these people REALLY REALLY scare the hell out of me....shivers...
UBC graduate journalism students Heba Elasaad (far left), Krysia Collyer (second from left), Blake Sifton (centre) and professor Dan McKinney (far right) spent 10 days in February in Ghana shooting a documentary on e-waste. (Courtesy of Blake Sifton)
'It's incredibly difficult to breathe' at the dump, said Blake Sifton, as up to seven fires are typically spewing 'black, sticky, acrid smoke' at any one time. (UBC Graduate School of Journalism)
One of the hard drives contained personal information and photos of a family in the U.K. Another contained sensitive data about U.S. defence contracts. (UBC Graduate School of Journalism)
"Man"
11 years ago
Monday, June 29, 2009
more proof that calgary sucks!
Papers refuse to run ad
Updated: Mon Jun. 29 2009 17:47:23
ctvcalgary.ca
Tie-down roping is the most controversial of all rodeo events and the Vancouver Humane Society is trying to get Calgary's two major newspapers to run an ad condemning the event.
The Vancouver Humane Society wanted to run an ad that referred to calves as babies and cowboys as bullies.
The Calgary Herald and the Calgary Sun refused to run the ads.
The Sun says the ad was in poor taste and the Herald says the paper reserves the right to edit, revise or reject any ad.
The Stampede says the Vancouver Humane Society has every right to give its opinion on tie-down roping but they do everything they can to protect the safety of rodeo animals.
"The Alberta SPCA and the Calgary Humane Society are on par with us at every performance
of the rodeo and the chuck wagons races and they are there to observe and if they see something wrong they let us know," said Stampede Spokesman, Doug Fraser.
Fast Forward weekly says they will run the ad in this week's edition.
Updated: Mon Jun. 29 2009 17:47:23
ctvcalgary.ca
Tie-down roping is the most controversial of all rodeo events and the Vancouver Humane Society is trying to get Calgary's two major newspapers to run an ad condemning the event.
The Vancouver Humane Society wanted to run an ad that referred to calves as babies and cowboys as bullies.
The Calgary Herald and the Calgary Sun refused to run the ads.
The Sun says the ad was in poor taste and the Herald says the paper reserves the right to edit, revise or reject any ad.
The Stampede says the Vancouver Humane Society has every right to give its opinion on tie-down roping but they do everything they can to protect the safety of rodeo animals.
"The Alberta SPCA and the Calgary Humane Society are on par with us at every performance
of the rodeo and the chuck wagons races and they are there to observe and if they see something wrong they let us know," said Stampede Spokesman, Doug Fraser.
Fast Forward weekly says they will run the ad in this week's edition.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
finally! an atheist camp to rival all those christian ones! i love richard dawkins!
Dawkins sets up kids’ camp to groom atheists
Friday, June 26, 2009
the military...... just in time for the olympics!!!
Military coming to YVR this fall
By June 26, 2009 10:53 am
VANCOUVER - The military is shacking up with a VANOC sponsor at Vancouver International Airport.
Defence Construction Canada published a request for qualifications for contractors on Thursday for a $1.5 million partial renovation of an Air Canada hangar at YVR.
Construction is to begin Aug. 1 and be complete by Oct. 1. Deadline for bids is July 7.
"This project is to provide a temporary facility for the Department of National Defence," said the federal procurement document.
The document does not specifically mention the 2010 Winter Olympics, but the Oct. 1 completion means the facility would be ready for November's full-scale Exercise Gold security rehearsal and the 2010 Games.
Air Canada did not return a phone call or email.
A call to Joint Task Force Games, the Esquimalt-based agency overseeing Canadian Forces' Games involvement, was also not returned.
The 2010 Games could see the biggest military presence at YVR since the Second World War. DND and Transport Canada operated the airport from 1940-1947 under lease from the City of Vancouver.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Michael Jackson - Beat It
i know, i know.....but i came of age with this album!! i was 13 when it came out! rip...........
