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(Courtesy of The Montreal Gazette) Got to love how dumb the law is in this country. You can't even defend your self from an intruder. I guess the politicians and police don't give a rats ass what happens to normal law abiding citizens I bet you break into a cops house or politicians house unknowingly and they stab you, the law will be on their side. I hate this hypocritical system As you can see I am biased. I am for the right the bare arms and self defence, but we just live in a to liberal society that lets people push people around and we have to be submissive / passive. OT: I think I should really go into politics and see how many votes I can get with my views and see if people would vote

RE : U.S. Health care debate After spending some time watching some news clips, reading some articles, and listening to people debate health care... there's one thing i just don't understand. If there are any socially conservative people here, (I know MTLskyline is fiscally conservative but not sure about social issues) I'd love to hear and try to understand your rationalization. I sincerely mean that. I'm not here to provoke debate, i just want to understand an opposing view point. I don't understand how sidewalks, electricity and roads are deemed acceptable publicly funded services, yet human health care is not. If life is so sacred, and the sanctity of life is so important that a woman cannot have the right to choose, then why is it wrong to acknowledge life as a basic right and grant health care to everyone? People that can't afford health insurance are permitted to suffer and die, by no fault of their own... their lives are meaningless. Yet a newly fertilized egg is sacred? To me, this seems outrageously hypocritical and appallingly unethical.

(Courtesy of the Associated Press) Plus here is the pic of the ******!

Montreal does it right Behind the chair BRYAN FADER hfxnews.ca I have just returned from a hair show in Montreal and once again I have fallen in love with that city. It is always so great to be in a place where people push the envelope with fashion. They seem to push the envelope with everything they do. While there I attended a Habs game against Ottawa. Now, to be honest, I am a Leafs fan and I hate both of these teams but to get caught up in all that was going on was easy to do. I did have some time in between great plays to notice that even at a hockey game the woman of Montreal dress well and have great hair and better makeup. What I also noticed is that they are not necessarily better looking. They are average I think in the big picture. But it's what they do with their version of average that matters. They accent the positive and hide the negative. They walk with confidence and a belief in themselves. It is really attractive to see a woman - any woman - carry herself with a sense of confidence. A sense of purpose and a sense of ease. Ease in herself and her look. I think it comes down to the details. Not a specific sweater or dress or haircut, but in all of the things that they pick it's quality over quantity. They make sure their hair is polished and their nails are manicured. The right earrings that can dress up any look. Now the great part about this is that you can do this, too. If you are feeling out of sorts with your fashion, whether it is your haircut or your clothes, this is the time to start to make a change, The first thing is to take a really good inventory. I was in Winners the other day trying on some shirts and I am not sure what the lights do in the dressing rooms but I know I look better than that!!! What it did do, though, was shine an honest light on what is working and what I have to work on. We need to be honest with ourselves if we expect to change and inventory helps with that. Start with your clothes. If it has a stain on it, if it has a rip in it or if you haven't worn it in a year then you must get rid of it. Just let it go. It isn't your friend. If it is your hair it's time for some detail. A cleaner cut, a solid colour that compliments your skin (your stylist can help you with that) . Think more polish. Think expensive. It doesn’t have to be expensive, just look expensive. And that means well done. Maybe your makeup is in need of an update. The first step is to book a consultation to reevaluate and start again. We get in such ruts with our looks that we sometimes can't see the forest for the trees. It's time to add a little French to our diet. Take the fashion challenge; you will be pleased with the results. behindthechair@hfxnews.ca Bryan Fader is throwing out everything with hair colour on it and starting again. He is an international Platform artist for Piidea Canada and trying to get better every day. http://www.hfxnews.ca/index.cfm?sid=107117&sc=273

