Islamic Conversions and Healing Hearts

There are always those gentle souls who feel personally obligated to do their utmost to aid those 'less fortunate' and whose lives are miserable and downtrodden.  People who see virtue and value in a religion they are unfamiliar with and find great solace within, impelling them to share the belief and to worship alongside those to whom they give compassion in a shared and charitable view of life.

There have been more than a few men and women of conscience and good nature who have gravitated toward Islam, forsaking their original religions and traditional values to embrace that of a religion that is a way of life foreign to them but which appears to have great appeal to them nonetheless.  And they dedicate their lives henceforth to alleviating the misery of people in disadvantaged states who pray to Allah.

There is a mystique that exists where people feel that if they convey adequate emotion and sympathy they will miraculously be spared condemnation and violence by those threatening  the well-being of others whom they find contemptible for not sharing the depths of their faith.  Apart from spreading terror because of their fanatical dedication to a faith that elevates martyrs who engage in mass murder for the greater glory of Islam, terror appeals to those who thrill to the prospect of instilling mortal fear in others.

While the mild of manner and humanely-dedicated martyrs of human goodness shared among the unfortunate go about their business spending their energies to a fixed idea of lifting the spirits of the oppressed, helping to feed them and to give them hope for the future, they are viewed, despite their studied ability to speak the language of those whom they serve, and pray to the higher spiritual order of those whom they serve, with indifferent contempt by those other martyrs to terrorism.

To the horror and disappointment of humanitarian aid workers who have converted to Islam and who dedicate their lives to working among the poor and the dispossessed Muslims in Pakistan and Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Arab and Muslim world, they are no more guaranteed respect and gratitude than any other interfering Western aid worker who will be abducted and held for ransom.  And if that ransom is not paid, their lives will be forfeit.


Just as the lives become forfeit of those Muslims who dare defy Islamist sharia law by becoming apostates, and turning to another religion, defying tradition and the outrage of those who insist they comply or face death in straying from Islamic belief.  The decapitated body of the "gentle and caring" British aid worker, Khalil Dale represents just another individual who felt compassion and the call of another religion to alter his life irrevocably.


Pakistan, the very country that breeds fanatical jihadists committed to violence and martyrdom, has taken another life.  Four months in captivity as a helpless pawn in a trade-or-perish device of captive-for-money, he was finally sacrificed to the anger of the Taliban for whom the ransom of $30-million was not forthcoming from the International Committee of the Red Cross.


Khalil Dale, like others before him, was completely committed to humanitarian aid.  He was a Red Cross nurse, managing a health program in Quetta, Baluchistan province.  A man driven by his aptitude to help and heal.  Hostage-taking has proven to be fairly lucrative for the Taliban.  Not nearly as lucrative, one might imagine, as the opium trade, but fair enough. 


For his troubles in dedicating his life to the succour of the unfortunate, Mr. Dale, fine religious man that he was, ended his days wrapped in a cellophane covering, inside a plastic bag, discarded at the side of the road, outside the city where he worked to make life more palatable for the indigent ill.  A video is expected to be released shortly, of his execution.


It is doubtless meant to have instructive value to the international community.

Punishment: Death

Capital punishment, though many countries of the world are now eschewing that final, irreversible punishment for crimes against society, still takes thousands of lives each year, in countries for which criminal punishment is felt to merit death rather than cluttering up state prisons with penalties of life imprisonment. 

In some countries, like Canada, for example, which abolished capital punishment in 1976, a life-sentence for first-degree murder of police officers or prison guards will net the accused 25 years.

Those countries of the world practising capital punishment are headed by China, the most populous country in the world, where, over the last four years, thousands were executed; in excess of six thousand prisoners in 2007 alone were executed for their crimes.  Crimes punishable by the death penalty there include tax fraud, drug offences, corruption and property theft.

In order of numbers executed by the state through capital punishment, the countries are listed as China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, United States, Pakistan, Yemen, North Korea, Vietnam, Libya, Afghanistan, Japan, Syria, Sudan, Bangladesh, Somalia, Egypt, Indonesia.  After which the remaining countries' annual executions are in the single digits.

In Iran, capital punishment is merited for convictions of murder, rape, adultery, pedophilia, sodomy, drug traffickers, armed robbery, kidnapping, terrorism and treason.  About 360 prisoners met their end in 2011, most for drug trafficking.  Under the above-stated categories, political prisoners accused of acting against the interests of the state are executed, as are homosexuals.

In Saudi Arabia, offences range from murder, rape, armed robbery, repeated drug use, apostasy, adultery, witchcraft and sorcery, to qualify for the death penalty.  Executions can be effected by beheading with a sword, stoning or firing squad, as well as by crucifixion.  Between 2007 and 2010, 345 executions were carried out by public beheading.  In 2011, the last reported execution for sorcery took place.

Iraq executed 34 people in 2012 on one day alone.  The death penalty will be imposed for 48 crimes which include damage to public property as an example of non-fatal crimes.  In 2011, 313 people were sentenced to death, over half convicted of murder.  Others were charged as drug traffickers, kidnappers for ransom and rape, and three were executed for blasphemy charges.

In the United States capital punishment is related only to homicide crimes including aggravated murder, felony murder and contract killing.  Execution method varies, with the most common technique being lethal injection.  A 2011 Gallup poll indicated that 61% of Americans favoured capital punishment, with 35% opposing it.

In Yemen the death penalty is applied for offences including murder, drug trafficking, rape, sexual offences and speech or action offensive to Islam.  Adultery is punishable by death by stoning.  Death sentences are often passed after court proceedings falling short of international standards for justice at fair trial.

Iran executes a greater number of people than any other single country, including China, on a per capita basis.

It's a Puzzler

Royal-watchers and their fascination with heirloom celebrity status who outrank and outperform their counterparts in the media, popular entertainment, music, dance, theatre, Hollywood through the mystique surrounding royalty, inheritance and class distinctions present a mystery.  No talent is required; birthright is a necessity. 

Popular legends help enormously and popular acclaim in support of a dynastic rule with a public willing and eager to ascribe exceptionality to the otherwise-banal.

A young woman from a financially privileged background whose sister has married into the British royal household suddenly is described as one of the "most influential people in the world", by Time magazine.  Just because a respected and popular news journal makes that pronouncement doesn't, of course, guarantee the statement has real meaning in the real world. 

But it does describe popular fascination with something, some mysterious element attracting mass popularity and appeal.

That something just happens to be a young woman - 28-year-old Philippa Middleton, popularly known as "Pippa", which doubtless helps - whose social exploits seem anything but celebrational, but which have led to her being doted upon as a social leader of elite young international celebrities; people who worship their imaginary lifestyles and lead the public to do likewise.

Her sister Catherine, now Duchess of Cambridge, married to the British heir to the throne, Prince William, gained her own wildly fond popular appeal.  Tinged, however, with respect, since she is now part of the royal institution and she will undoubtedly become the mother of a royal figure who may one day sit on the throne.  For whatever that is worth.

But Philippa, Kate's sister, single, and much sought-out by the cavalier and worldly youth of aristocratic and/or wealthy European elite, has herself become famous as she flaunts her own connections.  What she wears, how she portrays herself, has become influential in how others wish to display and comport themselves. 

She has received enough advantage to allow her a $600,000 publishing fee for a book on that vital topic: party planning. There is now ongoing a six-figure bidding altercation for a 'major' television interview, her first. 

The fickle public will doubtless soon become bored with this hollow manifestation of social prestige; utterly meaningless, but obviously a measure of notoriety beyond any connection to values having been attributed to the empty lifestyle of someone revelling in her fortuitous public appeal.

Bugando Medical Centre

A medical team from Israel’s Save a Child’s Heart, an international humanitarian non-governmental organisation, has successfully performed the first-ever paediatric open heart surgery on the youngest patient in Tanzania.

"She had a hole in her heart.  We had to stop her heart, go in and close this hole and then start the heart functioning again.  In places like Canada, you can do this operation any day. You don't let patients with the condition become six months old or even a year, without the operation.  But in Tanzania, this little girl was four years old and she could have died while being on a waiting list."

But that little girl is now healthy, and in school.  She is the child of farmers, living in a mud hut without running water or electricity.  And she had undergone what was historic surgery in Tanzania when a team of 13 doctors from Save a Child's Heart travelled to Tanzania from Israel to operate a cardiac clinic at the Bugando Medical Center in the city of Mwanza.

The Bugando Medical Center is an 850-bed hospital serving 15 million people, as best they can.  Lacking sufficient trained medical staff, pharmaceuticals, advanced technology.  Dr. Godwin Godfrey, son of a surgeon, born in a small town beneath Mount Kilimanjaro is a second-generation medical practitioner, intimately familiar with the heart-breaking difficulties of practising his profession in a developing country.

After he received his medical degree at Makerere University in Uganda he returned to Tanzania for his internship, choosing to do so at the Bugando Medical Centre.  "Most of our doctors are actually located in Dar es Salaam, the capital.  That is the biggest city and all the government offices are there.  But with me being interested in surgery, I thought if I went to work in one of the big hospitals I wouldn't get the hands-on experience that I wanted."

