Israel has bombed and killed seven Canadians who were vacationing in southern Lebanon:

Seven Canadians are dead, six of them possibly members of the same Montreal family, after an Israeli air strike in Lebanon. Three more were seriously injured.

The Department of Foreign Affairs did not release their names.

However, reports said the dead included a family of four children, their mother, and her husband’s uncle. They were vacationing in Aitarun, just 50 kilometres south of Beirut.

Israel’s reckless escalation of the conflict has now cost the lives of more than 100 civilians in Lebanon, including an estimated thirteen people who fled their village after Israeli loudspeaker warnings urged them to do so:

In one attack, apparently on vehicles full of families trying to get away from the bombing, an estimated 13 people, including eight children, died when a truck and a car were incinerated by an Israeli air attack.

The small convoy was carrying people evacuating the village of Marwaheen after Israeli loudspeaker warnings to leave their homes. Seven of the dead were from a single family, according to eye-witnesses including a photographer from the Associated Press, Nasser Nasser, whose pictures show bodies, including a baby, scattered on the road.

More on this situation later.

[tags]Canada, Israel, Lebanon, politics[/tags]

I was emailed a link to a piece called China’s Crackdown on Falun Gong after posting about the chilling report that China is ‘harvesting’ organs from prisoners:

Nearly a decade after it was outlawed in China, the mysterious movement known as Falun Gong is struggling to survive government persecution. What is the movement about – and why does it frighten Chinese authorities?

The article goes into some detail about the movement’s origins, current status in China, and its philosophy, which is something like a mixture of traditional kung-fu (or tai chi, or qi-gong) and Scientology. It’s worth the read.

This is about as appalling as it gets:

A former federal cabinet minister and a prominent lawyer will report today that they have found credible evidence that the organs of Falun Gong adherents in China are being harvested for paid transplants, and will call for international pressure to stop it.

The report, by former Liberal cabinet minister David Kilgour and Winnipeg immigration and rights lawyer David Matas, will call for international human-rights organizations to take the allegations seriously, and for governments and international bodies to shun China’s burgeoning transplant industry until it is stopped.

“Alarming is an understatement,” Mr. Kilgour said yesterday. “We simply can come to no other conclusion than that this is going on, on a large scale. That vital organs are being taken from people involuntarily in large numbers.

“All of the ‘donors’ — in quotation marks — are killed in process. Because they don’t just take one of your kidneys. From what we’ve learned, they take both of your kidneys, and anything else that anybody might want.”

Many of the alleged victims are in prisons.

And a report in the Montreal Gazette suggests that Canadians are travelling to China for these organs:

The Canadian government should revoke the passports of Canadians suspected of travelling to China for transplants and deny visas to Chinese doctors wanting to study transplants here, says a contentious report written by a former MP.

Our close relationship with China appears hypocritical yet again.

[tags]China, falun gong, medicine[/tags]

John Tory, the leader of Ontario’s Conservative Party, is angry. Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal government commissioned a new logo for Ontario, and Tory doesn’t like it:

“What we have here is the tried and true traditional trillium being replaced by the partisan political pork-barrel poison-ivy look-alike, and I think they should put a stop to it right away.”

He’s so upset he’s launched a website called Save the Trillium. Tory is not content just to protect the trillium from heedless hikers and flora filchers. He’s taking aim at the trillium’s most serious threat: liberal graphic designers.

Ontario’s trillium has long been the symbol of hope and opportunity for all. The classic T-shaped logo was first used by the Ontario government more than 40 years ago. It’s been used no matter which political party was in power.

That is, until now.

Now Dalton McGuinty and the Liberals have changed the logo to more closely resemble the Liberal Party logo.*cue ominious organ chord*

[Emphasis in the original. Organ chord added.]

Let’s take a look. This is Ontario’s new trillium logo:

And here is the Ontario Liberal Party logo:

At first glance, they may not seem similar. But if you stare at these long enough – and John Tory has – your screen will go black and a large Microsoft Windows logo will start to appear in random locations – shit. Where was I…oh yeah:

1. The new trillium logo is black and white. There are black people and white people in the Liberal logo.
2. The trillium in the new logo has three petals. So does the trillium in the Liberal logo.
3. The direction of the petals in the new logo is distinctly partisan. Two petals point left, and only one points right. The previous logo, where one pointed left, one pointed right, and the third, representing the NDP, pointed straight down, more accurately reflects Ontario’s political traditions.

[tags]politics, Ontario, liberals that have no regard for tradition or vegetation[/tags]

Whenever our country happens to catch the attention of someone from beyond our borders – a rare occurrence – I always get a little thrill.

I gain inordinate pleasure whenever Seth Bullock, the sheriff on Deadwood, mentions that he is from Etobicoke, Ontario.

When something unpleasant happens here, like the arrests of our homegrown terrorist wannabes, I enjoy reading the reports from American and international media, even when they are grossly sensationalized.

I especially enjoyed it when John Hostettler, chairman of the House of Representatives subcommittee on immigration and border security, condemned “South Toronto” after the arrests as “the type of enclave that allows for this radical type of discussion to go on”, because it’s nice to hear an American mention a part of Toronto, even if it doesn’t exist.

Today in The Guardian, Timothy Garton Ash recommends, half-seriously, that Canada ought to be in the EU:

Driving through Toronto earlier this week I saw a shiny black 4×4 with an English flag sticking out of one side window and a German flag out of the other. Presumably a Canadian family of mixed English and German origin, so rooting for both teams in the World Cup. A little later I saw a car with the Portuguese flag on one side and the Italian on the other. It occurred to me that this pretty much sums up what we’ve been trying to achieve in Europe since the second world war. Welcome to the European Union – in Canada.

In fact, why doesn’t the European Union invite Canada to join at once? In most respects it would be a much easier fit than Ukraine, let alone Turkey.

The United States isn’t our only trading partner or our only ally. We have long-standing friendly ties with many European countries. Should Canada pursue closer ties with the EU?

[tags]canada, politics, european union[/tags]