World Cup 2014 and with Bell as we prepare our joint Olympic 2014/2016 bid.” We’re not in Kansas any more, Dorothy. Presuming this deal passes the sniff test from those worried about concentration in the media – no one has protested yet – what will be the journalistic fallout? How does the prospect of Leafs general manager Brian Burke and Bob McCown of Sportsnet radio as colleagues sound? louis vuitton outlet To some, probably about the same as McCown and Toronto Blue Jays manager John Farrell drawing cheques from the same owners. Already, subtle editorial bias can be seen when a network’s program leads with a story on one of its properties. Not only do these two companies now control a vast array of media outlets from TV to radio to print, they also employ a number of journalists from other media. (Disclosure: Usual Suspects has done intermittent freelance work for CBC, Rogers and CTV in the past.) Among them are Jeff Blair of this paper, Damien Cox of the Toronto Star, Bruce Arthur of the National Post and Steve Simmons of the Sun papers, all of whom have exclusive deals with one corporation or the other. Most of the people in this vortex will bridle at the thought that their opinions can be bought or swayed on an issue involving the Leafs, Blue Jays, Toronto Raptors and Toronto FC. Their cachet with readers has come from objectivity built painstakingly over years. But this is different. This is bigger than individual reputations.

The chief of a Northern Ontario reserve grappling with a housing shortage that has some families living in unheated shacks says her band council will not pay for a third-party manager to oversee its spending. “My community will not consider third-party managers nor pay for them out of our already depressed band support funding budget,” louis vuitton mode Attawapiskat First Nation Chief Theresa Spence wrote, mostly in capital letters, in a response to Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Duncan on Friday. The Cree community declared a state of emergency at the end of October as winter approached with some families living in unheated tents and other makeshift housing without plumbing. The Conservative government initially responded by appointing a third-party manager — who was kicked out after he showed up in the community unannounced earlier this week. The manager was tasked with taking control of band-council spending and ordering an independent audit of its books that would cost Attawapiskat roughly $1,300 per day. The government also gave nearly half a million dollars to renovate five homes and on Friday announced that it had bought 15 trailer homes for $1.2 million to be delivered to the James Bay community when the winter roads open next month. In the meantime, sacoche louis vuitton it offered to either evacuate vulnerable families or retrofit the healing lodge or hockey arena to provide temporary shelter for those living in tents and shacks. That offer at first came with the condition that Attawapiskat accept the third-party manager, but now the federal government has gone ahead and bought the trailer homes. Still, Duncan would not tell reporters on Friday who would pay for them and his spokeswoman later explained that Ottawa expects reimbursement if the third-party manager finds the money at the band council. “If the third-party manager during his term identifies that there are existing and unspent federal dollars for housing to Attawapiskat these will be used to cover costs then,” Michelle Yao wrote in an email Friday. Spence thanked Duncan for the offer, but said it did not go far enough to meet immediate needs. That is because it turns out that only three vacant homes — louis vuitton outlet instead of five — can be brought up to code and so there is now a need for 22 trailers instead of 15. Spence also said that a budget has already been prepared for using the healing lodge as temporary shelter for families and will consult with her community about evacuation but believes they would rather wait for the trailers to arrive. Spence was defiant as she slammed Duncan for saying her band council was unable to manage itself. “My council does not lack the capacity. What we lack are funds to accomplish the above,” Spence wrote on Friday. Spence said she would welcome the federal government coming in to audit the last five years of band council spending — so long as the government paid for it.

perhaps in a dark basement in Montreal or Ottawa — louis vuitton mode Colby Armstrong figures there’s an enemy sticking pins into a voodoo doll of his likeness. “Someone has something,” Armstrong said with a smile after the Maple Leafs practised on Thursday. “I don’t know what it is. “For the most part, I have had some fluky things happen, and hopefully I can put it all behind me now. It’s not the way I wanted it to go in the first little bit of becoming a Maple Leaf, but hopefully I can start fresh.” Armstrong will return to the Leafs’ lineup on Friday night in Washington against the Capitals, with 23 games knocked off the schedule since his most recent appearance. Armstrong has recovered from a sprained ankle that he suffered on Oct. 19 against the Winnipeg Jets, and when he skates on to the ice at the Verizon Center, it will be the 56th time he has played for the Leafs. That’s against 55 games he has missed since he signed with Toronto in July 2010 because of injuries. When the Leafs clash with Alexander Ovechkin and the rest of the Capitals, they will take two big steps toward being a fully healthy team. Armstrong will be joined by fellow winger Clarke MacArthur, who missed one game with a shoulder injury. The return of the two veterans resulted in the demotion of Joe Colborne, who had one goal and three assists in nine games,sacoche louis vuitton to the Toronto Marlies. Armstrong has watched as many games as he has played for the Leafs since he wrote his signature on a three-year, $9-million US contract, but his impact was evident in the happy buzz among his teammates in the dressing room at the MasterCard Centre during the noon hour on Thursday. “You can’t say enough good things about him,” captain Dion Phaneuf said. “He’s always joking or saying something, and he is big part of our team. When a guy like that is out, it’s a big piece of the puzzle. It’s great to have him back.” Armstrong’s sense of humour and willingness to see the lighter side is clear to anyone who has spent even five minutes in his company (and if you can’t, follow him on Twitter at @armdog to get an idea). But he’s as serious as anyone else when it’s time to hop over the boards, and it’s that tenacity which will help the Leafs. “That’s another bullet in the gun for us, because he can play a 200-foot game and he can play in any situation,” Leafs coach Ron Wilson said. “And on top of that, you add his leadership qualities, his character.” Armstrong participated on a line with centre Tim Connolly and Joey Crabb, but don’t write that in stone. MacArthur didn’t have set linemates, and it was not until after practice that it was revealed by Wilson that MacArthur would play against the Capitals. Armstrong wants to wash away the sense that he has been missing out. He accompanied the team to Boston and New York last weekend for the annual fathers trip, louis vuitton outlet but has not been on the road for the majority of trips. Simply being around his teammates again will be a bonus.

The Conservative government will press ahead with its plan to abolish the Canadian Wheat Board's marketing monopoly, louis vuitton mode despite a Federal Court ruling that says Ottawa broke the law by failing to consult with farmers. A Federal Court judge in Winnipeg ruled Wednesday that Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz breached the Canadian Wheat Board Act by making changes without holding a plebiscite for producers. During a news conference later in the day, Ritz said the government will appeal the ruling and will aim to pass the legislation by the end of the year as planned. "Let me be clear, we will never reconsider western wheat and barley farmers' fundamental rights to market their own wheat and barley," Ritz said. Justice Douglas Campbell wrote in the court decision that repealing the Wheat Board Act without consulting producers "is threatening and should be approached with caution." "Generally speaking, when advancing a significant change to an established management scheme, the failure to provide a meaningful opportunity for dissenting voices to be heard and accommodated forces resort to legal means to have them heard. "Had a meaningful consultative process been engaged to find a solution which meets the concerns of the majority,sacoche louis vuitton the present legal action might not have been necessary." Ritz introduced Bill C-18 in Parliament in October to end the wheat board's 60-year marketing monopoly on western wheat and barley by next August. If passed, it would enable the government to dismantle the CWB single desk without first having held a producers' plebiscite as required under Section 47.1 of the Canadian Wheat Board Act. Opposition MPs have asked that the government to hold off on passing the legislation until the court proceedings run their course. "If they have any respect whatsoever for the parliamentary process, they would put the brakes on Bill C-18 until such time as the superior courts have ruled on the matter," louis vuitton outlet New Democrat MP Pat Martin told reporters on Parliament Hill.

