Authorities said it appeared nobody was killed in the bridge failure that raised the question about the safety of aging spans and cut off the main route between Seattle and Canada.

"We don't think anyone else went into the water," said Marcus Deyerin, a spokesman for the Northwest Washington Incident Management Team. "At this point we're optimistic."

A man and a woman were reported in stable condition with non-life-threatening injuries in the emergency room at Skagit Valley Hospital, hospital spokeswoman Kari Ranten said. Another man was reported in stable condition at United General Hospital in Sedro-Woolley, hospital CEO Greg Reed said. He said he didn't know whether the man would be admitted.

Survivor Dan Sligh and his wife were driving their pickup truck when he said the bridge disappeared before them in a "big puff of dust."

"I hit the brakes and we went off the bridge," Sligh told reporters from Skagit Valley Hospital, adding he "saw the water approaching ... you hold on as tight as you can."

Continue Reading...

Who is this guy? Is he really doing what people are saying he did? Even in the weird world of bourgeois politics in this neoliberal era, isn’t this sort of thing, well … different?

Who is Rob Ford?

Rob Ford is the right-wing populist mayor of Toronto, the fourth largest city in North America. With almost three million people, it’s also one of the most culturally diverse urban spaces in the world.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

By the time the firefighters brought the blaze under control, much of the house was in ruins. Kimberly and her older brother, Steve, would soon discover that they had lost much more than their home. The body of their twenty-nine-year-old mother, Corinne, was found at the foot of the basement stairs, horribly burned, bruised, and beaten. Leon, then thirty-four, was promptly arrested, put on trial, and sentenced to life in prison two years later for setting the fire that killed her.

Continue Reading...

The Geneva memorial honours the physician as warrior in the eradication of smallpox. On a Pfizer campus in Pennsylvania, a twin statue tells a different story, positioning Big Pharma as the hero. Neither monument, however, recalls the many casualties of smallpox, and this says a great deal about what we choose to remember.

Continue Reading...

The regulatory environment in Canada, however, is rather more strict, as several Bitcoin entrepreneurs have found out.

Bitcoin drew international attention through Cyprus’s banking emergency, its inclusion in the American financial regulatory framework, and increasing press coverage. The currency recently spiked to as high as $266 before crashing to a low of about $50, then rebounding to a post-crash high of $162.

Continue Reading...

Law enforcement officials in the U.S. said the target was a train that runs between New York City and Canada. Canadian investigators say Chiheb Esseghaier, 30, and Raed Jaser, 35, received guidance from members of al-Qaida in Iran. Iranian government officials have said the government had nothing to do with the plot.

"My comment is the following because all of those conclusions were taken out based on criminal code and all of us know that this criminal code is not a holy book," Esseghaier said at the hearing Wednesday. "We cannot rely on the conclusions taken out from these judgments."

The judge told him to "save that for another court," and take the advice of his lawyers. He was given a May 23 court date.

Charges against the two men in Canada include conspiring to carry out an attack and murder people in association with a terrorist group. Police — tipped off by an imam worried by the behavior of one of the suspects — said it was the first known attack planned by al-Qaida in Canada. The two could be sentenced to life in prison if convicted.

Continue Reading...

Chiheb Esseghaier, 30, and Raed Jaser, 35, had "direction and guidance" from al-Qaida members in Iran, though there was no reason to think the planned attacks were state-sponsored, Royal Canadian Mounted Police Assistant Commissioner James Malizia said Monday. Police said the men did not get financial support from al-Qaida, but declined to provide more details.

"This is the first known al-Qaida planned attack that we've experienced in Canada," Superintendent Doug Best told a news conference. Officials in Washington and Toronto said it had no connections to last week's bombings at the finish line of the Boston Marathon.

Iran's foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast told reporters on Tuesday that there is no evidence of any Iranian involvement and groups such as al-Qaida have "no compatibility with Iran in both political and ideological fields."

Continue Reading...

Chiheb Esseghaier, 30, and Raed Jaser, 35, who live in Montreal and Toronto, were planning to derail a Via Rail passenger train in Toronto but posed no immediate threat, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said.

"This is the first known al-Qaida planned attack that we've experienced in Canada," Superintendent Doug Best told a news conference.

RCMP Assistant Commissioner James Malizia said the two men had "direction and guidance" from "al-Qaida elements located in Iran," though there was no reason to think the planned attacks were state-sponsored. Police said the men did not get financial support from al-Qaida, but declined to provide more details.

"It was definitely in the planning stage but not imminent," RCMP chief superintendent Jennifer Strachan said. "We are alleging that these two individuals took steps and conducted activities to initiate a terrorist attack. They watched trains and railways."

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

Neither company said how much Ericsson is paying.

Mediaroom gives phone companies a way to provide cable-like TV services over phone lines. It's used in 22 million set-top boxes in 11 million households, Microsoft said. U-Verse accounts for about 4.5 million of those homes. It's also used by Deutsche Telekom of Germany and by Telus Communications of Canada.