He did get that hands-on-experience in Mwanza, possibly more than he had anticipated, let alone wanted.  A lack of surgeons and specialists meant he was busy with pediatric cases, orthopedic, ophthalmology and neurosurgery, quite the introduction. He shifted to cardiac surgery, but there was little equipment, much less expertise.  He looked into possibly training in cardiac surgery close to home, discovering the only places in Africa were in South Africa, Egypt, Morocco or Tunisia.

But there, he was informed they had no interest in training foreign doctors.  A visiting German doctor representing a Christian charity recommended that he apply to study in Israel under a humanitarian project sponsored by the Save A Child's Heart group.  At the Wolfson Medical Centre in Holon, Israel outside of Tel Aviv, cardiac surgeons have treated over 2,800 children with congenital heart diseases, and adolescents suffering from heart-valve diseases.

As Dr. Godfrey discovered, patients come in to Israel from international destinations to undergo roughly 225 emergency operations annually.  Some 43% of the cases flown in come from Africa, 47% from Arab states, including the Palestinian Authority, Jordan and Iraq.  Dr. Godfrey was offered a full five-year scholarship by Save A Child's Heart to study pediatric cardiac surgery.  And the organization helped him to train a complete surgery team to work in Tanzania with him.

"Heart surgery is teamwork," said Dr. Godfrey as he toured Sick Children's Hospital in Toronto.  "It's not just the work of a surgeon.  You need a cardiologist, an anesthesiologist, an intensive care unit internist, people to operate the heart pumps and ventilators."  On his graduation next summer from the Wolfson Medical Centre he will represent the first and only pediatric heart surgeon in Tanzania to serve a country of 43-million people.

"A child on the waiting list with a serious heart condition may wait maybe three or four years and die of complications like heart failure.  Sometimes it can be very depressing being a doctor in a poor country like Tanzania.  Too many times you see children dying in front of your eyes.  You know that you are supposed to do something, like give them medicine, but you don't have it."

In Israel at the inception of his training at the Wolfson Medical Centre the situation was completely different.  "I always used to see a lot of death.  In our department in Tanzania (Bugando Medical Centre, Mwanza) you could have five or seven children die every day.  When I got to Israel to train I realized we weren't seeing any children die - even in a month."

"This was really an eye-opener.  Whatever we were doing; it was wrong.  It opened my eyes.  There is so much that we don't know.  There is so much equipment that we don't have.  There is so much medication that we don't have."  Tanzania's Ministry of Health has a waiting list of nearly 500,000 patients desperately requiring heart surgery.

"A child on the waiting list with a serious heart condition may wait maybe three or four years and die of complications like heart failure."

That's All Right, Then

Now, that's inspiring.  It might indeed inspire copy-catters.  Assuming that individuals who might be attracted to subterfuges of that magnitude in the commission of horrendous crimes, having the faculties to plan a web of intrigue so simple yet so complex.  And assuming that they can read.

Ved Parkash Dhingra stabbed his wife to death seven years ago.  But he was deemed through expert testimony to have been insane at the time of the murder, according to an Ontario Court of Appeal ruling.

Normally, read the court's 17-page document setting out its decision, it is a "rule of public policy", that someone who murders may not share in the victim's estate.  Makes eminently good sense.  There should be nothing approximating a 'reward' for the taking of a human life.  But since that particular psychotic outbreak has been attributed to temporary insanity, why then...

Mr. Dhingra cannot be held legally responsible for the death of his wife whom he repeatedly stabbed and bludgeoned.  Kamlesh Dhingra lost her life to her husband's rage.  He was charged with second-degree murder, but a court found him not to be criminally responsible.  He had, evidently, suffered a schizoaffective disorder.

When the trial wrapped up, Mr. Dhingra proceeded to the logical next step, having evidently recovered his senses.  He applied for his wife's $51,000 life insurance policy.  After all, he has been deprived of his wife, and compensatory benefits, though they will never, ever make up for his loss, will diminish his grief somewhat, one assumes.

Their son, Paul Dhingra, appears not to approve.  Perhaps he knows and judges his father somewhat differently than the experts.  He had attempted to block the application submitted by his father to collect that $51,000.  And an Ontario Superior Court judge believed the son to be quite correct, and supported his contention that his father was not eligible under the circumstances to collect that insurance.

The Ontario Court of Appeal, in its wisdom, judged otherwise.

Testimony to Virulent Lunacy

He shudders and abhors the very idea that he can be considered unhinged.  But how else can someone be thought of who goes out of his way, deliberately and with malice aforethought to rid himself of normal human inhibitions against taking the lives of innocent beings.  Who submits himself to deadening hour after hour of repetitive motions designed to remove from his consciousness the fixed idea that murder is an unforgivable transgression.

And who carefully plans to acquire weapons, learn and practise how to use them expertly, lays out a scenario where he views himself as a warrior for justice for his community, his country, his culture and heritage and sets out to slaughter young people whom he perceives as representing an ideology prepared to surrender that culture, heritage and country to an foreign force preparing to submerge it into an alien culture and heritage.

His "gruesome" actions, according to Anders Behring Breivik, during his testimony in Oslo, were completely necessary.  Nothing less would alert and awaken his countrymen to the dire threat they were submitting to, in committing national suicide.  His protest against the inundation of Muslims emigrating in great numbers from their source countries to Europe, sounds the death knell of Europe; the mournful bells of regret ring in his brain.

Turning his mind to a solution.  He was a modern Knight Templar, jousting for the spirit and the soul of Europe.  First, his own country, Norway.  His was an act of courage, of desperate courage, seeking to rescue his country before it was too late.  If to do so he would become the servant of the Angel of Death, so be it.  He had as example, the martyrdom-fanaticism of Islamist jihadists.  If they could do it, so could he.

His cause was noble, theirs ignoble.

He used a fake police uniform to initially give confidence of his harmless, protective presence to his victims, before turning his weapons on them, in a horrible display of vengeance against those whom he blamed for his country's approaching demise.  His uniformed presence encouraged those whom he targeted to reveal themselves, before being cold-bloodedly shot.

And the real police, they were nowhere to be found, though desperate calls were being conveyed to alert authorities to the catastrophe that was occurring.  Breivik himself called police with the intention of surrendering, but there was no response.  He left a message.  "I said 'call me back when you got the right person'", he testified.

For Norway, the tragedy of one sole madman whose careful planning was able to visit upon its society an unforgettable misery.  For the authorities and the security establishment, a day of shameful regret at their lack of perception and reaction.

Working With Shawn Atleo

"We are not opposed to development, but we must be involved at the outset.  First Nation rights and responsibilities demand that we are full partners in discussions about exploration, ownership, participation in production, and long-term sustainability of our environment, our communities and our futures."  National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations

There was Shawn Atleo, brimming with righteous confidence, addressing the Canadian Club of Toronto.  Again.  Reading them the riot act.  Literally.  For riots is what they can anticipate should they forget for one moment that First Nations peoples were, ahem, here first - back in the day.  But that day, to them, is everpresent and as current as today.


Canada, Mr. Atleo said, faces "an aboriginal tsunami", which can be averted only if and when the "newcomers" (that's everyone outside the First Nations communities) acknowledge their undying debt to the firsters, which are the aboriginal peoples of Canada.  Cooperation with First Nations is the primary step to ensuring a happy collaboration between industry and warrior tribes.


"Currently, First Nations are often the last to know about major resource development.  This relegates our communities to few options, usually resulting in confrontation.  So we end up with protests and legal battles that frustrate opportunities for everyone and deepen tensions today and into the future", he explained eloquently.


(The Taliban in Afghanistan collect 'protection' money from Afghan farmers whom they force to grow poppy crops for their opium derivatives.  Just a little diversion, a stray thought.)


Economic partnerships is what Mr. Atleo stresses.  This constitutes what he terms a 'cornerstone of true reconciliation.  "We can do things the hard way or the harder way."  The population growth rate among aboriginal people is a whopping 25%, while the general population stands at a miserable 6%.  Get the picture?


"Almost every resource development activity currently operating or planned is occurring within 200 kilometres of a First Nations' community and right in the middle of our traditional territories", said Chief Atleo.  "Canada's economic fundamentals require greater economic participation of our quickly growing population."


Lands claimed as traditional territory give First Nations the right to claim partnership with any kind of development or resource extraction.  And it imposes upon industry and the greater public within Canada an unavoidable obligation to honour the need to share and share alike with Canada's First Peoples. 

In fact, there is no territory in the country that hasn't a prior claim on it.


This is a historical moment in time.  The historically dispossessed dictating to the colonialist descendants just how the reality of the situation is to be assessed.

Human Entertainment

Now that is truly pathetic.  How is it that a geographic area that is held by the international community to be under an oppressive siege, claiming that its people are oppressed and poverty-stricken, their basic human rights in constant peril, a shortage of fundamental necessities a way of life, yet within the Gaza Strip there are no fewer than five animal zoos.

