Canada third in world in integrating newcomers

Canada near top in integrating immigrants, survey says

The Globe & Mail: Canada's integration policies rank just short of the best in the world, according to a major international survey of Europe and North America. Canada placed third behind Sweden and Portugal on the latest Migrant Integration Policy Index, a benchmark European study that measures a range of indicators, from political engagement and paths to citizenship to public education...

Canadian opinion polls show majority public support for the world's highest immigration levels and no party advocates cutting immigration... The new citizenship guide and test... was singled out as the 'most professional' in all countries... Canada was second only to Sweden on education... Canadian students benefit from multicultural policies that teach how to live in a diverse society and also include opportunities, sometimes after school, to learn about their 'heritage' cultures...

Although Sweden and Portugal came out ahead of Canada, the foreign-born make up less than 6 per cent of the population in those countries, compared to more than 20 per cent in Canada.

Canada ranked 3rd in integrating newcomers

The Toronto Star: Known as MIPEX, the biannual index uses 148 'policy indicators' in assessing nations in seven areas involving immigrants: labour mobility, chances of reuniting with families overseas, education conditions, prospects of permanent residency, political participation, access to citizenship and equality laws...

The report credits Canada's multicultural policy and its special effort in English as a second language education for newcomers, as well as provincial investment in teacher training and heritage language classes to help with immigrant students' transition.

Image source here.

Song: We will stay here: Gadhafi will leave!

نشيد :: سوف نبقى هنا :: جميل جدا و رااائع !!

Listen to it here.

Cartoon of the day

By Mr. Fish. Source here.

Sign for the day: Wisconsin teachers' union

Image source here.

Vancouver #1 liveable city for 5th year

Vancouver still world's most liveable city: survey

Reuters: Vancouver topped the list of the world's most liveable cities for the fifth straight year, while Melbourne claimed second place from Vienna and Australian and Canadian cities dominated the lists's top 10 spots.

In the annual survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit, the Canadian west coast city and 2010 Winter Olympics host scored 98 percent on a combination of stability, health care, culture and environment, education, and infrastructure -- a score unchanged from last year. It has topped the list from 2007...

Los Angeles moved up three places to 44th and New York held on to the 56th spot. London moved up one place to 53rd while Paris came in at number 16. The top Asian city was Osaka at number 12, tying Geneva, Switzerland and beating out the Japanese capital of Tokyo, which came in at 18. Hong Kong came in at 31 but Beijing, capital of the world's most populous nation and No. 2 economy, straggled in at 72.

Following is a list of the top 10 most liveable cities as ranked by the Economist Intelligence Unit:

1. Vancouver, Canada
2. Melbourne, Australia
3. Vienna, Austria
4. Toronto, Canada
5. Calgary, Canada
6. Helsinki, Finland
7. Sydney, Australia
8. Perth, Australia
9. Adelaide, Australia
10. Auckland, New Zealand

Image: Getty Images

Oil giant predicts 'all nations to decline'

Shell report predicts peak oil now or soon, ponders 'Depression 2.0'

Raw Story: In a recent 'Signals & Signposts' report by Shell, forecasting energy scenarios through 2050, the oil giant predicted a growing volatility in the price of oil and a coming period of 'extraordinary opportunity or misery.' As the demand for oil butts up against actual production and remaining reserves, the climbing price of oil will cause the gross domestic product of all nations to decline, they predict. In another section, Shell calls these economic effects 'Depression 2.0.' ...

Shell predicts that as the energy industry struggles to meet global demand, 'environmental tension will swell and spread.' ... Competition and 'natural innovation' in energy efficiency would only account for a moderation in demand of about 20 percent by 2050. Meanwhile, between 2000 and 2050, demand for easily accessible energy will triple, they predict...

Businesses around the world, they noted, have already started to accept that climate regulations will soon become a reality for global trade and have begun to budget accordingly. But even the most rapid improvements... won't help much in the near term... Shell also predicts that '[the] longer the delay in climate policy action, the more likely the shocks become.'... Read the full report here (.pdf).

