Photos of missing and murdered aboriginal women lent a somber presence to the three-day Assembly of First Nations National Justice Forum this week in Vancouver. The forum began with a ceremony to honour the missing and murdered women and their families. Viveca Ellis)

With the Missing Women’s Inquiry ongoing in Vancouver, a national forum this week aimed at improving the security and safety of First Nations communities couldn’t have come at a more opportune time.

The three-day Assembly of First Nations (AFN) National Justice Forum brought together national and regional First Nations, frontline justice workers, and federal and provincial government representatives seeking solutions to the rampant violence facing First Nations communities across Canada.

The forum covered developing an action plan to end violence against indigenous women and girls, addressing the plight of hundreds of murdered and missing aboriginal women and girls across Canada.

Developing a First Nation justice strategy related to issues such as policing, sentencing, alternative measures, crime prevention, courts and corrections, and community-based programs was also discussed.

In an interview with The Epoch Times, AFN National Chief Shawn Atleo said change must be driven by communities themselves, and the forum allows aboriginals to design, develop, and implement changes as they take responsibility for enhancing the safety and security of their communities.

“The vision I have is … to smash unilateral decision-making and to give aboriginal people full decision-making power. To recognize the authority of First Nations, including their accountability for making real change,” Atleo said.

“First Nations must jointly design the solutions regarding justice for missing and murdered aboriginal women and girls.”

The forum began Tuesday with a ceremony to honour families of the missing and murdered women. Dancing and drumming surrounded a long, candlelit shrine of photos of dozens of missing and murdered women that dominated the conference hall.

According to the Native Women’s Association of Canada, there are 582 outstanding cases of missing and murdered indigenous women across the country.

Call for a National Inquiry

A speech by Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, president of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, called for a national Royal Commission of Inquiry to address the issue of murdered and missing aboriginal women and girls.

“All of these pictures on this table bear witness to the fact that the status quo is absolutely killing our people. It’s killing our women. It’s killing our daughters and our granddaughters,” Stewart said.

The “leadership call” for a royal commission coincided with a surprise announcement the same day from Missing Women Inquiry commissioner Wally Oppal.

Oppal said Tuesday he plans to begin hearing from public panels to assist him in making recommendations to protect the lives of vulnerable women. The inquiry—investigating why serial killer Robert Pickton wasn’t caught sooner despite evidence and warnings—has conducted over 50 days of hearings since Oct.11.

Oppal made a plea to aboriginal and community leaders as well as victim’s families to participate in the upcoming panels.

But across town at the justice forum, Stewart spoke critically of the fact that the majority of Aboriginal groups withdrew from the inquiry because they failed to receive legal funding from the province.

UN Asked to Investigate

On the international front, Sharon MacIvor of the Canadian Feminist Alliance for International Action and Jeannette Corbiere Lavell, president, Native Women’s Association of Canada, provided an update on the current UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) inquiry into the disappearance and murder of Aboriginal women and girls in Canada.

Following a request from the two organizations, CEDAW launched a preliminary investigation in December 2011 to determine whether to conduct a full investigation in Canada. MacIvor said a petition of 125 signatures of leading institutions requesting the committee come to Canada to conduct a full inquiry has been submitted.

They are waiting for news regarding a full scale UN inquiry following a CEDAW meeting scheduled for a month from now.

Hope for the Future

A press conference at the forum launched a website and public awareness campaign for MissingKids.ca. The joint initiative between the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, the RCMP, and the AFN, aims to assist First Nation families in searching for their loved ones, and educate communities on the issue in general.

“We need the resources to prevent children from going missing, and great things can be affected through great partnerships like this one,” Atleo said during the press conference.

“We are experiencing a resurgence. The women are leading our communities back. They are the storytellers, the communicators … we have to keep them safe,” Atleo told a room packed with delegates.

Viveca Ellis is a freelance journalist based in Vancouver.

Prince's swing has yielded an average of 40 home runs the last five seasons. (Jared Wickerham/Getty Images)

With spring training in full gear, baseball has started to grab headlines of late—excluding of course Jeremy Lin news days. So it’s about time to get out the annual rankings of what players are the best in their leagues.

For offensive players, attributes like speed on the base paths, discipline at the plate, as well as ability to hit count in the rankings.

Age also matters as this is a projection for the 2012 season. For instance, Rangers infielder Michael Young hit .338 last season and led the league with 213 hits and is a career .304 hitter (16th among active players) but turned 35 in the offseason, so his projection for 2012 is to have a bit of a drop-off.

