Why doesn’t cutting the gas tax this summer make sense? It’s Econ 101 tax incidence theory: if the supply of a good is more or less unresponsive to the price, the price to consumers will always rise until the quantity demanded falls to match the quantity supplied. Cut taxes, and all that happens is that the pretax price rises by the same amount. The McCain gas tax plan is a giveaway to oil companies, disguised as a gift to consumers.

Is the supply of gasoline really fixed? For this coming summer, it is. Refineries normally run flat out in the summer, the season of peak driving. Any elasticity in the supply comes earlier in the year, when refiners decide how much to put in inventories. The McCain/Clinton gas tax proposal comes too late for that. So it’s Econ 101: the tax cut really goes to the oil companies.

When the summer is over, we will have increased our debt to China, increased our transfer of wealth to Saudi Arabia and increased our contribution to global warming for our kids to inherit.

. . .

The McCain-Clinton gas holiday proposal is a perfect example of what energy expert Peter Schwartz of Global Business Network describes as the true American energy policy today: “Maximize demand, minimize supply and buy the rest from the people who hate us the most.”

Hillary Clinton has now joined John McCain in proposing the most irresponsible policy idea of the year—an idea that actually could aid the terrorists. What's worse, both of them know that suspending the federal gas tax this summer is a terrible pander, and yet they're pushing it anyway for crass political advantage.

Clinton and McCain have learned a destructive lesson from the Bush era: as Bill Clinton said in 2002, it's better politically to be "strong and wrong" than thoughtful and right. The goal is to depict Barack Obama as an out-of-touch elitist. By any means necessary.

I could highlight a long debate among economists on suspending the gas tax, but there is no debate. Not one respectable economist—and not one environmentalist or foreign policy expert—supports the idea, unless they are official members of the Clinton or McCain campaigns (and even some of them privately oppose it). To relieve suffering at the pump, send another rebate check or provide tax credits or something else, but not this.

Nato has warned Russia that its recent troop build-up in Georgia's two breakaway regions undermines its neighbour's territorial integrity.

Russia's moves in Abkhazia and South Ossetia were raising tensions in the area, a Nato spokesman said.

Moscow has accused Georgia of preparing to invade Abkhazia, and says it is also boosting Russian peacekeeping forces there and in South Ossetia.

. . .

Russia has kept a peacekeeping force in Abkhazia and South Ossetia under an agreement made following the wars of the 1990s, when the regions broke away from Tbilisi and formed links with Moscow.

There are around 2,000 Russians posted in Abkhazia, and about 1,000 in South Ossetia.

Tensions between Russia and Georgia have flared up recently, despite Russia lifting economic sanctions against Georgia earlier this month.

Last week, Georgia accused a Russian plane of shooting down an unmanned Georgian spy plane - which Russian authorities insisted was shot down by Abkhaz rebels.

And on Tuesday, Georgia said it was blocking Russia's entry to the World Trade Organization.

The family of a Montreal man stranded in Sudan for five years because Canada's spy agency suspects he's a security threat denied that he's a terrorist as they made a public plea to the government Tuesday to help bring him home.

. . .

Abdelrazik, who was detained by Sudanese authorities while visiting his mother in 2003, has since been released from jail and has taken refuge in the Canadian Embassy in Khartoum. Abdelrazik, who is a dual citizen of Canada and Sudan, hasn't been charged with any crime in either country.

No way.
This guy makes me uneasy and sorry.but when we throw in the fact that they are muslims,I get nervous.
I have read a lot on that subject, and again sorry,but they hate us and our religions!
We are nothing more than dogs,even though they deny that little fact.
So why would we believe this guy?
I will trust the governments judgement on this one.
Dual citizenship is being used as tool to bop back and forth from one country to another and for what reasons?
Some explaining to do, and that doesn't seem to be happening.
How do these people afford to do that?
Where does the money come from?
Who is supporting the family?
He is out of Canada and I will assume the governments reasons are enough to keep him out.



(I'll wait for the breaking news when an Air Canada flight gets blown out of the sky...then you gutless whiners can complain about the horrible job CSIS is doing in the investigation).

He better not be on a flight with my family.



There is a reason why this man has been brought to Canada's security list. It doesn't matter what colour or race a person is. If Canada sees them as a threat, I think it's our right to refuse them entry. We have to keep our country safe and sound or Canada will end up like all the other unstable countries. If he was white, born in Canada and lived here all his life and he comes to the attention of our Country as a risk, DON'T LET HIM BACK IN.
Dont be getting all out of shape over my comment because it has nothing to do with race. I want to know my country is very serious about keeping us safe. Innocent or guilty? Why would someone's name keep popping up as a security threat if they are like you and me, a law abiding citizen!!



Also, I dont really feel any sympathy for someone who has suspected connections to Al Qaeda going back to Sudan (post 9/11) to "see his mother" and getting stranded there. If I were a muslim and in Canada with my family I wouldn't hop on a plane to go to visit Iran to "see my brother". It seems a bit suspicous even without CSIS weighing in on the manner and having the guy arrested.