They got together in Minnesota in the summer of 2010 for some skating, some gym time,louis vuitton outlet but mostly to work on their punching skills. The level of familiarity was such that there was no need to talk business, Still, Calgary Flames forward Tim Jackman has fond memories of his sessions with fellow NHLers John Scott and Derek Boogaard, then members of the Minnesota Wild – all of them part of a smallish, pugilistically inclined hockey fraternity. Mr. Boogaard’s death earlier this year at age 28, and new revelations he suffered from a degenerative brain condition related to Alzheimer’s, don’t constitute much of a deterrent for Mr. Jackman and others like him in the game. In fact, nearly every current player interviewed by The Globe and Mail on Tuesday feels fighting should still be a part of hockey. “Obviously, it’s scary,” Mr. Jackman said of Mr. Boogaard’s fate. “It’s a physical sport. It’s our choice to play it … it’s kind of the price that we pay to play in this league,” said the 30-year-old, who has fought seven times in 26 games this season and 29 times dating back to 2009. That’s not to say Mr. Jackman isn’t confronting some thorny questions. “Hopefully, louis vuitton mode I don’t have anything wrong with my brain,” he said. The idea that the dangers of the job are understood and accepted is a recurring theme when you speak to NHL players who earn their living by dint of physical play and fighting. When rough-hewn forward Derek Dorsett of the Columbus Blue Jackets, who has more fights (eight) than points (seven) this year, was asked if there is such as a thing as too high a price to pay for the NHL dream, he didn’t hesitate. “No,” the 24-year-old native of Kindersley, Sask., said flatly. “There’s a lot worse things I could be doing. There’s risks in every job, my brother works in an oil field with heavy machinery, there’s risks doing that. … I love what I do, I wouldn’t change it for the world.” Which is really the nub of the issue: Those who typically face the greatest perils are more than happy to accept basically any risk to make the big-time. As rambunctious New Jersey Devils forward David Clarkson, who leads his team in penalty minutes, said: sacoche louis vuitton “I wouldn’t be in the league if I didn’t play that type of style.” There seems to be little in the way of spontaneous discussion in the league’s dressing rooms about Mr. Boogaard’s chronic traumatic encephalopathy diagnosis – part of that stems from the fact NHL players typically can’t afford to look beyond the here and now. (Mr. Jackman, Mr. Clarkson and Mr. Dorsett each had games to prepare for on Tuesday night.) Another common theme is “this-won’t-happen-to-me-ism,” which may reflect generational factors more than anything else – these are, after all, men in the full impregnability of youth. Winnipeg Jets tough guy Tanner Glass – whose father taught him how to fight at a young age – says the revelations about Mr. Boogaard don’t worry him.

Defence Minister Peter MacKay has defended a controversial airlift from a 2010 fishing vacation as a rare chance to see search-and-rescue crews practise their training –louis vuitton mode a story already seriously undermined by military e-mail records. The Globe and Mail has also learned that the minister was no stranger to search-and-rescue (SAR) demonstrations along the very same portion of Newfoundland’s Gander River – having flown on a Cormorant there only 12 months earlier. In 2009, he was a guest on what the military calls a “familiarization” flight, accompanying a search-and-rescue helicopter while it conducted landing and takeoff training in the vicinity of the fishing camp. Earlier this fall, when news of the 2010 flight came out, the Defence Minister’s office said the 30-minute trip from the camp to the Gander airport was an infrequent opportunity to watch the rescuers in action. “After cancelling previous efforts to demonstrate their search-and-rescue capabilities to Minister MacKay over the course of three years, the opportunity for a simulated search and rescue exercise finally presented itself in July of 2010,” sacoche louis vuitton Mr. MacKay’s office said in September. But far from being starved of opportunities to watch SAR crews in action, the Defence Minister had actually spent an hour on a search-and-rescue helicopter in the same region only one year previous. In 2009, when Mr. MacKay was in Gander for an official announcement, he was invited along on a search-and-rescue training flight. His calendar shows he was there on July 7, 2009, to announce an investment for 9 Wing Gander, which supplies search and rescue services for the region. This flight landed along the Gander River and also touched down in a tight spot with little room to park a helicopter – what the military calls a “constrained area.” Military e-mails that came to light last week showed that three days before the controversial 2010 flight, Mr. MacKay requested a helicopter on the grounds he had a last-minute need to head to London, Ont., “unexpectedly” on government business. They made no mention of a planned search and rescue exercise. The same records showed a senior Canadian Forces officer warned against giving the minister a chopper airlift because of potential backlash. The e-mails also show the minister’s office told the military they could land their helicopter near the Burnt Rattle fishing camp in 2010 because they’d done it before. “I am told by the minister’s staff that last year the minister was flying near this location, louis vuitton outlet and the pilot landed there (at a spot near the shore, perhaps a short distance away),” Colonel Frances Allen said. On Monday in the Commons, Interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae all but accused Mr. MacKay of lying, saying the e-mails make it “very clear that those comments by the Minister of National Defence are simply not true.” Outside the House, he characterized Mr. MacKay as “a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar,” and urged the minister to apologize and “indicate that he misled the House of Commons.” Mr. MacKay dismissed his critics again on Monday, saying all that happened is, “I was called back from personal time.” Mr. MacKay’s staff acknowledged the minister had flown training trips in the region before. “He has participated in demonstrations in the area and none of these previous flights related to personal time,” spokesman Jay Paxton said in an e-mail.

When Evander Kane met his namesake, boxer Evander Holyfield, the former heavy weight champion sized up the then 18-year-old hockey player and offered this assessment: louis vuitton mode “I’m the ‘Real Deal’. With all his talent, he’s the ‘Potential Deal’.” It has taken a couple of years, but Kane is finally starting to live up to that moniker. Now 20-years-old and starting his third season in the NHL, Kane has quickly become the best player on the Winnipeg Jets and one of the top scorers in the league. He has 14 goals so far this season, tying him for sixth spot in the NHL and just five short of his total goal production last year. Kane may have played his best game Saturday against the New Jersey Devils. He scored two goals and should have been credited with a third when he appeared to bang in a loose puck in front of the net (the goal went to Jet defenceman Mark Stuart instead). Even more important for the Jets, Kane never hesitated to hit the larger Devils and he led a constant series of rushes that included a pair of breakaways. His value to the Jets was evident by the reaction of the crowd when he crashed into the boards after one breakaway. The normally boisterous fans at the MTS Centre quieted noticeably as Kane lay on the ice for a few minutes holding his knee. Then a loud cheer went out when he got up and skated to the bench. “I felt good,” Kane said after the game. “I feel stronger.” Gaining that strength has taken time. sacoche louis vuitton When the Atlanta Thrashers became the Winnipeg Jets last spring Kane was touted as one of the new franchise’s key players. After all he’d arrived in the NHL with great promise, winning a gold medal at the World Junior Championships in 2009 and enjoying a remarkable junior career that included a Memorial Cup championship in 2007. The Thrashers took Kane fourth overall in the 2009 entry draft, which led to more glowing headlines and the meeting with Holyfield who is from Atlanta. Kane’s father, Perry, was an amateur boxer and hockey player and he named his only son after the legendary fighter because of Holyfield’s tenacity in the ring. Perry Kane taught his son to play hockey with the same ferocity, drilling young Evander constantly on hockey fundamentals from a young age on rinks around Vancouver. Kane stuck with the Thrashers his rookie year, scoring 14 goals and getting 26 points in 66 games. His second year was moderately better: 19 goals, 24 assists in 73 games. But this year was supposed to be break out season. It didn’t start out that way. Kane didn’t get a point in the Jets’ first five games, making all that pre-season talk of him scoring 30 goals this year look silly. Then a rumour surfaced that Kane wanted out of Winnipeg and that he didn’t get along with coach Claude Noel. louis vuitton outlet Kane shot down the suggestions and insisted he was happy with the Jets and Noel. But speculation mounted and critics piled on. He finally got his first goal on Oct. 22 and by November Kane was turning aside doubts about his potential. He quickly started piling up points, scoring two goals a game four times and getting at least one point in eight out of the last ten games. More importantly for the Jets, Kane began using his size – he is listed at 6 feet 2 inches and 195 pounds – to break free and cause havoc for opponents. “This is a really good example of what happens when you have confidence,” Noel said after Saturday’s game. “Look at the way he is playing now versus the way he was playing at the beginning of the year. He’s really going through the roof.”

Canada’s labour market has hit a wall, louis vuitton mode with job declines in three of the past four months suggesting turmoil outside the country’s borders is denting the confidence of employers. The country shed 18,600 jobs last month after a tumble of 54,000 in October, marking the first back-to-back monthly drop since the recession. The jobless rate hit a five-month high of 7.4 per cent, Statistics Canada said Friday. The slowdown comes as deepening global uncertainty is gnawing away at business confidence. Consumers, too, are growing cautious, with a report on gross domestic product earlier this week showing both spending and total domestic demand cooling in the third quarter. Monthly jobs numbers bounce around, but smoothed-out averages show virtually no growth since the middle of the year. Manufacturing employment tumbled to another record low last month, while in the finance and real estate industry, three-month average job losses are the steepest on record. Meantime, government hiring – a key source of employment in the past few years – is expected to weaken amid budget cuts. “It’s definitely not a friendly trend,” said Sheryl King, Canada economist for Merrill Lynch in Toronto. “Certain industries are growing worried about the state of economic growth, and there are signs restructuring is going on in other industries such as the public sector as well.” She sees the jobless rate climbing to 7.7 per cent amid stalled economic growth in the first half of next year. More Canadians gave up looking for work last month. The country’s labour force participation rate fell to 66.6 per cent in November, its lowest level since 2002. sacoche louis vuitton The drop may stem largely from young people becoming discouraged, economists said. That said, details of Friday’s Statscan report were better than the headline number suggested. The private sector resumed hiring last month, and full-time positions rose while part-time jobs declined. Nor do all economists think the jobs market is in trouble. Krishen Rangasamy, senior economist at National Bank Financial, believes the labour market will stabilize in the coming months, helped by accelerating economic growth in the United States. The country’s labour market is clearly delineated along an East-West divide, with provincial jobless rates higher than the national average from Ontario eastward, and lower than average from Manitoba to British Columbia. Among major cities, Regina has the lowest jobless rate in the country, at just 3.5 per cent. Barrie, Ont.,louis vuitton outlet has the highest, at 11.1 per cent. The city’s elevated rate reflects a struggling manufacturing base and a large youth population, which continues to see high unemployment, said Melissa Fletcher, employer liaison at the Barrie employment services centre. Displaced workers from the manufacturing sector “are not getting offered the $30-an-hour job. Those jobs just don’t exist in Barrie right now,” she said, adding that much of the growth is in temporary work, or minimum-wage retail jobs that require working evenings or weekends.

