Wednesday-Night

U.S. firm lays claim to ‘potentially vast’ Arctic oil resources
Randy Boswell, The Ottawa Citizen
Friday, March 21, 2008
A U.S.-based company that has controversially laid claim to nearly all of the Arctic Ocean’s undersea oil said yesterday that new geological data suggest a “potentially vast” petroleum resource of 400 billion barrels.
That figure is backed by a respected […]

21 March 2008
Are sovereign funds a threat?
The Bush administration somehow extracted promises from the governments of Singapore and Abu Dhabi (one of the United Arab Emirates) that they would not use their multi-billion-dollar investments in American companies for so-called “geopolitical goals.” So no, Abu Dhabi will not be trying to make Citigroup collapse in […]

March 21, 2008
Terms of Mulroney inquiry must be set by April 4
(CBC News) The Mulroney-Schreiber inquiry came one step closer to reality on Thursday, when the Prime Minister’s Office announced that a special adviser has until April 4 to set the parameters for the hearings.
David Johnston, the president of the University of Waterloo, has been […]

Rising temperatures will damage even strong economies and pose a global threat to security, top officials say.
Extreme climate conditions provoked by global warming could lead to “unprecedented” international security threats, with “serious security risks” even if climate change is contained within the European Union’s target of a temperature rise of 2°C above pre-industrial levels, […]

 
 How the blurring of the seasons is a harbinger of climate calamity

By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor
Thursday, 20 March 2008
(The Independent) Spring, which officially starts today, is starting to dissolve as a distinct season as climate change takes hold.
According to documented observations throughout 2007 and 2008, events in the natural world that […]

We had promised that Beryl would be with us last week to talk about the new publication, The MetropolitaIn, that he will launch next month. He was unavoidably detained, but assures us that he will be present tomorrow night.
As always, we have the U.S. presidential campaign on the Agenda and certainly this week we cannot […]

March 24
The War, The Media, and Ahmed Chalabi

As the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War is marked, and the 4,000th U.S. troop death is reported, an NBC News investigative producer is taking a look back at the man who aided the American cause for war.
In The Man Who Pushed America to War, NBC News investigative […]

There is now widespread scientific consensus that human-produced carbon emissions are contributing to global climate change. It may not be the only cause, and global feedback mechanisms (like the release of huge of the greenhouse gas methane from the melting permafrost) could be too far advanced to stop, but the political reality is that there […]

March 18, 2008
Westmount Examiner
By Martin C. Barry
If omens and the luck of the Irish have anything to do with election outcomes, the Conservatives’ Guy Dufort will be Westmount-Ville Marie’s next Member of Parliament.
Dufort’s nomination was confirmed during a riding association meeting at the Atwater Library on Monday afternoon, St. Patrick’s Day.
Dufort is a lawyer with […]

Jatropha curcus
Flickr/jurvetson
[BEIJING] Using China’s forests and ‘idle land’ to produce biofuels could pose a threat to biodiversity, warned experts at an international meeting.
Spike Millington, chief technical advisor to the European Union-China Biodiversity Programme, raised the problem earlier this month (7 March) at the International Workshop on Biodiversity and […]