A zoo in Gaza City painted a donkey with zebra stripes to entertain zoo goers with the notion that this was an exotic African creature, no mere donkey.  Evidently two zebras were killed during the Israeli offensive, and the zoo could not afford to replace them. 

Zoo owners have brought exotic animals through smuggling tunnels from Egypt, when Israel placed a moratorium on transport through conventional means after Hamas took possession of Gaza.

At the Khan Yunis wildlife park there is no zoo-keeper.  Ailing animals are treated remotely over the telephone by contact with veterinarians in Egypt.  Despite which, it is a popular public attraction in Gaza, overcrowded by people seeking to be entertained by the presence of wild animals from exotic locales.

There also, with the use of rudimentary taxidermy skills, the owner, Mohamed Awaida, has been embalming animals that have died.  Such as a lion that starved to death, a monkey, and a porcupine.  They are among ten animals that have thus far been preserved through taxidermy techniques taken from the Internet.

"The idea to mummify animals started after the Gaza war because a number of animals like the lion, the tiger, monkeys and crocodiles died", explained Mr. Awaida.  "So we asked around and we learned from the web how to start."

An ostrich, a tiger and a deer, kept in makeshift cages made of shipping crates and the remains of Israeli settlements which were dismantled in 2005, are seen alongside the mummified remains of other animals whose presence rounds out the offerings at the various zoos.

Mr. Awaida had abandoned his zoo during Operation Cast Lead, and the animals had died of starvation.  What remains, however, comprises, in those five zoos, a pathetic handful of animals barely maintained in dreadful conditions for the amusement of the inhabitants of Gaza.

Macabre and bizarre entertainment that nastily mocks the rights to humane existence of animals, imposed by people who claim their human rights have been broached and broken by the actions of an oppressor.

 Provoking Nature

From being a marvel of engineering, a technological feat as yet unsurpassed in its magnitude and power, the massive Three Gorges Dam reservoir now represents a project that is producing more than its anticipated share of headaches for the Chinese government.  Its bold plan to secure the reservoir at huge social displacement and immense cost did result in providing a large energy source to the energy-hungry giant.

But the people who were originally displaced from their traditional familial farms and homes never did receive the compensation and the assistance to settle elsewhere that the government promised them.  Those promises served as a demonstration to the international community that China respected human rights, that it could be counted on to do the right thing by its people.

Feasibility studies were done, and environmental studies as well to ensure that the Three Gorges Dam would be a success in harnessing power and making it available as required for a growing economy.  There were not feasibility studies done on the practicality of removing hundreds of thousands of people from their homes and having them settle elsewhere in the country.  The government would take care of the details.

The details that have since emerged include concerns about the effects of earthquakes occurring near the site.  And the suspicion that some of the earth's movements might be connected to the immense strain being placed upon the mantle of the crust as a result of the tremendous weight of that gigantic dam.  Moreover, cracks in the dam have been in evidence for quite some time, a rather worrying concern.

In 2010 the reservoir reached its high-water mark, causing landslides - and accidents have risen 70%.  "Due to the complexity and uncertainty of the problems, the pattern of geological disaster cannot be accurately predicted.  It's difficult to know what's going on", admitted Liu Yuan, who operates the Land and Resources Ministry's Three Gorges Geological Disaster Prevention Office.

As though naming a government arm a 'geological disaster prevention office' could conceivably have any ameliorating effect on a geological upheaval that may occur, resulting in the collapse of the reservoir, flooding areas never meant to be inundated, causing untold deaths.  This is a disaster years in the making. 

While China celebrated its massive technological feat in building the dam, nature is now responding.

There were 46,000 nearby residents who were moved from relative proximity to the reservoir site.  And the government is now considering that it will have to act to relocate another 100,000 area residents in anticipation of continuing rising water levels which have created increasing instability in lands adjacent the reservoir.

The unpredictable events leading from an unprecedented interference with the Earth's geological features can be fearsome. 

Impacting Whose Rights?

Impassioned Quebec student union members who deplore their government's insistence that it is about time university students be prepared to pay a more elevated share of their education costs revile the unshakable conviction of the government, while celebrating their own.  Perhaps they forget that it is the duty of a government to invest itself through democratic action to represent the interests of all the people whom they govern.

A far greater proportion of students from middle-class and well-off backgrounds attend university than do students from socially and economically disadvantaged backgrounds.  Parents who have attended university usually anticipate that their children will do the same.  French-Canadians are also unique in their outlook on life and those who govern them.  They believe in greater numbers than elsewhere in Canada, that the state has an obligation to provide them with social advantages far superior to those provided elsewhere.

This social-cultural belief leads them to be less receptive to requests from charities for contributions from French Canadians who traditionally are far less responsive to such appeals than other Canadians.  And it would appear that French Canadians of comfortable means are less likely to fund their children's university educations than are parents of students from other parts of Canada.  Expecting that the state will pick up the costs.

Which it does, to a huge degree.  Each of the provinces and the federal government, support education and higher education is largely underwritten by tax funding.  The amount of tuition that university students pay for their own education represents a small proportion of what it really costs to obtain that university education.  And Quebec university students pay far less in tuition fees than any other province charges.

A gradual increase in tuition fees of $325 annually over the next five years will only bring the student fees up to where they were in the late '60s.  And the argument that this increase will impact deleteriously on students from low-income backgrounds holds little water since the province at the same time as it is increasing tuition, is also increasing bursaries available for low-income students.

What the militantly belligerent students involved in the current protests against rising tuition in Quebec - estimated at around 50% of the student body - are doing is defying authority, enraged that their government which has the legitimate democratic right to impose an increase, is unwilling to solve the impasse to the satisfaction of student protesters who believe it is their right to deter and forestall the  process.

What they are also doing is creating a two-tier class of students; those who are willing to forgo their university year in favour of continued protests and those who deplore the activities of the students in actively challenging government, and who desperately want to complete their year.  Even though the Superior Court of Quebec (asked to intervene by students themselves) imposed an injunction, student activities have defied it.

Instead they have forced classes to be cancelled, disadvantaging those students who wish to continue taking their classes.  There are quite a few teachers who are vocally supporting the student activists, who have taken it upon themselves to close down classes.  And the students who are invested in continuing their education have been vilified, intimidated and threatened.

The increasingly violent nature of the boycott defeats the very notion of university student intelligence.  One student described his experience as a non-boycotting student:

"I went down to leave and all the strikers were right there trying to get into the school.  They locked down the school so we had to stay inside until about 2:30 (p.m.).  They broke into the cafeteria.  They broke windows, they broke doors, they threw microwaves.  It was really bad."

 Hundreds of non-striking students have joined a Facebook group opposing the strike, and hundreds have donated money to help pay the legal fees that were required to get the injunction.  "The only reason we did this is because of the right to education.  We just wanted to go back to school and finish our semester."

Disgraceful Maritime Conduct

Cruises are just so immensely popular with people who look forward to getting away from all that's familiar to them, hoping to experience something far different than what their normal lifestyle accustoms them to.  Boredom is a drag on the human psyche, whereas experiencing events that are out of the ordinary has a way of exciting and enthusing people, renewing them, resuscitating their interests in life.

There are a number of passengers who disembarked from the cruise they were on several months ago who experienced an event they would far prefer hadn't occurred, particularly with them as witnesses.  A handful of passengers on the Star Princess, travelling from Ecuador to Costa Rica, doubtless a memorable excursion on its own, spotted upon the waters of the Pacific something quite different.

It appeared to be a small vessel, with a few people on board.  "I saw a young man in the front of the boat waving his shirt up and down. Big motions, up over his head and down to the floor, waving it vigorously. Frantically I would say", explained Judy Meredith of Bend, Oregon, to her hosts on Good Morning America.

"That signal told me that they were in trouble.  They were trying everything they could to get our attention.  We expected the ship to turn back or stop or something", Ms. Meredith continued, over National Public Radio.  She and two other passengers on the Carnival-owned cruise ship had been bird-watching, using high-powered binoculars which enabled them, with telephoto lenses, to hone in close to the object of their attention.

"It was a really big, white ship.  I was waving a red T-shirt, and Fernando was waving a bright orange life jacket over his head.  For a minute it looked like they were going to turn to come for us, but then they just went on their way", later explained 18-year-old Adrian Vasquez, a hotel worker.  He had persuaded two friends, Oropeces Betancourt and Fernando Osario to accompany him on a fishing trip from Rio Hato, Panama.

But the outboard motor conked out, and their boat, The Fifty Cents, began to drift.  They were helpless and it was two weeks later that they spotted the liner on March 10th, and the three bird-watching passengers on the liner spotted them.  Ms. Meredith took the trouble of writing down the ship's co-ordinates, emailing a distress message to the U.S. Coast Guard.

The cruise ship she was on sailed on.  Even though she and the other two people had alerted a crew member, and the bridge.  She took it on trust that the captain was doing something useful, perhaps contacting authorities, because it became abundantly clear he had no intention of stopping his ship and attempting a rescue of the three stranded fishermen.