Intertidal habitats in the Strait of Juan de Fuca that separates Vancouver Island from the B.C. mainland that once teemed with mussels, barnacles and hundreds of other species have shrunk by as much as 51 per cent due to rising water temperatures, sacoche louis vuitton according to a study by University of B.C. zoologist Chris Harley. As recently as 50 years ago, mussels and barnacles thrived in thick bands across beaches on Vancouver Island, the Olympic Peninsula and the San Juan Islands, providing habitat for up to 300 other species of sea creatures. Beaches on the relatively cool west coast of Vancouver Island are much as they were five decades ago, but those in the warmer waters farther up the strait are in steep decline, according to the article published this week in the journal Science. The shrunken mussel beds are now home to as few as 10 other species, he said. As the mussels and barnacles are forced down the beach into cooler waters to stay within a suitable temperature range for their survival, louis vuitton outlet they are being devoured by sea stars that feed at the bottom edge of the intertidal zone. "Sea stars are the terrors of the intertidal zone," said Harley. "As it gets hotter you would expect (species) to just move down to lower positions on the shore where they wouldn't be out of the water for so long. But things aren't shifting in unison." The sea stars are camped out where they have always been, consuming the other species as they are forced by rising temperatures down the beach, out of their predator-free zone. Harley came across detailed data on intertidal zones in the region collected for a 1959 masters thesis by UBC marine biologist Tom Widdowson,louis vuitton mode who measured the upper and lower limits of a variety of species at sites throughout the strait. Widdowson supplied Harley with the Google Earth co-ordinates of the exact locations he had studied in 1957 and 1958. New measurements at those locations were revealing. "The outer coast, being cool, still supports amazing biodiversity with really wide mussel beds and all kinds of species in them," said Harley. "But as you come in toward Port Angeles and Sooke (the beds) get narrower and you just find a few (individual mussels) around Victoria and they are gone completely by the time you get to Friday Harbour." Daily high summer temperatures in the area have increased by 3.5 C degrees over the past 60 years. Harley erected cages in a few locations to exclude the sea stars and found that the mussel beds and some of the species that thrive in those beds recovered within a year. "Global warming is already having significant ecological impacts and it's only going to get more dramatic," Harley predicted. Mussels provide habitat for hundreds of other species that may face extinction when the habitat mussels provide shrinks or vanishes, he said: "A mussel bed is like an apartment complex . . . for crabs, and other small crustaceans, snails, worms and seaweed."

The album will feature ten songs, louis vuitton mode several of which were performed live by the Canadian singer-songwriter during his recent sold-out world tour. Speaking last month while receiving the Principe de Asturias Prize for literature in Spain, the 77-year-old outlined his current mindset ahead of the new album: "As I grew older, I understood that instructions came with this voice. And the instructions were these...Never to lament casually. And if one is to express the great inevitable defeat that awaits us all, it must be done within the strict confines of dignity & beauty." Cohen's world-weary baritone will be complimented by American singers Dana Glover and Sharon Robinson on the record, which was recorded earlier this year. The album's cover design and drawings were produced by Cohen himself. The resolution says the committee “strongly condemns the continued grave and systematic human rights violations by the Syrian authorities, such as arbitrary executions, excessive use of force and the persecution and killing of protesters and human rights defenders.” It also demands an immediate end to “arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances, sacoche louis vuitton torture and ill-treatment of detainees, including children” in Syria. Russia and China, which vetoed a European-drafted U.N. Security Council resolution last month that would have condemned Syria and threatened possible future sanctions, abstained, according to an official U.N. tally, which diplomats said could indicate a shift in their positions. Countries that voted against the resolution included Iran, North Korea, Belarus, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Vietnam. Syria’s U.N. Ambassador Bashar Ja’afari said the resolution, drafted by Britain, France and Germany, had no meaning for Damascus. Ja’afari held up for delegates what he said were documents naming terrorists arrested while smuggling arms into Syria. He said the documents offered clear proof of a U.S.-led plot to topple Assad. There are many scenarios that could see Assad brought down, none of them neat and orderly. Some see an Alawite who is part of the community’s hierarchy — but not the regime’s inner circle — moving to oust Assad and his family and, in the interest of the Alawites and other minorities such as the Christians and Druze, louis vuitton outlet to embark on an orderly transition towards a new democratic Syria.

Inside one of the squat buildings that make up Research In Motion Ltd.’s (RIM-T17.51-0.53-2.94%) sprawling headquarters in Waterloo, Ont., Kyle Dorcas is holding up a sleek, louis vuitton mode black and grey BlackBerry designed to sell mainly outside a radius of several thousand kilometres from its home base. Mr. Dorcas is the lead product manager for the BlackBerry Bold 9709, a cheaper, smaller version of the Bold 9900 that RIM has just begun selling in its most important markets, such as the United States and Europe. On the table in front of him is a second phone, a touch screen device called the Curve 9380. It, too, is merely a less-expensive version of a high-end device that the company launched in August. While these devices will eventually go on sale in the U.S., RIM’s biggest market, they were engineered and designed with emerging markets in mind. For the first time, RIM is rolling out a global device starting in an overseas market – with Mr. Dorcas’s new Bold going on sale Nov. 26 in Indonesia, one of the BlackBerry maker’s most successful overseas markets. “There is a large segment of the world that wants these capabilities, but in a smaller [device],”sacoche louis vuitton Mr. Dorcas says, as he holds the slimmer version of the Bold. “One size does not fit all, around the world.” For RIM, increasingly, the future lies abroad. The company has seen its market share in the United States plunge to just 9 per cent from more than 60 per cent a couple of years before. But in places such as Africa, BlackBerry use is exploding: RIM saw shipments of its devices grow 741 per cent, year over year, according to research firm Canalys. RIM’s domination of these emerging markets is a result of its huge start; it has faced little real competition in smartphones in developing economies. But that’s starting to change. Devices running Google Inc.’s Android operating system and Apple Inc.’s iPhone are assaulting RIM’s profitable stronghold. In the last quarter, Android and its various handset manufacturer partners accounted for an astonishing 52.5 per cent of all global smartphone sales, according to research analysts Gartner Inc., while Apple Inc. was at 15 per cent and RIM was reduced to only 11 per cent. In an interview, Patrick Spence, RIM’s London-based managing director for global sales and regional marketing, said the company will continue to dominate in these markets by relying on its popular BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) platform – louis vuitton outlet beloved because it’s virtually free and is more interactive than simple SMS texts – by continuing to tailor its marketing approach to each country, and by leveraging local software developers. Mr. Spence also defended the company’s strategy amid recent missteps, and tossed a few barbs at the company’s rivals. He said the success of Google Inc.’s Android operating system is simply a result of global smartphone growth generally and that RIM will continue to expand globally. “What we’re doing is staying focused on where our strengths are, in terms of our solution and what it is that got us to 70 million [BlackBerry users] – and then enhancing that,” Mr. Spence said. “The whole market is going smartphones, that’s why you’ve probably seen the growth numbers you have …I’m comfortable in terms of where we are and how we can compete.”

Voters in neighbouring Mission and Abbotsford ousted incumbent mayors in favour of newcomers who promised property tax relief. Ted Adlem captured 50 per cent of the vote in Mission to easily outdistance two-term incumbent mayor James Atebe. louis vuitton mode In the lead up to the election, Adlem told Mission voters he would bring in a provisional budget at 90 per cent of 2011 levels. Adlem led a winning slate of six team members as part of the Citizens for Responsible Municipal Government, the only slate in the Mission municipal election. Adlem is the owner of Pete's Place Pizza in Mission. He does not have previous council experience, nor do five out of six councillor candidates in his slate. Adlem was reached for comment at a celebration party in Mission. He joked that it was "a small victory." "A little overwhelming tonight, to be frank with you," he said. "In our wildest dream we did not expect to win every seat." In Abbotsford, Dr. Bruce Banman won with about 41 per cent of the vote, while incumbent George Peary finished about 1,100 votes behind. Banman, like Adlem, is new to politics and campaigned on a platform that tackled high property tax, unsustainable city expenditures and a poor business climate. sacoche louis vuitton He has called Abbotsford's land-use policies "out of date" and has singled out automobile-dependent subdivisions and shopping malls as problematic. Banman's vision for a future Abbotsford includes increased density with affordable housing and small businesses closer to residences. Abbotsford residents also voted overwhelmingly to can a $291 million plan to overhaul the city's long term water supply. The referendum question saw just 25 per cent of voters in favour of the project. The city-backed Stave Lake P3 water project was to include a new water source and treatment facility and involved the city entering into a 25-year contract with a private business to design, build, partially finance and operate the facility. The Stave Lake project would have been the largest capital infrastructure project undertaken by Abbotsford. Outgoing Mayor Peary spent his career in public service. According to his city biography,louis vuitton outlet he served for 28 years in the Abbotsford School District and entered public office with a position on the Matsqui Police Board. He held a seat on the Matsqui Council and later with the amalgamated City of Abbotsford. Before serving as mayor he held a term as a school trustee.