Overall, times have changed. Accept it. Being able to fly on an airplane is not a human right.[ATTENTION ALL MUSLIMS! TRAVELING TO A MUSLIM COUNTRY TO VISIT FAMILY IS SUSPICIOUS! STAY HOME IF YOU KNOW WHAT'S GOOD FOR YOU! - ed]

Another item that concerns me is the way some posters automatically assume that if you are not supporting his return to Canada that you are a racist, or islamophobic, or whatever. I believe that our government has a reason for acting and responding in the way they are. I do not believe, for even a second, that somehow there is something sinister behind this. There are some things that are just non of our business at this time. I trust our government officials to do whatever is in their power to make things happen legally and diplomatically, but I do not except them to jump through hoops because some lawyer is spouting off.

If this is the same person and he cannot unequivocally dipute otherwise , I am positive I do want him living in Canada.

The insurgency in Afghanistan has not been "contained," Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell testified before a Senate subcommittee in February. "It's been sustained in the south, it's grown a bit in the east, and what we've seen are elements of it spread to the west and the north."

A recent study by Sami Kovanen, an analyst with the security firm Vigilant Strategic Services of Afghanistan, echoed this assessment. He reported 465 insurgent attacks in areas outside the restive southern regions during the first three months of 2008, a 35 percent increase compared with the same period last year. In the central region around Kabul there have been 80 insurgent attacks from January through March of this year, a 70 percent jump compared to the first three months of last year.

The numbers are part of a nationwide trend of rising violence. In the southern and southeastern provinces, including the insurgent hotbeds of Kandahar and Helmand, guerrilla attacks spiked by 40 percent, according to Mr. Kovanen's research.

Kabul itself has been largely free from the violence, but as Sunday's attack shows, there are signs that the Taliban's presence is growing here, too. On the sprawling, serene campus of Kabul University, where the nation sends many of its best and brightest, the Taliban has reached an unprecedented level of influence, students say.

The union, which released its letter to Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion on its website on Monday, said urgent net neutrality action is needed in light of recent moves by service providers, including Bell Canada Inc. and Rogers Communications Inc., to limit the speeds of certain internet applications. Dion was called on to take a "clear stand" in support of such legislation.

"These internet service providers are, with little or no public accountability, implementing measures that will discriminate against the use of legal software for legitimate uses. This is unacceptable," wrote NUPGE president James Clancy. "The potential for violations of the privacy rights of users is clear. The continued silence on these matters by the CRTC and the Canadian government violates the trust the Canadian people have placed in our public institutions."

Prentice had rebuffed earlier questioning by Angus in the House of Commons and said the Conservatives were not in favour of regulating the internet.

"We have a well advanced internet system in this country. It is not publicly regulated," he said in the exchange earlier this month. "At this point in time we will continue to leave the matter between consumers on the one hand and internet service providers on the other."

Broadband access is exactly the same. The US is getting its lunch eaten. As SaveTheInternet points out, they get access that is often 30x faster than the US. As a result they are experiencing innovation - and enjoying applications, that Americans simply don't get. As this WPost story says:

The speed advantage allows the Japanese to watch broadcast-quality, full-screen television over the Internet, an experience that mocks the grainy, wallet-size images Americans endure.

Ultra-high-speed applications are being rolled out for low-cost, high-definition teleconferencing, for telemedicine — which allows urban doctors to diagnose diseases from a distance — and for advanced telecommuting to help Japan meet its goal of doubling the number of people who work from home by 2010.

Oh, and all that speed - costs less too.

Now, ten years ago Japan had slower internet than the US. So they looked to the US to see how to do it - and they saw that the US had open access laws (where in the old days, companies could buy access to the lines at wholesale rates - which is why there was an ISP on every corner in the 90's) and decided they were key.

So they opened up broadband access - mandated that phone and cable lines had to be available to whoever wanted access. As SaveTheInternet points out:

If this quaint idea of “competition” seems familiar, that’s because America invented “open access” policies in the first place. And open access worked for decades to bring lower prices and more choices in long-distance phone service and dial-up Internet access.

The Japanese first adopted open access because they were worried about falling behind us. But under pressure from our own phone and cable monopolists, the Bush administration abandoned open access – and the fundamental protections for Net Neutrality along with it.

Now they’re standing idly by as America drops further and further behind the rest of the world in every measure of broadband progress.

Now here's the thing. What we're talking about is the Republican administration reducing competition. In a competitive market this wouldn't have happened. When you're dealing with a natural monopoly (and phone and cable lines are natural monopolies because driving more than one each to each home doesn't make sense) you have to legislate the market in such a way as to make sure competition exists. The free market can't do its thing if there isn't a market - and in most of the US there isn't a market. You have at best two possible suppliers. Often one. And in many areas - if you want "high" speed - none.

The modern "conservative" fallacy is that free markets means lack of government regulation. That isn't even close to what it means - what it means is a market with many actors, relatively transparent information, and no one actor or group with pricing power, whether through collusion or monopoly.

The use of drug-sniffing police dogs in the random search of a southwestern Ontario school and a Calgary bus terminal was unconstitutional, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled Friday.

In a 6-3 decision, the top court ruled that the actions breached Section 8 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which covers what constitutes reasonable search and seizure.

. . .

In Friday's ruling, the Supreme Court wrote that while "a warrantless sniffer-dog search is available where reasonable suspicion is demonstrated," in this case, "the dog‑sniff search was unreasonably undertaken because there was no proper justification."

The court wrote that students' backpacks "objectively command a measure of privacy."