That night, Mr. Betancourt, 24, died of dehydration.  And Mr. Osorio, sixteen years old, died on March 15, as a result of sunburn, heat stroke and dehydration.  Nine days later Mr. Vasquez was finally rescued by an Ecuadoran fishing boat near the Galapagos islands, a thousand kilometres from where he and his two friends had set off for a day's fishing expedition.

"We're aware of the allegations that Star Princess supposedly passed by a boat in distress that was carrying three Panamanian fishermen on March 10, 2012.  At this time we cannot verify the facts as reported, and we are currently conducting an internal investigation on the matter."  Princess Cruises statement.

 There is a universally recognized code of conduct relating to maritime ethics and rescue.  No ship nor ship's captain should ignore the plight of anyone on the high seas requiring intervention to secure their safety.  The mission state of the Canadian federal Search and Rescue group fairly well reflects international standards:

To save and protect lives in the maritime environment
To fulfill our mission, our objectives are to:

• Save 100% of lives at risk.
• Reduce the number and severity of SAR incidents.
• Minimize loss of life, injury, property damage and risk to the environment.
• Support and involve the Canadian Coast Guard Auxiliary.
• Maintain the highest professional standards.
• Provide national leadership and effective SAR Program management.
• Provide international SAR leadership.
• Maximize SAR system efficiency through innovation.
• Promote volunteerism.
• Increase awareness of the SAR Program.
• Assist in the development of the National SAR Program.
• Foster co-operative SAR agreements.
• Provide humanitarian aid and civil assistance where possible.

These objectives will help us provide an effective SAR service for all those at risk in the maritime environment in Canada.

Put Out The Welcome Mat

Doubtless there will be some doing just that.  But it's a fairly safe bet that they're a distinct minority.  A group of people convulsed with the agonizing thought that a great wrong was done to a helpless young boy who had no other option but to react as he was programmed to.  After all, who could be more influential in a young boy's life than his father?  His mother, presumably, but perhaps not quite to the same extent.

In the Khadr family it was Ahmed Said Khadr, the confidante of Osama bin Laden and staunch supporter and funding agent for al-Qaeda who insisted that his three sons be schooled in jihad, taking his family to Pakistan where they could be further indoctrinated into the war against the West and then on to Afghanistan where they could turn their practical training into practise.

And it was Omar Khadr's mother who scorned the values of the West and particularly Canadian society, while taking advantage of all the social welfare values that are so helpful in raising a family without extending oneself too laboriously.  It is in Canada that one finds the freedom to excoriate societal values while absorbing all the useful hands-up offered to all equally without distinction or favour.

At fifteen, taught in the fine art of close combat, the use of artillery and how to construct explosive devices he was prepared and ready to embark as a mujahadeen, on a mission alongside others he had trained beside, meeting American troops head on, in Afghanistan.  It was an auspicious meeting, for far from killing him, American medics treated his grievous wounds and restored him to life.

So he could fester as a prisoner at Bagram and then Guantanamo, while the United States figured out what they could do with him when bringing him to trial as an 'illegal' combatant.  As if he wasn't steeped enough in the hatred of religious fanaticism and the ideology of East versus West, there among other prisoners he could continue to study the Koran and mark its passages, interpreting those that held the messages he sought.

The U.S. government, post-trial, post a year served of his final eight-year sentence, is prepared to restore this Canadian citizen back to the country of his birth.  Now there is an anomaly; Canadian-born, Egyptian heritage, fanatical religious-political-social commitment, exposure to hardened jihadists, time spent as a prisoner of an ideological war, and returned to a country where all of that should be completely foreign.

But it is not; three generations of Khadrs resident in Canada, awaiting the return of the youngest of the Khadr brothers, whose sister and mother spit venomous spite on Canada and its social contract, its shared values of civility and humanity, to take him to their bosom once more.  The Government of Canada as it is currently represented, has no wish to restore him to Canada, but must, legally.

He is a Canadian citizen. Was a Canadian child when his father and mother spirited him elsewhere.  Irrespective of whatever he was committed to, and the crimes he committed, he has Canadian citizenship and as such is guaranteed haven.  The forty years imprisonment he was sentenced to evaporated on a plea of a child soldier and a circumspect guilty plea.

The U.S. wishes to be rid of him, Canada wishes he would disappear - anywhere but not Canada.  But he will be welcomed, for want of a better word, back 'home', to the country where he was born, to parents who despised the country but were advantaged by its benefits.

Interdiction By Law

Society loves its illicit and ever-so-tempting substances that the law forbids yet are available through a multitude of sources, as long as one can come up with the money required to obtain them.  It makes little intellectual sense for people to harbour a deep desire to acquire harmful substances whose use takes a dreadful toll on the human body over time, but people are not always sensible.

And a significant proportion of any population is drawn to the use of hallucinogenic substances, drugs and alcohol whose use allows them to temporarily inhabit another world than the real one they live in.  Under the influence of alcohol or drugs everything appears different; troubles become insubstantial, and there's a glossy overtone of self-assurance and mastery of one's world.

Even though recreational drug use comes with a heavy social stigma, it's still cool.  All those stories of ruined lives, people descending into squalor, their family lives wrecked, with little prospects for the future due to ill health, lost employment and evaporated self-respect, nothing seems to restrain others for whom these personal stories of woe are readily accessible, from setting out on their own journey to hell.

The threat of being caught by police in an illegal drug transaction doesn't seem to bother most people.  Drug transactions take place in visible, public areas, including schoolyards with teens taking the plunge to find out for themselves what all the fuss is about.  Teens are notoriously curious about the world around them; anything forbidden becomes instantly attractive.  And friends go out of their way to enlist other friends in the neat experience.

In any given population up to 20% will become hopelessly mired in some kind of addiction, be it gambling, smoking, drinking or drugs.  From there, when taken to excess, need replaces reasoning capacity, and the downward descent is fairly rapid.  Prostitution, petty criminal offences, break-and-enter, assault, robbery and all manner of malfeasance geared to paying for the next fix become part of the lifestyle.

The cost to the individual and the cost to society is enormous.  It isn't the people who make themselves wealthy from the misery of others who largely spend time in prison.  It is the middleman, the pusher, the person who distributes drugs trying to fund their own addiction, for the most part.  Prisons burgeon with the population of convicted drug pushers, the little dealers who think they're big-time.

Cocaine, because it is illegal, has a grossly inflated price on the street where demand for it is high, and an expanding demographic of people become addicted to it, from all walks of life, some able to control their craving and reputations because they have personal wealth and connections, others descending into the netherworld of dependence and ruin. 

In the countries where cocaine and heroin come from, they're cheap.

And readily available through the cartels whose business acumen runs deep and brutal, expressed through jealously guarding their turf and violently eliminating any who have the audacity to challenge their territory.  And because there is so much at stake for them, they don't mind one little bit offering bribes to corrupt those who enforce the law, at every level.

In North America today, roughly half the population supports legalization of marijuana use.  That's the soft drug that has medicinal properties recognized by the medical fraternity, the community of the afflicted, and the governments that allow permits for their legal use.  That is also, should marijuana become completely legalized, the garden path toward hard drugs.

And the whole tangled mess and convoluted headache-inducing problem of combating illegal drug use, costing billions of tax dollars to prosecute, in the process filling jailcells and the bank accounts of the cartels goes round and round like a lunatic carousel.

Logical Extremes

Let's face it, children can be nasty.  To one another, in particular.  Not all children, of course, but enough of them to represent an ongoing problem that has plagued one generation after another from time immemorial and no one has yet been able to come up with any workable solution.  For the fact of the matter is, some people, even as children, have a mean and cruel streak and enjoy harassing others. 

These same children will grow into adulthood remaining mean and cruel, their character pathology making life miserable for others.

And, often enough, this type of character formation does not grow out of a vacuum.  Children model themselves, for the most part, on what they see around them in their most intimate surroundings; their family environment.  If the parents have no compunction over being anti-social or critical of others, or expressing their contempt and acting on it toward others, their offspring are fairly quick to pick up the clues that this is an acceptable mode of behaviour.

Threatening others feels empowering to some, it leaves them with a sense of having achieved a certain type of mastery over others.  It can be intoxicating to those personalities to respond to that kind of stimulus.  When young people have been raised in such environments they feel justified in continuing to express themselves as bullies. 

And, even when the parents are notified, for example, by other parents whose children have been targeted, or by school authorities, very little changes.

For one thing, the parents of bullies, most often themselves beyond assertive of their right to behave as they feel suits them, do not really respond positively to criticism of their children's social behaviour.  They can generally find some reason to point out why their children legitimately 'respond' to others' provocations, denying that their own are the source of those provocations, not those whom they victimize.

Unless they can adequately point out in a reasonable manner that when other children are shy, reserved, overweight, gender-confused, nerdy or fearful, they are by their very nature, a provocation toward those who are self-assured, egotistical and mean-spirited.  The latest defence in a New Brunswick school system in defence of a 12-year-old boy who is gay and overweight, appears to be assigning a staff member to shadow the boy.