With the release of Breaking Dawn – Part 1, he knows that the whirlwind surrounding him and his cast mates is about to peak. Then subside. He says he’s relishing the end, louis vuitton mode and he’s taking it all in: the attention, the career boost and the way his peers have coped with the sudden fame of a film series whose fans are nothing if not fanatical. “I am constantly amazed that no one has gone totally crazy,” he says, chuckling. “Everybody has their own way of coping. We’re all trying to be artists at the same time this whole thing is going on around us.” The 25-year-old British actor has worked with Oscar winners Reese Witherspoon and Christoph Waltz (Water for Elephants) and a former James Bond (Pierce Brosnan, in Remember Me). But he says his contemporaries – his Twilight cast mates – “have taught me the most. They’ve grown up in the eye of the storm. I learn from how they’ve dealt with fame. For me, that’s obviously the most overwhelming ... thing I’ve had to deal with. You learn a lot about the world and a lot about people when you and they go through something like this.” “Something like this” sacoche louis vuitton has been in evidence since before the first film opened. Pattinson was an all-but-unknown 21-year-old, best known for a glorified cameo as Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, when he landed the role that would change his life the instant he was cast. Tim Guinee, one of his co-stars in Water for Elephants, recalls the paparazzi in helicopters above that film’s set, the scores of fans hanging around, “hoping to catch a glimpse of him. What an extraordinary amount of pressure this was for such a young guy to deal with, and I was always amazed at the dignity and fortitude with which he dealt with all of it.” Pattinson knows that he’s in select company, having come from almost nowhere to star in three spectacularly successful movies in the Twilight franchise – louis vuitton outlet Twilight (2008), New Moon (2009) and Eclipse (2010) – with one more sure-to-be-a-hit instalment opening this week and another opening next year at this time. “It inevitably skews your idea of what this business should be,” he says. “But you have to fight against that. The whole fun, the whole point of being an actor is to keep reinventing yourself.”

Asian shares fell for a fourth day in a row and the dollar firmed on Friday as Europe's funding difficulties intensified, with Spanish borrowing costs hitting an unsustainable level and premiums for dollar funds rising further. In a sign global funding strains may spread to Asia, sacoche louis vuitton benchmark three-month euroyen interest rates futures fell to an eight-month low on Friday on concerns that tightness in dollar money markets may prompt non-Japanese banks to raise yen at a higher rate. Italy has pledged to embark on radical fiscal reforms to pull itself out of the debt crisis, but investor jitters remained firmly in place as euro zone governments struggle to raise funds and banks refrain from lending, seizing up market liquidity. MSCI's broadest index of Asia Pacific shares outside Japan .MIAPJ0000PUS fell 1 percent and Japan's Nikkei stock average .N225 opened down 1.2 percent. .T World stocks, measured by the benchmark MSCI All-Country World index .MIWD00000PUS, dropped 1.6 percent on Thursday. U.S. stocks fell on Thursday as fears over euro zone debt woes overtook more encouraging signs the U.S.louis vuitton outlet economy was improving after data showed a drop in new claims for jobless benefit to a seven-month low last week and a rebound in permits for future home construction in October. .N "Despite positive economic data from the U.S., the market is still focused on Europe and its contagion risk," said Hiroichi Nishi, equity general manager at SMBC Nikko Securities. The U.S. dollar held firm in Asia on Friday, while the euro was resilient, staying above five-week lows of $1.3421 hit on Thursday, with European banks seen repatriating funds back home as signs of funding stress grew. Euro/dollar three-month cross-currency basis swaps, the cost of swapping euros for dollars, widened by around 6 basis points to -136 basis points on Thursday, the most since the 2008 financial crisis. Risk aversion dampened sentiment in Asian credit markets, with the spreads on the iTraxx Asia ex-Japan investment grade index widening by 5 basis points on Friday. Investor commitment to a crucial bailout fund, the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), louis vuitton mode is conditional on improved market sentiment which can only be obtained through troubled countries such as Italy and Greece demonstrating progress in their fiscal reforms. A lack of confidence the fund can get enough resources to help purchase euro zone paper has aggravated European funding conditions, boosting interbank lending rates and shooting up sovereign debt yields as governments struggle to find buyers at their debt sales. Euro zone policymakers are aiming to boost the firepower of the EFSF through two options -- insurance against initial losses and a co-investment fund to attract private capital alongside the EFSF -- and are working to finalize the legal and technical details on November 29 and to have the leveraged EFSF ready for operation before Christmas.The yield premium of Spanish 10-year government bonds over German Bunds hit its highest level since the launch of the euro above 500 basis points after Spain paid an average yield of 6.975 percent on Thursday to sell its bonds, the highest rate since 1997 and just shy of the 7 percent level seen as unsustainable. Spain faces a parliamentary election on Sunday, putting the country under pressure to quickly reassure markets. New Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti on Thursday promised rigour and fairness in painful reforms, saying the survival of the euro partly depended on Italy's commitment. Ten-year Italian bond yields only eased slightly to below 7 percent after reaching 7.259 percent earlier on Thursday. Commodity prices on Thursday took their steepest tumble since September, with U.S. oil falling back below $100 a barrel, copper slipping 3 percent and silver slumping 7 percent. Gold, normally seen as a safe-haven, shed more than 2 percent.

The United States has clamored to return to the Asia-Pacific region as a leader,louis vuitton mode and its high-profile debut at the upcoming East Asia Summit by President Barack Obama and his top foreign policy official Hillary Clinton may serve as an occasion to sound the clarion. Right before the APEC summit meeting in Hawaii, Clinton declared a U.S. strategy shift to Asia in strong terms, saying in a speech at the East-West Center that "there are challenges facing the Asia-Pacific right now that demand America's leadership" and that the 21st century will be "America's Pacific century." Is there any country in the region that wants the United States to be its leader? The answer would probably be a resounding "No." Every country in the region, therefore, has good reason to question the United States' ambition.sacoche louis vuitton In fact, it wouldn't come as a surprise if the United States is trying to seek hegemony in the region, which would be in line with its aspirations as a global superpower. The 21st cen http://lintin55.bloglove.cc/19591 http://lintin55.bloglove.cc/19591 2011-11-17 08:58:42 Sino-Forest panel rejects fraud claims

The Chinese forestry company at the centre of a Canadian regulatory investigation rebutted allegations of fraud on Tuesday, even as the company’s own legal and accounting advisers raised concerns about their access to information. Sino-Forest released an interim report which it said disproved the “substance of the allegations”louis vuitton mode made by Muddy Waters, a US research firm that bets against companies by short selling their shares. “We can categorically say Sino-Forest is not the ‘near total fraud’ and ‘Ponzi scheme’ as alleged by Muddy Waters,” said Judson Martin, Sino-Forest chief executive. Muddy Waters first accused the forestry group in June of overstating its assets and revenues, causing shares of the Toronto-listed company to plunge 80 per cent. sacoche louis vuitton The claims also fuelled global concerns about the governance of Chinese companies. Carson Block, Muddy Waters’ founder, dismissed the company’s report, arguing that “all three directors who oversaw the investigation are defendants in shareholder lawsuits, and one of the three resigned just prior to this release”. Sino-Forest’s investigation committee currently has two members: William Ardell, chairman, and James Hyde, a director at the company since 2004. James Bowland, another director and the third member of the committee, resigned earlier this month. Sino-Forest has declined to comment on his departure. While Sino-Forest said the committee’s investigation vindicated its claims of no wrongdoing, one letter released by the committee along with the report raised questions about the scope of the inquiry. The document, written by PwC and three law firms hired by Sino-Forest to help their investigation, described a number of cases in which Sino-Forest employees restricted their access to information. The advisers described one case in which Sino-Forest management introduced a person as the vice-chief of a forestry bureau in Hunan province, louis vuitton outlet when in fact the individual was no longer in that position and was actually a paid consultant to the company. In August, the Ontario Securities Commission halted trading in Sino-Forest shares, saying the company appeared to have engaged in related party transactions that may violate securities laws. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police is also investigating Sino-Forest, which had a market capitalisation of more than $5bn just a year ago. The company has denied any wrongdoing. Sino-Forest postponed the release of its third-quarter results on Tuesday, saying the committee needed more time to verify information about the company’s relationships with suppliers and customers. If the earnings are not reported within 30 days, some of the company’s bondholders can declare a default. Sino-Forest has more than $1.8bn of bonds outstanding. Sino-Forest bonds rallied sharply after the interim report was released on Tuesday.