Conversely, consistency matters in projecting future seasons—for the most part. Obviously not all players are All-Stars in their rookie seasons but were minor-league All-Stars before that time.

10. Alex Gordon, 28 years old, Kansas City Royals; 2011 Offensive stats: (average/on-base/slugging) .303/.376/.502, 23 home runs, 87 RBIs, 101 runs scored, 67/139 walks/strikeouts, 17/25 steals/attempts. Career 162-game average: .262/.343/.434, 20 home runs, 72 RBIs, 85 runs scored, 66/145 walks/strikeouts, 13/19 steals/attempts—Kansas City’s second overall pick in the 2005 draft finally realized his potential in 2011 and is just entering his prime. Gordon’s surprise inclusion on this list bumps some good players for various reasons. Players like Evan Longoria (hit just .244 last year), Michael Young (is now 35), Curtis Granderson (needs another great year), Mark Teixeira (hit just .248 and .256 last two seasons), Adrian Beltre (inconsistent for years), David Ortiz (is now 36), Paul Konerko (turns 36 next month), Billy Butler (needs more power) and Joe Mauer (injuries).

9. Jacoby Ellsbury, 28 years old, Boston Red Sox; 2011 Offensive stats: .321/.376/.552, 32 home runs, 105 RBIs, 119 runs scored, 52/98 walks/strikeouts, 39/54 steals/attempts. Career 162-game average: .301/.354/.452, 17 home runs, 75 RBIs, 109 runs scored, 49/88 walks/strikeouts, 56/68 steals/attempts—Ellsbury’s projections for 2012 are a bit of a mystery. Having never hit more than nine home runs in any season he broke out for 32 last year. But his stolen base totals of 50 and 70 in 2008 and 2009 respectively (he played in just 18 games in 2010) dropped to 39 last year. A repeat performance of 2011 would bump him past teammate Dustin Pedroia.

8. Dustin Pedroia, 28 years old, Boston Red Sox; 2011 Offensive stats: .307/.387/.474, 21 home runs, 91 RBIs, 102 runs scored, 86/85 walks/strikeouts, 26/34 steals/attempts. Career 162-game average: .305/.373/.463, 17 home runs, 78 RBIs, 109 runs scored, 68/61 walks/strikeouts, 19/24 steals/attempts—Pedroia’s superior plate discipline and as well as being a consistently good hitter for longer than Ellsbury gives him the slight edge, despite Jacoby’s superior speed. Being injured for half of the 2010 season (played in just 75 games) and not playing at 100 percent in the games he did play hurt, dropped his career numbers a bit, keeping him slightly behind Cano.

7. Robinson Cano, 29 years old, New York Yankees; 2011 Offensive stats: .302/.349/.533, 28 home runs, 118 RBIs, 104 runs scored, 38/96 walks/strikeouts, 8/10 steals/attempts. Career 162-game average: .308/.347/.496, 22 home runs, 96 RBIs, 94 runs scored, 34/78 walks/strikeouts, 4/8 steals/attempts—Cano over Pedroia was the closest call on the list but Robinson’s stellar hitting the last three seasons (average of 27 home runs, 45 doubles, .314 batting average, and 104 RBIs) makes up for his lack of walks at the plate.

6. Josh Hamilton, 31 years old, Texas Rangers; 2011 Offensive stats: .298/.346/.536, 25 home runs, 94 RBIs, 80 runs scored, 39/93 walks/strikeouts, 8/9 steals/attempts. Career 162-game average: .308/.366/.543, 32 home runs, 117 RBIs, 101 runs scored, 56/126 walks/strikeouts, 10/12 steals/attempts—What could have been for the first overall pick in the 1999 draft had he not had drug/alcohol problems is anyone’s guess. Without various injuries since his arrival to the big leagues in 2007 that have cost him an average of 48 games per season the last three years, Hamilton could be right behind Pujols.

5. Adrian Gonzalez…

Rescuers work near the cruise liner Costa Concordia lying aground in front of the Isola del Giglio (Giglio island) on January 27, 2012 (Filippo Monteforte/AFP/Getty Images)

Eight more bodies were found on Wednesday in the wreckage of the Costa Concordia cruise ship that hit rocks off the Italian coast over a month ago.

The recovery team working on the ship said they found four people near the lifeboats and found four more later on Wednesday, meaning that 25 people are now confirmed dead in the disaster, Italy-based ANSA reported.