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
since this is where we often send our e-waste...this type of thing is more common then you can imagine
B.C. students buy sensitive U.S. defence data for $40 in Africa
'Donated' computers become toxic e-waste, documentary shows
Last Updated: Tuesday, June 23, 2009 | 5:50 PM ET
By Emily Chung, CBC News
A hard drive containing information about multimillion dollar U.S. defence contracts was obtained in Ghana by a group of Vancouver journalism students as they probed what happens to developed nations' discarded and donated electronics.
"It 's pretty shocking," said Blake Sifton, one of three UBC graduate students who purchased the device containing information related to contracts between the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security and the military contractor Northrop Grumman, reported University of British Columbia journalism school. The hard drive cost just $40.
"You'd think a security contractor that constantly deals with very secret proprietary information would probably want to wipe their drives," Sifton said Tuesday.
He visited Ghana for 10 days in February with classmates Heba Elasaad and Krysia Collyer and professor Dan McKinney while making the documentary "Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground" for an international reporting course.
The finished documentary looks at problems arising as discarded computers, televisions and other "e-waste" make their way from North America and Europe to the markets and slums of west Africa. It was scheduled to air Tuesday on the season finale of the PBS program Frontline/World.
'We plugged them and in and started reading files...they were just sitting there.'— Peter Klein, UBC
The team bought seven hard drives at a bustling market in Tema, a major port near the capital city of Accra where a lot of electronic waste from Europe and North America enters Africa. One of the unformatted drives contained personal information and photos from a family in the U.K. Another was from New Zealand, and another contained the U.S. security data.
Special skills or software weren't required to access the data, said Peter Klein, who teaches the international reporting course and supervised the documentary project.
"We plugged them and in and started reading files .… They were just sitting there."
Northrop Grumman declined to be interviewed by the students. The company simply said it was looking into how the hard drives got there, and asked the students to return it, which they did not.
Though the export of e-waste is technically banned by international treaties, it often winds up on long journeys to the developing world, the students found.
Some students in the class followed the e-waste to China and India — countries where e-waste is well-known to be dumped.
Many people aren't aware of the other path e-waste can take — to Africa, via donations of used electronics, Klein said.
Sifton, who graduated in May, said many exporters know that most of computers they bring in to Ghana aren't working.
Parts that work may be sold at the market, while the rest ends up in a nearby dump known as Agbogbloshie.
Charred toxic wasteland
"It's essentially this charred toxic wasteland," Sifton recalled Tuesday. "The ground is just scorched absolutely everywhere. Everywhere you walk, there's shards of plastic and metal and glass protruding from the ground."
Boys scramble about in flip-flops, helping young men smash piles of old computer monitors, televisions, and radios, rip out the wires, and burn them in fires fed by insulation from old refrigerators. In that way, they extract lumps of copper that they sell for less than 50 cents a kilogram, Sifton said.
"It's incredibly difficult to breathe because there's usually between five and six and seven fires going at any time .… and there's tons and tons of this black, sticky, acrid smoke coming out of them."
After visiting the dump, Sifton would spend 20 minutes trying to clean the dark, smoky residue off his skin.
Separated from the dump by a toxic, lifeless river was a shanty town of metal and wood shacks. Despite the horrific living conditions, however, the residents were very generous and welcoming, Sifton recalled.
People who donate their computers typically don't picture them ending up in either Agbogbloshie or the market in Tema, but put to good use.
Sifton said he did visit universities in Ghana equipped with computers that would have been unaffordable if they hadn't been donated.
He fears that people will increasingly start donating computers without the hard drives, rendering them useless and compounding the problem.
Hard drives can be safely donated: experts
Fiaaz Walji, senior director of sales for Websense Inc., a computer, internet and data security firm, said the case involving the Northrop Grumman data is scary, and when people don't erase their hard drives before disposal, "the risks are huge."
"If you look at some of the bad guys … this is part of what they do," he said. "They go and scour hard drives and look for information," such as personal information that can be used in identity theft and fraud.
