Leaving work around 3:30pm this afternoon, cycling west on Dundas past McCaul, I was nearly run off the road and clipped by a side-view mirror. The vehicle was a tan mini-van which swerved abruptly from the left lane to the right lane to make a last-minute turn onto Beverley. While doing so, he either didn't see me or just horribly misjudged the space and clipped me. With my heart in my throat, somehow I managed to holler at him and regain my balance, but he obviously didn't hear me and continued driving up the street and out of my sight. Considering the amount of time I've wasted chasing reckless drivers, I chose to forget about it and get to my destination. But to my surprise, I found myself behind that same van a few streets up and decided to follow them to their parking spot.

By the time I pulled up to the van there was nobody in the driver or passenger side, but I saw movement in the back and ended up confronting the wife of the driver. Blinking at me while I shakily insisted I speak with the driver, she just kept saying that he "must not have seen me", which should never ever be an excuse. To add to the mess, I saw that the driver had two toddlers in car-seats strapped in the back. Not only was he endangering me, but potentially his children. When he came out, I told him as much, adding angrily that he should really be considering the safety of those around him as a parent. I don't know if I got through to him but he listened to me and apologized all the same.

What did Cuizinier do that made you want sing about him having a small dick?
Nothing. I didn’t even know him. It was just funny to do a track about someone who represented French pimp rappers.

Was he mad about it?
Yes. He's pissed off because we got a record deal with that song. He thinks we are successful because of him. But it’s not a hate anthem. I am a fan of his. He's an MC and he should be able to answer a beef. He didn't.

Ten years after graduating from Taylor High School in Katy, Texas, Tina Lee Naro learned some surprising things about her former classmates.

One committed atheist became a Mormon. A tightly wound "business school" type became a laid-back bartender at a Montana ski resort. And a formerly hirsute friend is now completely bald.

Naro, now a consultant in New York City, learned all these things not in person, but on the social networking site Facebook - enough that she now plans to skip her 10-year reunion this September.

"I already had all those reunion moments: 'Really? You're gay? You're married? You joined the military?"' she said. "Actually going back to Katy holds a lot less appeal now."

Sites like Facebook and MySpace are now competition for the class reunion - that time-honoured tradition of dressing to kill, choking down rubbery chicken and gossiping about old classmates. Many far-flung graduates say the ease of exchanging pictures and memories online makes it hard to justify expensive trips home.

The idea resonated so deeply with Chris Farmer of Vancouver that he created a Facebook group entitled "Facebook Has Eliminated The Need For A High School Reunion."

When he signed up for Facebook, Farmer was flooded with messages from high-school classmates: jocks, nerds, popular kids, even people he was pretty sure he'd never spoken to before.

"It was overwhelming, this feeling of running into everyone I'd ever known," he said.

Farmer quickly sorted out what he calls "the good stuff" - which former party-girl now teaches Sunday school, who gained or lost 200 pounds, which high-school sweethearts broke up spectacularly and which went on to get married and have kids. But after reconnecting, "seeing people in real life seemed a little pointless," Farmer said.

In typical last minute style, I made a trip out to Home Depot to pick up a few things needed to put the final touches on the outdoor summer gazebo my brother and I built for my mother this morning (Happy Mother's Day!). I was pleasantly surprised to find that Toronto Hydro was there, giving away free clotheslines as part of their energy-saving promotion (a timely promotion that comes on the heels of a province-wide lifting of all municipal clothesline bans). I filled out the short survey, chatted briefly about CF light bulb recycling with the rep, and was on my way, free clothesline in hand.

When Edmontonians Pam and John Northcott bought their new home in Sherwood Park six years ago, they signed a lengthy restrictive covenant that aims to prevent unsightly additions to the neighbourhood.

No big TV dishes on the front lawn, no air conditioning equipment on the roof -- and no clotheslines.

"No outdoor clothes-hanging device shall be erected on any lot and no laundry, bedding or other such item shall be hung within any lot in any manner in which it is visible from any other lot," states the developer's covenant.

That bugs Pam, who sees clotheslines as an environmentally friendly and cheap way to dry clothes. In the summer months, she defies the covenant and discreetly hangs her washing under her deck to dry.