"No doubt ordinary businessmen and businesswomen riding along on public transit or going up and down on elevators in office towers would be outraged at any suggestion that the contents of their briefcases could randomly be inspected by the police without 'reasonable suspicion' of illegality," the court wrote.

Karl Walsh, president of the Ontario Provincial Police Association, said he was disappointed by the decision and that the ruling will serve to decrease public safety.

He said officers who are in schools, train stations and bus terminals are there because of a drug problem.

"If you think we have a drug problem or had a drug problem then, we're going to have a big drug problem now," he told CBC News. "Where there are drugs, there are weapons, so essentially what's happened is the safety of our officers and the safety of the public have been placed in increased jeopardy."

The problem is not that Hillary Clinton is still in the race. She has every right to be. It is that she is running the kind of race that she is. Having failed to convince voters of the viability of her own candidacy, she is now committed to proving the unviability of his.

Hillary once said it takes a village to raise a child. Now she seems determined to destroy the village in order to save it.

Now, Clinton and Obama will inflict themselves on the voters of Indiana and North Carolina and continue to make themselves less attractive to the general electorate. Obama's weakness among working-class whites - glaringly exposed in Pennsylvania - raise questions about his viability in Rust Belt swing states. Clinton's incessant attacks may have helped her win Ohio and Pennsylvania, but they have come at a price - driving up her negatives in the national polls, broadening the perception that she is untrustworthy, and generally damaging her standing with independents who like McCain already.

And the longer Obama and Clinton battle, the more invested in victory - and resistant to unity - their partisans will become. Right now, as many as 25 percent are vowing to support McCain or stay home in November if their candidate is denied the nomination. Some of that is probably just angry talk, the kind that is cheap in April. I suspect we'll know more in June. If the primary season concludes with a scintilla of clarity, perhaps the fence-sitting superdelegates will tilt decisively and end this thing.

But if there is no clarity in June, and if (for example) Clinton spends the summer grasping and clawing at a wounded Obama, like the Terminator after its skin had been stripped and its legs blown off . . . well, we know what could happen at convention time, and beyond.

Democrats are probably in no mood to take advice from a founding Republican, but Abe Lincoln's famous warning to the nation seems apt at the moment. He said, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." And he would know. He was instrumental in consigning the fractious Whigs to the dustbin of history.

"After I had the nomination won and everything except the crowning at the convention, the other candidates that I had defeated in the primaries and the caucuses ganged up on me and spent the next month just bad mouthing me around the country," he said. "And, of course the Nixon people used some of the quotes and threw them back at me in the general election."

It is in this regard -- not necessarily his general election defeat -- that McGovern worries history could end up repeating itself. Noting that Obama seems poised to be the eventually nominee, though believing Sen. Hillary Clinton should stay in the race, he called for a more civil discourse between the two candidates.

. . .

This, however, is not the only similarity McGovern draws between his run for the White House and the current process. In '72, after he won the California primary and clinched the nomination, McGovern's Democratic opponents argued that the delegation should have been rewarded on a proportional basis, rather than winner-take-all. It was, McGovern says, a changing of the rules in mid-game that resulted both in the weakening of his campaign and his limping into the convention. Thirty-six years later, he sees parallels with the Clinton campaign's push to count the results of the non-DNC-sanctioned Florida and Michigan primaries.

"We can't overturn those rules now that the counting is over," he said. "I think Barack didn't even enter one contest [Michigan]. Those states knew what the rules were, all the candidates knew what the rules were, and to change it now I think is wrong."

It's electability, stupid.

That's what Hillary Clinton and her surrogates have been spinning to super-delegates and anyone else who will listen since she lost her grip on once-inevitable nomination.

There's just one problem – when it comes to independent voters, those crucial swing votes in swing states, Hillary doesn't hold the electability edge: Barack Obama does.

Independent voters favor Obama by a 2 to 1 margin over Hillary – 49% to 24% – according to a NBC/WSJ poll taken after the Jeremiah Wright scandal in late March. His approval rating among Republicans is almost twice Hillary's as well – 19% to 10%.

Crossover appeal is the key indicator of electability – especially for Democrats. Despite Democratic dominance of Congress during most of the 20th Century, no Democratic president managed to win more than 51% of the popular vote, with the exceptions of FDR and LBJ. What's the lesson? Democrats especially depend on Independent voters and even some centrist Republicans to win the White House.

That's true now more than ever: Independent voters are the fastest growing and largest segment of the American electorate, as detailed in former Clinton and Bloomberg pollster Doug Schoen's new book "Declaring Independence: The Beginning of the End of the Two-Party System."

Obama's Independent edge has already had an impact in key 2008 swing states like Virginia, where independents made up 22% of the February 12th open primary. Obama won their support by a 2 to 1 margin, on his way to a 64-35 blowout victory.

Going negative doesn't begin to describe what has happened. Hillary is going over the edge. Even worse are the flacks she sends before the cameras on her behalf, like that Kiki person, who smirks and shakes her head at the camera every time she fields a question. Or the real carnivores, like Howard Wolfson, Lanny Davis and James Carville, whose sneering smugness prevents countless women like my wife from considering Hillary at all.

To use the current terminology, Hillary people are bitter people, even more bitter than the white working-class voters Barack has talked about. Because they circle the wagons so tightly, they don't recognize how identical, self-reinforcing and out-of-touch they are.

