The week Rob Ford learned to play well with others

On Thursday of this week, the proceedings of Toronto city council came to a sudden halt when a group of babies, toddlers and parents flooded the council chamber to stage a demonstration. Sympathetic left-leaning councillors crowded around, accepting apple slices and Cheerios in return for a pinky-swear pledge to protect daycare. Their opponents sat and grumbled.

Frances Nunziata, council’s brusque speaker, who is often an ally of Mayor Rob Ford, tried to re-establish order. “We have to continue with our agenda,” she bellowed.

That will be a tall order.

Mr. Ford swept to office last October on a wave of annoyance at city hall, but the last couple of weeks have been the roughest yet for him. Fights over service cuts and the waterfront have slowed his momentum, raising doubts about whether he can achieve his ambitious program of subway building and trimming the size of government. Even the Toronto Sun, whose opinion pages often champion Mr. Ford, published an article wondering whether he has “lost his mojo.”

TRAIN Act To Limit Clean Air Protection Passes The House

The U.S. House of Representatives forwarded a bill on Friday that environmental leaders warn would undermine the Environmental Protection Agency's ability to curb air pollution and protect public health. Green groups are now urging the Senate and President Barack Obama to stand strong -- and avoid a repeat of recent environmental health failures, such as the shelving of proposed ozone and greenhouse gas standards.

"The Tea Party House has passed, with ease, the most radical dirty-air legislation in the history of this country," John Walke, the clean air director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told HuffPost. "It absolutely eviscerates the legal standards for adopting emissions limits under the Clean Air Act."

Introduced by Rep. John Sullivan (R-Okla.), the Transparency in Regulatory Analysis of Impacts on the Nation (TRAIN) Act would create a special committee to oversee the EPA's rules and regulations, and require the agency to consider economic impacts on polluters when it sets standards concerning how much air pollution is too much. For the last 41 years, since passage of the Clean Air Act, only scientific and medical considerations have been allowed in that analysis.

"This results in lying to the American people about whether the air is healthy or not," said Walke.

Rick Perry's Sudden Fall Due To Unforced Errors

ORLANDO – How did Rick Perry get here?

Just a few weeks ago, the Texas governor was taking the Republican presidential primary by storm, but his star has fallen rapidly over the course of his first three debates. On Thursday night, it came crashing down.

Conservatives flocked to the three-day conclave here – kicked off by the Google-Fox News debate Thursday night – "ready to marry" Perry, but left "spooked" by his performance, said one Florida Republican with contacts among both campaign operatives and grassroots activists.

That discontent has been building, though it's not final in any sense. Perry's fortunes have fallen in large part because of a series of gaffes that demonstrated his lack of discipline and experience on a national stage. In several key moments during the past few weeks, the governor showed a tendency to undermine some of his best moments and to make tough or difficult moments even worse. His potential supporters have grown leery of Perry as the list of his unforced errors has grown longer.

Alberta Oil Sands: Protest Planned In Ottawa, Pipeline Advocates Hit Back

As hundreds of demonstrators prepare to descend on Parliament Hill on Monday to protest the development of the Alberta oil sands, the patience of some of their most prominent adversaries appears to be wearing thin for what they claim is a campaign of rhetoric not based on fact.

In a speech to the Canadian Club of Toronto Friday, Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver turned his attention to the question of how to address the increasingly vocal opposition to the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline, acknowledging that “There is a significant communications challenge.”

Noting the “celebrity protesters” that have made headlines in recent weeks for opposing the transport of bitumen from Alberta to Texas, Oliver outlined the safety and environmental standards the pipeline has met, pointing out that greenhouse gas emissions in the oil sands are lower than in coal plants in Wisconsin.

“We just have to keep repeating those points and making people understand that this exaggerated rhetoric about the end of the planet just doesn’t pass muster,” he said. “With regard to the oil sands and the Keystone XL Pipeline in particular, it’s time to separate fact from fiction.”

More than 1,200 demonstrators were arrested in Washington earlier this month as they protested Keystone XL, which is currently awaiting approval from U.S. President Barack Obama. The protesters, many of whom represent environmental and First Nations groups, say the pipeline will pollute waterways and fisheries.

Palestinian UN Statehood Bid: Mahmoud Abbas Submits Formal Request For Member State Status

UNITED NATIONS — The Palestinian leader took his people's quest for independence to the heart of world diplomacy Friday, seeking U.N. recognition of Palestine and sidestepping negotiations that have foundered for nearly two decades under the weight of inflexibility, violence and failure of will.

The bid to win recognition of a state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem – submitted over the objections of the U.S. – laid bare the deep sense of Palestinian exasperation after 44 years of Israeli occupation.

"The time is now for the Palestinian Spring, the time for independence," Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas declared.

"The time has come to end the suffering and the plight of millions of Palestine refugees in the homeland and the diaspora, to end their displacement and to realize their rights."

