what to make of this

Much transpires in Caledonia of late.

Rainin' in paradise

Canada tried to "bribe" African countries to reject U.N. decleration on indigenous rights: CanWest

Last week, after the African countries announced their support for the revised document, a senior official with the African Indigenous Caucus accused Canada of having tried to use aid as a bribe to keep them on side.

"By approaching Africa, which had so many problems, and trying to use aid as a tool, Canada was committing a crime," said Joseph Ole Simel, caucus co-ordinator, according to UN note-takers.

Stonechild murdered over gun deal?

Stonechild killed over gun deal, hearing told

Darren Bernhardt

CanWest News Service

Thursday, September 13, 2007

SASKATOON -- The notorious freezing death of Neil Stonechild 17 years ago was a murder calculated to keep him from testifying at a trial, and had nothing to do with police, a commission hearing was told Wednesday.

A career criminal, known as X to protect his identity, told the Saskatchewan Police Commission in Saskatoon that a gun deal gone bad led to Stonechild's murder by a man against whom he was scheduled to testify.

A second man set to testify about the ill-fated deal was shot dead four months later, X added.

"I never ever heard anything about the cops. If they took him to a field and kicked the shit out of him, there'd be somebody making a fuss about it (in the prison system)," he said.

The first time he heard of possible police involvement was "on the news" when the story broke in early 2000, said X.

The 34-year-old is in a federal penitentiary and appeared Wednesday handcuffed on the stand. His former cell mate was the person against whom Stonechild, 17, and the other man were to testify, he claimed. The cell mate, known as AA, either performed the killings himself or ordered them after learning the men "ratted him out," said X.

"He (Stonechild) was taken out of town and beat up. That's what I heard. He (AA) basically said all rats should be dead and they got what they deserved," said X. "And he said Neil was lucky that's all he got."

Asked what that meant, X replied: "Freezing to death rather than a bullet to the head."

Back in the 1990s in Saskatoon, AA and his brother and their friends were feared by everyone, said X, who worked for them by delivering drugs, kicking in doors to collect on debts, "protecting hookers and holding guns to people's heads," he said.

"It was known by everyone that if you went against (AA and his brother), you paid the price," he said, adding, "I'm risking my life by sitting here now."

He learned of AA's link to Stonechild in 1996 but never went to police out of fear of retribution. His family begged him not to testify Wednesday but X said he's no longer afraid of AA.

"I've tooken (taken) my licks. I'm at the same calibre now," he said.

Climate change nothing special: 500 scientists

WASHINGTON, Sept. 12 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A new analysis of peer-reviewed literature reveals that more than 500 scientists have published evidence refuting at least one element of current man-made global warming scares. More than 300 of the scientists found evidence that 1) a natural moderate 1,500-year climate cycle has produced more than a dozen global warmings similar to ours since the last Ice Age and/or that 2) our Modern Warming is linked strongly to variations in the sun's irradiance. "This data and the list of scientists make a mockery of recent claims that a scientific consensus blames humans as the primary cause of global temperature increases since 1850," said Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Dennis Avery.

Other researchers found evidence that 3) sea levels are failing to rise importantly; 4) that our storms and droughts are becoming fewer and milder with this warming as they did during previous global warmings; 5) that human deaths will be reduced with warming because cold kills twice as many people as heat; and 6) that corals, trees, birds, mammals, and butterflies are adapting well to the routine reality of changing climate.

Despite being published in such journals such as Science, Nature and Geophysical Review Letters, these scientists have gotten little media attention. "Not all of these researchers would describe themselves as global warming skeptics," said Avery, "but the evidence in their studies is there for all to see."

The names were compiled by Avery and climate physicist S. Fred Singer, the co-authors of the new book Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, mainly from the peer-reviewed studies cited in their book. The researchers' specialties include tree rings, sea levels, stalagmites, lichens, pollen, plankton, insects, public health, Chinese history and astrophysics.

"We have had a Greenhouse Theory with no evidence to support it-except a moderate warming turned into a scare by computer models whose results have never been verified with real-world events," said co-author Singer. "On the other hand, we have compelling evidence of a real-world climate cycle averaging 1470 years (plus or minus 500) running through the last million years of history. The climate cycle has above all been moderate, and the trees, bears, birds, and humans have quietly adapted."

"Two thousand years of published human histories say that the warm periods were good for people," says Avery. "It was the harsh, unstable Dark Ages and Little Ice Age that brought bigger storms, untimely frost, widespread famine and plagues of disease." "There may have been a consensus of guesses among climate model-builders," says Singer. "However, the models only reflect the warming, not its cause." He noted that about 70 percent of the earth's post-1850 warming came before 1940, and thus was probably not caused by human-emitted greenhouse gases. The net post-1940 warming totals only a tiny 0.2 degrees C.

