What a year! We’re still here, so hopefully that means that we’re doing something right…or not at all if we look at the last year in eco news. Without getting all ‘told you so’ on your butt, let’s have a look to see what the Green Bean has brought you throughout 2010 … Earth Day turned 40 this year! Two days before that anniversary, the biggest accidental, and certainly most frustrating ecological disaster we’ve ever seen dominated the media for months. Yup, it’s the BP oil spill, one of the worst environmental disasters of all time, but Obama did good by banning offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico until 2017.
Month: December 2010
2010: The year of confusion – From Rob Ford to Burlesque, the year that made no sense
I must admit, I’m a bit confused. I’m not quite sure what I’m supposed to write about here. It’s a year-in-review piece, so at least the time frame is solid, but the subject matter, hmm, that’s another story. You see, I don’t really have a clear beat. I started off 2010 as a theatre writer, but now that’s done by others and occasionally me, at least when it comes to burlesque shows (heh heh, but seriously, check out my reviews of Blood Ballet and Glam Gam). I do write about news and politics, even in this space, but I’m not the only one, so this can’t be a year in the news piece. I could write about the year it was for FTB. (and in fact I will, but that’s coming up New Year’s Eve, not here.) So I guess I’m just going to have to talk about the year in random things that caught my attention.
Divided FCC Ruling May Have Divided the Internet
The Federal Communications Commission in the United States has approved new rules intended to prohibit broadband corporations from interfering with Internet traffic streaming to their clientele.
The 3-2 vote Tuesday on “net neutrality” has angered republicans who wish to tie up the new rules in court in hopes of getting the new law overturned. Meanwhile, the democrats are also bitter as they fear the new rules don’t go far enough.
The rules prohibit phone and cable companies from
A Christmas present for Cleo: Yaccarini may throw in the towel
For supporters of Café Cleopatre and the heritage of Montreal’s historic Red Light District, Christmas may come early this year and I’m not talking about the Glam Gam holiday show that wrapped up last weekend, either. Angus head Christian Yaccarini confirmed to Cyberpresse that he may just throw in the towel and give up on his company’s ongoing attempt to expropriate the legendary burlesque, drag and fetish performance space and downstairs strip club. For several years, Yaccarini’s Société de développement Angus (SDA), with the full blessing and encouragement of Montreal mayor Gerald Tremblay and his administration, has been buying up spots on St-Laurent boulevard between St-Catherine and the Monument Nationale theatre and leaving them vacant, creating a virtual ghost town around the lone holdout Cleopatre. They hope to raize the area and replace what was recently a thriving community experiencing a rebirth with a giant skyscraper to house Hydro Quebec offices. Meanwhile, a coalition of artists, historians, academics and residents have been fighting this plan tooth and nail in the media, at City Hall, at the Office de consultation public and recently in the courts. It’s this case brought by Cleo owner Johnny Zoumboulakis that may finally break Yaccarini’s stubbornness on the matter. He argued that it might just not be worth it to keep paying legal fees when, as he put it in French, “Cleo’s lawyers just don’t want to come to an agreement.”
Leaving only yourself behind
It’s the strangest Christmas present I’ve ever helped to give. This week, my mom and I will be putting our beloved cat, Bobo to sleep forever. He’s been suffering with a tumor and can barely lap up food any more. After months of treatment, we have decided to call it quits and give him our own holiday gift: an end to his suffering. Pets bring a lot of comfort and we’ve been lucky to have one of the best cats ever over the last ten years. Like everything on the planet, everything has its final hour. With this bleak holiday message, it brings to mind what will happen with everything else we may be leaving behind. The holidays are a conundrum of giving, taking and waste. At the end, we leave behind our own trail of consumerism. We have the power to diminish our impact on the planet, but what about when we die? What legacy will we be leaving behind when we’re committed to the earth?
The Wrath of Grapes
The mouth of the great white north is at it again. Don Cherry seems to make headlines whenever he speaks, whether it’s practicing the gentle art of bigotry in front of a national audience on Coach’s Corner or speaking at the inauguration of the newly elected conservative Mayor of Toronto Rob Ford. In the past, Cherry has belittled Europeans and French Canadians and slammed the Canadian government for not supporting the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Most recently he insulted anyone who rides a bicycle or takes public transportation to work, not mention every liberal in the country.
London calling to Montreal: get some ideas behind your riots, please
Mass arrests, tons of damage, Prince Charles under attack, police under fire for doing way too much or not doing enough. Yes, London was the site of some pretty intense riots last week, which is funny considering they don’t even have a hockey team…must be football. No, wait, it’s actually over student tuition hikes, something that means something. Pardon my confusion, but I’m from Montreal and that just seems strange.
Mass-Mirroring WikiLeaks
Since the Cablegate documents first started to trickle through the whistle-blower website Wikileaks a little more than a week ago, it has come under constant attack from government hackers hell bent on silencing the mouth of the website and its founder Julian Assange.
Online payment service PayPal on Friday blocked financial transfers to Wikileaks after governments around the world initiated legal action against the website. That shift came after Wikileaks’ domain name provider had cut off the site and servers belonging to Amazon.com had stopped hosting it. “If Amazon is so uncomfortable with the First Amendment, they should get out of the business of selling books.” WikiLeaks said.
The Swiss website, wikileaks.ch, has been handling a great deal of …
BREAKING NEWS: Someone to charge Dick Cheney with something!
He’s responsible for two wars, countless deaths, torture, profiteering, corruption and he even shot a man in the face. Now, finally, someone has decided to take Dick Cheney to task, or more specifically to court, in Nigeria. As the former CEO of Haliburton, Cheney is named in a $180 million anti-bribery case brought about by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Nigeria’s anti-corruption police. Basically, through subsidiary KBR, Haliburton bribed Nigerian officials between 1994 and 2004 to secure $6 billion worth of contracts for the Bonny Island liquefied natural gas (LNG) project in the Niger Delta.