Image source here.

Record melting in Greenland during 2010

Image: Earth Observatory

Quotes for the day

He who does not know the truth is only a fool. He who knows the truth and calls it a lie is a criminal. -- Bertold Brecht, in The Life of Galileo

We know, of course, there is really no such thing as the 'voiceless.' There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard. -- Arundhati Roy, in 'Peace and the New Corporate Liberation Theology'

Politically motivated violence is always preceded by a 'period of slander, innuendo, or rumour mongering that is meant to legitimize the actions that follow'... The underlying aim of hate propaganda is 'fostering suspicion against democratic society, democratic institutions and democracy itself.' -- Paul Wilson on Stieg Larsson: 'The Archivist,' in The Walrus

But listen to what they're really saying when they shout about 'privatize public broadcasting!' They're saying we should not have access to information unless it's served through the filters of ideologues and corporations, a claim worthy of Orwell. -- Karoli, at Crooks & Liars

George Orwell had warned six decades ago that the corrosion of language goes hand in hand with the corruption of democracy. If he were around today, he would remind us that 'like the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket,' this kind of propaganda engenders a 'protective stupidity' almost impossible for facts to penetrate. -- Bill Moyers, 'Facts still matter'

Map: Protests across Middle East, North Africa

View Protests across the Middle East in a larger map

Sun flares, erupts but Earth dodges storm

X-class Flare

NASA: On Valentine's Day the Sun unleashed one of its most powerful explosions, an X-class flare. The blast was the largest so far in the new solar cycle. Erupting in the Sun's southern hemisphere, the flare is captured here [VIDEO] in this extreme ultraviolet image from the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). The intense burst of electromagnetic radiation momentarily overwhelmed pixels in SDO's detectors causing the bright vertical blemish. This X-class flare was also accompanied by a coronal mass ejection (CME), a massive cloud of charged particles traveling outward at nearly 900 kilometres per second.

Earth dodges geomagnetic storm

Raw Story: A wave of charged particles from a huge solar eruption has glanced off the Earth's northern pole, lighting up auroras and disrupting some radio communications... But the Earth appears to have escaped a widespread geomagnetic storm, with the effects confined to the northern latitudes.

Images: NASA

Extreme weather: 'No one to blame but ourselves'

Scientists find global warming fingerprints in extreme rainstorms, floods

The Toronto Star: Extreme rainstorms and snowfalls have grown substantially stronger, two studies suggest, with scientists for the first time finding the telltale fingerprints of man-made global warming on downpours that often cause deadly flooding. Two studies in Nature link heavy rains to increases in greenhouse gases more than ever before...

Both studies should weaken the argument that climate change is a 'victimless crime,' said Myles Allen of the University of Oxford... 'Extreme weather is what actually hurts people.'... Since 1950, flooding has killed more than 2.3 million people, according to the World Health Organization's disaster database... Similar studies are now underway to examine whether last year's deadly Russian heat wave and Pakistan floods... can be scientifically attributed to global warming...

For years scientists, relying on basic physics and climate knowledge, have said global warming would likely cause extremes in temperatures and rainfall. But this is the first time researchers have been able to point to a demonstrable cause-and-effect by using the rigorous and scientifically accepted method of looking for the 'fingerprints' of human-caused climate change [read the entire article for methodology]... In fact, the computer models underestimated the increase in extreme rain and snow...

Similar fingerprinting studies have found human-caused greenhouse gas emissions triggered changes in more than a dozen other ecological ways: temperatures on land, the ocean's surface, heat content in the depths of the oceans, temperature extremes, sea level pressure, humidity at ground level and higher in the air, general rainfall amounts, the extent of Arctic sea ice, snowpack levels and timing of runoff in the western United States, Atlantic Ocean salinity, wildfire damage, and the height of the lower atmosphere.

All those signs say global warming is here, said Xuebin Zhang, a research scientist for the Canadian government and co-author of the Northern Hemisphere study. 'It is affecting us in multiple directions.' 'We start to see an emerging pattern,' said Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria...'And we have no one to blame but ourselves.'