Nevertheless, Walji doesn't think it's necessary to destroy the hard drive.
"That doesn't help from a recycling perspective."
He said high-level data wiping methods that write over the old data should be sufficient.
Cliff Missen, director of a project that has donated hundreds of computers to African universities, said he has never heard of anyone in Africa recovering data from a hard drive that has been wiped three or four times, even though it's theoretically possible.
Missen's Widernet project at the University of Iowa has donated hundreds of computers, mainly from corporate donors, to universities in Ethiopia, Liberia and Nigeria. Most arrive with "just about everything" on the hard drive, but Widernet erases them, refurbishes the computers with extra memory, and packages up spare parts, before shipping them off.
Even though the computers are only delivered as part of computer training programs, the cost of security means some are stolen and may not end up where they were intended, he said.
Consumers should be vigilant: Sifton
Meanwhile, Sifton hopes people won't get too caught up in the cybersecurity element of the story his team has been trying to tell.
"The big picture here is that there's thousands of tonnes of toxic waste — because we want the newer computer, newer TV, or the newer cellphone — being sent and poisoning children in Ghana," he said.
He wants people to think about whether they really need a new, bigger, flat-screen TV before throwing their old one out.
But he acknowledged that when electronics do get too old, it isn't easy for consumers to know what to do with them.
"You don't really know where your computer's going to end up, even if you have the best intentions. It's hard .… I just hope people will think twice and maybe be a little more vigilant when they're donating their computer."
handcuffing an 11 year old goes way too far!
11-year-old N.W.T. girl handcuffed, put in jail, mother says
Last Updated: Wednesday, June 24, 2009 | 8:38 AM CT
CBC News
A complaint has been filed against the RCMP after an 11-year-old girl in Fort Resolution, N.W.T., was handcuffed and put in a jail cell, according to the girl's mother.
Kelly Geroux said her daughter Morgan was visiting relatives in Fort Resolution, N.W.T., when RCMP and N.W.T. social services workers came to their home following a report that a party was going on while children were in the house.
"I have never been handcuffed. I don't even know what the inside of a jail cell looks like. And to have my 11-year-old daughter go through that is just crazy, you know? It makes me angry," Geroux, a resident of Hay River, N.W.T., told CBC News in an interview.
"From my understanding, the police went into the home and they kicked in the door. They went into the bedroom, found my daughter, my cousin and my … six-month-old niece. The police went in there and they were pointing handguns at the girls."
Geroux said she was never notified by the RCMP or social services officials that Morgan had been picked up by police.
"After the social worker had transported her here, Morgan, like, when she saw me, she told me what had happened to her right away," she said.
"I then confronted the social worker about the guns and the handcuffs and she claimed that she wasn't aware of anything."
RCMP Sgt. Brad Kaeting told CBC News that two officers went to the house to help a local social worker with a call she had received that day.
Kaeting said despite the 11-year-old girl's diminutive size, the officers' response was standard procedure.
"I'm not saying that the 11-year-old in this case was any threat, but until you can determine what that threat is, you have to treat everybody in a very similar fashion," he said.
Geroux said she wants to know why the RCMP handcuffed her daughter and treated her like a criminal.
The RCMP said they are investigating the allegations.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
high density....not urban sprawl
trians take precedent in Prince George's new Smart downtown.
Prince George, Squamish and other BC towns try Smart Growth ideas.
Published: June 23, 2009
TheTyee.ca
On George Street, a hub of the city, it's lunch time but the café is closed. So is the bakery. And a nearby restaurant. No wonder, given there is no one on the street to go inside. A car glides past. A woman gets out, unlocks the door to an unmarked office space, and goes inside, locking the door behind her. On her way in, she glances behind her... for what? A sign of life? Forget it. This is downtown Prince George on a Sunday afternoon.