Du site de BBC News - 2 articles sur la conférence à McGill en fin de semaine, in "the Canadian city of Montreal" - lol Forum tackles genocide prevention Local people in front of burnt out buildings in Darfur Delegates said atrocities continued to this day in Darfur A conference in the Canadian city of Montreal has been discussing ways to try to prevent genocide. Delegates heard from survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, as well as genocidal campaigns in Rwanda and Cambodia. Many delegates referred to the current crisis in Darfur, Sudan, which has been described as "genocide in slow motion". "It seems that for the most part the vow of 'never again' was not taken seriously," Payam Akhavan, the conference chair, told AFP news agency. Esther Mujawayo, a Rwandan woman who lost her mother, father and husband in the 1994 genocide, said she was sceptical about the world's willingness to prevent atrocities. "Don't tell me you didn't know. The world did know. The world looked away. You knew but did not have the will," said Mrs Mujawayo. "When the people were evacuating, the French, the Belgians, the Americans, all the expatriates, they even evacuated their dogs and their cats," while Rwandans were left behind, she said. 'Arm opponents' Much of the discussion at the conference, sponsored by McGill University's law faculty, has centred on how to prevent common aspects of genocides, like media outlets demonising potential victims and foreign bureaucratic inertia preventing intervention. But a controversial thesis was also presented by the French scholar, Gerard Prunier. He said the only way to stop government sponsored mass killings was to give military backing to opponents of that government. "If we decide that in fact what is going to happen is of a genocidal dimension, we have to support, including militarily, the people who are fighting against it," he said. He told the BBC that would mean arming and assisting the rebels fighting against government-backed militia in Darfur. Some two million people have been displaced and at least 200,000 have died during the four-year conflict in western Sudan. Can the world stop genocide? Can the world stop genocide? A conference in the Canadian city of Montreal has been discussing ways to prevent genocide. BBC world affairs correspondent Mark Doyle, attending the meeting, asks whether this can be done. Remains of victims of the Rwandan genocide laid to rest at the Murambi Genocide Memorial. Some 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered in 100 days in 1994 The 75-year-old woman sat on stage in front of hundreds of United Nations officials, legal experts and academics. The day before, Marika Nene had travelled from Hungary to Canada - the first plane she had ever taken on her first journey outside Hungary. She was not intimidated by the gathering. Her long hair was lit up by a stage light and her facial features were strong. But the strongest thing about Marika Nene, a Roma - or Gypsy - woman who was trapped in the anti-Gypsy pogroms during World War II, was her determination to tell her story. "I had no choice. I had to give myself up to the soldiers," Marika Nene said through a translator. "I was a very pretty little gypsy woman and of course the soldiers took me very often to the room with a bed in it where they violated me. I still have nightmares about it". Many members of Marika Nene's Roma family died in the work camps and the ghettos. She had travelled to Montreal to give a reality check to the experts and UN officials at the "Global Conference on the Prevention of Genocide". We do not need to have a legal finding that genocide has been committed in order to take preventive action Payam Akhavan Former war crimes prosecutor She was joined by other survivors - from Rwanda, Cambodia and the Jewish holocaust. They all told their horrific stories bravely. But there was something especially extraordinary about the elderly Roma who had transported herself from a village in eastern Hungary into the glare of an international conference in one of the most modern cities in the world. It was an example of what Nigerian Nobel Prize-winning author Wole Soyinka would later describe to me as one of those points where people meet each other in a spirit of "egalitarian awareness". Six million Jews or one million Tutsis are just numbers. But this strong Roma woman was a human being who was not ashamed to tell her story. Betrayal The Montreal conference drew personalities from the UN, academia and the legal profession. Romeo Dallaire Romeo Dallaire could do little to prevent the Rwandan genocide The general aim was to build pressure on politicians to take mass killings - even in far-off places about which we know little and sometimes care less - far more seriously. If that sounds like a fuzzy and vague ambition, Canadian Gen Romeo Dallaire, who commanded a UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, begged to differ. Gen Dallaire led a force in Rwanda which was betrayed by UN headquarters in New York - his mission was starved of resources and so forced to observe genocide rather than stop it. Since that failed mission, he has made a career out of lobbying politicians to do better on issues like peacekeeping, abolishing the use of child soldiers and nuclear disarmament. "This conference is aimed especially at young people," said