To take just one example, the imagined association between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers will suffice. Hillary is blind to her own roots in the sixties. In one college speech she spoke of ecstatic transcendence; in another, she said, "Our social indictment has broadened. Where once we exposed the quality of life in the world of the South and the ghettos, now we condemn the quality of work in factories and corporations. Where once we assaulted the exploitation of man, now we decry the destruction of nature as well. How much long can we let corporations run us?"

She was in Chicago for three nights during the 1968 street confrontations. She chaired the 1970 Yale law school meeting where students voted to join a national student strike again an "unconscionable expansion of a war that should never have been waged." She was involved in the New Haven defense of Bobby Seale during his murder trial in 1970, as the lead scheduler of student monitors. She surely agreed with Yale president Kingman Brewster that a black revolutionary couldn't get a fair trial in America. She wrote that abused children were citizens with the same rights as their parents.

Most significantly in terms of her recent attacks on Barack, after Yale law school, Hillary went to work for the left-wing Bay Area law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, which specialized in Black Panthers and West Coast labor leaders prosecuted for being communists. Two of the firm's partners, according to Treuhaft, were communists and the two others "tolerated communists". Then she went on to Washington to help impeach Richard Nixon, whose career was built on smearing and destroying the careers of people through vague insinuations about their backgrounds and associates. (All these citations can be found in Carl Bernstein's sympathetic 2007 Clinton biography, A Woman in Charge.)

All these were honorable words and associations in my mind, but doesn't she see how the Hillary of today would accuse the Hillary of the sixties of associating with black revolutionaries who fought gun battles with police officers, and defending pro-communist lawyers who backed communists? Doesn't the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whom Hillary attacks today, represent the very essence of the black radicals Hillary was associating with in those days? And isn't the Hillary of today becoming the same kind of guilt-by-association insinuator as the Richard Nixon she worked to impeach?

It is as if Hillary Clinton is engaged in a toxic transmission onto Barack Obama of every outrageous insult and accusation ever inflicted on her by the American right over the decades. She is running against what she might have become. Too much politics dries the soul of the idealist.

Outmaneuvered by raucous Ron Paul supporters, Nevada Republican Party leaders abruptly shut down their state convention and now must resume the event to complete a list of 31 delegates to the GOP national convention.

Outnumbered supporters of expected Republican presidential nominee John McCain faced off Saturday against well-organized Paul supporters. A large share of the more than 1,300 state convention delegates enabled Paul supporters to get a rule change positioning them for more national convention delegate slots than expected.

"I've seen factions walk out. I've never seen a party walk out," said Jeff Greenspan, regional coordinator for the Paul campaign.

“…I think it's very clear who Hamas wants to be the next president of the United States,” said McCain. “So apparently has [Sandinista leader] Danny Ortega and several others. I think that people should understand that I will be Hamas's worst nightmare

. . .

McCain adviser Steve Schmidt told CNN's Dana Bash that the Hamas view was "a fair issue for the American people to ponder should he be the Democratic nominee for president."

“Hamas has said they want Barack Obama to win. The reason for that is his policy. He wants to negotiate with the terrorist-funding, nuclear-aspiring, holocaust-denying, Israel-threatening dictator of Iran.

. . . this way of looking at the world reveals a seriously flawed foreign policy outlook. Consider Saddam Hussein. He's a bad dude. And which American president is his worst nightmare? Well, it's George W. Bush. Thanks to Bush, Saddam got booted from power and killed. Compared to George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Dubya was a disaster for Saddam. But of course Dubya's Iraq policy has also been a disaster for the United States of America, whereas Clinton and Papa Bush ran policies that made us better off.

The polar bear has become an icon of global warming vulnerability, but a new study found an Arctic mammal that may be even more at risk to climate change: the narwhal.

The narwhal, a whale with a long spiral tusk that inspired the myth of the unicorn, edged out the polar bear for the ranking of most potentially vulnerable in a climate change risk analysis of Arctic marine mammals.

. . .

"What we wanted to do was look at the whole picture because there's been a lot of attention on polar bears," said study co-author Ian Stirling, a polar bear and seal specialist for the Canadian government. "We're talking about a whole ecosystem. We're talking about several different species that use ice extensively and are very vulnerable."

. . .

Stanford University biologist Terry Root, who wasn't part of the study, said the analysis reinforces her concern that the narwhal "is going to be one of the first to go extinct" from global warming despite their population size.

"There could a bazillion of them, but if the habitat or the things that they need are not going to be around, they're not going to make it," Root said.

Polar bears can adapt a bit to the changing Arctic climate, narwhals can't, she said.

. . .

The narwhal, which dives about 6,000 feet to feed on Greenland halibut, is the ultimate specialist, evolved specifically to live in small cracks in parts of the Arctic where it's 99 percent heavy ice, Laidre said. As the ice melts, not only is the narwhal habitat changed, predators such as killer whales will likely intrude more often.

"Since it's so restricted to the migration routes it takes, it's restricted to what it eats, it makes it more vulnerable to the loss of those things," Laidre said in a telephone interview from Greenland, where she is studying narwhals by airplane.

. . .

Inuit natives of Greenland were telling scientists last year that it seemed that the narwhal population was in trouble, Corell said.