"I honestly can't imagine Prince George ever being a place that people would want to go," says Katherine McKnight, a recently graduated student who moved there to attend university and moved away to Revelstoke as soon as she was done. It's a feeling that echoes through the empty streets. For her, she says, Prince George is a city of outdoor recreation, of house parties with passing tree planters, but without a vibrant centre to foster community.
But if Prince George City planners have their way, Prince George's downtown could be teeming with life as it joins a trend sweeping midsized cities across British Columbia. They want to wake up their downtowns.
Prince George's project began in 2008 when the city teamed up with Smart Growth on the Ground (SGOG), an offshoot program of Smart Growth BC that seeks to help B.C. communities prepare more sustainable neighborhood plans. It looks at land use, transportation, urban design, and building design plans in small to mid-sized B.C. communities and develops new concept plans that encourage smarter development socially, environmentally, and economically.
Having already successfully completed projects in Maple Ridge, Squamish, and Oliver, Smart Growth was looking for a fourth candidate. Prince George was an excellent candidate.
Malled, but healing
A typical resource town, like many in B.C., Prince George grew rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s with the opening of several pulp mills. The city doubled in size each decade, and responded to the growth by spreading out rather than up. It was a decision that Dan Milburn, Manager of Long Range Planning for the City of Prince George says shaped the face of the downtown core from there on in.
ADVERTISEMENT
"A large suburban type land use pattern developed, and hence the desire for the creation of suburban malls, which initially tried to almost mirror the downtown in look and function," Milburn explains. "Since that time, we've seen more growth in commercial space outside the downtown than in the downtown."
Not only that, but while the housing market exploded through the rest of the province, land in Prince George remained cheap and plentiful, making single family homes financially obtainable for most residents. With little demand for cheaper apartments or townhouses, almost zero housing exists in the downtown core today.
"If you walk downtown during most days, it's a busy hustle and bustle of pedestrian and traffic as a normal routine," says Milburn. "But what happens generally is that it gets very quiet on Saturdays and Sundays, or in the evenings, because there aren't a lot of residents downtown. So we want to try and change that."
Prince George in 25 years
So the community's own residents and organizations created a new 25 year plan for Prince George's downtown, with the help of designers, researchers, and planners, all facilitated by the Smart Growth team. It addresses a number of issues with the city's core, including alternative transportation modes, residential density, and environmental impact.
The plan envisions connecting the downtown core to the river to provide the citizens access to the city's waterfront; walkways and streets favoring pedestrians and cyclists; a year round public market similar to Granville Island in Vancouver; more commercial development in the downtown core. But most importantly, the plan sees hundreds of residential units of varying size and price range erected in the downtown.
The model takes the big city idea of eco-density that has dominated the development of cities like Vancouver, and applied it to a smaller environment. This spring, the city of Prince George built a community garden on a lot that will eventually be a credit union. It has constructed over 100 kilometers of bike lanes, and created incentives for downtown businesses.
The goal, says Milburn, is a vibrant, walkable city. "People are starting to enjoy that lifestyle more and more."
And Prince George isn't alone in wanting to catch onto the trend.
The ice cream effect in Squamish
The brilliant green of Gelato Carina's storefront banner pierces through Squamish's subtle downtown core. Beneath it, customers peruse the selection of organic produce the shop has just started offering. Others group around patio tables in sunglasses and short sleeves licking gelato cones. It's a simple example that Squamish Director of Planning Cameron Chalmers sees as the city's biggest success story.
Where the gelato shop is now was once a washed up mens- and boys-wear store. Useful to some, but not exactly full of life. But Gelato Carina took over and opened up around the time that Squamish was beginning to implement their own Smart Growth plan to revitalize the city's downtown.
The city started by putting 1500 residential units, with more to come, into a downtown that previously had less than 500. The people living in those units then started walking to get their ice cream, and staying a little while on the patio. The gelato shop owner started bringing in performers to entertain those people, which made more people want to come. Now, it is a bustling hub of activity that is slowly waking the downtown core from a long slumber.