Vitamins, supplements and other natural health products should be subject to the same level of scrutiny as drugs in order to protect consumers, louis vuitton outlet according to an editorial in Canada's leading medical journal. The editorial, published Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, disputes the idea that vitamins, herbal remedies and similar products are safer than conventional drugs simply because they are natural. “The fact that's it's natural doesn't mean it's safe and it doesn't mean it's effective,” said Matthew Stanbrook, one of the authors of the editorial and deputy editor for scientific content at the journal. The central problem, according to the authors, is that unlike drugs, natural health products (NHPs) are often approved with limited evidence. The regulatory system for NHPs “has permitted products . . . to be marketed with limited content labelling, poorly documented health benefits and little or no safety data.” Drug manufacturers must spend money on large, rigorous clinical trials and provide regulators with extensive information on the safety and efficacy of new medicines before they're allowed on the market. Vitamins, supplements and other products, however, are regulated separately, louis vuitton mode through Health Canada's Natural Health Products Directorate. Under those regulations, NHPs can be approved for sale as long as the manufacturer can show the product has been used traditionally for at least 50 years, or if the company submits evidence from scientific studies. “The fact that's it's natural doesn't mean it's safe and it doesn't mean it's effective,” said Matthew Stanbrook, one of the authors of the editorial and deputy editor for scientific content at the journal. The central problem, according to the authors, is that unlike drugs, natural health products (NHPs) are often approved with limited evidence. The regulatory system for NHPs “has permitted products . . . to be marketed with limited content labelling, poorly documented health benefits and little or no safety data.” Drug manufacturers must spend money on large, rigorous clinical trials and provide regulators with extensive information on the safety and efficacy of new medicines before they're allowed on the market. Vitamins, supplements and other products, however, are regulated separately, through Health Canada's Natural Health Products Directorate. Under those regulations, NHPs can be approved for sale as long as the manufacturer can show the product has been used traditionally for at least 50 years, or if the company submits evidence from scientific studies. The Canadian Health Food Association, which represents companies that sell NHPs, says the regulations are appropriate for the industry and ensure consumers have access to a wide array of products. But the problem, louis vuitton according to the editorial and other experts who are critical of the regulations, is that the burden of proof establishing whether these products are safe and actually do what they claim has been set too low. Demonstrating that a product has been used for decades doesn't prove how safe or effective it is and clinical trials used to support the use of vitamins or supplements are often flawed, they say. “If you're going to make a health claim about a product you're marketing, then it should meet the same standards [as drugs],” Dr. Stanbrook said. For instance, some studies on echinacea have cast doubt on whether it actually fights or prevents colds. Growing evidence suggests St. John's wort, often used to treat depression, can interact with a wide variety of drugs or exacerbate some existing health problems, such as infertility, major depression or Alzheimer's disease.

The 18-year-old son of BC Lions head trainer Bill Reichelt died in a car crash Saturday night in Langley. The BC Lions Football Club said today they are mourning the loss of Dylan Reichelt,louis vuitton mode who passed away from injuries sustained in the automobile accident Saturday evening. "The Reichelt family thanks those who are supporting them during this difficult period and ask that their privacy be respected at this time," BC Lions spokesman Jamie Cartmell said in a statement. Reichelt and his family live in Langley. Poor weather and speed may have contributed to the fatal car crash in Langley, say RCMP. Charges are being contemplated in the crash, which also involved another vehicle, said police. A BMW travelling east in the 19800 block of 36the Avenue went off the road to the right, hit a tree and came to rest against a second tree. The driver received minor injuries and was transported to hospital but the passenger was killed, louis vuitton said Langley RCMP spokeswoman Cpl. Holly Marks. The police said another vehicle, a Mazda, was also travelling eastbound with the BMW. The Mazda went off the road to the left and crashed into a hedge, but both occupants were uninjured, said police. All the occupants of both vehicles were known to each other, added RCMP. The drivers of both vehicles may be charged, said police. Anyone with information on the fatal collision is asked to call Langley RCMP at 604-532-3200. But the most compelling argument for a merger, bolstered by this Ipsos poll as well as previous ones, is simply this: Liberal and NDP supporters are now, for all intents and purposes, the same kinds of people, with the same basic sets of views. Topp is seen to represent traditional NDP values, but he’s not particularly traditional; he’s a pragmatic problem-solver who can read a balance sheet. Rae, for his part, is trying to shift his party rightward on economics. louis vuitton outlet But he’s no small-c conservative. Rae and Topp strike many similar notes, in fact. They’d get on well at a policy convention. Thomas Mulcair, Topp’s most formidable leadership rival, is a former Liberal and even closer to the mainstream than Topp. The upshot? The NDP will pick a leader in March. While that unfolds, look for Rae to succumb to a “draft Bob” movement from within his own party, making him the permanent Liberal leader within a year, possibly sooner. Then, driven by the reality of a Conservative majority and a future with neither corporate nor government donations, the merger machinations will begin in earnest.

Kavis Reed was an aptly named, reed-thin defensive back who, when he first reported to the Edmonton Eskimos in 1995, weighed "about 120 pounds, is my guess,"louis vuitton mode says Rich Stubler. “He says 140, but I don’t believe him. I remember Hugh Campbell coming up to me on the sidelines one day and saying, ‘Do you think he’s big enough to knock anybody down?’ ” Turns out he was, and then some. In fact, Stubler — the grizzled veteran of CFL wars who was then an Edmonton assistant coach, and now the defensive coordinator on rookie head coach Reed’s staff, with plenty of stops in between — is one of the many converts to the Cult of Kavis that pervades the Eskimo populace, all of which seems to believe that the 38-year-old from Georgetown, South Carolina, can do just about whatever he sets his mind to. And there was a lot on that mind Friday, as Reed ran a final full practice in preparation for Sunday’s West Division semifinal against the Calgary Stampeders at Commonwealth Stadium; a practice that was almost — and here’s a word you don’t often hear associated with professional football — joyful. There was a musical interlude, during which players danced as they stretched to (no fooling) Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s ukulele version of Somewhere Over The Rainbow. louis vuitton There was a sharp whistle from Reed that stopped all activity for a moment’s silence at precisely 11:11 a.m. in observance of Remembrance Day. And there was a late-practice gathering involving the Grande Prairie Warriors, the high school football team that is in the city to play a provincial quarter-final game Saturday, less than a month after four of their players died in a horrific car crash. Reed summoned the Warriors’ quarterback, Jarrod Caufield, and had him run some plays with the Eskimos’ offence, then gathered his team and the high school players into a circle and asked the captain of the young team if the Warriors would raise the Eskimos’ “13th Man” flag Sunday. Each team shouted its pre-game chant at the other. “Warriors!” yelled the kids. “BONE!” growled the professionals. louis vuitton outlet (Brotherhood Of Nasty Eskimos, dating back to the 1970s.) Maybe you had to be there, inside the splashy new field house that is part of the city-owned stadium complex now, to catch the raw emotion of the moment, and in Reed’s voice as he addressed both teams. “I’ll tell you one thing,” said Stubler, “he can command a room.” The players know it. And it’s more than just Reed’s pre-game speeches, which are always inventive and passionate; all that only works if results follow. They have. After six years without a home playoff date, missing the playoffs altogether three of those seasons — a stretch unlike anything this franchise has experienced since the lost decade of the ’60s — the combination of GM Eric Tillman’s radical overhaul of the roster and Reed’s somehow humane good cop/mad cop management of personalities has brought the smiles back in the locker-room, and among the fans.

Apple today released iOS 5.0.1, the anticipated update designed to fix multiple unspecified bugs that drained the iPhone's battery much faster than expected. The update also patched five security vulnerabilities, including one revealed earlier this week by noted researcher Charlie Miller, who demonstrated that Apple's louis vuitton mode App Store code signing could be sidestepped to download malware onto an iPhone without the owner's knowledge. iOS 5.0.1 was the first update that Apple delivered "over-the-air" -- in other words, without requiring users to connect their devices to a Windows PC or Mac, and launching iTunes -- a new feature that debuted with iOS 5 in October. Apple did not spell out the specific battery-related patches, saying only "Fixes bugs affecting battery life" in a short list of the update's contents. Almost immediately after the launch of the iPhone 4S, owners began reporting that the phone was exhausting its battery at a prodigious rate, louis vuitton with some claiming that their batteries were losing 1% of their power every few minutes. While some users Thursday morning said that they had already downloaded iOS 5.0.1, it was too early for results reports to appear on Apple's support forum. Other fixes included in iOS 5.0.1 claimed to resolve bugs with documents stored and synced using iCloud, improved voice dictation accuracy for Australian users, and added multitasking gestures to 2010's first-generation iPad. On the security front, Apple patched five vulnerabilities and also revoked the digital certificates of a Malaysian certificate authority (CA). Microsoft and Mozilla had done the same last week for their Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers. The most notable patch was for the bug discovered earlier this year by Miller, louis vuitton outlet principal research consultant for Denver-based security firm Accuvant and the only four-time winner at the annual Pwn2Own hacking contest. That bug let Miller craft an iOS app, which Apple approved and distributed via its App Store. Miller's app, however, exploited the flaw to force the app to "phone home" to a server he controlled, which then could issue commands to any hijacked iPhone running iOS 4.3 or later.