Campaign finance records released this week show that a growing number of Clinton's early supporters migrated to Obama in March, after he achieved 11 straight victories. Of those who had previously made maximum contributions to Clinton, 73 wrote their first checks to Obama in March. The reverse was not true: Of those who had made large contributions to Obama last year, none wrote checks to Clinton in March.

"I think she is destroying the Democratic Party," said New York lawyer Daniel Berger, who had backed Clinton with the maximum allowable donation of $2,300. "That there's no way for her to win this election except by destroying [Obama], I just don't like it. So in my own little way, I'm trying to send her a message."

The message came in the form of a $2,300 contribution to Obama.

Donors are not the only ones who have made the leap. Gabriel Guerra-Mondragón served as an ambassador to Chile during Bill Clinton's presidency, considered himself a close friend of Sen. Clinton, and became a "Hill-raiser" by bringing in about $500,000 for her presidential bid.

But he had a fitful few weeks as the battle between Clinton and Obama turned increasingly negative. Last week, he decided he had seen enough.

"We're just bleeding each other out," Guerra-Mondragón said when asked why he had decided to join Obama's finance committee. "Looking at it as coldly as I can, I just don't see how Senator Clinton can overcome Senator Obama with delegates and popular votes. I want this fight to be over -- the quicker, the better."

The Obama converts include William Louis-Dreyfus. The billionaire New York financier said he had been impressed by Clinton's performance in the Senate and distressed by eight years of the Bush administration when he donated the maximum to her campaign last August. Then, he said, he began watching more closely.

"However much one might have supported the Clintons, or one might support the usual suspects in the Democratic Party, I began to believe Obama represents a new approach. He gives off such a sense of relevance that he's sort of irresistible," Louis-Dreyfus said.

He also expressed, as did other big givers who crossed to Obama, exasperation about the tone of the Clinton campaign and frustration with the candidate herself.

"At the end of the day, all she had to do was open her mouth for me not to believe her," Louis-Dreyfus said.

A new Rasmussen Pennsylvania poll finds Hillary Clinton still more likely than Barack Obama to beat John McCain in in November.

In the critical state of Pennsylvania, Rasmussen Reports in a poll released today that Hillary leads McCain by 5 points but McCain beats Obama by 1 point.

What a difference two weeks of intense campaigning can make. The final two weeks of campaigning in the Pennsylvania Primary may not have changed the outcome of the Democratic race, but it helped John McCain in the Keystone State.

Two weeks ago, in Pennsylvania, Hillary Clinton enjoyed a nine-point lead over McCain and Barack Obama had an eight-point edge over the Republican hopeful. Now, however, Clinton’s lead is down to five points and Obama trails McCain by a point.

. . .

McCain and Obama are each viewed favorably by 51% of the state’s voters, Clinton by 49%. For Obama, that’s a six-point decline over the past two weeks. Clinton’s numbers are down four points. McCain has gained a point during the same two week period.

Travellers flying with Air Canada are going to have to fork over a little more to bring a second suitcase, the airline announced Friday.

The Montreal-based airline said passengers with Tango and Tango Plus tickets bringing two bags on flights within Canada and to the U.S. will be charged a $25 fee on flights after July 15, 2008. Until now, Tango and Tango Plus allowed travellers to check two bags at no additional cost.

Jaded American insiders shrugged off the remark as typical campaign season bluster, filed away with myriad other exaggerations and gaffes.

But it prompted shock overseas as well as headlines from Bulgaria to New Zealand.

The statement triggered alarm bells in the Persian Gulf, which would likely suffer the consequences of any war between Iran and the U.S. In a harshly worded editorial, the Saudi-based daily Arab News trashed Clinton's comment today as insane:

If so, it cannot be assumed that Hillary Clinton as president would be less irrationally hawkish and more restrained in the unleashing of military force than John McCain. The latter, at least, has personal experience with the true, on-the-ground costs of militarism gone wild.

Israel has passed a message to Syria that it would withdraw from the Golan Heights in return for peace, according to a Syrian government minister.

The expatriates minister, Buthaina Shaaban, said the message had been passed on by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

. . .

Israeli authorities, for their part, have demanded that Syria abandon its support for Palestinian and Lebanese militant groups before any agreement.

The last peace talks between the two countries broke down in 2000.

A video taken inside a secret Syrian facility last summer convinced the Israeli government and the Bush administration that North Korea was helping to construct a reactor similar to one that produces plutonium for North Korea's nuclear arsenal, according to senior U.S. officials who said it would be shared with lawmakers today.

. . .

But beginning today, intelligence officials will tell members of the House and Senate intelligence, armed services and foreign relations committees that the Syrian facility was not yet fully operational and that there was no uranium for the reactor and no indication of fuel capability, according to U.S. officials and intelligence sources.

David Albright, president of Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) and a former U.N. weapons inspector, said the absence of such evidence warrants skepticism that the reactor was part of an active weapons program.

"The United States and Israel have not identified any Syrian plutonium separation facilities or nuclear weaponization facilities," he said. "The lack of any such facilities gives little confidence that the reactor is part of an active nuclear weapons program. The apparent lack of fuel, either imported or indigenously produced, also is curious and lowers confidence that Syria has a nuclear weapons program."

