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Delay in getting prisoners to court on time agitates judge
A judge has warned that he'll free prisoners on bail if they don't start getting to Kitchener on time for their court appearances.
"People who should be in jail are going to be on the street because the government can't get them to court," Justice James Ramsay said yesterday.
"That's going to happen and it's going to happen soon."
For the last two weeks, prisoners have arrived several hours late from the Maplehurst Detention Centre in Milton each day because of a work-to-rule campaign by jail guards.
Ramsay ordered the superintendent of the jail, Doug Dalgleish, to appear before him yesterday to explain the delays.
He also blasted jail guards — members of Local 234 of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union — and the provincial government for letting the situation drag on this long.
Ramsay said it's unfair, illegal and "every other thing in the book" to deny prisoners their right to appear for scheduled court proceedings.
"You can't just lock someone up and leave them there," he said. "That's not English justice."
Ramsay threatened to throw guards in jail for "deliberately interfering with the administration of justice" and warned some criminal cases might be tossed out because of delays.
Dennis Brown, a lawyer for the Ministry of the Attorney General, also appeared in court.
He said the province applied yesterday to the Ontario Labour Relations Board to have job actions by jail guards declared an "illegal strike" and to get an order forcing them to stop.
"Hopefully, it will be dealt with expeditiously," he said.
Dalgleish said the dispute stems from an agreement between guards and the government on overtime.
During negotiations that led to ratification of a new contract in March, he said, the province said it was planning to withdraw its consent for guards to bank overtime and use it for days off.
When the government followed through after the contract was settled, Dalgleish said, it led to a "groundswell of anger."
Guards have since been refusing overtime and meticulously following procedures for the transportation of prisoners.
Dalgleish said the union characterizes it as "working safe," while administrators consider it "working slow."
"I would say it's a sham," Ramsay shot back.
At least four local judges have voiced concerns about delays gumming up the court system, meaning cases start late or aren't reached at all.
While Ramsay was trying to get answers in Superior Court, Justice Gary Hearn ruled in Ontario Court down the street that the delays amount to contempt.
Deciding on a motion brought before him last week, he found the delays were "deliberate" and showed a "wilful refusal to comply with court orders."
Hearn didn't actually cite anyone for contempt, however, and is expected to deal with the issue again next week.
Despite talking tough, Ramsay also took no direct action. Instead, he put the union and the government on notice that he is running out of patience.
"That sounds likes the Ontario government I know," he said after being told how the province is handling the situation. "In other words, they aren't doing anything about people trampling on the rights of people who have already had their liberty taken away."
Ramsay said nobody seems concerned about the prisoners, whom he described as "mostly drug addicts," but he vowed to do what is necessary to protect their rights.
"I'm proposing to bide my time — but not for long," he said.
Union officials have yet to comment.
Body artists gaze upon mothers-to-be with an eye to turning them into there latest canvas.Painting the nursery is so last century. Today's mother-to-be has her eye set on a different canvas.
All she has to do is look down.
It's called pregnant belly art. It can take the form of a teddy bear, fish tank, giant baseball or floral theme painted on with non-toxic, washable body makeup. Or it can be traditional henna used to bless and celebrate.
Either way, adorning the baby bump is the newest form of body art for the generation that made tattoos and piercings mainstream.
A hot trend in Europe, belly painting made its formal debut in the GTA last month during a demonstration for a convention of Canadian face and body painters.
Victoria Kuek, a Toronto financial analyst, was a volunteer model.
"It's a way to remember that time of being pregnant, and I wanted to capture that," says Kuek, 23.
She was at home with her 2-year-old awaiting the birth of her second child when she stumbled on an Internet ad seeking models. It tickled. Daughter Naomi was born a couple of days later.
Trisha Gardiner, 31, was invited by a body artist who dropped into her Kitchener nutrition store and spotted her well-rounded physique.
"I was ecstatic. I love that kind of experience," says Gardiner, an artsy type who is expecting her first child next month.
"The best thing is the memory."
Tara MacLean decided on a natural henna design just before the birth of her third daughter last year.
The Toronto based singer wanted to celebrate the beauty of pregnancy and "there's something so ancient and sacred" about henna.