"I don't really like it because I'm losing a lot of friends because she's there.  She has to know whatever anybody tells me or whatever I say.  I can't keep anything from her", the boy complained, despite that the teacher's aide's purpose is to keep him from harm.  The result is, however, that the boy is effectively isolated and being babysat continually, leaving him completely friendless, and still a target for bullying.

The child that is a victim is stigmatized further, and separated even from those of his peers who might be his friends.  Teacher's aides are paid $16.48 an hour in New Brunswick, no less so when they are assigned to act as part of a "personal intervention plan".  If that personal intervention plan proves not to work then specialists such as psychiatrists are called upon to assist.

The student being assisted has little privacy, being followed during recess, lunchtime, and accompanied to bathroom breaks. 

What would happen if the teacher's aide was assigned to closely monitor the bully, not the victim, and apprehend the bully's acts of aggression and threats and intimidation?  Furthermore, paying for the teacher's aide's salary not out of public taxes but directly from the offending parents' bank account?

 Eating Bliss

 So that's settled.  It's a big, bad, bloated us.  Have we no pride, no self control?  Evidently not, on the evidence.  And the evidence is there, in the statistics, for all who are interested, to scrutinize and - if one is included in the ranks of the overweight, and worse, the obese of the world - deny.  Denial, it appears, it something we do very well. 

Denial, for example, that we are the instruments of our own ill health.  That what we do with our bodies has a direct impact on our state of health.  That to remain indolent and unwilling to exercise bodies that thrive on testing muscles and sinews, and over-feeding our greedy appetites will spell disaster in the future.  It is the obese that are driving up the incidence of diabetes.

And diabetes is well enough known to lead to many other illnesses.  For example, neurological injuries to the body leading to amputation, heart and stroke, blindness, kidney damage.  Are those brief sensuous pleasures we revel in, eating sumptuously foods that are too heavily weighted in cholesterol, sugar, salt really worth it?  Do we really have to eat past the point of satiation?

Rationally, no.  But we do.  According to the World Health Organization, about 1.6-billion people worldwide are overweight.  What that means is that 25% of their body weight is comprised of fat.  What it also means is that 25% of the world's population is vastly overweight.  In a world where at least a like number of people are malnourished and underweight.

In Australia, the Royal Adelaide Hospital has refurbished itself with larger rooms equipped with ceiling-mounted lifting apparatus, reinforced wheelchairs and beds, and larger CT scanning machines to avoid hospital staff from incurring strain injuries attempting to move overweight patients.

In Brazil, where 51.7% of the population is overweight, fruits are commonly lathered with sugar, and tradition has it that a nice, full body is very much appreciated, particularly a woman's body for the Brazilian man "has always wanted something to grab on to."

In Britain it is estimated that obesity causes an estimated nine thousand premature deaths yearly.  If current trends continue 90% of British children will be held to be obese by 2050.  Britain's Health Secretary has called for the population to cut five billion calories from its collective diet.  Good luck.

In Canada, being overweight is considered the norm by age 36.  According to data collected in the Canadian Health Measures Survey, the average 12-year-old boy is 14 pounds heavier than in 1981, while girls are 11 pounds heavier.  It's estimated that 26% of children six to 11 are overweight or obese, a number that rises to 28% in the teens.

Over 70% of people in Finland exercise regularly with a government initiative that awards cash prizes to towns that lose the most weight.  The Finnish government encouraged shoe manufacturers to make non-slip soles so people would still go out in icy weather, to battle the 58% overweight dilemma the country faces.

Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig weight loss centres are busy signing up new members in France in numbers greater than other national markets.  In France, with a 50.7% overweight figure, people are exhorted to remember this simple rule: "have dessert or cheese, but not both".

In Jamaica, where 55.3% are overweight, a thin woman is not held to be attractive.  Heaviness is equated with happiness and social harmony.  Resulting in many women struggling to gain weight, and eating appetite-enhancing chicken feed laced with arsenic.  Which practise leads to side effects like diarrhea, dermatitis and eventually cancer.

The percentage of overweight/obese in Mexico has tripled to 68.1% since 1980, with diabetes the leading cause of death.  Soft drink consumption is readily available, where clean drinking water is not.  Mexicans drink the most Coca-Cola per capita in the world.

The Pacific island nation of Nauru has a 94.5% overweight population, qualifying it as the world's fattest nation, where life expectancy for men is 59, and for women 64.  Phosphate mining made the island wealthy but incapable of growing vegetables, so the islanders live on Western processed imports.

In Nigeria there are "fattening rooms", where women are encouraged to eat large amounts of food , especially before weddings.  In Saudi Arabia girls are banned from participating in sports because the Supreme Council of Religious Scholars forbids sports for girls, since it is felt activity can cause girls to tear their hymens, thus lose their virginity.

Tonga has a 90.8% overweight population resulting in poor overall health.  Obesity is blamed on imported food like Spam, corned beef and "turkey tails" which were banned but the ban lifted to allow membership into the World Trade Organization.

In the U.S. with its 70.8% overweight population, a U.S. retailer offers an extensive selection of extra-wide and reinforced chairs, along with high-capacity weigh scales and extra-large "Big John" toilet seats.  Police officers are becoming skilled in executing body searches of obese subjects "up in the folds".

 Abusing The Host

Canadians have a love affair with the United States.  It is not entirely reciprocated, however, since some love affairs just do not manage to elicit a similar and matching reaction in the object of someone's unsought attentions.  In fact, is it not so that people, be they male or female, who are obsessed to the point of few returns, deciding in their rattled state of emotional upset to follow and confront the object of their passion, are termed 'stalkers', and as such can be ordered to desist at best, and in the worst scenario, found guilty of a criminal offence and incarcerated...?

This 'love affair' of Canadians with the United States consists, for the most part, of Canadians wishing to visit various places in that great country, as a visitor, a guest, a tourist.  There is, after all, much to admire about the country, from its spectacular scenery, its great cities and museums and art galleries, and its popular culture, complete with the, well, seedier side of life.  For its part, the United States encourages tourism - Canadians largely represented among them - to continue visiting and leave behind valuable currency.

In the process of which temporary exchange of citizens some of them invariably run afoul of the law.  Committing crimes for which they are held accountable and as a result, dealt with under the American criminal justice system.  Let's say, through crimes relating for example to drug dealing and importation, all the way to murder.  Commit those crimes in the country you're a visitor in, and you face that country's system of justice.  Sounds fair enough.  The accused/sentenced can bleat for their home country to bring them home to serve out their sentence on more familiar territory.

Then there are the dreadfully despicable crimes committed by grown men against children when those grown men succumb to their sexual;u perverse desires and seek young girls to prowl about and seduce or rape.  One such man, a Canadian, is currently in a jail cell in Virginia.  The man, 48 year-old,Alan Sauve, from Windsor Ontario, has children of his own.  And this deviant predator stalked a 14-year-old girl whom he contacted over the Internet.  His younger daughter is a year junior to the young girl whom this man was planning to 'start a relationship' with.

He sent the young girl nude pictures, purportedly of himself.  Although he was posing as a 16-year-old boy, named Dominic.  Perhaps the girl balked at his demands, for he went so far as to threaten suicide, presumably in an attempt to guilt the girl into relenting and agreeing to meet with him.  At which point he had intended to abduct the girl he had been 'chatting' with.  He claimed he intended to get her pregnant and take her back with him to Windsor.

The girl had , when he continued to press her, spoken to her guidance counsellor at school.  And this is when the local police were brought into this unappealing picture, as an officer thereafter assumed the girl's identity, and the relationship was prolonged in Internet chats over another ten months.  He was arrested on November 13, 2010.  His very explicit 'chats' with the person he believed to be a young girl gave police all the evidential ammunition they required.

For soliciting sex online from a 14-year-old girl, he was arrested, tried, and sentenced by the State of Virginia to 110 years in prison.  The State of Virginia abolished parole, away back in 1994.  Alan Sauve would dearly love to wake up from his ongoing fear of dying in prison, but it appears a fear that is well justified, and it represents a situation he himself engineered.  In Virginia, his sentence represents the minimum for a crime such as he was involved in.

"No physical, visual or verbal contact and I get the death penalty?  That's what I call it; 110 years is a death penalty." Would an actual death penalty carried out by the state seem more acceptable to him?  His life has been spared, he may now serve out his sentence as a dangerous, caged animal would.  As a dedicated child molester intent on satisfying his sexual urges with a child, he does represent a dangerous animal, one best put away to protect society.

Alan Sauve considers his 110-year jail term "a death penalty".  Spot on.

 Retiring: 38 Years of 'Employment'

German politicians and the German public were aghast and outraged that their European Union euros were being yet-again wasted in support of a country like Greece whose social support policies they considered too rich, compared to the frugal, responsible Germans who know the value of a pfennig and respect it for what it's worth.

And because they are the mainstay of the EU with their strong economy they feel resentful that their hard-working, pfennig-pinching population must pay to prop up a profligate economy for a self-entitled people.  Austerity is the key to success, and it was past time for Greece to engage in a little bit of belt-tightening, even if the populace furiously denied this.

