Calgary Herald
Man says Diefenbaker's brain could prove paternity
By Derek Abma, Postmedia News February 6, 2012


    Photograph by: Aaron Lynett,
    George Dryden  National Post is shown in a January 2011 file photo.

Dryden, who was raised by a prominent Liberal, believes he is the son of former Conservative prime minister John Diefenbaker.

The man who says he could be John Diefenbaker's son says he has some new leads that might prove his case, including a tip that the former prime minister's brain is preserved somewhere.

John George Dryden, a 43-year-old Toronto legal consultant, recently hit a road block in efforts to determine who his father is when the Diefenbaker Canada Centre in Saskatoon was unable to retrieve a reliable sample of the former prime minister's DNA from some of the objects he once possessed, such as a pipe, hats and watch strap.
However, Dryden said he received a call from a man in Western Canada who has a relative who was a medical professional participating in an autopsy that saw Diefenbaker's brain removed and stored.
"We checked him out," Dryden said of the person who called. "The guy's for real, a professional person, not a nutcase by any means."
Dryden's focus on Diefenbaker as his possible father started after learning last June that the person he thought was his father, Gordon Dryden, was not. He says his mother, Mary Lou Dryden, had an affair with Diefenbaker about four decades ago. The Toronto man's appearance has also been likened to Diefenbaker, who was the Conservative prime minister from 1957 to 1963 and died in 1979.
As well, Dryden said he heard from a woman who claims to be the illegitimate daughter of Diefenbaker. The woman, he said, also happens to be a professional in the adoption sector and was approached in 1977 by an RCMP officer worried about the potential of news getting out that Diefenbaker was father to a nine-year-old boy.
"I was the nine-year-old boy because I had just met Diefenbaker in '77 up on the Hill with my mom when I was nine," he said. "Among the few things he said was, 'you were named for me.' So I guess he took a look at me and got kind of concerned."
Dryden also said he's been called by a Utah-based company that claims to develop advanced technology for collecting DNA, which he says could prove to be more successful in retrieving a match between him and Canada's 13th prime minister.
The Toronto man said he's not looking for any money in his pursuit, only the truth.
"I'm just looking to find out who my father is, period."
dabma@postmedia.com

 

Tens of thousands rally for a Russia without Putin
CTVNews.ca Staff
Sat Feb 04, 11:39 AM
Demonstrators braving a bitter frost march during a massive protest against Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's rule in Moscow, Saturday, Feb. 4, 2012. (AP / Ivan Sekretarev)

Where did the picture go? Hackers at work?


Tens of thousands of Russian protesters braved bone-chilling temperatures on Saturday as they swept into Moscow, rallying against Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's rule.
"So many of us have come that they can't arrest all of us," said 56-year-old demonstrator Alexander Zelensky as he marched with his wife.
Organizers estimate 120,000 protesters attended the rally intended to be a show of force against the prospect of Putin further extending his 12 years in office.
Many pollsters anticipate the Russian PM will win the nation's March 4th election, in spite of Putin himself acknowledging last week that he could face a runoff.
Still, those who flooded into Moscow on Saturday wearing ribbons and holdings placards reading "Russia Without Putin!" assert that six more years under his rule would be six years too many.
Zelensky's wife Alyona Karimova said she hopes the mounting opposition against Putin is a sign that Russia is edging towards a different style of governance.
"This is going to be a gradual process, but we believe it will eventually lead to democracy and free elections," she said.
Even with its large numbers, the rally remained peaceful and represented a fairly wide swath of the Russian public, noted The New York Times' Moscow Bureau reporter Michael Schwirtz.
"There was a huge column of communists, a huge column of nationalists, people representing various Liberal parties, gay and lesbian groups," he told CTV News Channel on Saturday, adding that many of the attendees were well-to-do Muscovites.
Officials did agree to authorize Saturday's protest, which comes on the heels of two similar rallies which are believed to be the biggest in Russia since protests 20 years ago that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
"Certainly they got their message heard," said Schwirtz.
He added that government-run media have broadcast previous protests with a "pretty objective view."
December's protests occurred after allegations of election fraud in favour of Putin's party plagued that month's parliamentary election.
For his part, Putin has ignored requests for a do-over.
Anti-Putin sentiment was also strong in St. Petersburg on Saturday, the site of a smaller protest which drew a smaller crowd of about 5,000. Dozens of cities across Russia held similar events.
"There are more protests planned," Schwirtz said in a telephone interview from Moscow. "As far as we know the next major protest is planned for March 5th."
Back in Russia's capital, many demonstrators bundled up in fur on Saturday as the temperature dipped as low as - 20 C.
Across town, Putin's backers gathered for a rally of their own, which drew about 15,000 people. Several of the supporters including union activists and teachers said they showed up willingly while others admitted they had been asked to attend.
Putin is squaring off against three other competitors in the presidential race. All but one of his opponents have run against him in the past.
Election newcomer Mikhail Prokhorov is the billionaire owner of the New Jersey Nets basketball team. He joined Saturday's protest but didn't make any speeches.