"People will go where they see other people doing something, whether that be sitting eating ice cream or doing anything else. That was lacking in our downtown," says Chalmers. "Once we started seeing people on the streets and more people in and around downtown, other vacant storefronts became trendy little cafes," he says, pointing to another patio where customers laugh and sip coffee. He says that the patio they are sitting on is actually illegal. Instead of enforcing the bylaw though, the city is just going to change it to allow more patios.
Like Prince George, Squamish has a 25-year plan, a long term timeframe Chalmers sees as essential for doing the job right. "Downtown Squamish was built all at one time. It was built, it was fresh, it was new and then it all aged at the same time. And it bottomed out all at the same time, and if it were to all rebuild at the same time, that cycle would happen again in 20 to 30 years."
Squamish reclaims its waterfront
Planners hope to wean residents from their vehicles by taking Squamish from a city that is experienced from a car, to a city that is experienced by a pedestrian. Just off the main strip, three-story residential units line the street, with parking garages on the main floor. They can't be built underground because Squamish sits at sea level and is too close to the water table. But instead of a grey cement wall facing the street, designers have built the parking garage with a windowed art gallery around it so pedestrians don't even know it's there.
Squamish residents have previously never had access to their waterfront, either. With the new revitalization plan, they will see waterfront boardwalks lined with storefronts open the shoreline. Open squares will cap each end. Across the little inlet, 1500 residential units will look over the short distance to downtown, connected by bridge and aqua bus.
Other cities are doing it, too. Maple Ridge is redesigning its priorities, putting community based businesses and residential housing first in the downtown core. The city of Oliver is so small that not only the downtown got a revamp through Smart Growth, but the whole city. Salmon Arm businesses and city councilors have committed to living up to the city's new slogan: "Friendly faces, funky spaces, unique places."
Not all towns have been receptive to the changes, though. The small Okanagan town of Summerland was sharply divided by the idea of a seven-story high-density residential tower leaning over the sleepy downtown. The planned tower was backed by a hill to be less noticeable, and the goal was not only to bring more life to downtown, but also to preserve the area's valuable orchard land from ongoing suburban sprawl.
"But an apartment block is more noticeable than 20 houses," says former Summerland City Councilor David Finnis. "It makes change and growth more noticeable," so the community loudly opposed it.
The plan dominated the town's election, and was eventually squashed by the failing economy.
'Thrown together communities'
But density is not the only answer to a freshened downtown. John Curry is a professor in the Department of Community Development and Planning at the University of Northern B.C., with expertise in downtown revitalization. He says the key to success is keeping a balance between the needs of the public, and the needs of the private sector.
Lucky for Prince George, the downtown has a strong backbone of commercial infrastructure. It just needs a community built around it.
And while Prince George has had its own failed revitalization efforts in the past, this time it's ready says Curry. He says many B.C. communities are.
"I've lived in B.C. since 1990 and now call it home. I've travelled the world, and I keep coming back to B.C. and saying that it's one of the most wonderful, and beautiful landscapes in the world -- except for our communities. We seem to have, in our history, merely thrown our communities together without a lot of planning or without ensuring a high quality of urban life," says Curry.
"I think that's starting to change now in medium sized communities and the smaller communities. We have this beautiful natural landscape surrounding us, and people have loved to interact with that landscape, and now they're saying, 'Well, why can't we also have beautiful urban landscapes where we can enjoy a high quality of life?'"
Monday, June 22, 2009
true dat!!!!!
OTTAWA – At the time it was hailed as groundbreaking. Fill out a one-page form, pay a $5 fee and Canadians had the right to ask for any federal government record. The introduction of the Access to Information Act in 1983 put Canada on the cutting edge.
"We were amongst the leaders in the world," says Robert Marleau, the federal information commissioner.
But the leader has become the laggard after 26 years of "static decline," Marleau says.
"Since then it's been the same song and dance, no effort by any government to have this legislation or these processes keep pace with time, change and technology," he said in an interview.