Can one blame them?  After all, if one set of people acknowledge by their thrift and hard work the value of both and the virtues of fending for oneself, and being socially and fiscally responsible at the personal and the governmental administrative level, while the other seeks continually to advantage themselves by short-changing the government on tax renditions while at the same time insisting their social dues are owed them, they're not entirely compatible.

And why then should the responsible, self-respecting population be expected to financially support the irresponsible, selfish beliefs in entitlements of those who consider their personal welfare must be sustained at no personal sacrifice whatever to the greater good of their society?  It simply makes no sense.  So all hail to the Germans for their superior values and life-modes.

Um, what?

A civil servant has had the unmitigated hubris to crow about the fact that he "did nothing for 14 years" while collecting quite a hefty salary?  How un-Teutonic.  How utterly selfish, and unprincipled.  How values-distorted and -degrading.  But this retiring worker boasts that he had 'earned'  $975,000 since 1998 for doing no work whatever?  Impossible!  Say it is not so...!

"Since 1998, I was present, but not really there.  So I'm going to be well-prepared for retirement ... Adieu", was what he had the unmitigated gall to write in an email that he fired off to his colleagues, some 500 other civil servants in Menden, North Rhine-Westphalia.  He has evidently worked in a municipal state survey's office since 1974.  And he has accused the local authorities of inefficiency, overlapping and parallel structures, etc.

The hiring of another surveying engineer to perform the very job this man was doing, left him with nothing to do.  "Of course, I well benefited from the freedom that came by me", he chortled.  Where is this man's personal sense of responsibility?  Oh, of course; it dwindled to zero representing the respect he finally had for those who made these decisions in administrative incompetence.

And he wasn't finished with just that.  He went on to accuse the Menden city authorities of other grave instances of administrative malfeasance: buying unusable computers and software, for example.  For his part, the mayor of Menden, experienced a "good dose of rage" as he viewed the email.  Claiming that the employee in question had not once - not once - complained about not having work to do to earn his salary.

Family Life - And Death

At some time, during their twenty years of marriage, living together in enough harmony one must presume, to produce two children, something went dreadfully awry.  A family is now destroyed.  The depth and extent of that destruction is obvious.  It seemed that at least during the last handful of years the family of four - mother, father and two teen sons - shared in what appeared outwardly to be a normal, functioning familial relationship, life descended into hell.

The children's father, husband of their mother, the man who loved them and by all accounts acted as a doting, caring father to them, is dead.  Dead at his own desperate hands.  He drove himself to a conservation area not far from their nice middle-class home in the suburbs of Ottawa and hanged himself.  Before he did that, though, while their two boys, 12 and 15 years of age were at school, he attacked their mother, his wife.

He was distraught, explained his brother and his sister-in-law.  He was dreadfully unhappy.  More than miserable, he had become fairly unhinged.  He was, they say now, suffering from mental illness.  His life had turned upside down and inside-out and he saw no future that he could recognize or would wish to inhabit.  He mentioned to them the potential of suicide, then in their hearing, brushed it aside.

He had beaten her so severely that all her recognizable features were destroyed.  "He bashed her skull to the point they had to take part of her brain out.  I have never seen brutality like that ever in my life."  These are the descriptive words of Therese Lefebvre's mother.  She had encouraged her daughter on several occasions before this dreadful event had occurred, to leave him.

But she resisted leaving her husband.  Even though she had described on a number of occasions how she suffered at his hands.  After one assault, when police were called she refused to lay charges.  Hoping, as people are wont to do, that miraculously everything would change.  He would realize the severity of his behaviour, how brutalized she was by him, and feel hugely regretful, and never, ever repeat that behaviour.

Frances Moreau, Theresa Lefebvre's mother, said "It didn't come out of nowhere.  She was very afraid of him."  This was her brief story about the latter events in the married life of her daughter.  Abuse that began four years ago.  This is a picture of a son-in-law that the mother of the woman he attempted to murder has enshrined in her memory of him, the father of her two grandchildren.

This is not the picture that has been painted by his brother, by his brother's wife.  They insist he was a loving, compassionate father and husband.  Going out of his way to do things for his family, and extending that willingness to the society they lived in.  Responding to social welfare needs in support of fundraising for cancer research and treatment.  And in sport events that involved his sons.

"Like all partnerships, there were ups and downs, most recently Theresa asking for a divorce because she no longer loved him, not because he abused her", read a statement submitted by the father's brother's wife.  This is obviously a personal version well suited to the belief of those who love someone prefer to maintain; we are all inclined to the subjective.

The thought of a divorce he had no wish to take place sank Peter Lefebvre, according to his older brother, into deep depression.  His wife would likely have lost her love for her husband because he violently, viciously abused her.  And, unwilling to be subjected to any additional and ongoing abuse, opted for divorce, a reasonable enough and rational solution.  This is classic cause and effect.

He is dead.  She remains in an induced coma after brain surgery, with another operation scheduled but put on hold because of her deteriorating condition.  And two young boys who have obviously been witness to more familial grief and strife than they could conceivably abide, are living a nightmare they cannot wake from.

No one, in this colossal tragedy will emerge the better for it.  All their lives have been irremediably altered to reflect the dreadful misery of human fallibility and failure.

 Welcome To Life . . .

Parents, new parents in particular begin worrying fairly early in their caretaking role of infants about the safety, security and well-being of those tiny creatures that nature has left in their care.  And what of the parents who face the misfortune that nature has given them a child still-born?  A dreadful personal loss, one that parents the world over have faced as their own personal tragedy.

In Argentina, a premature-born baby weighing 1.76 pounds was attended by medical professionals clustered within the delivery room where Analia Bouter awaited word from the nurses, the doctors, that all was well in the delivery of her child.  She was informed, however, that the child was still-born.  The grieving parents left the hospital, then returned, to look for the first and last time at their child.

"I went with Fabian, my husband, at around 9:00 p.m. to see her body.  We opened the drawer and I touched her hand.  I felt her look at me and when I saw her alive I fell to my knees.  Then suddenly she let out a cry.  She was freezing in there.  She was all covered up and full of something that looked like frost."  The baby was in the hospital morgue where bodies are kept refrigerated until interment.

"I folded back the blanket and we saw her hands moving.  I couldn't believe it.  I was speechless.  It was like she was waking", Fabian Bouter, the baby's father further clarified.

"I don't know who is to blame, and I'm not thinking about it as this moment.  The joy of knowing she's alive is covering every other feeling.  I'm a Christian, and I believe this was a miracle of God", exclaimed the baby's mother ecstatically.

Five people, doctors and nurses, have been suspended of their duties as an investigation into the event is undertaken.  The health undersecretary of Chaco province in Argentina's north, declared the incident to represent a disgrace. The attending doctors at the birth had insisted the baby had no vital signs.

The baby was rescued from the morgue where she had been placed after birth, after having spent a full twelve hours there once the doctors had declared her still-born.  She is held to be gravely ill, in critical condition.

These young parents need another miracle, one that will allow their tiny daughter to surmount the ill fortune that greeted her upon birth.

Analia Bouter and her husband Fabian Veron pose for a photo outside the hospital in Resistencia, Argentina, April 11, 2012. Bouter found her baby alive in a coffin in the morgue nearly 12 hours after the girl had been declared dead.

(Credit: AP)

Public Protection

This was a woman so intoxicated, she was pie-eyed.  She was also offensive in her manner, crude and unruly, earning the description of being "drunk as a skunk".  But she was with people who were her friends, and they, responsibly enough, offered to drive her home.  In the process, stopping briefly on the way, the driver exiting the vehicle, enabling this boozed-up woman to grasp the vehicle keys and drive off.

Erratically, recklessly, speeding down the main Ottawa thoroughfare of Bank Street.  And in a 23-minute time span, no fewer than nine alarmed people dialled 911.  Alex Hayes, 16 years old, was bicycling home on the evening of September 9, 2010, after work as he usually did.  Samira Daoud struck Alex Hayes, then sped off, leaving him to die agonizingly in a field, alone, close to this home.

Ms. Daoud, a rather disreputable figure of the demi monde, had, at that time, three times the legal limit of alcohol in her system.  She was sentenced to six years in prison.  She will be 47 when she exits prison.  Alex Hayes will be forever 16.  Those who loved him will never see a day when  they will not be reminded of his loss.

This woman committed vehicular murder; driving under the influence of alcohol. 

The Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario has stepped in finally, in a demonstration that they also hold responsible those who serve the clearly inebriated.  The pub where she drank the last of the alcohol she had imbibed that day - and it was considerable - has had its liquor licence suspended for 28 days, for failure to safely deal with a drunk client.

Ms. Daoud was well known to the people in the bar, the servers, bartender, and owner.  Before even entering the bar she had consumed six bottles of beer at home, and from there went to a Chinese restaurant, insisting that the owner give her a drive to Pub 31.  She had sweetly convinced him he should have a drink with her at the bar: "if he did not go in, she would get her gangster boyfriend to shoot him."