Image source here.

Meanwhile, US House ends F-35 engine program

House Votes to Kill F-35 Jet Engine

Slate: The proposed F-35 jet engine has until now survived two administrations' attempts to kill it, but the GOP-led may have finally delivered a death blow... to what critics have long said was a wasteful weapons system... The elimination of the engine will save the Pentagon $3 billion over the next few years.

House Votes to End Alternative Jet Engine Program

The New York Times: The Joint Strike Fighter is the nation's most expensive weapons program, and eliminating the alternate engine would be one of the most noteworthy cancellations this year... The vote was a victory for President Obama and the defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, who had called the engine 'an unnecessary and extravagant expense.'... As costs have risen on the F-35 program, Mr. Gates has said the alternate engine seemed more a luxury than a necessity. And it is possible that the Pentagon and several allied nations will not end up buying as many of the planes as they expected.

U.S. 'unseen puppeteer' in Harper's F-35 dance

The silent U.S. hand guiding Canada's F-35 debate

Scott Taylor, Embassy: Although no actual contract has been signed, the Harper Tories remain adamant that they will proceed with the purchase of the stealth aircraft... the largest military project expenditure in Canada's history...

Thanks to recent revelations made public via WikiLeaks, it is safe to surmise that the U.S. State Department is the unseen puppeteer making Harper do the F-35 dance. The embarrassing documents contain American diplomatic correspondence detailing how they used a public 'carrot' and a private 'stick' approach to convince Norway to buy the F-35.

A 'lessons learned' cable from the U.S. embassy to Oslo reads: "We needed to avoid any appearance of undue pressuring... We opted for 'choosing the JSF will maximize the relationship' [between the U.S. and Norway] as our main public line. In private we were much more forceful."... The American Embassy subsequently reported to Washington, "The tide has turned in Norway... The media have recently run a number of articles from active duty and retired officers extolling the strengths of the F-35."...

Fast-forward to the Jan.24 edition of the Ottawa Citizen, wherein former Canadian air force generals Angus Watt and Paul Manson penned a joint editorial entitled 'The truth about those jets'... the gist of which was to extol the strengths of the F-35...

While he was indeed once the chief of the defence staff for the Canadian Forces and a top project officer on the acquisition of the air force's current fleet of CF-18 fighter aircraft, Manson forgot to mention his post-military sting as the president of Lockheed Martin Canada... Lockheed Martin is the main manufacturer of the F-35.

Image source here.

Nonviolent, democratic Arabs 'bad for Israel'

Egypt's revolution and Israel: 'Bad for the Jews'

Ilan Pappe, The Electronic Intifada: Spearheading the Israeli interpretation are the former Israeli ambassadors to Egypt... Their tirade can be summarized in the words of one of them, Zvi Mazael, who told Israeli television's Channel One on 28 January, 'this is bad for the Jews; very bad.' In Israel of course when you say 'bad for the Jews,' you mean the Israelis... But what is really bad for Israel is the comparison...

Nonviolent, democratic (be they religious or not) Arabs are bad for Israel... What is at stake here is the pretense that Israel is a stable, civilized, western island in a rough sea of Islamic barbarism and Arab fanaticism. The 'danger for Israel is that the cartography would be the same but the geography would change. It would still be an island, but of barbarism and fanaticism in a sea of newly formed egalitarian and democratic states.

In the eyes of large sections of Western civil society the democratic image of Israel has long ago vanished but it may now be dimmed and tarnished in the eyes of others who are in power and politics... One way or another the cry rising from Cairo's Tahrir Square is a warning that fake mythologies of the 'only democracy in the Middle East,' hardcore Christian fundamentalism (far more sinister and corrupt than that of the Muslim Brotherhood), cynical military-industrial corporate profiteering, neo-conservatism and brutal lobbying will not guarantee the sustainability of the special relationship between Israel and the United States.

Image source here.