Former Governor-General Clarkson says Canada has redefined citizenship

Adrienne Clarkson is a former governor-general and is co-chair of the Institute for Canadian Citizenship. She came to Canada in 1942 as a young child with her family, who left Hong Kong as refugees. Ms. Clarkson is delivering this year’s Massey Lectures, broadcast on CBC Radio and published by House of Anansi Press.

The title of your lecture series is Belonging: The Paradox of Citizenship. What does that mean?

In other countries, citizenship in the traditional sense is a label of expectations imposed on the person who becomes a citizen. We allow people to become what they are. We don’t say you’re going to fit in to an idea of “the citizen.” In effect we have redefined what citizenship is. We are a country of people who have come from all sorts of places with different experiences, what I call, borrowing from [Canadian literary critic] Malcolm Ross, ‘the impossible sum of our traditions,’ and that is what makes us different and special.

This Illustration Of Ebola Coverage Shows How Problematic Media Reports Can Be

The first Ebola patient to be diagnosed in the U.S. died Wednesday. Three days earlier, government health officials in Sierra Leone reported 121 Ebola deaths in a single day. But Western media made little mention of the latter.

A new illustration from frequent Vanity Fair contributor André Carrilho puts that into perspective.

Until American doctors treating patients with Ebola in West Africa were diagnosed with the disease, the current Ebola outbreak has been largely faceless, mainly about statistics and if and when the virus would spread to American soil.

Islamic State Has Taken a Third of Strategic Kobani in Syria but Lost Tuz Khurmato in Iraq

al-Khalij [The Gulf] (Sharjah, UAE) reports that the Syrian Human Rights Observatory says ISIL fighters are now in one third of the Syrian Kurdish city of Kobane (`Ayn al-`Arab).  The radical fundamentalists have advanced into the besieged city despite a new round of US and other bombings on its outskirts.  In contrast to reports that ISIL more or less has taken control of the town of (in good days) 50,000, the US maintains that Kurdish fighters are still in control of the bulk of the city.

In Iraq, the Kurdish Peshmerga militia coordinated with the Iraqi army to retake the largely Turkmen district of Tuz Khurmato, including dozens of villages.

The Peshmerga and the Iraqi army now have their sights on Tikrit, a Sunni Arab city north of Baghdad.  That would be the fourth major campaign against ISIL there; all have so far failed.


Rumors are flying in Iraq that ISIL may make a play for Kirkuk, a disputed oil city in the province of the same name, now in the hands of the Kurdish Peashmerga.
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Original Article
Source: truthdig.com/
Author: Juan Cole

BC's Sinister Drive to Recruit More Gamblers

I shouldn't have been surprised when the credit card machine at the liquor store asked if I wanted to buy some lottery tickets with my cheap white wine.

The provincial government has annual targets for recruiting new gamblers and increasing people's losses.

Luring shoppers into an impulse buy at the government liquor store is just one small part of the strategy to create more, bigger losers. The same week, an ad in the Times Colonist announced the only casino in the capital region had applied for a new liquor licence. The Great Canadian Gaming casino has been allowed to serve alcohol to a maximum 132 people. Now it wants to serve drinks to up to 1,577 people, so gamblers can knock back a few cocktails as they pump money into the casino's 565 VLTs.

Can Boris Johnson really go from self-styled joke to prime minister?

'Why don’t we just write the piece collaboratively?’ Boris Johnson says when we sit down to begin this interview. ‘The Mayor, predictably, was late. He stammered out an unconvincing excuse about the cares of his day job. And then professed not to know much about the subject upon which he’d agreed to be interviewed.’

‘Although,’ I chip in, ‘he refused to say what he’d been doing for that hour.’

‘Secret,’ Boris says, not dictating now. ‘I can’t tell you for security reasons.’

I go on. ‘He did say, however, that his job was going incredibly well…’

‘It is.’

… and that he was ploughing on towards the prime ministership.’

‘Er, no,’ Boris says.

It’s true. He didn’t say that. I knew the collaborative thing wouldn’t work.

The Holder of Secrets

From the garden terrace of a sixth-floor walkup on a quiet Berlin street, there was a clear view to the TV Tower, in Alexanderplatz. The tower, completed by the East Germans in 1969, once served as the biggest symbol of a regime that maintained its power by spying relentlessly on its citizens. It’s now a piece of harmless Cold War kitsch—a soaring concrete column with a shiny top resembling a disco ball. On the front door of the apartment somebody had affixed a sticker that mimicked the visual style of the “Hope” campaign poster for Barack Obama, with the words “Ein Bett für Snowden” (“A Bed for Snowden”) next to the face of the world’s most famous fugitive. The sticker was part of a movement advocating that Edward Snowden, who is living in exile in Russia, be given political asylum in Germany. The apartment’s interior had been turned into a film studio, where Laura Poitras—the maker of documentaries who, last year, helped Snowden leak documents exposing the fact that the National Security Agency collects huge amounts of data on United States citizens—was in the final days of a three-year project about surveillance in America.

The Rise of the New, Liberal Islamophobia

The recent television kerfuffle involving “Real Time” host Bill Maher and guest Sam Harris over whether Muslims are bad people because their religion is, in the words of Harris, “the mother lode of bad ideas,” is symbolic of the new American Islamophobia.

Muslim-bashing has become a popular sport several times over the last decade and a half, most notably in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks; after the election of Barack Obama; over the proposal for the so-called Ground Zero mosque; and now with the rise of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. But this time, it’s not just members of the extreme right, such as Rep. Michele Bachmann and presidential wannabe Herman Cain, equating Islam with terrorism.

Why France's Former Enviro Minister Said 'No' To Canada’s Oil Lobby

Corinne Lepage is used to standing up to big oil companies. In 1978, an oil tanker operated by the U.S. company Amoco spilled 69 million gallons of oil off the coast of Brittany, France. Over six times bigger than the Exxon Valdez disaster, it was one of the largest oil spills in human history. Lepage was a young lawyer at the time, and for the next 12 years she battled Amoco in court, eventually winning $85.2 million in damages, and setting a legal precedent for victims of pollution.

So when Lepage -- who's since served two years as France's Environment Minister, attended five international climate talks, and just ended one term as a member of the European Parliament -- was recently lobbied by Canadian ambassador Ross Hornby on behalf of Alberta's oil sands, she stood her ground. Hornby tried to persuade Lepage that the oil sands were no worse for the climate than other fuel sources. "My position was 'no,'" Lepage told The Tyee in an interview from France.

Why Does China Get To Renege on Its Promise of Democracy in Hong Kong?

I was in Hong Kong in July 1997 when Britain transferred its sovereignty to China in return for promises to slowly democratize the former colony. There was excitement in the air, and gigantic fireworks displays for two evenings. But the anxiety was palpable the day after celebrations when we all woke up to Chinese tanks and troops positioned along several main thoroughfares.

The show of force sent a message and launched speculation as to whether China would keep its grand promises.

Now we know.

U.S.-led air war in Syria is off to a difficult start

REYHANLI, Turkey — The U.S.-led air war in Syria has gotten off to a rocky start, with even the Syrian rebel groups closest to the United States turning against it, U.S. ally Turkey refusing to contribute and the plight of a beleaguered Kurdish town exposing the limitations of the strategy.

U.S. officials caution that the strikes are just the beginning of a broader strategy that could take years to carry out. But the anger that the attacks have stirred risks undermining the effort, analysts and rebels say.