Taken literally, the developer's restriction wouldn't allow a homeowner to dry a beach towel outside or air a duvet, she said.

"I couldn't even shake my hanky out the window."

In a bid to curb the use of energy-sucking dryers, the new regulation will overrule neighbourhood covenants – part of the mortgage agreement between many developers and homebuyers – that outlaw clotheslines because they're considered unsightly.

The regulation, to take effect today, will not only prohibit new bans but also wipe out most that already exist, a provision that angered the province's building industry.

It will apply to free-standing and semi-detached homes and most row houses.

Highrise condos and apartments won't be affected for now. The province wants more consultation about them to deal with safety and other concerns.

One initiative in particular that Iran is genuinely interested in, and hopeful about its prospects, deals with trilateral cooperation among the three Farsi-speaking nations of Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan. Such a union, if formed in the (intermediate) future, will definitely enhance Iran's regional status and create new linkages between Iran and Central Asia and beyond.

[. . .]

[T]he ECO-based initiative to enhance cooperation among the Farsi-speaking nations has a definite geocultural dimension or ramification, at least as far as Turkey and other Turkish-speaking ECO members are concerned. Iran has always been suspicious of Turkey's, or for that matter Kazakhstan's, attempts to forge closer ties to the Turkish-speaking Azerbaijan and the Turkish-speaking Central Asian states; such attempts, particularly by Turkey during the early and mid-1990s, were perceived as being directly anti-Iranian in nature.

Since then, mutual fears and concerns of pan-Turkism and pan-Persianism have been much dissipated by the growing maturity of Iran-Turkey and Iran-Azerbaijan relations in particular, based on mutual and shared interests, and the initial sound and fury of a "new great game" in Central Asia and the Caucasus has been replaced by the cold, realistic logic of cooperation and interdependence.

Pro-Western forces in Serbia began tough talks on Monday to cobble together a coalition, after the electoral commission confirmed they scored an upset poll victory over nationalist rivals.

President Boris Tadic's "For a European Serbia" alliance garnered 38.8 percent in Sunday's parliamentary elections dominated by the issue of Serbian ties with the European Union.

While short of an absolute majority, the alliance was well ahead of the ultra-nationalist Radical Party on 29.2 percent, said the commission.

There had been predictions of a possible nationalist backlash over widespread EU support for the independence of Serbia's breakaway province of Kosovo.

In the end, the result "undoubtedly confirmed a clear European path," Tadic said at his Democratic Party campaign headquarters.

"The Democratic Party will be the key player in the future cabinet," said the president, refusing to reveal who might be his prime minister.

"The negotiations will not be easy (but) I warn everyone not to play with the electoral will of the citizens and try to take Serbia back to the isolation of the 1990s," he said in reference to the hardline regime of late president Slobodan Milosevic.

The Democrats' expected coalition partners include the Socialist Party of Serbia, founded by Milosevic, and/or the Liberal Democratic Party, whose leader Cedomir Jovanovic negotiated the late strongman's arrest in 2001.

Israel's ambassador says he is concerned that the growing number of Muslim Canadians might cause a shift in this country's Middle East policy.

Israel marks its 60th anniversary today and still feels isolated in the world. But it counts Canada as one of its few staunch allies on matters like UN votes, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper will visit the country in June.

However, Alan Baker, Israel's ambassador in Ottawa, said Muslim communities have had an impact on the foreign policies of such countries as France, and he is concerned Canada might follow.

"The question is, how do you treat the results of this fact? Do you expect from these greater numbers that they will absorb themselves into Canadian society as Canadians or that they'll try to push Canadians to adopt their own values and principles? And this is the gist of the problem," Mr. Baker said in an interview.

He cited intensifying demonstrations when he or other Israeli dignitaries speak on Canadian university campuses that have led to speeches being cancelled. He also mentioned reports that some delegates to the 2006 Liberal leadership convention sought to use the Jewish religion of Bob Rae's wife against him.

"First of all, there's a Muslim member of Parliament, who's elected to one of the Toronto ridings ..., [Omar] Alghabra, who has been outspoken in his hostility toward Israel," Mr. Baker said.