An asteroid that is 400m (1,300ft) wide has passed by Earth, much to the delight of astronomers. Although invisible to the naked eye,louis vuitton scientists said they spotted strange structures on its surface as it spun past at 30,000mph (48 280.32 km/h). Asteroid 2005 YU55's was the closest an asteroid has been to Earth in 200 years, according to Nasa. It is also the largest space rock fly-by Earth has seen since 1976; the next visit by a large asteroid will be 2028. The aircraft-carrier-sized asteroid was darkly coloured in visible wavelengths and nearly spherical, lazily spinning about once every 20 hours as it raced through our neighbourhood of the Solar System. Ron Dantowitz, the director of the Clay Centre Observatory in Massachusetts, followed the asteroid through a telescope. "We're tracking the asteroid itself, louis vuitton outlet so the stars are moving by in the background and the asteroid is actually streaking by at about 30,000mph," he said. "As we track it, it looks like the stars are moving in the background and the asteroid is locked on in the centre view. "It's not so much that we can see it tumbling like a rock in space, we're examining it for the brightness and colour." Nasa said it had been no closer than 201,700 miles (324,600km), as measured from the centre of the Earth. The rock reached its closest point to Earth at 23:28 GMT on Tuesday. It will now trace a path across the whole sky through to Thursday. The asteroid often travels in the vicinity of Earth, Mars and Venus, but Nasa said this fly-by had been the closest the asteroid had come to Earth in at least 200 years. "This is the closest approach by an asteroid that large that we've ever known about in advance," louis vuitton mode said Lance Benner of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But he stressed that there had been no chance that the pass would be anything other than a close encounter. "2005 YU55 cannot hit Earth, at least over the interval that we can compute the motion reliably - which extends for several hundred years," he said. Instead, the pass gave astronomers a rare opportunity to study the asteroid in detail. In particular, two radio telescopes - the Goldstone Observatory in California, US and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, US - tracked radio echoes off it in a bid to understand better what it is made of and how it is shaped.

The TSX finished higher after a volatile session on Monday led by surging gold issues, louis vuitton mode as bullion prices gained on renewed concerns about the European debt crisis. After Greek political unrest held the market's attention last week, investor focus switched to Italy, where speculation that Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's government was on the verge of collapse sparked fears the euro zone debt crisis could overwhelm the region's third largest economy. The Toronto Stock Exchange's subindex of gold producers , which often climbs on investor uncertainty, hit its highest point since September 22. Goldcorp (G.TO: Quote), finished up 3.6 percent at C$54.30, while Barrick Gold (ABX.TO: Quote) louis vuitton gained 2.5 percent to C$53.54, as bullion rose 2 percent and notched its biggest daily gain in two weeks. "Given the weight of the TSX gold sector, which is roughly 13 percent, it's going to have a positive net effect for the broader index," said Sid Mokhtari, market technician and director of institutional equity research at CIBC World Markets. The move by gold miners helped lift the broader materials sector, which rose 1.6 percent. The Toronto Stock Exchange's S&P/TSX composite index .GSPTSE ended up 53.73 points, or 0.43 percent, at 12,461.98, after touching a monthly high of 12,485.20. The turmoil in Italy, one of Europe's biggest economies, extended the European debt malaise that has embraced the region and global markets for weeks. "The volatility has been unbelievable since the beginning of July and it certainly looks like it wants to continue," said Levente Mady, market strategist at Union Securities. Six of the TSX's main sectors finished higher, with financial stocks ending flat. Manulife Financial Corp (MFC.TO: Quote) led decliners, falling 2 percent to C$12.54. louis vuitton outlet Bank of Nova Scotia (BNS.TO: Quote) was down 0.2 percent to C$52.15. While Canadian banks have little direct exposure to European debt, there is concern they could get swept up in a widening economic crisis. Energy issues rode rising oil prices, which were boosted by elevated concerns about Iran's nuclear program and recent North Sea production disruptions. U.S. crude closed above $95 per barrel, its highest price since August. Suncor Energy Inc (SU.TO: Quote) led the sector's gains, rising 1.1 percent to C$33.26. Canadian Natural Resources Ltd (CNQ.TO: Quote) rose 0.5 percent to C$37.93. In individual company news, Cameco Corp (CCO.TO: Quote) fell more than 6 percent to C$20.35 after the uranium producer's third-quarter operating profit fell short of expectations.

Eric Schmidt, Google's chairman and former chief executive, admitted to the U.S.louis vuitton mode Senate antitrust subcommittee that Apple's new Siri personal assistant technology is a "significant development" in search and could pose a threat to his company's core business. The comments came in the form of a statement to the subcommittee in response to questions from the senators after a hearing in September, as noted by Neowin.net. Schmidt's remarks, however, may be best taken with a grain of salt, as letter's objective is clearly to downplay Google's prominence, while highlighting its competitors. The executive took special care to call out Siri as a new development that might supplant Google's search engine. "Even in the few weeks since the hearing, Apple has launched an entirely new approach to search technology with Siri, its voice-activated search and task-completion service built into the iPhone 4S," he wrote. Schmidt even went so far as to cite two publications for calling Siri a "Google killer" and Apple's "entry point" into the search engine business. In the letter, louis vuitton Schmidt backpedaled from a previous statement in September 2010 where he had denied that Apple and Facebook were a "competitive threat." "My statement was clearly wrong," he said. "Apple’s Siri is a significant development—a voice-activated means of accessing answers through iPhones that demonstrates the innovations in search." "Google has many strong competitors and we sometimes fail to anticipate the competitive threat posed by new methods of accessing information," Schmidt added, noting that Google competes against search engines (Microsoft's Bing, Yahoo!), louis vuitton outlet specialized search engines (Kayak, Amazon, WebMD, eBay), social networks (Facebook, Twitter), commercial software companies (Apple, Microsoft), mobile apps and direct navigation. Apple unveiled Siri in October as a prominent new feature of the iPhone 4S. The software, which Apple originally purchased in 2010, is currently in beta, though, and has experienced some embarrassing outages in the first weeks of usage.

A 35-year-old Australian man has been detained by Israeli authorities after trying to break the Gaza blockade, louis vuitton mode the Department of Foreign Affairs has confirmed. A spokesperson for the Department said they were attempting to arrange a consular visit with Sydney man Michael Coleman, who was on board one of two boats carrying medical supplies activists trying to break the Israeli blockage of the Gaza Strip. The Israeli navy said it advised the vessels to turn back or sail to Ashdod Port in Israel or to Egypt, louis vuitton outlet but the activists refused to cooperate. The navy said it boarded the two boats and detained the protesters peacefully. Kate Ausburn from Free Gaza Australia said Mr Coleman made contact last night but they have not heard from him since. "Shortly after [the boats were intercepted] the Israeli defence forces were the only form of contact we had with the people on board those boats," she said. "The IDF released a statement confirming that their navy had boarded the boats and would be taking all the passengers to Ashdod Port in Israel." In May 2010, louis vuitton Israeli commandos boarded the Turkish Mavi Marmara aid vessel to enforce the naval blockade of the Palestinian enclave and killed nine Turks in clashes with activists. Israel spurned Turkey's demand for an apology over the incident and Turkey expelled the Israeli ambassador two months ago after ties broke down.