Today, the access to information system is collapsing from a combination of neglect and bureaucrats foiling citizens' right to know through foot-dragging and fees.
The tale of what's happened to the Access to Information Act is just as easily the story of Canadian democracy in recent decades as benign neglect, calculated power grabs and public apathy erode principles and institutions.
Power is being concentrated in the Prime Minister's Office.
MPs, for years mere props in the production, are now more useful to their leaders as partisan attack dogs. They preach accountability but hide their expenses.
Cabinet ministers are also becoming increasingly sidelined and more government business than ever is being done in the dark, far from the prying eyes of Canadian voters.
Canadians who are fighting to stay engaged in the process increasingly feel their elected officials no longer represent their interests. More importantly, more and more Canadians are tuning out.
That lack of outrage merely allows elected officials to avoid the transparency that the system was supposed to demand.
"Our national political and administrative institutions are not in good shape," political scientist Donald Savoie says.
"We got there by being complacent, by not focusing on the real important things. We're focusing on the message of the day ... not on the real fundamental functioning of our institutions.
"I'm not optimistic. I think we've thrown fundamental policy debates out the window.''
For a nation that has had three general elections in less than five years – and teetered on the brink of yet another last week – the idea that democracy is on the decline may seem odd.
But even elections drive home the concern. Voter turnout in federal elections, especially among the young, is dropping, from 75 per cent in 1979 to 58 per cent in last October's election.
"Young people are disturbed by the diminishing role of the member of Parliament. Party discipline ... has eliminated the freedom of the member of Parliament to express his or her views or to represent the constituency as it ought to be represented," former Prime Minister John Turner told a session during the Liberals' spring convention.
Fixing the problem will require a prime minister who seeks less power, not more, and more assertive MPs willing to stand up for their constituents, rather than their parties. And citizens must reclaim their voices in the political process.
IT DIDN'T HAPPEN overnight. Instead, this trend has been in the works over decades with both Progressive Conservatives and Liberals in government, though many observers agree that the worrisome trends have accelerated since Prime Minister Stephen Harper took power in 2006.
University of Toronto political science professor Lorraine Weinrib charges that Harper has an "extended track record" of showing disdain for the principles and practices at the heart of Canada's constitutional system.
"While Harper touts the democratic principle as his ideal, his actions align with another principle – an all-powerful executive authority that makes his own rules," she writes in an essay for a book titledParliament Democracy in Crisis.
She notes how the Conservatives cancelled the court challenges program, which provided funding for court challenges by rights advocates. Harper himself has challenged the non-partisan officers of Parliament, such as the head of Elections Canada and the ethics commissioner.
Savoie, a long-time observer of parliamentary traditions in both Canada and Britain, bemoans the shift of power away from MPs and cabinet members to non-elected advisers around the PM.
"We now know that cabinet has been disempowered," said Savoie, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Public Administration and Governance at the Université de Moncton.
"Power and influence in Ottawa is centred around court government, around the Prime Minister, around lobbyists, around spin doctors and our democracy has been bastardized, if you like, by lobbyists who only have one interest – their self-interest," he says.
Liberal MP Bob Rae has the perspective of someone who served in Parliament from 1978 to 1982, left for provincial politics and now has returned to Ottawa. He says debates at committees and in the Commons these days are "ritualistic," as if MPs are merely going through the paces.
"This is the least populist, the most centralized, the most disciplined approach to government that I've seen in a long time," Rae said.
In his mind, reversing that trend will require MPs to flex their collective muscle and return power back to Parliament, though he's not confident that will happen.
"I'm not sure we've got the willingness right now on the part of enough people who are in Parliament to really address it," Rae said.
"It's almost as if you need a prime minister who is prepared to say 'I actually want less power.' A prime minister who said, 'We need to restore how Parliament is supposed to work,' " Rae said.
