Turkey Mulls Military Role Against ISIS

NEW YORK (AP) — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Tuesday he is considering expanding support for Western and Arab operations against the Islamic State group to include military involvement.

His comments Tuesday to Turkish reporters in New York mark a potential shift in Turkey's position on international efforts to fight the group, hours after the U.S. and Arab allies launched airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Syria.

Today in demonstrating contempt for Parliament

Just after 2:15 p.m. this afternoon, NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair, leader of Her Majesty’s official Opposition, democratically elected member of Parliament for the riding of Outremont, stood in the House of Commons and spoke aloud a fairly straightforward question he thought the government should be responsible for answering. This being within the 45 minutes reserved each day for question period, Mulcair was well within both his rights and responsibilities to do so.

“Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister has failed to answer clear questions about his ill-defined military deployment in Iraq,” Mulcair said by way of preamble. “Yesterday, Conservatives refused, once again, to answer in this House, but the member for Selkirk-Interlake stated on CPAC that the mission will end on Oct. 4. Will the Conservative government confirm that the 30-day Canadian commitment in Iraq will indeed end on Oct. 4?”

'Band-Aid' schools: Just the thing for a government suffering the death of a thousand cuts

So we can probably all see how this one is going to roll out: Premier Jim Prentice announced four new "starter" public schools in under-served Calgary suburbs today. That's just Calgary.

Today or tomorrow, if he likes, he can announce four more in Edmonton, a couple more the next day in Red Deer or Lethbridge, and so on, just to keep the good news rolling, day after cheerful day, at least until the next session of the Legislature begins.

BC Gov't Slow to Respond to Info Requests, Routinely Deletes Email

Over the past two years, the British Columbia government has become significantly worse at responding to information requests on time, and some people in Premier Christy Clark's office routinely delete their email, according to a report published today by the province's Information and Privacy Commissioner Elizabeth Denham.

"I'm discouraged by what I found, not surprised," Denham said in an interview. "I do think the public should be concerned about this report... A lack of timeliness erodes the public's right to know."

By law, public bodies have 30 business days to respond to requests.

Harper Would Rather Make a Quick Buck Than Provide Canadians With Clean Water

In honour of Small Change Fund's National Freshwater Fund, let's talk about all the issues facing our freshwater supply in this country. Canadians are becoming dangerously complacent about the amount of freshwater we have available to us; a luxury we are able to afford due to the fact that we live in a country with the world's third largest freshwater reserves. We waste about 335 litres a day -- almost three times more than European nations and second only to the United States. With these statistics, it seems inconceivable to think that there are actually communities here in Canada that have limited access to clean drinking water.

Amazon Resorts To Wordplay To Keep Salaries Low

Two thousand Amazon warehouse workers went on strike in Germany on Monday. As The New York Times explains, the German labor union Ver.di is trying to pressure Amazon into classifying its warehouse workers as retail employees. Doing so would force Amazon into a collective wage agreement on par with the rest of Germany's retail sector, instead of being able to set wages on its own.

Washington Gripped by Madness: When War Is Not War, Combat Is Not Combat, and Boots Are Never on the Ground

On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King delivered a speech at Riverside Church in New York City titled "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence." In it, he went after the war of that moment and the money that the U.S. was pouring into it as symptoms of a societal disaster. President Lyndon Johnson's poverty program was being "broken and eviscerated," King said from the pulpit of that church, "as if it were some idle political plaything on a society gone mad on war... We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor." Twice more in that ringing speech he spoke of "the madness of Vietnam" and called for it to cease.

Ebola Cases Could Rise To 1.4 Million By January, CDC Says

NEW YORK/GENEVA, Sept 23 (Reuters) - Global experts issued stark new warnings of the scale of West Africa's Ebola outbreak on Tuesday, with the U.S. government estimating between 550,000 and 1.4 million people might be infected in the region by January.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said its projection was based on data from late August and did not take into account a planned U.S. mission to fight the disease, so the upper end of the forecast was unlikely.

Coal CEO Blasts 'Insane, Regal Administration Of King Obama' For Regulating Emissions

Robert Murray, the outspoken chief executive officer of Murray Energy Corporation, compared the White House to the "Gestapo" and said that he is so worried about the reaction to his opinions on environmental regulations that he has hired former CIA agents as security, according to a report from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

"They're trying to silence me, but I won't be silenced," he said, according to the Post-Gazette. "They use the power of the government to silence me, but that won't happen."

America Has More Low-Paying Jobs Than Any Other Developed Country

America may be exceptional in many ways, but it also tops the charts of a new, troubling ranking.

The U.S. has more low-paying jobs than any other country in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, an economic group of 34 developed countries, according to a research note released by Morgan Stanley on Monday.

Economists Ellen Zentner and Paula Campbell based their analysis on the OECD Economic Outlook Report, which documents employment and labor trends in each member nation.