Some 45 minute after arrival Ms. Daoud was in a mood to socialize, flashing her body parts, slapping men back of the head, choking one patron, writhing on the floor, slurring her speech, drooling, slopping drinks on the bar and sitting on men's laps.  One of the bar's servers who knew her well, offered to drive her home at the end of her shift.

The bar's owner made a similar offer.  And it was the bar owner's vehicle that Ms. Daoud had made off with.  And from that juncture it took no time at all for Alex Hayes to lose his life.

Chivalry Lives

That much hinted-at code of honour among thieves, evidently extends to crime-hardened malefactors having a tender spot of empathy for those who trust them, as well.  As in the case of Paul "Sasquatch" Porter, presently before the courts.  This man is distinguished by the fact that he is big, as in physically imposing, large, hard to ignore in a crowd or alone, in a darkened alley.

How does 6'-7" sound, weighing in at 400 pounds?  Not someone you might want to come afoul of.  On the other hand, if you happen to be his very special girlfriend, then he will go out of his way to shield and protect, if and when the case may be that such shielding and protection is required.  Assuredly so, if this outstanding couple are under police surveillance.

Which they were.  Mr. Porter is president of Hells Angels Ontario, Nomads chapter.  It seems highly likely at this point he will be sentenced to two years in prison for his carelessly casual drug trade business.  Though it was not he who was charged but his girlfriend, in whose purse was found the drugs in question, when the police who had been following them, stopped their vehicle.

For having secreted a "nine pack" of cocaine - 248.1 grams, valued at $14,000 - for the purpose of drug trafficking it was not the crime boss driving his vintage Cadillac Deville who was initially charged.  Officers from the Biker Enforcement Unit and Ottawa police drug section, tipped off to a drug pick-up, followed the pair, and subsequently charged Mr. Porter's girlfriend.

Despite that he gallantly claimed the drugs to be his, not hers.  She will be cleared of the charges brought against her, and he will be looking at two years in the Big House, the Slammer, Federal Prison, jail.  And most assuredly, she will be faithful to him, and await his eventual release from incarceration.

Love, it strikes where it will, and we're the better for it.

A Thorn Plucked Out Of Contention

At age 70, after having built his own coffin, preparing himself to die, Wiebo Ludwig, the bane of Canada's gas industry, has died.  Mr. Ludwig was an original.  A patriarchal, bible-thumping eco-terrorist.  Once a pastor in the Christian Reformed Church, his confrontational, very personal and belligerent style alienated people and he left the Church to establish is own extended self-sustaining farm, and where he did pastoral work among his own.

His large, extended, family-owned-and-operated farm in northwest Alberta was plagued, in the 1990s by the incursion of oil and gas companies' building wells in sight, sound and smell of his Trickle Creek farmhouse.  "If the oil companies run roughshod over your lives, you have to take defensive action against them, whatever is necessary. You can't just let them kill your children", Mr. Ludwig explained years ago.

This was just after negotiations to purchase the extensive farm by AEC West, which was operating wells near Trickle Creek, fell through.  And it took no time at all before explosions were set off at two of the company's wells.  Mr. Ludwig claimed innocence, but he could understand how frustrated people were, reacting violently to the actions of the gas extractors.

His and his family's experiences with the sour gas wells was fairly dreadful.  Their deadly fumes made them ill, and had far more sinister, profound effects, both on women of child-bearing age and on the cows that were carrying calves.  Mr. Ludwig lost a few grandchildren in the process, stillborn, and this and much more was attributed to the ill effects of the proximity of the sour gas wells to his home.

He and his family were not dreadfully popular with their neighbours. They may have elicited sympathy at first, but that dried up after awhile, and he was simply viewed as a wild man.  Where others saw the potential of jobs and earning a good living working for the oil and natural gas industry, he saw the vulnerability of the land and the people who lived on it, to the poisoning effect of gas extraction.

He was accused of countless acts of vandalism against the industry.  But it was the notorious event one evening where joyriding area teens driving trucks, went onto the Trickle Creek farm, shouting and drunk, frightening Mr. Ludwig's family, with the result that shots were fired, and a 16-year-old girl on one truck died.  A preliminary RCMP investigation was never quite concluded, though Mr. Ludwig was blamed.

His farm was extensive and self-sustaining, with a biodiesel refinery of its own, a greenhouse, a mill, and dozens of other buildings.  It was not just his immediate and growing family who lived there, but his supporters as well, the entire becoming an extended family.  The final irony is that he died of esophageal cancer, diagnosed as he was touring with a documentary, Wiebo's War.

His war brought him accusations of violent explosions at Encana operations near Tomslake, near Dawon Creek, B.C.  He was arrested in 2010 on suspicion of being involved on those pipeline bombings, though he claimed to be willing to help the RCMP in their search for evidence.  They did unearth evidence, but it was located at Trickle Creek; explosive chemicals, chemistry books and notebooks that fingered him.

The man who was a pastor, an authoritarian figure, someone who enjoyed debating his ethics and values was an admittedly polarizing figure.  To some, a sympathetic figure.  And he was also an enemy of the oil and gas extraction industry which he felt ran roughshod over peoples' lives with no restraining influence from government to protect people.

It isn't hard to sympathize with the man on one level, while deploring at another, his having resorted to the kind of violence that just might have harmed other people.  And, in the case of one young neighbour, did.

Irreversible, Imprudent Choices

 China, cognizant of its international reputation as a country that has been proven to remove body parts for transplantation from prisoners accused of capital crimes and facing the death penalty, has decided to clean up its image a little, initiating a stab at passing new laws making some crimes less susceptible to the death penalty.

Of course that would be a vast improvement; anything that might provide for fewer executions would help.  China remains the country with the largest numbers of state-imposed executions as punishment for various types of criminal behaviour.  On the other hand it is also the most populous country in the world.

China is also accused by those who have done some very interesting research, of being complicit with the removal of organs from Falun Gong adherents who are persecuted for their beliefs, in a movement that has been outlawed by China.  So that represents yet another source of organ removal, unauthorized by the individual whose organ it represents, but a matter of state policy, a state that asks for agreement from no one.

China has, by these practices, become a source for organ transplants for international travellers who are unable to source organs legally in their own countries of residence.  These people, desperate to prolong their lives through the transplantation of someone else's healthy organs, are willing to pay handsomely for the opportunity to undergo surgery and live to see another changing of the seasons.

China claims to be cracking down on illegal operations in which the state has no hand. The Chinese authorities have arrested five people in southern China recently, charging them with intentional injury.

A Chinese teenager seems to have valued the potential acquisition of an iPhone and an iPad, far above the value he placed in his kidneys.  Do 17-year-old boys generally think that any harm can come to them?  They are invincible, their lives spread before them through the years to come.  This boy obviously felt he had two kidneys and he could get along well enough with one.

But the boy, identified by his surname Wang, has discovered that life and foolish decision-making are more complicated in their issues than his imagination might have supplied.  He now suffers from renal deficiency as a result of the surgery undertaken to remove one of his kidneys.

Which leaves the question of surgical practise at the hands of those qualified to remove organs, living in the dim shadow of the criminal netherworld. The boy now requires one of those rare objects to regain his health and his future - a kidney from some source other than his own, and they are difficult to come by.

He was paid $3,500 for his generous offer to surrender one of his kidneys.  The individual who arranged the kidney removal, conscripting the services of a surgeon (who obviously bungled the surgery as far as the 17-year-old's future is concerned) was paid $35,000 by someone who valued it highly enough.

That greater sum was split with the surgeon and the three other defendants along with medical staff.  Supplementing their income, in a practise that is more common than might be imagined.

The boy, post-surgery, bought an iPhone and iPad, the hugely desired objects that led him to sacrifice his kidney.  When his mother asked how he had obtained the money to fund his purchases, he informed her of his decision.  In China, iPhones start at $635, and iPads at $475.

This boy, from Anhui province, one of China's poorest, is now experiencing a deteriorating renal deficiency.  And he is now facing the very same dilemma that most Chinese in need of an organ transplant face, only a fraction of whom are able to obtain one.  Even while China's black market for human organs continues to thrive.

Officially, the trading of human organs was banned in China in 2007.

Wildly, Inconceivably Dysfunctional

It is difficult for a reasonable person to strain one's imagination harder to visualize a more horrendous failure to give impressionable young children the opportunity to learn positive, civilized behaviour.  This is a drama that has been unfolding for some time.  Long enough for two irresponsible, dysfunctional people - with their own sad and telling stories of failure in socialization and responsibility behind them as children themselves - to bear four children of their own.

And having brought them into this world, having no idea whatever what it takes for parents to render love and protection and give those children the practical necessities of life and support them emotionally, imbuing them with the skills they will need to face an independent future.  The fourth child born to this pair of societal outcasts had previously been taken into custody by the Children's Aid Society and made a permanent ward. 

After her birth the Society had closely supervised the family.