"To lie down and have someone pamper you like that is glorious," says MacLean, 35. "I felt like I was giving the baby a gift, too."
The Toronto artist she hired, Holly Monster of Henna by Holly, has done 17 pregnant bellies. She uses natural henna only, which is considered safe and lasts a couple of weeks. The process takes a couple of hours and costs $50 to $100, depending on the design.
Skeptics might suggest that pregnant belly art is akin to spraying graffiti on the Mona Lisa. Why try improving on perfection?
But to Marion Brown of Kitchener, president of the Canadian Association of Face and Body Artists, "it's all in the eye of the beholder."
"It's subjective. It's art," says Brown. "It's just another expression of how beautiful it is to be pregnant."
Just when you thought you'd heard of everything....
A crucial Crown witness who was supposed to begin testifying at a first-degree murder trial today stunned a downtown Toronto court this morning by refusing to take the oath.
"I'm not testifying," Marlon Wilson said shaking his head as jurors looked on in Superior Court.
"You're required to testify sir," Justice Michael Dambrot told Wilson.
"I'm not going to say my name ... I ain't taking no oath," Wilson replied.
"Nice to see you members of the jury," Dambrot said to the seven women and five men who had moments earlier taken their seats.
The jury has heard Wilson is alleged to be a "gang associate" of the three men on trial, Tyshan Riley, 26, Philip Atkins, 25, and Jason Wisdom, 23.
They're charged with first-degree murder and attempt murder in the March 3, 2004 drive by shooting at Finch Avenue and Neilsen Road that killed Brenton Charlton, 31, who worked in a concession stand at the SkyDome. His friend, Leonard Bell, now 48 and a renovator, was hit several times in a barrage of gunfire and survived.
The Crown has described the shooting as a case of mistaken identity linked to gang warfare between Galloway gang members and rivals in Malvern.
Wilson was supposed to testify about receiving a call on the night of the shooting as well as hearing his account about a social gathering later on. The jury was also told on opening day Wilson would give evidence about a .357 Glock found by police to have the presence of DNA of both Wilson and Atkins.
Ballistic evidence will show shells found at the scene were consistent with and could not exclude the fact that one of the guns used in the shooting, Crown attorney Suhail Akhtar told the jury on opening day last week.
About an hour after Wilson's refusal, the jury returned to the court and another attempt was made.
"Mr. Wilson you've indicated you are refusing to take an oath," Dambrot said facing him in the witness box.
"Right," replied Wilson, wearing a blue button-down shirt and a thick black beard and glasses.
"I'm ordering you to take the oath ..is your position still the same?," Dambrot asked.
"Yup," Wilson said,
Dambrot then told Wilson he has the power to find him in contempt of court and impose a punishment or that he could be charged with obstruction of justice.
Wilson shook his head to signal he wasn't changing his mind.
Dambrot then told the jury this was not "an everyday event," and instructed them to return to court Tuesday to give counsel time to reorganize the schedule.
Social networking site Twitter's current top trending topic (things that are twittered the most by user members) has a security hole. The hole is no technical snafu, rather it traces back to human error or sneaking social engineering.
The "twitter porn names" game is a fun distraction that gives you and your friends something to tweet about. However it is actually nothing more then a disguise to get users to publicly post answers to your own online security questions. With that information Web scoundrels can hack into your personal online accounts.
The current game has a few variations but the information it illicit is all the same. To find your "porn name" you are asked to take the name of your first pet, combine it with the street you grew up on or your mother's maiden name. Yep, all of these are common security questions to access your online accounts and bank information.
Be wary of this and other combinations of the game that might entice you to reveal potential answers to your security questions. Be sure to pass along the information to your friends if they have been unwittingly providing answers to their security questions.
If you have publicly revealed answers to your online security questions delete the post, change your passwords, and updating your security questions.
In the spring of 2007, Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, the well-known broadcasting advocacy group, began posting videos and podcasts of Parliamentary committee proceedings on the group's website. When officials at the House of Commons caught wind of the activities, they promptly sent a "cease and desist" letter, demanding that the videos and podcasts be removed from the Internet. A lawyer for the House of Commons argued that posting excerpts from committee proceedings could be treated as "contempt of Parliament."