Microsoft Corp., which is based in Redmond, Wash., said it's focusing its resources on making its Xbox service a delivery vehicle for entertainment to game consoles, phones, PCs and tablets.

Ericsson said the Mediaroom business complements its portfolio of TV products. The business employs more than 400 people and is based in Mountain View, Calif.

Continue Reading...

20-year-old artist Jennifer Pawluck was arrested Wednesday morning at 10:30am after posting a picture of anti-police street art on her Instagram feed a few days before.

“Many of my friends do not like the police,” Pawluck told the Huffington Post Québec in French. “I thought it would be funny to put the picture on Instagram. I do not even know who he is, Ian Lafrenière.”

Pawluck took the photo in the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve neighbourhood of Montreal, where she lives, and police arrived early yesterday with a warrant accusing her of uttering threats to the Montreal police spokesperson Ian Lafrenière.

The photo in question depicts a hand-drawn image of Ian Lafrenière with a gunshot wound to the head flanked by the words “Ian Lafrenière” and “ACAB” — a popular graffiti acronym that stands for “all cop[per]s are bastards.”

Continue Reading...

The problem is not ignorance; it is not that we are unaware of the risks we take. Nor do we lack the instruments to deal with them. The problem, deeply embedded in the architecture of our decision making, is that in the pursuit of economic growth we privatize reward and socialize downside risk. To describe this tendency, economists borrow a term, “moral hazard,” from the insurance industry. A moral hazard exists whenever decision makers in risky situations reap the rewards from their decisions without bearing all of the costs. The ability to pass downside costs on to others encourages imprudent decision making.

Continue Reading...

Prejudice, like diabetes, is a condition for which no drug yet exists, and as a new bit of research in the Canadian Medical Association Journal demonstrates, even physicians working in a universal care system aren’t immune to its effects.

Stephen Hwang, an internist at the University of Toronto, wanted to know just how endemic socioeconomic discrimination was in local clinics. “I provide care for a number of people who are homeless and marginalized in society,” he says, “and they not infrequently mention to me that they feel that, in the past, they’ve been treated differently by certain health care providers. They feel that it was simply because they were poor or homeless.”

Continue Reading...

For a market that’s yet to be determined, this much ballyhooed project would transport hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil daily from Canadian tar sands compounds to the U.S. Gulf Coast for refining. What we do know is that the pipeline would dramatically increase the volume of climate change-causing greenhouse gas emissions, erasing what little progress North America has made in reducing its carbon footprint.

The State Department — which has final say in whether Keystone XL gets built — recently admitted as much in a highly publicized (and heavily criticized) preliminary draft of its environmental impact study. State acknowledged the climate-change risks but then argued that rejecting the project wouldn’t reduce the amount of emissions flowing into our atmosphere because Canada would still burn the tar sands and pipeline the oil elsewhere.

Continue Reading...

But Obama did not rule out a decision to approve the $7 billion pipeline, according to participants.

Obama told Republicans at the Capitol that he's still weighing a decision on the pipeline, which would carry oil from western Canada to refineries along the Texas Gulf Coast.

Rep. Lee Terry, R-Neb., said Obama appeared "conflicted" on the pipeline, saying that many of the promised jobs would be temporary and that much of the oil produced likely would be exported.

But Terry said Obama also indicated that dire environmental consequences predicted by pipeline opponents were exaggerated.

"He said there were no permanent jobs, and that the oil will be put on ships and exported and that the only ones who are going to get wealthy are the Canadians," Terry said.

A White House spokesman said Wednesday no decision on the pipeline has been made.

Continue Reading...

A few weeks later, the ghost ship Ryou-Un Maru was spotted off the BC coast, just one wreck among the estimated five million metric tons of debris washed into the ocean from Japan by the 2011 tsunami. About 30 percent of that flotsam now drifts across an area in the North Pacific roughly three times the size of the continental US (the rest sank). It is impossible to know when, where, or in what quantities the debris will land on the west coast of North America, but the US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts that it will begin arriving en masse with the early winter storms of this year.

Continue Reading...

Canada is the only nation with polar bears that allows sports hunting. With two-thirds of the world’s polar bear population, Canada exports several hundred polar bear hides and parts for sale each year.

...Each year, an average of 3,200 items made from polar bears – including skins, claws, and teeth – are reported to be exported or re-exported from countries in which the animals live. Polar bear hides sell for an average of $2,000 to $5,000, while maximum hide prices have topped $12,000.

Continue Reading...

Joel Bitar was granted bail for $500,000 and will face an extradition hearing in March, according to a release published Friday at SuppotJoel.Com:

On Thursday, February 14th, at 6 o’clock in the morning, federal marshals arrested an American activist, Joel Bitar, in his New York, NY home on a provisional arrest warrant issued by the US Attorney’s office, acting on a foreign extradition request from Canadian authorities. The complaint against Joel cites 26 counts, almost all relating to property damage that occurred during the G20 summit protests in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in June 2010.

In 2010 it was announced that extradition was being sought for three Americans on property damage charges. However, no arrests have been made until this month.

Continue Reading...