Barring a miracle, Clinton will win Pennsylvania, though probably not by the massive margin she needs, not that it will matter to her or her supporters. I also fully expect some variation of the “kitchen sink” fusillade in the closing days of the Pennsylvania campaign so that she can pad her victory by as much as possible. . . .

That means she stays in until at least the May 6 primaries in Indiana and North Carolina. NC appears solid for Obama. Indiana is less certain, but most polls favour Obama as well. (ed - actually, they're inconclusive at the moment, but I can expect Obama to pull his support up as he has everywhere else.) Obama takes another late-round flurry, but probably wins both, wiping out any gains Clinton made in Pennsylvania.

It would be nice if this decided the contest, but a look at the calendar shows that a week from these primaries is the one in West Virginia, which favours Clinton, and the week after that she has another solid state in Kentucky while Obama picks up Oregon. That only leaves Montana, South Dakota and Puerto Rico. Clinton shouldn’t have too hard a time convincing herself to carry on through all of them, continuing to complain about the Michigan and Florida primaries she once agreed were not to be counted all the while.

Basically, regardless how slim her chances get, it is pretty easy to see Hillary continuing to potshot Obama all the way to the convention in August, wearing both of them down to the point neither is capable of taking on McCain.

Nearly seven in 10 voters said Clinton has attacked Obama unfairly, and half said the same of Obama's campaign against Clinton. Those are the highest numbers saying the candidates have unjustly characterized each other since before Super Tuesday contests on Feb. 5, according to network exit polls conducted with voters as they left polling places.

Barely more than a third of Clinton voters in Pennsylvania said they would be happy with Obama atop the Democratic ticket; less than half of those backing Obama said they would be satisfied with Clinton as the one leading the challenge of Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the presumed GOP nominee.

Clinton voters also appear especially likely to say they will abandon the party if their candidate is not the nominee. Fifty-three percent of those voting for her yesterday said they would cast a ballot for Obama in a hypothetical November matchup against McCain. More than a quarter said they would vote for the Republican, and about two in 10 said they would not vote at all. More of those supporting Obama in the primary, 68 percent, said they would vote for Clinton over McCain in the fall, if that became their choice.

Osama bin Laden's chief deputy in an audiotape Tuesday accused Shiite Iran of trying to discredit the Sunni al-Qaida terror network by spreading the conspiracy theory that Israel was behind the Sept. 11 attacks.

. . .

Al-Zawahri accused Hezbollah's Al-Manar television of starting the rumor.

"The purpose of this lie is clear — (to suggest) that there are no heroes among the Sunnis who can hurt America as no else did in history. Iranian media snapped up this lie and repeated it," he said.

The comments reflected al-Qaida's No. 2 leader Ayman al-Zawahri's increasing criticism of Iran. Al-Zawahri has accused Iran in recent messages of seeking to extend its power in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq and through its Hezbollah allies in Lebanon.

. . .

"Iran's aim here is also clear — to cover up its involvement with America in invading the homes of Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq," he said.

Iran cooperated with the United States in the 2001 U.S. assault on Afghanistan that toppled al-Qaida's allies, the Taliban.

For the first time since the Spanish influenza of 1918, life expectancy is falling for a significant number of American women.

In nearly 1,000 counties that together are home to about 12 percent of the nation's women, life expectancy is now shorter than it was in the early 1980s, according to a study published today.

The downward trend is evident in places in the Deep South, Appalachia, the lower Midwest and in one county in Maine. It is not limited to one race or ethnicity but it is more common in rural and low-income areas. The most dramatic change occurred in two areas in southwestern Virginia (Radford City and Pulaski County), where women's life expectancy has decreased by more than five years since 1983.

The phenomenon appears to be not only new but distinctly American.

"If you look in Western Europe, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, we don't see this," Murray said.

Scientists studying the icy depths of the sea around Antarctica have detected changes in salinity that could have profound effects on the world's climate and ocean currents.

. . .

Voyage leader Steve Rintoul said his team found that salty, dense water that sinks near the edge of Antarctica to the bottom of the ocean about 5 km (3 miles) down was becoming fresher and more buoyant.

So-called Antarctic bottom water helps power the great ocean conveyor belt, a system of currents spanning the Southern, Pacific, Indian and Atlantic Oceans that shifts heat around the globe.

The average density of surface seawater is 1.025 grams per millilitre at 4 degrees Celsius. When compared to fresh water, with a density of 1.0 grams per millilitre at 4C, seawater is denser and heavier. That's an average of course, since the density of seawater varies around the planet.

Using SI units the mass density of surface seawater ranges from about 1020 to about 1029 kilograms per cubic meter. That depends on several fundamentals but the two most important factors are the surface temperature and the percentage of salinity. Generally speaking, surface seawater has a saline level of anywhere from 3.1 to 3.8 percent, (although in around areas which discharge fresh water it can be considerably lower.) The average salinity of surface seawater is about 3.5 percent or 35 practical salinity units (PSU).

I know, I'm probably boring you with all this, but stay with me a little longer and this might just get interesting. (If you find alarm bells interesting.)

Here's another factor. Deep seawater, because of the increased pressure, can achieve a density of 1050 kilograms per cubic meter.

We all know that cold air falls and warm air rises. The same occurs with water. And we all know that something dense will fall faster than something less dense occupying the same space. Fresh water is more buoyant than salt water so it would make sense that it floats nearer the surface. However, it's water. It mixes with the salt-water and changes the salinity thus the density. Add too much fresh water and reduce the density of the sinking salt water and the velocity at which it sinks is significantly reduced.

