from the Toronto Star
"How an overseas outsourcing firm managed to get Ottawa’s nod to bring in foreign workers to replace 45 Canadian employees at the Royal Bank has become the centre of an official probe.
"On Monday, the federal government confirmed iGate, based in Fremont, Calif., was granted a positive labour market opinion (LMO), which is supposed to be issued only when an assessment determines the hiring will not take jobs away from available and qualified Canadians. …"
from The Nation
"A few weeks ago, Time magazine called the fight over the Keystone XL pipeline that will bring some of the dirtiest energy on the planet from Alberta, Canada, to the US Gulf Coast the 'Selma and Stonewall' of the climate movement.
"if you think about it, may be both good news and bad news. Yes, those of us fighting the pipeline have mobilized record numbers of activists: the largest civil disobedience action in 30 years and 40,000 people on the mall in February for the biggest climate rally in American history. Right now, we’re aiming to get a million people to send in public comments about the environmental review the State Department is conducting on the feasibility and advisability of building the pipeline. And there’s good reason to put pressure on. After all, it’s the same State Department that, as on a previous round of reviews, hired “experts” who had once worked as consultants for TransCanada, the pipeline’s builder. …"
from the Vancouver Sun
"I laughed out loud when I read Barbara Yaffe's column this past Wednesday about the Fraser Institute's report on the risk posed to civil democratic societies by the growing numbers of tax-exempt workers.
"Not laughing at the column. It was a timely, succinct and well-sketched discussion of the think tank's study, Tax Payers and Tax Takers.
"Nope, what punched the funny bone was the irony of the Fraser Institute, which is registered as a tax-exempt organization, wagging its finger over too many, um, tax exemptions. …"
from The Guardian
"The jaguar is the tiger of the South American continent. Living in the Amazon rainforest, it symbolises agility, cunning and surprise. Ecuador is now being described as Latin America's jaguar. That's because not only have we broken with the orthodoxies of the Washington consensus but we are developing innovative economic alternatives of our own, born in the southern hemisphere.
"Ecuador's transformation began in 2007, after the electoral victory of President Rafael Correa's so-called citizen's revolution. After six years in office, the revolution won a new democratic majority in February, with 57percent of the vote in the presidential election and two-thirds of the seats in the parliament.
"By rejecting the neoliberal recipes of privatisation, structural adjustment and curtailed demand, we have grown by 4.3percent over the last five years despite the global slowdown. Central to this growth, and to the reduction of unemployment to the lowest rate in the region, has been public investment, which at 14percent in 2011 is the highest in Latin America. …"
from The Tyee
"The current crisis in our forests challenges each of us to consider what type of future we want for BC
"What is the right direction, in a province where our identity is so closely linked to our vast forests, salmon rivers and diverse species; where some of our forests may hold their greatest future value as storehouses of living carbon and the source of critical ecosystem services like flood control and clean water; where First Nations are increasingly retaking their rightful role in decision-making about their ancestral lands; and where communities are tired of important decisions affecting their lives being made in corporate boardrooms far from home?"
from the Vancouver Observer
"Last week, a new ad promoting oil pipelines appeared ahead of my favourite new song on YouTube. It featured a pair of actors having a simulated ‘real-life’ conversation about the paradox between protecting the environment and future economic growth. After the female actor asks, “But can’t we have both?” the man responds, “but if we let pipelines and tankers into our environment, what safeguards to we have?”
from RT, Russia Today TV
Researchers have discovered that the Fukushima nuclear disaster has had far-reaching health effects more drastic than previously thought: young children born on the US West Coast are 28 percent more likely to develop congenital hyperthyroidism.
In examining post-Fukushima conditions along the West Coast, researchers found American-born children to be developing similar conditions that some Europeans acquired after the 1986 meltdown of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.
“Fukushima fallout appeared to affect all areas of the US, and was especially large in some, mostly in the western part of the nation,” researchers from the New York-based Radiation and Health Project wrote in a study published by the Open Journal of Pediatrics….
…Just a few days after the meltdown, I-131 concentration levels in California, Hawaii, Alaska, Oregon and Washington were up to 211 times above the normal level, according to the study. At the same time, the number of congenital hypothyroid cases skyrocketed, increasing by an average of 16 percent from March 17 to Dec. 31, 2011. And between March 17 and June 30, shortly after the meltdown, newly born children experienced a 28 percent greater risk of acquiring hyperthyroidism….
Dozens of employees at Canada’s largest bank are losing their jobs to temporary foreign workers, who are in Canada to take over the work of their department.
“They are being brought in from India, and I am wondering how they got work visas,” said Dave Moreau, one of the employees affected by the move. “The new people are in our offices and we are training them to do our jobs. That adds insult to injury.”
Moreau, who works in IT systems support, said he is one of 50 employees who facilitate various transactions for RBC Investor Services in Toronto, which serves the bank’s biggest and wealthiest institutional clients.
In February, RBC told Moreau and his colleagues 45 of their jobs with the regulatory and financial applications team would be terminated at the end of April…
by Common Dreams staff
Up to 120 tonnes of radioactive water may have "escaped" from an underground storage tank at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, an official announced Saturday.
"We are transferring the remaining water from the tank to others," said a Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) spokesman. The company claims that it is "unlikely" any of the contaminated water found its way into the ocean.
The contaminated water may have leaked from one of the seven underground reservoir tanks which stores water previously used to cool down the nuclear reactors, AFP reports.
The news follows reports Friday that one of the plant's cooling systems had failed temporarily, the second outage in a matter of weeks.
Published on Saturday, April 6, 2013 by Common Dreams
by Walter Hickey
At least when it comes to marijuana, the war on drugs is over.
Two states have passed marijuana legalization laws that fly in the face of national drug policy.
Polling on the issue shows a rejection of prohibition. The opinions of law enforcement commanders has begun to shift.
For some who want to cut the budget, the drug war is looking like a good place to start.
Now, for the first time, when a marijuana lobbyist calls a member of Congress, they get asked for money, not hung up on, Allen St Pierre, the executive director of NORML told Business Insider. And, as St Pierre was proud to point out, the man in the White House personally invented a new way to smoke marijuana in high school….