Add to that mix a batch of rookie MPs – 205 have been there less than five years – with little institutional memory of Ottawa, little respect for their political rivals, and reluctant to flex their political muscle against their party leaders.
"That is a problem. They come in and think that all this yelling and hollering is the way it should work," Progressive Conservative Senator Lowell Murray said.
WHILE OTTAWA is seen as ground zero, the roots of the problem are found across the country among everyday citizens.
In short, look in the mirror.
Marleau complains Canadians know too little about the institutions that govern them.
He points to last fall's parliamentary showdown as proof when the notion of the Liberal-NDP coalition was dismissed as "unconstitutional."
The coalition may have been politically unpalatable. But it was perfectly legal under Canada's parliamentary system.
And yet complaints about the coalition as a "coup" found a ready audience among Canadians, something Marleau finds worrisome.
"We do not do a good job in Canada about teaching and learning about our basic institutions."
tear down the wall!!!!!
Palestinian Lawsuit Condemns Canadian Condo Project as War Crime
They're building condos on our land, villagers say
Members of a tiny Palestinian farming community will be in Quebec Superior Court tomorrow claiming two Canadian construction companies are committing war crimes by building condominiums and roads on the village's land in the West Bank.
It will be the first time that Canada's War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity Act, passed in 2000, will be used in a civil case.
University of Toronto law professor Ed Morgan, who is also past president of the Canadian Jewish Council, said that while the move is "imaginative," the group may have some difficulty in convincing the Quebec court that it has jurisdiction over the case.
"The Quebec court is going to have to find that there's a real and substantial connection to Quebec, which seems a stretch to me," he said, pointing out that any alleged wrongdoing took place outside of Canada.
The village of Bil'in, with a population of just 1,700, claims Green Park International and Green Mount International, two companies registered in Quebec, are "aiding, abetting, assisting and conspiring with Israel" to illegally construct residential and other buildings on the village's lands.
According to the lawsuit, the lands of Bil'in are subject to the rules and obligations of international law because the West Bank has been under Israeli military occupation since 1967. Canada's war crimes law and other international laws prohibit an occupying power from transferring parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.
Ronald Levy, the lawyer representing the two companies, declined to comment on the case while it is before the courts.
But he recently told the Canadian Jewish News he thought the suit was "a media exercise intended to besmirch Israel - they don't care if they win or not, they just want attention. We consider this an abusive action."
Levy has filed three motions arguing that a Quebec court shouldn't hear the case.
Mohammed Khatib, of the Popular Committee Against the Wall, Bil'in, has been travelling around Canada with other residents of the 408-hectare agricultural village, trying to raise awareness and support. He said they're optimistic.
"We believe we'll succeed and that's why we're here," he said.
"Maybe not today or tomorrow or the coming months, but we will succeed because we are right."
The 35-year-old said the companies are destroying olive trees to make way for buildings that are reserved exclusively for Israeli citizens. So far, about 45,000 people have moved into the settlement.
Morgan said the Quebec court may also have an issue with the fact Bil'in already went to an Israeli court, where it argued the settlement violated building and planning laws.
It also argued against the location of an Israeli security wall that separates the village from 60 per cent of its land. The court agreed that the wall had to be partially moved.
"It's a creative legal manoeuvre to try to use the home jurisdiction of the company that you're suing, but Canadian courts, Quebec included, don't like to think of themselves as courts of appeal for a foreign court that you lose in," he said.
"Having already sued for something very similar in the Israeli courts ... they're going to have to convince the Quebec Court why it should be reheard here."
But Emily Schaeffer, an Israeli lawyer helping the villagers, said no civil suit has ever been filed in Israel because the Supreme Court there has never ruled on the legality of settlements in the Occupied Territories, saying instead they are a political issue.
The case is scheduled to be heard tomorrow, Tuesday and Thursday.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
food inc.....go see it!