Now the nitty-gritty. The surface seawater around Antarctica hovers between 33.8 to 34.5 PSU. Because it's cold and relatively dense, it sinks. As it sinks it becomes even more dense and the rate of sink is accelerated. That movement displaces the water below it and causes the deeper waters to move, creating a current. A big current.

The same thing happens off Greenland in the North Atlantic. Simply put, between the Antarctic and Greenland movements of deep, dense, bottom salt water, they constitute the major natural engines which cause the ocean conveyor belt which drives the ocean currents.

Without those ocean currents the distribution of global heat would be completely altered and the world would experience total chaos. Not just a little bit either. It would be a complete global disaster.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice mocked anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr as a coward on Sunday, hours after the radical leader threatened to declare war unless U.S. and Iraqi forces end a military crackdown on his followers.

Rice, in the Iraqi capital to tout security gains and what she calls an emerging political consensus, said al-Sadr is content to issue threats and edicts from the safety of Iran, where he is studying. Al-Sadr heads an unruly militia that was the main target of an Iraqi government assault in the oil-rich city of Basra last month, and his future role as a spoiler is an open question.

"I know he's sitting in Iran," Rice said dismissively, when asked about al-Sadr's latest threat to lift a self-imposed cease-fire with government and U.S. forces. "I guess it's all-out war for anybody but him," Rice said. "I guess that's the message; his followers can go too their deaths and he's in Iran."

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

Many also shared with Mr. Bush’s national security team a belief that pessimistic war coverage broke the nation’s will to win in Vietnam, and there was a mutual resolve not to let that happen with this war.

This was a major theme, for example, with Paul E. Vallely, a Fox News analyst from 2001 to 2007. A retired Army general who had specialized in psychological warfare, Mr. Vallely co-authored a paper in 1980 that accused American news organizations of failing to defend the nation from “enemy” propaganda during Vietnam.

“We lost the war — not because we were outfought, but because we were out Psyoped,” he wrote. He urged a radically new approach to psychological operations in future wars — taking aim at not just foreign adversaries but domestic audiences, too. He called his approach “MindWar” — using network TV and radio to “strengthen our national will to victory.”.

A high-ranking labor supporter of Hillary Clinton is distributing to union leaders and to Democratic strategists a document detailing the radical activities of Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, two former members of the '70s group the Weather Underground, who decades later, in Chicago, crossed paths with Barack Obama.

The document - a three-page emailed essay by Rick Sloan, communications director for the International Association of Machinists as Aerospace Workers (IAMAW) -- takes both literary and political license to outline what Sloan believes would be the thrust of a hypothetical Republican campaign against Obama focusing on his tangential connection to Ayers and Dohrn.

The goal of the essay appears to be to discredit Obama as the prospective Democratic presidential nominee.

The Democrats are doing everything they can to blow this presidential election. This is a skill that comes naturally to the party. There is no such thing as a can’t-miss year for the Democrats. They are truly gifted at finding ways to lose.

. . .

That’s been it for the party for the past 40 years. The Democrats have become so psychologically battered by these many decades in the leadership wilderness that they consider the Clinton years, during which the president was impeached and they lost control of both houses of Congress, to have been a period of triumph.

Now comes 2008, a can’t-lose year if there ever was one. A united Democratic Party should be able to win this election in a walk. The economy is terrible and getting worse. The Republicans are demoralized. John McCain is no J.F.K. And the country wants to elect a Democrat.

So what are the Democrats doing? The Clintons are running around with flamethrowers, gleefully trying to incinerate the prospects of the party’s leading candidate, Barack Obama. As Bill Clinton put it last month: “If a politician doesn’t want to get beat up, he shouldn’t run for office.”

. . .

Voters across the country seem disgusted with this state of affairs. George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson of ABC News are being pilloried for the way they conducted Wednesday’s debate. Hillary Clinton’s disapproval ratings have climbed into a zone that makes it legitimate to wonder whether she could defeat Senator McCain. And much of the excitement and enthusiasm surrounding Mr. Obama’s candidacy has cooled.

That raucous laughter you hear in the background is coming from the likes of Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, President Bush and Senator McCain. They can’t believe their good fortune.

Whether or not it is reasonable, we are letting things get to us, and that can be bad news on the health front. Anger puts people at high risk for cardiovascular disease, the No. 1 cause of death in Canada.

For men, bottling it up makes it even worse. Males can reduce the risk of stroke and coronary heart disease by letting out their anger, according to a 2003 Harvard study.

Researchers tracked 23,500 male health care professionals, age 50 to 85, with no previous record of cardiovascular disease for two years. They found that the men who suppressed their anger were twice as likely to suffer strokes and heart attacks as men who expressed anger at moderate levels.

Women also benefit from venting but only if they do it once in a while. Women who usually suppress their anger recover their blood pressure more quickly after venting than those who usually express it, according to a 1992 study by Canadian researchers Josanna Lai and Wolfgang Linden.

Iran is installing vending machines in Tehran to sell cheap condoms and syringes to drug addicts to prevent the spread of AIDS and hepatitis, an official said on Wednesday.