They’ve berated bankers and scorned the one-per-centers. Now the folks at Occupy Vancouver have forced Santa Claus to slightly adjust his schedule. The protesters’louis vuitton mode controversial tent city outside the Vancouver Art Gallery has prompted organizers of the eighth annual Rogers Santa Claus Parade to change the route of this year’s event on Dec. 4. The public space where protesters now squat is normally a focal point of Santa Claus Parade activity. Every year the lawn on the north side of the VAG is turned into the Coast Capital Savings Christmas Square, with bleachers for viewing, family entertainment and a drop-off location for donations to the Greater Vancouver Food Bank Society. This year, the Coast Capital Savings Christmas Square will be located on Thurlow Street between Georgia and Melville, between 10:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. Normally, the parade travels east on West Georgia Street before turning right at Howe Street. This year, louis vuitton the parade will start at West Georgia Street and Broughton (at 1 p.m.), travel east along West Georgia, turn north on Burrard and finish at Burrard and Cordova. Parade producer Robyn Jones-Murrell said the minor rerouting shouldn’t affect attendance or the fundraising that goes on at the event for the Greater Vancouver Food Bank Society. “I’m expecting that we’ll have the same number of people attending as we do every year, which is about 300,000,” said Jones-Murrell. She said that as in past years, people will be able to donate to the food-bank society at the Coast Capital Savings Christmas Square or when the fundraising truck goes by in the parade. The parade has collected $96,200 and more than 63,500 pounds of food for hungry families in the Lower Mainland since it began in 2004. “We have logistical issues that we deal with every year,” said Jones-Murrell. “And at the end of the day, we’re going to have a great parade.” Non-Partisan Association mayoral candidate Suzanne Anton cited the parade’s rerouting as further proof that city hall needs to end the tent city. “Poor old Santa is being kicked off the art-gallery lawn. Santa should be able to occupy the lawn, too,” said Anton. Her comments came one day after city council rejected her motion to order the Occupy camp to close. “Council clearly took the option of doing nothing, which, of course, is the easiest option. But it’s not a very responsible one and not one that the people of Vancouver want.” The Santa Claus parade issue underlines how the Occupy Vancouver camp is preventing other groups from using the city space, she added. “Here you have the Santa Claus parade, louis vuitton outlet playing by the rules, paying its fees, and they can’t do it.” Occupy protester Lauren Gill said the rerouting is a minor change which shouldn’t affect the parade’s success. “I don’t think it’s that much of a big deal,” said Gill, adding that the parade often faces other challenges, such as rain.

ALGERIA’S FOREIGN minister Mourad Medelci has said that Damascus has reached an agreement with an Arab League committee on a proposal to end violence in Syria. The plan calls for the withdrawal of troops and tanks from cities and towns,louis vuitton mode release of prisoners held since unrest began in mid-March, deployment of league monitors and dialogue between the government and opposition. Qatari prime minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, whose country is spearheading the league effort, said Syrian president Bashar al-Assad must also implement serious reforms. Ahead of the league’s ministerial meeting today in Cairo, Mr Assad said he was willing to talk to the opposition. “We will co-operate with all political powers, both those who had existed before the crisis and those who arose during it. We believe interacting with these powers is extremely important.” It is not clear, however,louis vuitton if the league will find opposition factions prepared to hold talks with the government. While some are ready for dialogue once violence is halted and prisoners are freed, others flatly reject talks. Ausama Monajed of the Syrian National Council, an umbrella grouping of secular factions and the Muslim Brotherhood, said: “There can be no negotiations. Negotiations are a red line for us.” He revealed that the council was seeking to persuade army defectors who have joined the “Free Syrian Army” to co-ordinate resistance activities with the council and to defend civilians from attack rather than strike against the Syrian army and security forces. He said the council insisted “that this uprising will remain peaceful” and not initiate sectarian or civil war. Complicating the picture, Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has reiterated support for the opposition. While Ankara has permitted defecting army commanders and troops to base themselves on Turkish territory and carry out operations inside Syria, Nato has ruled out military intervention. Commentators argue that the situation remains deadlocked with the government unable to halt protests and the protesters unable to topple the regime. Meanwhile,louis vuitton outlet the committee appointed by the government to draft a new constitution has met twice this week with the aim of completing its task within three months. Syrian troops have been laying land mines along the country’s 320km border with Lebanon. An unidentified Syrian official said the mines were meant to stop arms smuggling while opposition spokesmen say they were intended to halt the flow of refugees into Lebanon. Many Syrians routinely cross into Lebanon along well-established routes to visit relatives, find employment or smuggle fuel and other commodities. The arms trade has ballooned sine unrest began. Some 5,000 Syrians have fled to Lebanon and 10,000-15,000 to Turkey during the last seven months. Human rights organisations say 3,000 civilians have been killed. The government says hundreds of soldiers have died in attacks by army deserters and “armed gangs”.

A Canadian Muslim cleric will have to keep a low profile and stay quiet about being arrested, bruised, bloodied and shackled in a holding cell while he completes a pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia. Usama Al-Atar, a well-known Edmonton Shia spiritual leader, was released on Monday.louis vuitton mode He was arrested after a clash with Saudi religious police who noticed his group performing supplications at the Jannat al-Baqi, the graveyard near the Prophet's Mosque in Medina. “I was falsely arrested and held by Saudi authorities for the best part of the previous 36 hours in what can only be described as horrid conditions,” Dr. Al-Atar said in a statement released on Monday. It was as far as he could go in his remarks. “As I will be staying in Saudi Arabia and continuing with my Haj [religious pilgrimage], it would not, unfortunately, be sensible nor wise of me to conduct any media interviews,” the statement added. The cleric was kept in a cell with 24 to 26 others and was dishevelled and sporting bruises on his arms when he came back, said Mohamed Hayward, a British member of the group. A bail order stipulates that Dr. Al-Atar be available to the authorities at any time, Mr.louis vuitton Hayward said. “We have another 10 days to go here in Mecca and Medina, and we don't want to compromise his position any more.” The cemetery has long been a place of tension between Shia pilgrims and the religious police, who uphold a strict application of Wahhabist Islam at odds with other Muslim schools of thought. “They [the religious police] are very touchy about people going there,” said Massoud Shadjareh, chairman of the London-based advocacy group Islamic Human Rights Commission. Mr. Shadjareh said Saudi authorities are very edgy this year because of all the upheaval in the Middle East. Mohamed Ridha Hamid, a London Shia who has been in touch with pilgrims in Dr. Al-Atar's group, said he saw similar arrests during two previous Hajs. He said the religious police can identify Shia pilgrims by the way they perform their rites. louis vuitton outlet “They attempt to scare you by putting you in a holding area. If you're a foreign national, ultimately they release you.” He said a friend travelling with Dr. Al-Attar told him that the Saudi religious police had warned them twice the previous day that they were being too loud. It wasn't immediately clear if the religious police knew they were dealing with a famous Shia figure. Dr. Al-Atar, a post-doctoral chemistry researcher at the University of Alberta, is familiar to many Shia because he has given lectures around the world, Mr. Hamid said. The Edmonton cleric has denounced human-rights violations in Saudi Arabia and in neighbouring Bahrain. “The atrocities committed today against innocents in several countries such as Bahrain and Saudi Arabia among others, are crimes one cannot stand silent about,” he said at a demonstration last March after Saudi-backed troops in Bahrain cracked down on protests by the Shia majority. Dr. Al-Atar arrived in Medina last week, one of three clerics accompanying 170 pilgrims on a tour organized by a British agency. On Sunday, he was leading a rite at the cemetery when more than a dozen members of the religious police forced them to leave. One of the religious police then called out that Dr. Al-Atar was a thief, leading to his arrest, Mr. Hamid said.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper left a critical Commonwealth summit Sunday declaring that while the association is imperfect and he remains frustrated, progress is slowly being made on key issues such as human rights. “A consensus-based organization like the Commonwealth does not always move as quickly as we would like,louis vuitton mode but overall progress has been made,” Harper told a news conference. “I’m not here by any means to suggest that the Commonwealth is perfect.” “Yes there’s some frustrations,” he said, stressing, however, that he’s not giving up on the 54-nation organization. “For our purpose,louis vuitton the most important part of the Commonwealth is that we are building on a common heritage and trying to push globally an agenda of freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law. Harper noted that the Commonwealth represents a “range of countries” on all continents and not all of them have the same approach to human rights as does Canada. “We’re not under the illusion that things are perfect.” Indeed, Harper did his best to put a positive face on a gathering — known as the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) — that fell short of what an advisory group and some countries, including Canada, had hoped for. “Canada was here to encourage the Commonwealth to refocus on core values of democracy and human rights and to support key reforms,” said the prime minister. Harper said that “progress” had been made, and that he thinks the Commonwealth still remains the best international forum to promote democratic principles and human rights protections. “I think we’ve had a good summit overall. There’s obviously some areas where I would like to see more progress. louis vuitton outlet But I think we all realistically knew that the progress would not be quite to the bar that we wanted in the first place.” Countries like Canada and Britain had come to the meeting hoping for major reforms to improve the Commonwealth’s credibility and ensure it cracks down on human rights violators within its membership. Among those said to be opposing the reforms were India, Nigeria, South Africa and Sri Lanka.

