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Canada-EU Pact Touted as Model Trade Deal

By Philip Blenkinsop February, 2017 STRASBOURG (Reuters) – Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau praised the European Union as an unprecedented model for peaceful cooperation, in a speech to EU lawmakers that contrasted sharply with the critical stance of U.S. President Donald Trump. Speaking to the European Parliament on February 16, a day after it backed a comprehensive free trade deal between Canada and the EU known as CETA, Trudeau said the 28-nation bloc had a crucial global role to play. By contrast, Trump has questioned the value and future of the EU and has applauded Britain’s shock decision to leave

Churchill essay on aliens timely reminder of modern dangers

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, circa 1940-`945. Photograph MH 26392, Imperial War Museums collection, by Cecil Beaton, UK government, public domain via Wikimedia By Elizabeth Tasker, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)  February 18, 2017 Buried within the archives of a museum in Missouri, an essay on the search alien life has come to light, 78 years after it was penned. Written on the brink of the second world war, its unlikely author is the political leader Winston Churchill. If the British prime minister was seeking solace in the prospect of life beyond our war-torn planet, would the discovery of a plethora of

The terrifying mathematics of the Anthropocene

By Owen Gaffney and Will Steffen, February, 2017 Here are some surprising facts about humans’ effect on planet Earth. We have made enough concrete to create an exact replica of Earth 2mm thick. We have produced enough plastic to wrap Earth in clingfilm. We are creating “technofossils”, a new term for congealed human-made materials – plastics and concretes – that will be around for tens of millions of years. But it is the scale that humans have altered Earth’s life support system that is the most concerning. In 2000, Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer proposed that human impact on the

Canada needs ranked, not proportional, voting

TOM REGAN: SUMMONING ORENDA February 11, 2017 Like many Canadians (even those of us who live abroad and may have dual citizenship) who had hoped that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would follow through on his campaign promise to reform the voting system in Canada, I found myself deeply disappointed by his sudden announcement, that he had abandoned plans for reform and was sticking with the first-past-the-post system. Canada is the only country in the OECD that still uses first-past-the-post in all elections. (England still uses it on its federal level, but uses different methods for voting on lower bodies.) It’s a

Media literacy in a post-fact age

PENNEY KOME: OVER EASY February, 2017 Fake news is as old as the Internet. From the 1990s, I remember spam, scams, and ghost ship “rolling” petitions that sailed the white-font-on-black-background PINE and LYNX seas – almost as soon as the first E-list was compiled. Spam couldn’t easily penetrate Usenet – the threaded online discussion Bulletin Boards, or BB ses that scientists used. When email lists proliferated, however, spamsters found ways to hop on board other people’s trains, at open relays. Good e-lists relied on volunteer moderators (as the long-lived feminist PAR-L list still does)  but messages on even the best-intentioned lists often carried warnings

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