"Five of these machines which have been made will be installed in five of Tehran city's welfare shelters for addicts," the deputy head of Iran's anti-narcotics organization, Mohammad Reza Jahani, said.

"Condoms, syringes, bandages and plasters will be easily accessible just by inserting a coin. This protects addicts from acquiring AIDS and hepatitis," he added, according to the semi-official Fars news agency.

He said that a single 500 rial (five cents) coin is required to purchase the items.

. . .

Condoms are freely available in Iranian pharmacies.

The Islamic republic in the 1990s started actively promoting contraception as it encouraged families to have just two children to prevent the country's population growth increasing further.

Iran has tried to change its approach to drug addicts by treating users as "people who need help" rather than throwing them into already overcrowded jails.

In both the laptop and desktop showdowns, Apple’s computers were the winners. Oddly, the big difference didn’t come in our user ratings, where we expected the famously friendly Mac interface to shine. Our respondents liked the look and feel of both operating systems but had a slight preference toward OS X. In our speed trials, however, Leopard OS trounced Vista in all-important tasks such as boot-up, shutdown and program-launch times. We even tested Vista on the Macs using Apple’s platform-switching Boot Camp software—and found that both Apple computers ran Vista faster than our PCs did.

. . . Our biggest surprise, however, was that PCs were not the relative bargains we expected them to be. The Asus M51sr costs the same as a MacBook, while the Gateway One actually costs $300 more than an iMac. That means for the price of the Gateway you could buy an iMac, boost its hard drive to match the Gateway’s, purchase a copy of Vista to boot—and still save $100.

Windows is "collapsing" and Microsoft Corp. must make radical changes to the way it does business if it wants to remain viable, according to a pair of Gartner analysts.

. . .

The Redmond, Wash.-based software behemoth is being dragged down by nearly two decades of legacy code, which has made it impossible for it to quickly design a new version of Windows that has any meaningful improvements. That is primarily why computer users have been so slow to voluntarily adopt Windows Vista, Silver and MacDonald said.

"This is a large part of the reason Windows Vista delivered primarily incremental improvements," they said at a Gartner-sponsored conference in Las Vegas. "Most users do not understand the benefits of Windows Vista or do not see Vista as being better enough than Windows XP to make incurring the cost and pain of migration worthwhile."

. . .

"Apple introduced its iPhone running OS X, but Microsoft requires a different product on handhelds because Windows Vista is too large, which makes application development, support and the user experience all more difficult," they said. "Windows as we know it must be replaced."

Once labelled Canada's first homegrown, Islamist terror plot, the case of the so-called Toronto 18 is quietly melting away.

With yesterday's decision to stay charges against four more of those that it had once labelled dangerous terrorists, the federal government is now admitting that it never had a serious case against almost half of the men and youths charged two years ago.

So far, the Crown has stayed charges against seven of the 18 Toronto-area Muslim males. While technically, that means it could re-lay charges within a year, legal experts call such a move unlikely.

. . .

But what is becoming clear from material that can be revealed is that the alleged plot was never quite as advertised.

Back in June 2006, the overriding sentiment in government and media was that a dangerous attack had been narrowly avoided. The allegations – that Canadian Muslim extremists were planning to behead Prime Minister Stephen Harper, seize MPs and blow up the CBC – seemed unbelievable. But in a post-9/11 world, the unbelievable had, for many, a ring of truth.

Other elements of the government's case did not stand up well under scrutiny. The alleged terror training camp turned out to be a hapless adventure in the rain, one where participants spent much of their time in a local doughnut shop and where the ammunition for target practice was apparently provided by one of two paid RCMP informers.

As for the alleged plot to behead Harper, it was apparently derailed because the plotters didn't know how to get to Parliament Hill.

Nor, it seems (according to material released by the Crown), were they exactly sure who the Prime Minister was.

A defence factum filed with the court suggests only two suspects and police informant Mubin Shaikh knew the true purpose of the so-called training camp, which was to "identify people of skill, physical and spiritual," and not to conduct training.

According to court documents released last month, an alleged terrorist accused of wanting to behead Prime Minister Stephen Harper was lured to the camp on the assumption he was doing some winter camping and was frequently sent on coffee runs to Tim Hortons.

Coming at a time when Parliament was reviewing the 2002 anti-terror law, the arrests bolstered the arguments of those who wanted the more draconian aspects of that legislation kept in place.

“I’m friendly with Tom Coburn too, and he’s a far-right conservative who thinks we ought to use the death penalty on abortion providers. Do you want me to apologize for what he said too?”

I'm no leftwing blogger, but I can only imagine how furious they must be with the debate so far. Nothing on any issues. Just a lot of box-checking on how the candidates will respond to various Republican talking points come the fall. Now I think a lot of those Republican talking points are valid and legitimate. But if I were a "fighting Dem" who thinks all of these topics are despicable distractions from the "real issues," I would find this debate to be nothing but Republican water-carrying.

What if she instead starts attacking McCain and making the case that she is better able to run as a true Democrat against McCain’s strengths and weaknesses than Obama can? What if she draws the contrast with Obama not with personal or character attacks, but with direct arguments that she is a better advocate for progressive causes and concerns against McCain on issues such as the economy, health care, protecting Social Security, tax fairness, the Supreme Court, energy independence, and the environment? In other words, what if she runs more as a Democrat than he does?