With files from The Associated Press

What's With Harper???????
Do we really want him playing around with our Old Age Security.

Parkland in the Media: Op-eds
Harper must get fired up to deal with fuel shortage
The Edmonton Journal
January 26, 2012

Lack of contingency plans for likely international oil crisis will leave Canada in the cold

By Gordon Laxer

Smallpox is a scary disease. It kills a fifth of those infected, and scars and blinds many survivors. Canada has been smallpox free since 1962 and the world since 1977. But, Canada has a smallpox contingency plan. So does Britain. The chances of a smallpox outbreak are remote, but I am happy to pay taxes so Canada can employ people to fight its return. That's what governments are for.

Canada stands on guard for just about every other imaginable disaster too. Click onto Public Health Canada's "Get Prepared," and you find detailed advice and plans on a long list of emergencies. But there is one glaring omission. Canada has no plan to deal with an international oil shortage even though one is almost certain to hit soon.

Just think about Iran closing the strait of Hormuz after a U.S. attack - 40 per cent of ocean-bound oil shut in at one blow. Canadians, who face special conditions of long cold winters, would be immediately affected. Some could even freeze in the dark.

This country imports half its oil, and a growing portion comes from OPEC countries. We are as dependent on Middle East oil as the U.S., yet have no plan to direct domestic oil to Canadians. Canada is the only country in the 27-member International Energy Agency without strategic petroleum reserves.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper's reply to Peter Mansbridge in a Jan. 16 interview reveals why Canada has no oil plan. He doesn't believe in one. Mansbridge asked, "Does it not seem odd that we're moving oil out of Western Canada to either U.S. or new markets to Asia when a good chunk of Canada itself doesn't have domestic oil?"

Harper replied that "on a certain level it does seem odd," but that "the fundamental basis of our energy policy is market-driven." He added that "we're the only supplier that is secure."

Secure sure, but for whom? Canada promises the United States oil security. The U.S. has its own energy security and independence plan which includes giant strategic petroleum re-serves in salt caves on the Gulf coast. If Canada is looking after U.S. oil security, and the U.S. is looking after its own oil security, who is looking after Canadians?

"We don't dictate (that) pipelines go here or there," Harper said. That's the problem. Enbridge's Line 9 used to take western Canadian oil to Montreal. Ottawa allowed the line to be reversed in 1999 so that instead of supplying western Quebec with domestic oil, the pipeline now brings imported oil into Ontario.

Proposals are afoot to re-reverse Line 9 to ship domestic oil to Montreal again. It sounds good, but only a small portion would remain in Canada. Most would flow on to Portland, Maine. to be sent anywhere. Ottawa has the power to decide that all of that oil remain in Canada. (And let me make clear: only Canadian conventional oil please. Alberta's oilsands release too many greenhouse gases.)

The federal government gives no directives that Newfoundland oil go first to Atlantic Canadians. Instead most is exported and Atlantic Canada imports more than 80 per cent of its supply. This may make sense for big corporate oil, but doesn't make sense for Atlantic Canadians. Canada is the only International Energy Agency country that takes a pure corporate market stance. The other 26 members treat oil as a security issue. "Security trumps trade" - Hillary Clinton's catchphrase after 9/11 - captures the oil issue well. It means government actions take precedence over markets to ensure that oil, the lifeblood of modern societies, flows uninterrupted. Despite its oil abundance, Canada is the most insecure IEA member. In place of Harper's "laissez-faire, don't-care" ideology, Canada would do well to copy the U.S. "energy security and energy independence" plan. Put Canadians first.

The IEA was set up in the 1970s to counteract the threat of the OPEC oil cartel to the industrial countries. The Paris-based agency requires that all its members have strategic petroleum reserves to deal with international oil-supply crises. It exempts net oil exporters on the assumption that its few members who are net oil exporters will supply their own people first, before exporting. Norway does this. Canada does not. Mr. Harper explained to Peter Mansbridge why.

Harper is abdicating as prime minister, and talks as if he is the CEO of an oil transnational. He says Iran scares him, but refuses to bring in a plan to protect eastern Canadians. Let the market do it. Mr. Harper's shirking of responsibility recklessly plays with Canadians' economic and even physical security. Ambulances, hospitals and fire trucks don't work without oil. Nor do the furnaces of people who heat their homes with oil, as half of Atlantic Canadians do.