"I've got nothing against the fact that Muslims are members of the Canadian Parliament. But it worries me that the type of political influence that we're seeing in Britain, in France, might ultimately reach the Canadian political system."

Mr. Alghabra, the Liberal MP for Mississauga-Erindale, said he is "at a loss" to understand why he would be called hostile to Israel, noting he supports a two-state solution for the Middle East.

"Also Bulgarian-Israeli ties are very friendly both at government and at 'street level.' One high-ranking official told me tongue-in-cheek that if you ask a thousand Bulgarians whether they support Israel or the Palestinians and one says that he favors the Palestinians, it means he did not understand the question. One feels this attitude also in the newspapers. With Bulgaria, also, the restitution issue is settled.

• Phil Hunt at Amused Cynicism boils down the desire of many for cracked dogmas of various kinds on their desires for excessively simple black-and-white systems.


• blogTO covers the recent Toronto performance of Crowded House and judges it quite good.


• Ken MacLeod links to a brief look at end-of-the-world corporate insurance.


• Otto Spijkers at The Invisible College has a post up examining geographic parity in the various institutions of the United Nations.


• From Joe. My. God, news that another anti-gay "family values" Republic has a secret sexual life, in this case a mistress and a "love child."


• Gideon Rachman is critical of the idea of a concert of democracies, while Norman Geras takes him to task.
  
• Jaime Woo at Torontoist bemoans the publicity given to the new Sex and the City movie, though he does end his post by suggesting that Torontonians try to enjoy their city in the way that Carrie enjoys New York City.

[B]itterness is widely shared among the world's 10m Palestinians, 70% of whom are refugees or their descendants. Other peoples have suffered great tragedies, but the Palestinians' trauma not only refuses to reach closure, it has a horrible habit of repeating itself. Worse yet, its effects continue to poison politics within the wider region and beyond. In annual polling over the past six years, three-quarters of Arabs consistently place the issue of Palestine among their priorities.

In other words, little has changed since 1948, when street sentiment prompted five reluctant Arab governments to send troops on a vain mission to block the creation of Israel. During the ensuing war, the Palestinians' initial nakba, more than half the native population of Palestine, some 750,000 people, fled or were driven from the territory that became the Jewish state, whose troops then barred their return and systematically razed 531 of their ancestral villages. The six-day war in June 1967 brought the remaining 22% of historic Palestine under Israeli rule, and pushed out 250,000 more refugees.

In her first state visit to France, Governor-General Michaëlle Jean has been extolled in the media as the "almost Queen of Canada" and a symbol of successful multiculturalism - and all in this decidedly anti-monarchist country where immigration is widely seen as a problem.

"I perceive my role as a kind of catalyst," she said in an interview yesterday. "And I find myself in that role here."

Ms. Jean met with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and is scheduled to join him again today in Normandy for memorial services marking the anniversary of the Second World War armistice in Europe. They are also to visit a Canadian military cemetery.

In interviews with the French press, Ms. Jean said one of her aims is to impress upon French officials that French-speaking Canada extends well beyond Quebec. While her comments were welcomed in Paris as confirmation of the health of what the French call the francophonie, they prompted indignation from the Bloc Québécois. Pierre Paquette, the Bloc's deputy leader, called Ms. Jean's statements an insult to Quebeckers.

The other theme to Ms. Jean's visit was the 400th anniversary celebrations of the founding of Quebec City. She will spend half a day in La Rochelle, the port city that was the embarkation point for Samuel Champlain, founder of Quebec, and for later French settlers sailing for Canada in the 17th and 18th centuries.

[. . . T]he French government has signalled a possible policy shift away from official neutrality on the issue of Quebec sovereignty.

Last month, Alain Joyandet, the French minister in charge of relations with francophone countries, said France considered the political question of separatism to be a "non-issue." But he also said Mr. Sarkozy favoured a "direct and privileged" relationship with the province that could include special agreements on trade and labour exchanges.

Ms. Jean's five-day state visit ends on Saturday with another ceremony in Bordeaux, once a thriving port for the African slave trade, where she will join French government ministers to commemorate France's abolition of slavery 160 years ago.