The group responded that members did not want to remove the videos but would be willing to follow a reasonable procedure to obtain the necessary permissions.
That response did not sit well with the chairs of the Finance and Canadian Heritage Standing Committees, who upon learning that the group was offering webcasts and downloads of their proceedings, asked the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs (SCPHA) to examine the issue to prevent further infringement.
The notion that videos of committee hearings constitute proprietary content that when used without permission raise the potential for allegations of contempt of Parliament will undoubtedly come as news to many Canadians. Using these excerpts in YouTube videos, webcasts, or podcasts has emerged as an important and powerful tool for business and consumer groups to educate the public on policy issues and legislative proposals.
Yet, House of Commons lawyers maintain that many of these activities violate the law and have sent notice and takedown demands to YouTube seeking the removal of videos that include House of Commons and committee proceedings. These include clips that involve satire and parody, since they are seen to "distort" the video itself.
SCPHA hearings held earlier this year revealed that Canada's elected officials safeguard Parliamentary video with highly restrictive licencing requirements that are typically limited to use in schools or for private study, research, criticism or review. Relying on Crown copyright, the policy states that any other use – including any commercial use – requires the express prior written approval of the Speaker of the House of Commons.
This stands in sharp contrast to the circumstance in the United States, where the default presumption is that such videos are in the public domain and can be freely used without permission. House of Commons lawyers portrayed that approach as representing an extreme position.
To their credit, most of the MPs on the committee recognized that changes to the policies in the YouTube era are needed. However, MPs from the three opposition parties expressed reluctance to mirror the U.S. approach, fearing that some videos taken out of context could be "terrifically damaging." Bloc MP Claude DeBellefeuille raised the possibility of lawsuits to enforce the copyright and noted that "we will have to establish rules so that we have some recourse and that remarks can be withdrawn after they have been broadcast and pointed out."
Conservative MP Scott Reid came closest to recognizing the problems associated with retaining certain restrictions, warning against policies that provide that videos are "usable for certain purposes but not for the purposes that lie at the heart of what this speech is for." Instead, he argued that using video excerpts for either favourable or critical purposes would be appropriate.
The committee adopted a liberalized policy that permits non-commercial reproduction without prior permission. Commercial uses still require prior approval, while distorting a video for parody, satire or political comment may still lead to demands for its removal. The new policy is a modest improvement, but it fails to fully realize the potential of public political participation through online video.
Part of the power of social networking is the ability to form communities with like-minded individuals.
But what happens when those communities are offensive to others?
That issue is at the heart of attempts by a Dallas, Texas, attorney to have social-networking site Facebook remove pages for Holocaust deniers.
The Holocaust Denial movement seeks to deny or minimize the Holocaust, in which Nazis killed about six million European Jews during World War II.
Attorney Brian Cuban, brother of Dallas Mavericks team owner Mark Cuban, has been trying since last year to have the pages of groups with such names as "Holocaust: A Series of Lies," and "Holocaust is a Holohoax" removed from Facebook.
He pointed out that Facebook has removed groups based on complaints before and said the site is "setting the subjective standard on what they remove and what they don't."
"There is no First Amendment right to free speech in the private realm," Cuban said. "This isn't a freedom-of-speech issue. Facebook is free to set the standard that they wish."
Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt said his company is in agreement with Cuban that the Holocaust-denial pages are offensive and objectionable.
Where the two sides part, Schnitt said, is whether people have the right to discuss such ideas on Facebook.
"It's a difficult decision to make. We have a lot of internal debate and we bring in experts to talk about it," Schnitt said. "Just being offensive or objectionable doesn't get it taken off Facebook. We want it [the site] to be a place where people can discuss all kinds of ideas, including controversial ones."
Schnitt said Facebook has drawn the line with pages or groups that attack an individual or incite or threaten violence. Schnitt pointed to the recent removal of the "Isle of Man KKK" page, created by residents of the island off the coast of England.
Facebook interpreted the page's advocacy of "cleansing the island of foreigners" as threatening and inciting violence, he said.
Facebook receives lots of reports about such pages and actively polices the site, Schnitt said. Last year Facebook removed several pages posted by Italian neo-Nazis after complaints that they encouraged violence against gypsies.
