Wednesday-Night

We are delighted that Anne Lagacé Dowson, the NDP candidate in our by-election will be joining us this Wednesday. As all of you who have not been hibernating (what would be the summer verson of hibernating?) in the woods, absent all forms of print and telecommunications news, the race in Westmount-Ville-Marie is […]

Feeding the future (IPS news round-up)
The World Bank Group’s New Deal on Global Food Policy

August 20
Enough food aid is once more pouring in to stave off serious famine; but it will not remedy Ethiopia’s deepening aid dependency and rural despair. With a smaller — because more mobile — landowning rural population, […]

17 August
Russia’s Arctic ambitions challenged
With rich oil and gas reserves at stake as the Arctic ice thins, US and Canadian ships are teaming up to conduct a seismic survey of the Beaufort seabed north of the Yukon-Alaska border
16 August 2008
Russia leads scramble for Arctic
(The Telegraph) With the polar icecaps melting, and oil prices at […]

August 16
New governor vows to boost security in Kandahar
Rahmatullah Raufi, a former general in the Afghan National Army, assumed the new post four months after a Canadian politician made a diplomatic gaffe by suggesting it was time for a change at the governor’s palace in order to fight political corruption in the south.
His predecessor, Assadullah […]

August 15, 2008
David Jones . Don’t kid yourselves, Canada
Citizen Special
Sometimes one wonders why a politician marches into a swamp clearly marked, “Here lie alligators.” Is it hubris — the conviction that water walking is not confined to Biblical characters? Is it an effort to float a lead balloon by someone confused as to whether lead […]

See also Wednesday Nights 1375 ; 1376 and 1378
August 15
Eurozone edges closer to recession
(FT) The eurozone moved closer to recession on Thursday after it emerged that the economy contracted in the second quarter for the first time since the launch of the euro.
The economy shrank by 0.2 per cent in the three months to June, […]

Wednesday Night’s West Wing holds its fifth session August 13th. Alexandra and James have set up a beautiful new website  for our Wednesday Night sibling and even better news, Alex will be with us next week!
Russia & Georgia
Media Scout had the best headline Opening Ceremonies, Open War for its daily roundup of Canadian media takes […]

See also: Candidates and Issues
August 13
A Cut-and-Paste Foreign Policy
By Joe Conason
(Truthdig) The discovery that John McCain’s remarks on Georgia were derived from
Wikipedia is, to put it politely, disturbing and even depressing-but not
surprising. Under the tutelage of the neoconservatives, who revealed their
superficial understanding of Iraq both before and after the invasion, he
favors bellicose grandstanding over […]

More from our West Wing
The “Wednesday Night Salon” series - west coast edition is going for its fifth monthly anniversary! As the new relationships are developing amongst all of these great Vancouverites, we are still enjoying the discovery period of new connections and degrees of separation unfolding at each event… Many […]

On the eve of the opening of the Beijing Olympics, we have some very special guests, along with the much-anticipated return of Cleo Paskal from her wanderings (who else do we know who covers the UK, Athens, Faroe Islands and India in what seems like a minute?). Cleo […]