At age two the little girl was finally removed from her parents, a year ago.  Leaving with the parents three older siblings, aged four to seven.  And they too have finally been taken from their biological parents to be placed for adoption.  It's hard to believe it has taken so long for the Children's Aid Society to remove these vulnerable children from the incapable and miserable hands of their parents.  No life skills have been imparted to these children, they have simply been neglected.

The four year old boy was incapable of communicating other than through grunts.  Their five-year-old had been suspended twice from school as a result of his inability to play with other children, due to his temper tantrums.  It's hard to argue for family life when these children lived in a garbage strewn home, where everything that could be useful was broken, and there were holes punched in all the walls.

There was no attempt at cleanliness or personal hygiene.  Feces were smeared on a wall, and not cleaned away.  The children seldom bathed, a disturbing odour emanated from them, they lived with lice, and dried mucous was not washed from their faces.  Underwear was seldom changed, the children had no idea of regular mealtimes and wholesome foods.

The behaviour they displayed was described as "wild, destructive and uncontrollable".  State wardship of the remaining three children, two boys and a girl of this sad and dreadful family situation was achieved early in the year.  Superior Court Justice Catherine Aitken ruled that the children be placed with adoptive homes where they could receive the support they need.

"Having considered all the evidence, I conclude that the best interests of the children can only be served by an order of wardship.  The (Children's Aid) Society and numerous community services have done everything in their power to assist first (the mother) and (the father), and more recently (the father) on his own, to maintain the family unit.
"These services have failed to bring (the father's) parenting and household management capabilities to the point where he can adequately meet the children's needs.  One cannot help but feel very badly for both (the mother and father) for having tried as hard as they have.  Society let them down when they were children.  Now the court is permanently removing the children from their care.  I hope that both (mother and father) will come to understand that this step is necessary to ensure that we do not let their children down the way they were let down as children."

When the Children's Aid Society took the children from their parents they immediately took them to McDonald's, and then they were taken to a foster home in Ottawa.  The imagination boggles; it was seen as appropriate to take these children to McDonald's; on the way to introducing them to values other than what they have absorbed with their parents?

From there, to the prospective foster home where they removed their shoes revealing an "overpowering" stink.  And the children ran amok in the foster home, pulling curtains, ripping blinds, smashing anything they came across, and tormenting the family's dog.  That initial introduction revealed the extent of their failed socialization, demonstrating just how obviously in need of remediation these children were.

With the help of foster parents, their behaviour since January has been ameliorated.  Three Ottawa families who have stepped forward with a willingness to adopt the children have been approved by the Children's Aid Society.  As a side-note, their inept and psychologically frail father was said to have suffered dreadful abuse with foster parents from infancy until ten years of age.

He had been reduced to living on the streets of Ottawa as a petty criminal and drug addict when he met his wife, at age 19.  She became pregnant while they were still homeless.  They lived afterward in a public-housing project and were evicted, then they were placed in emergency shelter in a motel room.  Then came a family shelter, and finally the apartment from which the children were seized.

It is a tragic commentary on the human condition that these young parents had experienced such a dreadfully lacking existence, finding comfort at last with one another, but not the understanding that they would raise children as abused and needy as they themselves have been, without taking precautions against pregnancy.

And it is sad beyond words to contemplate even briefly the misery of their dislocated and empty-of-value lives.  As little as they were able to comprehend the level of their responsibility to vulnerable young children, failing them in the process, they are, for all practical means, themselves vulnerable young children, maturity having failed them, leaving them sad dregs of society.

"He Did Everything"

It is difficult to believe that someone can simply disappear from life through a simple accident.  Particularly the young, the energetic young people who engage in sport activity, who enjoy life and leave the indelible impression among their peers that this is a singular individual of great merit and personal charm.  Someone who makes it evident that he cares deeply for the welfare of others.

Smiths Falls is in mourning for an 18-year-old high school student.  His death earlier in the week shocked his community and dreadfully grieved his fellow students at Smiths Falls District Collegiate Institute.  His family is left to remember their youngest son and brother whose enthusiasm for life was irrepressible. 

What occurred with Josiah Grant, seems to happen in similar vein all too often to young people.

Young people who seem to be in physical shape, and who enjoy challenging themselves physically.  And who somehow, come afoul of Dame Fortune.  Who can imagine someone in their late teens suddenly - with no prior medical history - suffering a fatal heart attack?  In Josiah Grant's experience it was something else.  He was part of a high jump practice that went dreadfully awry for him.

He simply jumped too far beyond a safety pad.  And ended up landing on his neck and shoulders.  It was only as a precaution that he was taken to a local hospital, conscious of everything around him.  He even telephoned his father to inform him he was at the emergency department of the hospital, with a headache.  A responsible son, concerned his parents would worry when he was late coming home.

Concerned perhaps because their son's physical self was compromised by a dreadful illness; cystic fibrosis.  The doctors who assessed Josiah at the Smiths Falls hospital felt he had suffered a concussion, but that there was no neural damage they could detect.  But it was decided to transfer him by ambulance to Kingston.  That evening his condition was aggravated, and his deterioration continued overnight.

Taken into an operating room, doctors informed his father, Gary Grant, that his son Josiah was unlikely to survive.  That dread prognosis did not fully enter his parents' consciousness.  They were unable to fully appreciate that potential, thinking the boy might be "in a coma for a few weeks and then he would come back and wake up.  I figured the doctors were maybe being negative with us", his father explained.

But he did not recover, he failed to survive his innocent-enough-appearing experience.  An accident on the gym floor of his high school.  A horrifying conclusion to a school day.

"He was just a really kind, thoughtful kid", his father said.  "He loved sports.  He was active, and he was never the absolute best at everything (but) he did everything."

Some areas of human habitation are timeless.  Cities of ancient lineage constructed as capitals of nations that endure over the ages; Jerusalem is one such city, but there are countless others, in the Middle East and in Europe and Asia that have survived long past the time of their early endowment as monuments to human beings' prideful endeavours.  Far outliving their destinies, they yet endure.  And some do not.  Some of these constructions of human ambition and hubris have long been abandoned, yet their shell remains, to awe those who view the remains as sacred to the memory of human aspiration.

Cambodia's 12th Century Angkor Wat is one of those fabled places originally built as a monument to the aspirations of an ancient kingdom, and a ruler who envisioned it as his capital, a place that would thrive and become a testament to his power.  Within its precincts, a temple, originally consecrated to one religion, and over time, reverting to the worshipful reverence of another.  No longer inhabited, but the fabulous, exotic design and its purpose continue to fascinate.

Bjorn Christian Torrissen

And then, there are modern cities, those that have been constructed to reflect modernity in another kind of culture, one that worships for example, other ideals, like the free enterprise system, and capitalism, and opportunities for a different kind of civilization where it was envisioned that people are equal, all privy to the same kind of opportunities, dreams and aspirations, and through applying oneself to the task at hand, nothing is impossible.

The City of Detroit in the United States, that exemplar of free-enterprise capitalism and republican democracy, is a fairly modern version of an ancient vision.  That city thrived because it became the central point for the manufacture of motorized vehicles that would transform the world through the potentials realized of transportation that made possible all manner of advances in modern technology, agriculture, commerce, and trade.

But the emergence of the automobile also made it possible to exit a city, leaving it a shell to decay with disuse and lack of upkeep.  Where the poverty-stricken were forced to stay and to live out their cramped existence with fewer municipal services to make life attractive.  Where inner-city schools took on the reputation of offering a poor grade of education for the young.  And in a country where racial divides endure, the white population seldom as poor as its black counterpart, moved out of the city.

Eventually factories that produced vehicles also moved out of that city once known as Motor City.  Leaving a lot of people without employment.  Many of whom continued to live there, in increasingly squalid conditions; many also who decided to abandon not only the city but their homes they could no longer afford.  And nor could anyone else in times of tight money.  And the city became further degraded, and crime rates soared and people soured.

The city with 1.8-million residents in 1950, could boast a mere 714,000 in 2010.  Unemployment, crime rates, sinking school standards all convinced people they could conceivably do much better for themselves elsewhere.  And elsewhere is where they gravitated to.  Leaving the city with debts of over $12-billion, and the governor of the state in a dilemma whether to replace local politicians with an emergency manager or simply allow the city to sink further into apathy and despair.

Bankruptcy imminent, the city has withdrawn sullenly into itself.  The largely black population feels disgruntled and betrayed.  No one appears prepared to rescue Detroit, to help it back to a situation of self-respect and financial capability.  Should the municipal politicians be removed from power those who voted them into power will have been completely abandoned to their misery with empty neighbourhoods and decaying properties, both private (abandoned) and public (equally abandoned).

"This is a city that's been on the edge for a long time.  what we see now is the culmination of a very long process, and the prognosis is grim. We're going to see more layoffs in a region that has already suffered an extraordinary number of redundancies", explained Lyke Thompson, director for Urban Studies at Wayne State University.

On the other hand, the Big Apple was once declared on the verge of bankruptcy; the state of California has flirted with insolvency.  Like the country itself, strained and depleted after a hard recession that struck globally, it too will endure.