Toronto posted a 15-year high in the rate of homicides with firearms in 2005, and the press and the public have begun to fret that the country is becoming infected by the lethal ways of the United States.
“Canadians deserve safe streets. Toronto isn’t Detroit. Vancouver isn’t south Los Angeles,” Martin said. “We are not going to allow our cities to fall into mindless violence.”
But in the campaign leading up to next Monday’s parliamentary elections, Martin’s opponents have lambasted him for failing to get tough with the United States to stop the smuggling of weapons across the border.
“This is the first government that couldn’t control the flow of guns,” Conservative Party leader Stephen Harper said in a televised debate last week.
Click here for link.
Trial Transcripts Show Lack of Evidence
A month after the trial, a female juror wrote to U.S. District Judge John G. Koeltl, complaining that fellow jurors talked of terrorist attacks and their desire to teach the defendants a lesson. “They had an agenda,” Juror 39 told The Washington Post in her first interview. “People are so fearful that if you disagree with the government on one thing it makes you a terrorist.
“I have to plead guilty to being a coward,” Juror 39, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said of her vote to convict. “It doesn’t feel good, but I punked out.”
Click here for link.
All the comments about the Bush administration being a reverse Robin Hood by cutting programs for the poor while cutting taxes for the rich have been more literally true than people realized.
National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson, in her annual report to Congress, reports that the IRS has been devoting significant resources to cheating poor Americans of refunds they are due.
As many as 1.6 million filings of those making $13,000 or less have been frozen and labeled fraudulent without the taxpayers being informed. Of those that pursued their refunds, 80% eventually had their returns processed.
The returns are being flagged by a “data-mining” computer program similar to ones used by the NSA to target people for eavesdropping. Unfortunately, the program has proven to be very unreliable. Even among the returns that were designated “conclusively fraudulent”, half were ultimately found to be legitimate.