Brian Cuban, who is of Russian Jewish descent, has written about his fight to have the Holocaust-denial pages removed on his site, The Cuban Revolution.
He said he contacted Facebook after a conversation with a friend who runs the Jewish Internet Defense Force, a group that monitors and tries to eradicate anti-Semitic online content.
The Jewish Internet Defense Force, which was successful in removing a Facebook page for the group "Israel Is Not A Country! Delist It From Facebook As A Country," is outspoken in its own right and sometimes guilty of sweeping generalizations of its own.
In an article on Brian Cuban's site published during the 2008 presidential campaign, a representative from the Jewish Internet Defense Force was quoted as saying that "99.9 percent of Muslims hate us."
The article went on to quote JIDF spokesman on the last Presidential campaign: "We hope to continue to highlight the issues surrounding [then-candidate Barack Obama's] terrorist connections as well as his racist and anti-Semitic church, which has supported Hamas and the Rev. Louis Farrakhan."
A Jewish Internet Defense Force spokesperson named David, who requested his last name be withheld because his group has received death threats, said Thursday he would rather people not focus on those specific quotes for several reasons, including the fact that it was an "informal interview" and Cuban "would not let us correct any of our statements after we quickly answered him to help him meet his deadline."
But on the matter of Facebook and Holocaust deniers, the Jewish Internet Defense Force has a clear stance.
"Facebook should not provide a platform for hatred, especially as it is against their TOS [terms of service]," David said. "Holocaust denial is illegal in 13 countries and represents a form of Jew hatred and hate speech in general."
Deborah Lipstadt is the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University and an expert on Holocaust denial. She said social-networking sites like Facebook are attractive to deniers.
"It allows people to find one another, both for good and for bad," she said. "People who are drawn to Holocaust denial tend to be fringe kind of people who might not otherwise be able to find a group, but this way they can find other like-minded people."
Deborah Lauter, director of Civil Rights for the Anti-Defamation League, said the issue of anti-Semitism and hate speech online is a growing one, partly because of the anonymity the Web offers.
Lauter pointed out that Facebook's Statement of Rights and Responsibilities says that users "will not post content that is hateful, threatening, pornographic, or that contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence."
She said the Anti-Defamation League has worked with sites such as YouTube and MySpace to encourage them to be "socially responsible corporate citizens."
"Even though in the States this kind of hate is protected speech, [Web sites] don't have to provide the forum to help spread it," said Lauter, whose organization is the U.S. representative for the International Network Against CyberHate. "Our position is that if you are going to be providing it, then you have to step up and put in the mechanism for policing it."
It'd be a pretty dull day at the office if no one ever cracked a dirty joke.
But, some say, years of zero tolerance sexual harassment policies in the workplace have produced a frigid climate where everyone has to check their sexual beings at the reception desk (without making an inappropriate comment to the receptionist, of course).
Well, a new study has broken the ice...sort of.
Researchers at University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management and the University of British Columbia's Sauder School of Management discovered that some employees say they actually, gasp, enjoy the occasional sexually charged joke, discussions of sexual matters or flirtation around the office.
But before you go patting your coworker on the butt, the study also found that the same workers who said they enjoyed a some sexual banter in the workplace also withdrew from work, felt less valued and reported depressive symptoms more often than employees who experienced little to no sexual behavior at the office.
In other words, a little sexual innuendo might be good for a laugh, but it's lousy for morale and productivity.
'In our culture, sexuality has connotations of domination, subordinance and vulnerability,' said Professor Jennifer Berdahl, coauthor of the study. 'Often a dominating behaviour is a way of making someone squirmy. Why bring this into the workplace?' Considering how quickly most dinner party conversation eventually gets around to the topic of sex, it's unrealistic to think that people who spend 8-12 hours a day together aren't ever going to go there.
But you only have to watch an episode of Mad Men to see how bad things things might still be if we hadn't put on the brakes. Sexual harassment laws did much to eliminate the day when it was okay to make 'bosom' cracks in front of your female secretary.