One of her public themes for her visit is what she called "the duty of memory." As the great-great-granddaughter of slaves, she said the Bordeaux leg of the trip would be a particularly personal undertaking.

"I know it's going to be a deeply emotional experience for me to be there on the docks in Bordeaux," she said, "there where at least one of my ancestors was probably selected for transfer ... and where slaves were loaded onboard the boats like cargo."

Brenda Martin, a Canadian woman who spent more than two years in a Mexican jail, arrived at an airport in southern Ontario on Thursday and was promptly whisked away to a federal prison.

Martin, from Trenton, Ont., had been working in Mexico and was found guilty last week of money laundering by a Mexican judge. She had been in a Guadalajara-area jail since 2006, with the past few months spent sedated and on suicide watch.

A government-chartered jet carrying Martin touched down at Waterloo Regional Airport shortly before 6 p.m. ET, the CBC's Ron Charles reported.

Accompanied by Canadian officials, Martin was loaded into a Corrections Service of Canada van and taken to the Grand Valley Institute for Women, in nearby Kitchener.

Several friends and supporters were at the airport to greet Martin as her plane touched down on home soil.

One woman held up a sign with "Welcome home, Brenda" written in large black letters. "Woohoo," the friend screamed, "She's home. She's home finally."

According to the 110-page verdict, the judge found Ms. Martin guilty of depositing and transferring illicit funds. Between March and August of 2001, she received nearly $60,000 in Canadian funds in her Mexican bank account, and about $3,000 of it was transferred from the Latvian bank account of one of Mr. Waage's shell companies. Most of the money - $38,700 - was transferred by Ms. Martin from another account in her name.

Ms. Martin also received a $15,000 transfer from Keith Nordick, a Saskatchewan man living in Puerto Vallarta who was Mr. Waage's right-hand man in the scheme.Mr. Nordick pleaded guilty in a California court to fraud and money laundering in 2005.

Ms. Martin also transferred $16,000 from her bank account to Mr. Waage's sister, Lynn Johnston. Ms. Johnston is wanted on fraud charges, but has never been apprehended.

• From The Financial Times, Gideon Rachman's blog.


• From the GLBT corner of the blogosphere, gay news links site Towleroad.


• From Canadian newsmagazine MacLean's, Scott Feschuk's Feschuk's Mailbag and Paul Wells' Inkless Wells
  
• From Toronto, blogTO and Torontoist.

According to rough estimates, the YPA had 44 casualties and 146 wounded, and the Slovenian side 19 casualties and 182 wounded. 12 foreign citizens were killed. There is no data available as to the number of Slovenian soldiers killed while attempting to escape from the YPA. 4693 YPA servicemembers and 252 federal police officers were captured. There were 72 minor and major armed conflicts during the war. 31 YPA tanks, 22 personnel carriers and 6 helicopters were destroyed, damaged or confiscated, along with 6,787 infantry, 87 artillery and 124 air defence weapons according to YPA inspections.

Slovenia [. . . ] benefitted from excellent intelligence on the JNA's military strategy. Slovenes who served in the JNA gave sensitive information to senior Slovene military and political leaders. The information allowed the Territorial Defense forces to wage surprise guerrilla attacks against the JNA. Slovenia also demonstrated excellent coordination between its military and political-media staff. It successfully portrayed itself as the victim of a massive attack by the XNA. The Territorial Defense forces purposely attacked helicopters and tanks in an effort to show the JNA as thrusting its superior weaponry against the under-armed Slovenes. These attacks galvanized the world media and centered attention on Slovenia's resistance. At the same time, Slovenian political leaders cultivated diplomatic ties with key European allies, notably Germany and Austria, who spoke out against the JNA's moves. Overall, the short war illustrated a well-planned military operation by the Territorial Defense forces, coupled with a highly effective political and diplomatic strategy.

By all accounts, Yugoslav Army units are surrounded by Slovenian territorial defense forces behind barricades throughout the breakaway republic and are often without regular supplies of food and water, and oftencut off from their headquarters and from access to medical assistance.