After Abbas submitted his formal application, international mediators called on Israel and the Palestinians to return to long-stalled negotiations and reach an agreement no later than next year. The Quartet – the U.S., European Union, U.N. and Russia – urged both parties to draw up an agenda for peace talks within a month and produce comprehensive proposals on territory and security within three months.

Metro Vancouver Park Smoking Ban In The Works

Smoking will be banned in Metro Vancouver's 12 regional parks starting next year.

The region's board members voted in favour of the ban at a meeting on Friday afternoon. The ban means smoking will be forbidden in regional parks except in designated areas.

Some directors questioned the value of the ban if it won't be enforced. But Pitt Meadows Mayor Don MacLean called on fellow politicians to support it.

"Not only should we look after our own health but I think we have an obligation to all of our fellow citizens, especially as people that legislate in certain areas of the region, and parks has been something we've been mandated to do," he explained.

The Wreck Beach Preservation Society opposed the ban, pointing out dogs, fires, camping, and parking are already forbidden at the beach.

New Pot Laws Could Overwhelm B.C. Jails

Minimum sentences in the federal government's new 'tough on crime' legislation are going to overwhelm B.C.'s overcrowded jails with small-scale marijuana growers, according to the province's prison guards.

If passed, the federal government's new legislation will mean a six-month minimum sentence for anyone convicted of growing between six and 200 cannabis plants.

Growing more than 200 to 500 plants would draw a year in jail and more than 500 plants would draw a minimum two years in jail. The maximum sentences in all cases would rise from seven to 14 years in prison.

Dean Purdy, the BC Government and Service Employees' Union spokesperson for the province's prison guards, says B.C. jails are already 150 to 200 per cent over capacity, forcing some inmates to be bunked in tents.

Melancthon quarry galvanizes opponents

In 1830, a group of men set out from Hamilton, Ontario, to open up 32 hectares of land on a small Ojibway lake by Melancthon Township's Pine River. They, and the small industries that came after them, were attracted to the water resources in what was soon to be known as Horning's Mills. They built a sawmill, a grist mill, a frame house, and brought their families to settle and build this small historic community.

I stood on the crumbling foundations of one of the original mills for which Horning's Mills is named 180 years later, thinking about another group interested in the area's resources. The Highland Companies, with the financial backing of the $23 billion U.S. hedge fund Baupost, has bought up close to 8,000 acres of prime Ontario farmland in this sensitive area, and proposes to blast a 2,400 acre hole into the region's aquifer.

They'll also have to pump out some 600 million litres of water that filters through the aquifer each and every day to keep that big hole from filling up with water from a complex, largely unmapped network of underground streams and rivers. Now why, you may ask, would anyone want to destroy an aquifer -- the headwaters of five major rivers -- and put at risk the drinking water of some 1 million people downstream?

Israel alone

Israel has never had a surplus of friends in its neighbourhood. But almost since its founding it could count on an alliance with Turkey, one of the strongest nations in the Middle East. And for more than three decades its southern border has been protected by a solid peace treaty with Arab powerhouse Egypt. Now these two pillars of Israeli security may be crumbling.

Turkish-Israeli relations frayed last year when Israeli commandos stormed a flotilla of ships from Turkey trying to reach the Gaza Strip in defiance of an Israeli naval blockade, killing nine. Turkey demanded an apology; Israel refused. Bonds between the two countries have ruptured further since. This month, Turkey expelled Israel’s ambassador and froze military co-operation with it. Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, says his country is committed to ending Israel’s blockade of Gaza and has pledged that Turkish warships would protect convoys of aid to the Palestinian territory. The “Turkish navy is prepared for every scenario—even the worst one,” he told an Egyptian newspaper.

Erdogan’s boast came as he toured the newly liberated Arab countries of Egypt, Libya and Tunisia. Erdogan received a hero’s welcome. Turkey is a rising power, and for aspirant democrats in the region it is a model. The Turkish prime minister repeatedly denounced Israel during his tour, comparing it to a spoiled child, while urging the Arab League to support a Palestinian bid for full membership in the United Nations.

Right place, right time, right party

Stephen Harper sent his regrets and a note, which was read to the 300-odd revellers the other night at the Coast Edmonton Plaza Hotel. “Special greetings to Ted Byfield and Preston Manning, who have done so much to inspire, inform and lead the conservative movement in Canada,” the Prime Minister’s note said.

The occasion was a “victory celebration” for a defunct magazine that never made anyone rich. The magazine was Alberta Report. Well, sometimes it had other titles, but we’ll stick with that one. Its founder was Ted Byfield, an irascible right-wing coot—I do not believe his friends would disagree with that description—and a mentor to dozens of journalists who went on to other roles, including this magazine’s Ken Whyte, Mark Stevenson and Colby Cosh.

But as I’ve said, the Report shut down in 2003. So what’s to celebrate? Power. “The West Is In,” the party invitations read. The reference was to the Harper Conservatives’ majority government. The dinner’s souvenir program promised a “national gala to reunite the original authors of Harper’s historic victory.”