Gen Dallaire from a hotel surrounded by the campus buildings of McGill University, which organised the conference. "If these young people became politically active," he continued, "they could dictate a whole new concept of what national interest should be and what humanity should be." What is genocide? Payam Akhavan, professor of international law at McGill and a former prosecutor at the UN war crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, said defining genocide mattered from a legal point of view - but that analysing how it could be prevented was the real point. Pol Pot in the 1970s, and shortly before his death in the 1990s Pol Pot, who led Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, was never brought to justice "The legal definition of genocide is contained in the 1948 Genocide convention," he told me. "In simple terms, it is the intentional, collective destruction of an entire human group based on national, racial, religious or ethnic identity." "But the key point", Mr Akhavan continued, "is that we do not need to have a legal finding that genocide has been committed in order to take preventive action." That is because, of course, by the time the lawyers have decided a mass killing fits their definition, it is usually too late to act. The Iranian-born professor said it was necessary to think about the ingredients of genocide, which he listed as: * incitement to ethnic hatred * demonisation of the target group * radicalisation along ethnic or religious lines * distribution of weapons to extremist groups * preparation of lists of those to be exterminated Similarities As someone who personally witnessed and reported on the Rwandan genocide, I found it quite disturbing to read about other mass killings. Genocides can only be stopped by the people directly involved Gerard Prunier It was not the details which I found shocking, but the spooky similarities that kept cropping up across the world. The lists prepared by the Hutu extremists in Rwanda, for example, were mirrored by the obsessive recording of the details of victims by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The yellow identity stars Jews were forced to wear in World War II were the equivalent of the ethnic identity cards every Rwandan had to carry. This is the grim opposite of Wole Soyinka's "egalitarian awareness". It is the social science of genocide, which appears to have common features across history. The conference aimed to isolate and analyse Mr Akhavan's "early warning" factors to raise awareness. But what to do with the information? As speaker after speaker reminded the Montreal conference, the US government, among others, has asserted that genocide is being committed right now in the Darfur region of Sudan. It was continuing even as we sipped our coffee in softly carpeted rooms and nibbled our Canadian canapes. Everyone has known about it for several years but virtually nothing had been done to stop it. A dissident voice So all the talk about "early warnings" and "United Nations peacekeeping forces" and "the will of the international community" could be said to amount to little. Local people in front of burnt out buildings in Darfur The US and others have said a genocide is unfolding in Darfur At this point, a controversial scholar intervened with comments which challenged the entire conference. French author Gerard Prunier, like the proverbial ghost at a wedding, said genocides could not be prevented by the international community. "When you see a dictatorial regime heating up, everyone starts talking, talking, talking ... and by the time the talking stops, either matters have quietened down or they have happened." And that is the crux of the matter, according to Mr Prunier - it is difficult for politicians or the military to intervene in a situation that has not yet evolved into a crisis. Give war a chance? So what is Mr Prunier's solution? "Genocides can only be stopped by the people directly involved - and usually that means people involved in the war that accompanies most mass killings." And if it is the government committing the genocide, the solution is "arm the rebels", he says. "It won't be clean - it will be messy," the French author said, "but it is more likely to stop the mass killing than international intervention." To a large extent, Mr Prunier has history on his side. The Holocaust only ended when the allies destroyed Hitler's regime. The killing fields of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge were only stopped when the Vietnamese army moved in. And the genocide in Rwanda only ended when the Tutsi rebels overthrew the extremist Hutu regime. Against this, it could be argued that some interventions have worked - for example the Nigerian intervention in Liberia, which was followed up by a UN peacekeeping mission. It seems that resolving dramatic human rights abuses may require some of the diplomacy and the "international good will" that flowed so freely in Montreal. But as well as what Winston Churchill called "Jaw Jaw", some situations, it seems, may only be resolved by "War War".