Food Inc.' puts the gross in 'groceries'
Updated Sat. Jun. 20 2009 7:05 AM ET
Angela Mulholland, CTV.ca News
The images of chickens struggling to stand under overgrown breasts, and cow carcasses being forced through massive meat grinders may make viewers of "Food Inc." avert their eyes. But director Robert Kenner hopes his film is ultimately an eye-opener.
Kenner's thoughtful, if occasionally revolting, documentary bills itself as an exposure of the food industry's underbelly that will make you "never look at dinner the same way."
The questions the film raises have been asked before -- and in greater depth -- by Michael's Pollan's book "In Defense of Food," and Eric Schlosser's bestseller "Fast Food Nation." (The two authors in fact figure prominently in the film, providing much of its narration.)
Yet, what "Food Inc." does that those books couldn't is put faces to the problem. We meet chicken farmers who are guilt-laden by their own practices, and a mother whose son slowly haemorrhaged to death from E. coli in packaged hamburger.
In one heartbreaking scene, a low-income family's youngest daughter begs for a fresh pear at the supermarket, but is refused because a similarly-priced bag of chips and pop would fill her belly longer.
There's little doubt the industrialization of the food industry has brought us pesticides in our streams, massive food recalls, and the obesity crisis.
But we also now have the most efficient food production system ever known to mankind. As one representative of the National Chicken Council notes: "We can grow more chickens on less land. In half the time. For fewer dollars. What's wrong with that?"
Kenner says that's the kind of the other-side-of-the-story he hoped "Food Inc." would also convey.
"I think that's an important point of view to have in the film and that's what I would have wanted more of: industry's point of view," he told CTV.ca in a phone interview from Los Angeles.
But though he approached dozens of food companies and producers, almost none wanted to go on film to talk.
"I wasn't given any access, so that kept changing the film," he says. "Because I'm not Michael Moore. I didn't set out to have doors slammed in my face. I wasn't into that. I wanted to have a conversation, a debate. But it wasn't happening."
He adds, "I like to joke that I think I would have had greater access if I had been doing a film on nuclear terrorism."
Now that the film is in limited release in theatres with a huge media campaign behind it, those same food producers are launching their own counter-campaigns. Monsanto deconstructs the documentary's withering accusations in a section on its website, and a coalition of meat producers have set up their own website, SafeFoodInc.com.
Kenner finds it all a little amusing.
"First, they won't talk to me and now, they try to follow me on radio shows," he says with a laugh.
"But you know, ultimately, I don't think they really want you thinking about how your food is grown. They want to keep up this myth that it all comes from a small farm, when in reality, it's all produced by very few corporations that create this stuff in giant factories."
The film makes the case that our food supply is controlled by just a handful of corporations with a scary amount of influence in Washington. Kenner says that wasn't at all what he expected to uncover.
"At first, we thought it would be a film just about just fast food, but that had been done with 'Super Size Me' and I felt we had to move beyond that. So then it became about supermarket food, and then that led to look at the industrialization of the food industry. And then when we saw how corn was connected to all of it. And we started to connect the dots.
"We saw that food was getting centralized and these corporations grabbed more power. And we heard about "veggie libel laws" [laws passed in some U.S. states that make it easier for food industry interests to sue their critics for libel] -- all of those things were big surprises for me. I didn't know that any of that existed.
"And I didn't know how litigious it was. If I had, I might have done a different film," he half-jokes.
"When I stumbled into this stuff, I realized, 'Wow, it's more insidious that I thought. It's real-life "Michael Clayton".' We're in the middle of a thriller and I didn't realize it."
With images of Big Food dark forces who visit farmers at night to demand their silence, viewers might be reminded instead of "The Insider," Hollywood's take on the Big Tobacco cover-up.
"The tobacco analogy is a good one," says Kenner. "In both cases, it's rich, powerful corporations, with connections to government who are designing an addictive product, and spreading misleading information with questionable studies.
"I'm optimistic," he insists. "I think things are going to change. Low-cost food is just too expensive when you look at the costs on our health, on the environment, on the workers in the industry."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)