BANGKOK: The main river in Thailand's capital swelled to a record high on Friday, spilling over its banks and sending water rippling into the grounds of the Grand Palace , louis vuitton mode a primary historical monument of temples and gilded spires. The amount of water entering the palace grounds was small, but the breach was symbolically significant as Bangkok enters a crucial period when high tides to the south are pushing back at runoff from the north that has breached the city's outer defences and is now flooding some outlying districts. "The crisis we're facing today is the most critical natural disaster that ever happened in Thai history," PM Yingluck Shinawatra said. Chinatown, not far from the palace, was flooded, and concerns grew that floodwaters could reach the commercial center of the city, with its banks and shopping malls and five-star hotels,louis vuitton scene of the "red shirt" protests early last year that were Thailand's most recent crisis. The commercial center was quiet on Friday as Bangkok residents continued to flee by the thousands after the government warned that there was little more that it could do to stop deluge. "What we're doing today is resisting the force of nature ," the prime minister had said on Thursday. "We cannot resist all of it." A huge mass of flood water has coursed down over recent weeks from the north, following an unusually heavy monsoon season , taking a steep economic toll as it inundated cities and industrial estates. Several feet of stagnant water continue to paralyse the ancient capital of Ayutthaya, to the north of Bangkok. With bad news continuing , and the prospects for recovery becoming an increasingly steep challenge, the Bank of Thailand cut its economic growth forecast for 2011 to 2.6% from 4.1%. "The widespread flood, now affecting not only agricultural production but also manufacturing activity, louis vuitton outlet is likely to weigh on the fourth quarter's growth substantially ," the central bank said. Floodwater breached the defences of the domestic airport , Don Muang, earlier this week. Airport director, Kanpat Mangkalasiri, said that 90% of the airport was now flooded. The main international airport, Suvarnabhumi , continued to function normally.

Ahmad is not one of Syrian President Bashar Assad's cronies. But since August, when the U.S. louis vuitton mode imposed its most recent sanctions on Syria — which Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said targeted "Assad and dozens of his cronies" in the wake of a bloody crackdown on protesters — Ahmad has dissolved one company and resigned his positions in several other business ventures. Ahmad, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Syria, moved back to his homeland seven years ago. Under the executive order signed by President Obama, which froze any Syrian government assets in the United States and banned oil imports, an American working in Syria is deemed an exported service and in violation of the sanctions. "The U.S. is not going to contribute to a government or the structure of a government that is behaving in this way," said a U.S. Embassy official in Damascus, the Syrian capital, who was not authorized to speak on the record. Even Ahmad's volunteer activities, which include serving on the boards of several nonprofit groups, could be illegal. He is holding out hope that the U.S.louis vuitton Treasury Department will issue an exemption before Nov. 25, when the grace period for winding down business interests ends. "The sanctions are devastating to me," said Ahmad, who lives in a Damascus suburb and did not want his last name used. "I think the U.S. sanctions are way too broad. Their breadth tells me the U.S. does not really understand the situation on the ground in Syria. These broad sanctions are like carpet bombing an entire country instead of targeting the few bad individuals you are after." The effect of the U.S. and European sanctions on people such as Ahmad provides a look at how they could end up affecting the Syrian economy more broadly, with comparisons already being made to Saddam Hussein-era Iraq, where many complained that international sanctions hurt the Iraqi people more than the leadership that was their focus. Some Americans feel unnecessarily targeted. For the last few months, Karriem Shabazz was stuck in Damascus with a MasterCard that no longer worked and a Social Security check he couldn't cash. louis vuitton outlet Eventually the checks stopped coming altogether.Shabazz, an American who taught English at the American Language Center, was reluctant to leave the country where his wife and three children were born. But when he found himself with little means of supporting himself and his family, and as the unrest in the capital worsened, he decided to leave. He arrived in Atlanta this month and is trying to "start over." Since the unrest began in March, there has been a large outflow of Americans from Syria, said a U.S. consular affairs official in Damascus, who was not authorized to speak on the record. It is difficult to track the number of Americans in any foreign country, because they are not required to register with the embassy, but the number in Syria is thought to still be in the thousands, mostly in Damascus and Aleppo.

Talks between envoys of the international peacemaking Quartet and Israeli and Palestinian officials in Jerusalem ended with a pledge to introduce "comprehensive proposals" but no deal on new peace talks. In a statement released late on Wednesday, the peacemaking group, which comprises the United States,louis vuitton United Nations, European Union and Russia, said its envoys had met separately with both sides in a bid to kickstart long-stalled negotiations. Last month, the Quartet called for talks to begin by October 23, a deadline that has already passed, with the goal of reaching a deal within a year. But Israel and the Palestinians interpreted the call differently, with Israel saying the Quartet sought talks without preconditions and the Palestinians saying the group supported their demand for a freeze to settlement construction. The talks on Wednesday did not include any Israeli-Palestinian interaction, and ended with both sides expressing "their readiness to engage with the Quartet,"louis vuitton outlet the group's statement said. "The parties agreed with the Quartet to come forward with comprehensive proposals on territory and security within three months in the context of our shared commitment to the objective of direct negotiations leading toward an agreement by the end of 2012," the statement added. The Quartet set out its proposed timeline for new talks on September 23, the same day the Palestinians submitted their bid to join the UN as a member state. But so far the framework has failed to get off the ground,louis vuitton mode with Israel saying talks should start without preconditions and the Palestinians refusing to talk without a clear framework and a freeze to Israeli settlement construction. Negotiations have been on hold since late September 2010, when they ground to a halt shortly after they were relaunched in Washington, also over the issue of settlement construction.

MK Michael Ben Ari (National Union) and the far-right religious party Eretz Yisrael Shelanu (Our Land of Israel) have filed a petition to the High Court of Justice against the swap deal intended to release US-Israel citizen Ilan Grapel from a Cairo prison in exchange for 25 Egyptian inmates held in Israel. The petitioners claimed the government, louis vuitton and not the cabinet, is the only one authorized to approve such a deal. They also said that the case of Grapel differs from Gilad Shalit because they believe Grapel is "an anarchist, a leftist, who came to Egypt on his own initiative." The organizers of Saturday's rally say the public is dissatisfied with the government's response to this summer's social protests and express hope that people will again turn out in large numbers. After protests earlier this year over the cost of living, the government convened an advisory panel, louis vuitton outlet headed by Manuel Trajtenberg, which made a number of recommendations for changes in government policy to address socioeconomic concerns. It is interesting indeed that the mainstream media has not shown one of the anti-Semitic signs or focused on any of the anti-Semitic verbiage at the Zuccotti Park demonstrations louis vuitton mode (“What Now For ‘Occupy’ Protests?” Oct. 14). Not one Democratic party member of Jewish origin, not one U.S. senator and not one U.S. congressman has spoken out against the anti-Semitism expressed during these demonstrations.

A National Pledge for Unity on Israel issued jointly on Monday by the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee has created a backlash, with some Jewish organizations refusing to sign it.

The pledge, meant “to encourage other national organizations, elected officials, religious leaders, louis vuitton mode community groups and individuals to rally around bipartisan support for Israel while preventing the Jewish state from becoming a wedge issue in the upcoming campaign season,” notes that Israel often comes up as a vote-splitter of an issue.

“The Jewish community has had a strong interest in ensuring that American support for Israel is one of the critical strategic issues that unites rather than divides parties and officials,” the pledge reads. “US-Israel friendship should never be used as a political wedge issue.”

The pledge comes just before the beginning of the one-year countdown to the 2012 presidential election.louis vuitton Both the Emergency Committee for Israel and the Republican Jewish Committee have issued statements saying they refuse to sign the pledge.

“This effort to stifle debate on US policy toward Israel” contravenes American traditions of open and vigorous debate, said Republican Jewish Committee Executive Director Matt Brooks. The Republican Jewish Committee “will not be silenced on this or any issue,” he said.

Emergency Committee for Israel chairman William Kristol issued a statement saying “Here’s the Emergency Committee for Israel’s answer to Directors Abe Foxman and David Harris: You must be kidding.

“Indeed, this attempt to silence those of us who have ‘questioned the current administration’s foreign policy approach vis-a-vis Israel’ will re-energize us,” Kristol continued. “Nor, incidentally, should those who support the administration’s approach to Israel be bashful about making their case. louis vuitton outlet Directors Harris and Foxman need a refresher course on the virtues of free speech and robust debate in a democracy. Their effort to stifle discussion and debate is unworthy of the best traditions of America, and of Israel.”

“Harris and Foxman have vigorously criticized Obama on Israel many times in the past, making them violators of their own pledge,” Emergency Committee for Israel spokesman Noah Pollak said in an e-mail. “And where was Foxman & Harris’s desire for ‘unity’ in previous moments, such as when J Street was attacking mainstream pro- Israel groups or when liberal groups were attacking the Bush administration on the issue? There’s so much opportunism and hypocrisy at work here.”

Marc Tracy of Tablet Magazine surmised in a piece Tuesday that the ADL-AJC pledge “could reflect a genuine backlash at the recent hyper-politicization of the Israel issue at the hands of groups like ECI that surrounded events such as the UN General Assembly and the special election in New York.”

During the UN General Assembly session in September, the Emergency Committee for Israel put billboards around New York accusing US President Barack Obama of being insufficiently supportive of Israel in dealings with the Palestinians.

Additionally, Israel became a key issue in the recent special congressional election in New York’s 9th district, formerly represented by disgraced Rep. Anthony Weiner. Bob Turner was elected as the first Republican congressman from the district since 1920. Many said it was due to the election being framed as a referendum on Obama’s Israel policies.