Sure, harassment laws can be applied overly zealously - using them to stop a man from putting a picture of his wife in a bikini on his desk, something that apparently happened somewhere in the US, for example. But, as far as I'm concerned, as long as men and women are too daft to recognize behaviour that makes another person squirmy, we still need rules to keep the workplace from feeling like a singles' bar or, even a dinner party.
And no, I don't think that's funny.
Nefertiti bust may be a fake: Thought to be an ancient treasure of the Nile, it may have been made in Germany less than 100 years ago according to art historians.
The bust of Egyptian Queen Nefertiti, considered to be the Mona Lisa of the ancient world, may be a fake, according to two art experts.
Swiss historian Henri Stierlin, author of several books on Egypt and the Middle East, claims in his new work, Le Buste de Nefertiti – une Imposture de l'Egyptologie? (The Bust of Nefertiti – an Egyptology Fraud?) that the treasure, until now believed to be 3,300 years old, could be a 1912 copy.
He suggests it was made by an artist named Gerardt Marks on the orders of German archeologist Ludwig Borchardt, who is credited with digging it out of the banks of the Nile south of Cairo in 1912.
"It seems increasingly improbable that the bust is an original," Stierlin, who has been working on the subject for 25 years, told Agence France-Press.
He said Borchardt had hoped to produce a new likeness of the 18th-dynasty Egyptian queen wearing a necklace he knew she had owned, and at the same time carry out a colour test with ancient pigments found at the archeological site.
But Stierlin said a German prince admired the copy as an original, and Borchardt didn't want to make his guest look stupid.
Recent radiological tests seemed to have proven that the bust was more than 3,000 years old. They also uncovered a hidden face carved into the statue's limestone core.
But Stierlin has argued that while is it possible to carbon-date pigments, it is impossible to accurately date the bust because it is made of stone covered in plaster.
Inconsistent with Egyptian style
He noted that the bust has no left eye, which the ancient Egyptians would have considered a sign of disrespect to their queen. He pointed out that the shoulders were cut vertically, while Egyptian artisans cut their busts' shoulders horizontally.
He said French archeologists who were present at the 1912 dig never mentioned the find, nor did contemporary written accounts.
Berlin author and historian Edrogan Ercivan's new book, Missing Link in Archaeology, which was published last week, adds to Stierlin's argument. Ercivan has also called the Nefertiti bust a fake, saying it was modelled on Borchardt's wife, the Guardian newspaper reported.
Both historians have said Borchardt kept the bust for 11 years before handing it over to a Berlin museum.
Dietrich Wildung, director of Berlin's Egyptian Museum, has refuted the historians' claims, saying they are attempts to exploit the work's popularity. "A beautiful woman and a putative scandal — that always sells," he told the Guardian.
The bust is now on display at Berlin's Altes Museum. It will return to the Neues Museum when it reopens in October after a restoration by British architect David Chipperfield.
Queen Nefertiti, the wife of Pharaoh Akhenaten, lived from about 1370 BC to 1330 BC.
Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch expects News Corporation-owned newspaper Web sites to start charging users for access within a year in a move which analysts say could radically shake-up the culture of freely available content.
Speaking on a conference call as News Corporation announced a 47 percent slide in quarterly profits to $755 million, Murdoch said the current free access business model favored by most content providers was flawed.
"We are now in the midst of an epochal debate over the value of content and it is clear to many newspapers that the current model is malfunctioning," the News Corp. Chairman and CEO said.
"We have been at the forefront of that debate and you can confidently presume that we are leading the way in finding a model that maximizes revenues in return for our shareholders... The current days of the Internet will soon be over."
Murdoch said the experience of the News Corp.-owned Wall Street Journal had proved that charging for content could be made to work.
He said 360,000 people had downloaded an iPhone WSJ application in three weeks. Users would soon be made to pay "handsomely" for accessing WSJ content, he added.
Murdoch said he envisaged other News Corp. titles introducing charges within 12 months.
Murdoch's international newspaper empire includes the New York Post, the News International stable of UK titles including the Sun and the Times, and a cluster of Australian papers including the Daily Telegraph and the Herald Sun.
His comments come with the U.S. newspaper industry in a state of crisis amid plunging advertising revenues and falling circulations with several historic titles already going out of business.
Joshua Benton, Director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, said Murdoch was not the only executive looking to generate new income streams from online content.