CEOs of oil corporations must by law deliver profits to their shareholders. They are not charged with providing for people during international oil shortages. That's the responsibility of prime ministers. When will Stephen Harper stop thinking as an oil CEO and start acting like he is prime minister of Canada?

Gordon Laxer is a political economy professor, and the founding director and former head of Parkland Institute at the University of Alberta.

© Copyright (c) The Edmonton Journal

Welcome To the Bloggers in Russia

Good to see people from Russia are following on the blog.
Hope to hear some comments from you soon.
Cheers

Power Struggle Over Afghanistan

Former UN envoy says if negative trends are not reversed through better coordination, Afghanistan faces civil war.

Last Modified: 18 Jan 2012 12:43

On March 6, 2010, I boarded my last flight out of the Afghan capital as the UN envoy.
Two years had passed since my arrival in Kabul. At that time the most urgent task had been to bring some order to a chaotic international engagement in Afghanistan. I had arrived with hopes of being able to make a difference and help shape a strategy that could finally work. Now I was tired and bitter: tired from two dramatic years of a constantly worsening security situation, political disagreements and personal rivalries, as well as the media attention that followed it all; bitter from the strong feeling that I had not achieved what I had come to achieve.

The previous day, I had said farewell to President Karzai during a small ceremony in his palace. Our relationship had been close and friendly for almost two years. The farewell ceremony had been a rather formal event. Karzai was disappointed in me because he believed I had not stood up strongly enough against the United States and other foreigners who had interfered so blatantly in the presidential elections. And I was disappointed in him because he had become more dependent on the warlords and powerbrokers that had destroyed Afghanistan in the past, and should not be allowed to contaminate its future.

But the most important reason for my bitterness was my ever-growing disagreement with Washington's policy towards Afghanistan, which was increasingly dominated by military strategies, forces, and offensives. Urgent civilian and political requirements were treated as appendices to the military tasks. The UN had never been really involved or consulted by Washington on critical strategy-related questions, nor had even the closest NATO partners. More importantly, Afghan authorities had mostly been spectators to the formation of a strategy aimed at solving the conflict in their own country.
During a visit to Washington shortly after the Obama administration had taken over, one of the senior ministers of Karzai's government sent me a text message.
"Neocolonialism," it read. That was all. In my opinion, the US strategy was doomed to fail.

Narrow outlook

As my plane circled over Kabul, gaining altitude before flying over the mountains that surround the city, I looked down on the capital for the last time. Kabul had become a fortified city with a constant proliferation of concrete walls, sand bags, barbed wire, road- blocks, security checks, bomb-sniffing dogs, and speed bumps. The city I was leaving was very different from the one in which I had walked freely around during my first visit in September 2003. As a result of the worsening security situation, the ability of the UN and other civilian organisations to operate across the country had become severely limited.

I have long been fascinated by Afghanistan's beauty and by its people, and I have missed them both every day since I left the country. During my many flights around the country, I used to look out of the window to see how much snow had fallen on the mountain ranges and to see the colour of the ground beneath me. Would the crops be sufficient this season? Would there be more food shortages, or would there be floods? Would we reach vulnerable areas with emergency aid in time?

On a helicopter trip over the central Bamiyan province, I could see a man and a woman with their donkey, high up on a mountain ridge. We flew almost close enough to see their faces, and still the distance between us felt indescribable. Voter registration for the presidential and provincial elections was taking place and my days were filled with challenges related to the election process. The two people below me had far more important concerns than how they would get their registration documents. We lived so close to each other, but we existed in two very different worlds.

In so many meetings with foreign dignitaries, I had to come back to some basic facts to illustrate the challenges we were facing. Afghanistan is a country with weak and sometimes non-existent institutions. Its infrastructure is so poor that 3,000 donkeys were hired to bring election material to remote parts of the country during the 2009 elections. The illiteracy rate is still around 70 per cent, and in remote villages, it can be hard to find anybody who can read or write. Afghanistan lacks the middle class that is required for sustainable development to take place quickly. A significant part of the country is engulfed in an armed conflict. All of this combined makes rapid progress impossible.

Yet, we have been eager to set deadlines that would permit us to withdraw our international engagement and declare success. As a result of our inability to understand the country and therefore to formulate workable strategies, support for our engagement in Afghanistan has declined. We are trapped between an impatient public and a growing insurgency in a country where quick fixes do not exist.

We have become impatient and so have the Afghans. Dr Sima Samar, the leader of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), wrote to me in late 2010 that the Afghan people are losing hope. More than a year later, they have little hope left. So many sacrifices have been made in terms of lives and suffering; yet, a solution to the conflict seems to have slipped even further away.

My two years as UN envoy were - at that time - the two most dramatic years since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. Since leaving my post, I have argued that if the existing negative trends could not be reversed, they would become unmanageable and it could be too late. Today, the negative trends seem to continue.

