nonamedufus

Today is Blog Action Day. This year's topic is human rights and the aim is to encourage bloggers from around the world to raise awareness about human rights by posting something about it. I posted a Blog Action Day badge in my left hand column last week. I hope you guys have been clicking on it. You may think that's a stupid question but it happens every day all around the world.  Sadly, the chief targets are women, children and the poor. Violence, human trafficking, ethnic cleansing, child labour, the arrest, torture and in some cases killing of demonstrators against abuses of human rights are just some of the types of activities which impact on individuals' human rights. But it doesn't just happen somewhere else. It happens in our own backyards too. Here in Canada I think of the plight of the poor and of Aboriginal people as two examples. In my province of Quebec, the government has come up with a Charter of Values that would forbid public employees from wea...

Today is Blog Action Day. This year's topic is water and the aim is to encourage bloggers from around the world to raise awareness about clean water by posting something about it. I posted a Blog Action Day badge in my right hand column several weeks back. I hope you guys have been clicking on it. Many of us take clean water for granted. It comes out of our taps and we drink it and out of our shower heads and we bathe in it. Most of us clean our clothes in washing machines and our dishes in dishwashers. And, wonder of wonders, we flush our toilet and the little piece of work we deposited there disappears. Here's a few things you may not have known about water: Unsafe drinking water and lack of sanitation kills more people every year than all forms of violence, including war. More people have access to a cell phone than to a toilet. Every day women and children in Africa walk a combined 109 million hours to get water. It takes 6.3 gallons of water to produce just...

One of the many - and I mean many - jokes that were made the day President Obama was awarded his Nobel Peace Prize was the fact it was so ironic he should be awarded a peace prize on the day he chose to bomb the moon. Kidding aside, Obama - or in his name NASA - shot a rocket into the moon's south pole in search of ice. Now quite apart from conjuring up images of French visionary film maker Georges Melies, and his milestone silent sci-fi film, 1902’s Le voyage dans la lune (A Trip To The Moon), the bombing of the moon underlines a very unfunny reality: Earth is running out of potable water. Why else are we looking for a source of water on, of all places, the moon? And it wasn't coincidence last week that at the same time the U.S. was bombing the moon, some clown was visiting the International Space Station. Guy Laliberté, the founder of the internationally acclaimed Cirque de Soliel , spent millions to tag along with a couple of Soviet rocket jockeys as Canada's first spa...