"News executives are starting to recognize that online advertising revenues are not enough on their own," Benton told CNN.
But he said the challenge for media organizations was finding a balance between advertising and subscription revenues and figuring out how to charge for content without alienating existing users -- which could lead to Web sites offering tiered levels of free and paid-for material.
"I suspect within any readership there is a small slice -- maybe three percent -- that is willing to pay. News organizations are going to have to find a way of getting money from that slice without driving away everybody else," Benton said.
"I don't think you can afford to put a lock and chain on the front page. It is a matter of figuring out which products you can charge money for."
Benton said the U.S. newspaper industry was in a "horrible state" which was likely to get worse.
"We're starting to see holes where newspapers were. The question is, will new Web sites fill the holes, will traditional names come in -- or will they just not get filled?"
Earlier this week, the 137-year-old Boston Globe said it would be forced to shut down unless it reached an agreement with unions over a $10 million program of cost-cutting measures.
The paper's owners, The New York Times Co., postponed plans to close the paper after reaching a deal with six of seven employees' unions but said the Globe was expected to lose $85 million in 2009 if it did not make major cuts.
The developments followed the demise of print editions of The Rocky Mountain News in Denver, Colorado; The Seattle Post-Intelligencer; and The Christian Science Monitor.
The Rocky Mountain News shut down completely; both the Seattle paper and the Christian Science Monitor remain in online editions.
At least 120 newspapers in the U.S. have shut down since January 2008, according to Paper Cuts, a Web site tracking the newspaper industry. More than 21,000 jobs at 67 newspapers have vaporized in that time, according to the site.
Despite the general mood of gloom over the state of the economy, Murdoch said he believed the worst of the financial crisis had passed.
"I'm not an economist and we all know economists were created to make weather forecasters look good," he said. "But it is increasingly clear the worst is over."
Thoughts? Would you pay to use news websites?
Not likely to happen, but motion passes unanimously to use Games to promote seal hunt.
Canada's Olympic athletes will be wearing seal skin on their 2010 uniforms to protest an international ban on the product – that is, if the country's parliamentarians have their way.
The federal Parliament voted Wednesday to use the Vancouver Games to protest a European Union ban on seal products.
Parliamentarians from all parties agreed unanimously to a motion from the Bloc Quebecois that says the Games should be used to promote products from the seal hunt.
The motion suggests one possibility: that Canada's Olympic uniform include at least one seal product, likely skin.
Fisheries Minister Gail Shea applauded the idea, while wondering whether it might be too late.
"I would imagine the Olympic clothing is all designed and probably made by now," Shea said.
"But I think it's a good symbolic suggestion – to add something to the outfit of our athletes. I think it would be a good statement for the Canadian sealing industry, and Canada's support of it."
Parliamentary motions are non-binding on either the government or the Canadian Olympic Committee, but are an expression of the will of Canada's elected politicians.
The European Parliament voted massively in favour of a seal ban, which could have a dramatic impact on Canadian hunters and exporters.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said he does not want the ban to scuttle separate talks on Canada-EU free trade.
But Canadian lawyers are already considering a legal challenge, while the EU council of ministers considers whether to implement the ban.
Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe said the Canadian government was outmanoeuvred on the public-relations front and that it should have been more aggressive defending the seal hunt.
Duceppe singled out one country that had no business lecturing Canada on animal rights: Spain, where fights with bulls in front of cheering spectators is a national sport.
"I find it completely abnormal to see protests (against the seal hunt) in Spain – the country that holds the bullfights," Duceppe said.
"We need a campaign. Our adversaries conducted one heck of a campaign, and Canada did not conduct a major one on the promotional level. ...
"The Olympics aren't a trivial thing. We could use this event to shed light on this, but we need to use other events, too."
Duceppe shot back at one questioner who asked whether Olympic athletes might bristle at the idea of being forced to wear animal pelts to make a political statement.
"I don't know what my shoes are made of – but if they're not made out of plastic, they're not made out of straw, they come from an animal."
Is this the sort of nonsense our elected officials spend there time on while our economy is in shambles, people are losing there homes, people are out of work, and more losing there jobs left and right every day? GET TO WORK!!!!
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