The historic evidence of the natural cycle includes the 5000-year record of Nile floods, 1st-century Roman wine production in Britain, and thousands of museum paintings that portrayed sunnier skies during the Medieval Warming and more cloudiness during the Little Ice Age. The physical evidence comes from oxygen isotopes, beryllium ions, tiny sea and pollen fossils, and ancient tree rings. The evidence recovered from ice cores, sea and lake sediments, cave stalagmites and glaciers has been analyzed by electron microscopes, satellites, and computers. Temperatures during the Medieval Warming Period on California's Whitewing Mountain must have been 3.2 degrees warmer than today, says Constance Millar of the U.S. Forest Service, based on her study of seven species of relict trees that grew above today's tree line.

Singer emphasized, "Humans have known since the invention of the telescope that the earth's climate variations were linked to the sunspot cycle, but we had not understood how. Recent experiments have demonstrated that more or fewer cosmic rays hitting the earth create more or fewer of the low, cooling clouds that deflect solar heat back into space-amplifying small variations in the intensity of the sun.

Avery and Singer noted that there are hundreds of additional peer-reviewed studies that have found cycle evidence, and that they will publish additional researchers' names and studies. They also noted that their book was funded by Wallace O. Sellers, a Hudson board member, without any corporate contributions

one of Canada's greatest poets

SAMUEL HEARNE IN WINTERTIME

John Newlove

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I.	In this cold room I remember the smell of manure on men's heavy clothes as good, the smell of horses. It is a romantic world to readers of journeys to the Northern Ocean- especially if their houses are heated to some degree, Samuel. Hearne, your camp must have smelled like hell whenever you settled down for a few days of rest and journal-work: hell smeared with human manure, hell half-full of raw hides, hell of sweat, Indians, stale fat, meat-hell, fear-hell, hell of cold.
2.	One child is back from the doctor's while the other one wanders about in dirty pants and I think of Samuel Hearne and the land - puffy children coughing as I think, crying, sick-faced, vomit stirring in grey blankets from room to room. It is Christmastime the cold flesh shines. No praise in merely enduring.
3.	Samuel Hearne did more in the land (like all the rest full of rocks and hilly country, many very extensive tracts of land, tittimeg, pike and barble, and the islands: the islands, many of them abound as well as the main land does with dwarf woods, chiefly pine in some parts intermixed with latch and birch) than endure. The Indians killed twelve deer. It was impossible to describe the intenseness of the cold.
4.	And, Samuel Hearne, I have almost begun to talk as if you wanted to be gallant, as if you went through that land for a book - as if you were not SAM, wanting to know, to do a job.
5.	There was that Eskimo girl at Bloody Fall, at your feet, Samuel Hearne, with two spears in her, you helpless before your helpers, and she twisted about them like an eel, dying, never to know.

Omar Khadr

The Unending Torture of Omar Khadr

JEFF TIETZ / Rolling Stone 24aug2007

He was a child of jihad, a teenage soldier in bin Laden's army. Captured on the battlefield when he was only fifteen, he has been held at Guantanamo Bay for the past four years — subjected to unspeakable abuse sanctioned by the president himself Jeff Tietz

In July 2002, a Special Forces unit in southeast Afghanistan received intelligence that a group of Al Qaeda fighters was operating out of a mud-brick compound in Ab Khail, a small hill town near the Pakistani border. The Taliban regime had fallen seven months earlier, but the rough border regions had not yet been secured. When the soldiers arrived at the compound, they looked through a crack in the door and saw five men armed with assault rifles sitting inside. The soldiers called for the men to surrender. The men refused. The soldiers sent Pashto translators into the compound to negotiate. The men promptly slaughtered the translators. The American soldiers called in air support and laid siege to the compound, bombing and strafing it until it was flat and silent. They walked into the ruins. They had not gotten far when a wounded fighter, concealed behind a broken wall, threw a grenade, killing Special Forces Sgt. Christopher Speer. The soldiers immediately shot the fighter three times in the chest, and he collapsed. When the soldiers got close, they saw that he was just a boy. Fifteen years old and slightly built, he could have passed for thirteen. He was bleeding heavily from his wounds, but he was — unbelievably — alive. The soldiers stood over him.

"Kill me," he murmured, in fluent English. "Please, just kill me."

His name was Omar Khadr. Born into a fundamentalist Muslim family in Toronto, he had been prepared for jihad since he was a small boy. His parents, who were Egyptian and Palestinian, had raised him to believe that religious martyrdom was the highest achievement he could aspire to. In the Khadr family, suicide bombers were spoken of with great respect. According to U.S intelligence, Omar's father used charities as front groups to raise and launder money for Al Qaeda. Omar's formal military training — bombmaking, assault-rifle marksmanship, combat tactics — before he turned twelve. For nearly a year before the Ab Khail siege, according to the U.S. government, Omar and his father and brothers had fought with the Taliban against American and Northern Alliance forces in Afghanistan. Before that, they had been living in Jalalabad, with Osama bin Laden. Omar spent much of his adolescence in Al Qaeda compounds.

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