"We are practically surrounded by the territorial defense," Col. Jovan Miskov, second in command of Yugoslavia's main Ljubljana barracks, said at a news conference on Sunday.

The final data released from the 2006 census showed the median earnings of full-time Canadian workers had increased to $41,401 in 2005 from $41,348 in 1980 - only about $1 a week more, measured in constant dollars.

In British Columbia it was worse: Median earnings actually fell 11.3 per cent between 1980 and 2005, the steepest slide in the country and something Statscan officials were at a loss to explain.

In addition to income stagnation, the census data, as predicted, revealed the income gap between rich and poor is widening, young people entering the labour market are earning less than their parents did a generation ago and immigrant incomes are plummeting.

Over the quarter century of census data tracked by Statscan, the incomes of the richest Canadians increased by 16.4 per cent while incomes of the poorest fell by 20.6 per cent.

The data also showed a rise in the proportion of Canada's youngest children living below the poverty line, a factor attributed to the declining incomes of immigrants and young native-born men at the family formation stage of their lives.

[. . .]

Armine Yalnizyan, senior economist for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives who has studied income inequality for the past several years, said she was surprised by the continuing income decline for immigrants and young people "because in 2005 we're at almost the tail end of a decade of strong economic growth, the strongest we've seen in 40 years, low inflation, low interest rates, low unemployment, strong economic growth and people are worse off than they were in the 1980s and 1990s, which were recession plagued decades.

"You'd think that with a tight labour market that the opportunities would increase for young people under 35 and for newcomers. But that just doesn't seem to be the case."

Nowhere are these national trends more pronounced than in the Toronto area, home to the country's largest percentage of new immigrants.

As a result, median family incomes (the point at which half are higher and half are lower) in the Toronto area dropped between 2000 and 2005 while they rose across Ontario and the rest of the country.

"We are becoming a city of the servant class – who earn servant wages and live in the city's northern suburbs – and the downtown elite who run everything," said University of Toronto urban studies professor David Hulchanski.

"Immigrants who used to come to this country came for middle-income jobs in construction that were unionized and well paying. Today they can't find those jobs. They are locked out by unions or education we don't recognize, or lack of Canadian experience," he said. "So they clean our offices and hotels and universities, drive our taxis and cook our meals."

[. . .]

Recent immigrant men with employment income in 1980 earned 85 cents for each dollar earned by Canadian-born men. But by 2005, the ratio had dropped to 63 cents. It was even worse for recent immigrant women, whose corresponding earnings were 85 cents and 56 cents, respectively.

Harjot Mangat, a 35-year-old lawyer from India, completed an MBA from Leeds University Business School in England before immigrating to Toronto in 2004. But the only work he has been able to find is selling electronics. "Even though my MBA is recognized by U of T, I quickly realized without Canadian experience no one was interested in hiring me," he said.

When he switched tactics and earned a diploma as a certified immigration consultant, no one would hire him because they were worried he'd compete for business, Mangat said.

So now he's trying to put his MBA to work through a website www.help4immigrants.com. "It's not about whether you are white or brown," Mangat said. "It's about the haves and have-nots. The haves don't want to let you in."

[. . .]

Across the Toronto area, median family incomes dropped to $77,693 in 2005 from $75,829 in 2000. The 2.4 per cent decrease compares with a national increase of 3.7 per cent and a provincial increase of 1.4 per cent.

• Via 'Aqoul, al-Qaeda blames the theory that the Israelis perpetrated the September 11th terrorist attacks on Iran.


• Centauri Dreams discusses the Great Filter that seems to be necessary in order to explain the Fermi paradoxi, "the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence for, or contact with, such civilizations."


• Aziz Poonawalla at City of Brass examines the motives behind the acceptance of pseudoscience by smart people, starting from the whole nasty IQ debate.


• Far Outliers quotes at length an analysis of China that blames many human rights violations on the weakness of the national government versus its nominally subordinate provincial and other local governments.


• Hunting Monsters takes a look at the "shadow countries" of Taiwan and Somaliland.


• Joe. My. God links to a survey in the United States suggesting that non-heterosexuals make up something in the area of 3% of the population.