Certainly, the additional 60,000 international troops - an astonishing number - that arrived in Afghanistan since President Obama was inaugurated have stemmed the growth of the insurgency in some parts of the country. But the Taliban has not been defeated, not even significantly degraded. Afghanistan is going through a period of profound uncertainty.

The tension between Karzai and key partners in the international community has increased. The conflict between the government and the National Assembly led to a political standstill, threatening the entire political system. The friction between Afghanistan's ethnic groups has intensified. And efforts to bring the Taliban into political talks have not brought tangible results, but experienced a damaging blow when the Chairman of the High Peace Council, Burhanuddin Rabbani, was killed in September 2011.

I still hope that it is not too late to turn the trends and to find a solution to the conflict that brings peace and protects the progress and reforms that have been made over the last decade. But to find this solution would require very significant changes in the way we approach Afghanistan and the conflict. We must recognise that - even after 10 years - short-term deadlines will not lead us closer to, but further away from, a solution to the conflict. And we must place political initiatives above military offensives. There is still - in spite of the setbacks - no acceptable alternative to a policy of dialogue and reconciliation with the insurgency.

At the Bonn conference in December 2001, all the Afghan participants managed - after 20 years of conflict - to come together and agree on a new interim administration, with the assistance of Afghanistan's neighbours. Ten years later, a policy of national unity and a strong involvement of the country's neighbours are urgently needed. It may be unappealing to many - inside and outside Afghanistan. Perhaps, it is too late and no longer even realistic. But the only alternative could well be a civil war of the kind we experienced in the early 1990s, which led to the birth of the Taliban movement.

Kai Eide, a senior Norwegian diplomat, is the former United Nations Special Representative to Afghanistan (2008-2010).
This piece is based on an excerpt from his new book Power Struggle over Afghanistan, published on January 18 by Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
Source:  Al Jazeera

UK Politics

12 January 2012

Scotland would be 'worse off outside UK' - Osborne

Chancellor George Osborne has said Scotland would be worse off financially if it chose to leave the UK. Mr Osborne told ITV News he did not believe an independent Scotland would be as "prosperous" as it is now.He also questioned whether Scotland alone would have been able to bail out the RBS and HBoS banks in 2009.But Scotland's deputy first minister Nicola Sturgeon said it already "paid its own way" and would be even better off as an independent country.

The SNP administration in Edinburgh, which wants to leave the UK, has said it would prefer to hold a referendum on Scotland's constitutional future by the autumn of 2014, describing the poll as the most important decision facing the country for 300 years.

National debt

Amid a row over the timing of the poll and what question will be asked, Scottish first minister Alex Salmond and the leaders of the Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties have all called for a debate on the substance of whether Scotland should remain within the UK or go its own way.

Mr Osborne, who chairs the UK cabinet's Scotland committee, said he believed Scotland would not benefit economically from a break-up of the UK.

"I think the people of Scotland would lose out in terms of the Scottish economy," he told ITV News. "I don't think Scotland would be as prosperous as it would be as part of the UK.

He added: "If you look at the scale of the national debt, for example, that Scotland would have to take if it became independent, if you look at the fact it has an important banking industry as we know and you ask yourself 'would Scotland alone have been able to bail out the Royal Bank of Scotland or Halifax of Scotland'.

A spokesman for Scottish finance secretary John Swinney dismissed Mr Osborne's comments, suggesting Scotland's economy would be boosted by leaving the UK.

"When all Scotland's resources are included in our nation's economic output, an independent Scotland would be ranked sixth in the world league tables of OECD nations in terms of gross domestic product per head - ten places ahead of the UK," he said.

'Paying own way'

Economists have said the financial position of an independent Scotland could hinge on several factors, including its share of the UK's existing revenues from North Sea oil, its gold reserves and national debt as well as its liabilities in specific areas such as defence and welfare.

Scotland's deputy first minister Nicola Sturgeon told the BBC One's Question Time, in an edition due to be broadcast later on Thursday, that both Scotland and England would be better off in the event of Scottish independence and would remain "close allies".

"Scotland is doing well and can do better with independence," she said. "Scotland is not subsidised at all. Scotland pays its own way and I won't hear anything else."

For Labour, shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander told the same programme that all parts of the UK "benefited from sharing risks, rewards, and resources".

And for the Lib Dems, former leader Lord Ashdown said a break-up of the union would not be a "happy circumstance" for all concerned.

He also suggested David Cameron had "bungled" his approach to the issue so far and could not remain as UK prime minister if Scotland voted for independence.

Early on Thursday, the Scottish Parliament backed calls for the terms of the forthcoming independence referendum to be decided by Holyrood. Mr Salmond and UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg will both be attending a summit of Irish and British leaders in Dublin on Friday.