Divers said they recovered the body of Dayana Arlotti, 5, but said they have not found the body of her father, the news agency said.

In another development, seven other people are now under investigation for offenses relating to the disaster, ANSA reported. Prosecutors have placed the ship’s Capt. Francesco Schettino under investigation alleging that he left the stricken vessel before the passengers. Ciro Ambrosio, his first officer, was also placed under investigation.

“We have received seven formal notifications—four for officers on board, three for company employees on land,” the Costa Crociere press office told AFP confirming the investigation.

The search for bodies has been complicated by waves, poor weather conditions, and the movement of the

Earlier this month, workers began the task of pumping more than 2,300 tons of fuel from the wrecked ship to prevent it from spilling into the marine environment.

Diane Finley, Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development, announced the launch of the Foreign Credential Recognition (FCR) Loans Pilot on Wednesday in Vancouver. (PMO Photo)

Labour Minister Diane Finley announced a three-year pilot project to help internationally trained professionals get their credentials recognized in Canada.

“For many internationally trained professionals, the cost of licensing exams, training, and skills upgrading can present a significant barrier to credential recognition,” notes a statement from the government.

The Foreign Credential Recognition Loans Pilot will develop and test projects to give those professionals financial assistance to help them get credentials recognized and find work in their field in Canada.

The Institute of Marriage and Family Canada released a report on Wednesday taking aim at no-fault divorce laws.

The institute, a pro-marriage research and advocacy group, argues no-fault divorce laws allow unilateral divorces without any cause given. Because of the law, the report says there have been more divorces and increased poverty.

When a city councillor in Mexico City recently proposed temporary marriage licenses, a range of reactions from appreciation to disbelief ensued. While this idea may be a source of controversy, the reality is that Canadian law actually values marriage as a short-term prospect through no-fault divorce, the report says.

“Research shows that when unhappily married couples manage to avoid divorce they are happily married five years later; those who divorce are no happier than those who stayed married.”

The NDP has translated its breakthrough in the last election into a 50 percent increase in the number of card-carrying party members since October.

The party released numbers Tuesday illustrating that some 128,351 members are now eligible to vote in the March 24 leadership vote which was moved to a larger venue to accommodate the number of registered delegates.

“Canadians are really engaged and involved in our leadership race, as these historic numbers show,” said New Democrat national director Chantal Vallerand. “Canadians are turning to New Democrats in record amounts in order to defeat Stephen Harper and elect a prime minister for all Canadians.”

“This leadership campaign is about choosing the next leader of the Official Opposition, but also the next Prime Minister,” said Vallerand, who said Harper’s policies are driving NDP membership.

President Barack Obama speaks on his 2013 budget to students at Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale, Va., on Feb. 13. Key features of the budget include rebuilding jobs, increasing innovation and manufacturing, deficit reduction, and tax reform. (Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images)

President Barack Obama’s proposal to reform the corporate tax structure has critics concerned that small businesses are being left out.

Obama intends to simplify the tax code, eliminate a range of tax loopholes and subsidies, and lower the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 28 percent. “It’s a framework that lowers the corporate tax rate and broadens the tax base in order to increase competitiveness for companies across the nation,” he said in a Feb. 22 statement.

Obama added that the present corporate tax system was “outdated, unfair, and inefficient” and decried it for encouraging American businesses to move offshore.

“It’s not right, and it needs to change,” he said.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said the U.S. corporate tax system was among the highest in the developed world. He blamed the high tax rate on loopholes that were only available for certain industries but cost taxpayers millions of dollars a year.

“Those families and businesses deserve a stronger, more efficient tax code.” -- Orrin Hatch, senator

“You can call these tax preferences, tax expenditures, loopholes, incentives, or tax benefits. But whatever you call them, they are subsidies,” he said.

Apart from lowering the corporate tax rate and removing loopholes, Geithner identified four other areas of reform in the proposal. They include replacing tax deductions for companies relocating overseas with tax credits for coming back home, lowering tax rates for manufacturing, simplifying the tax system for small businesses, and making sure all new incentives are paid for.

Mixed reactions

House Republicans were mixed in their response. House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) acknowledged the administration’s efforts to address corporate tax reform—particularly in lowering tax rates and closing loopholes—but said he would have liked to see broader reforms, particularly in the area of individual tax.

“So, while this is a good step by the administration, I will borrow from the president’s own words to Congress from just yesterday, ‘Don’t stop here. Keep going,’” he said in a statement.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, was dismissive, describing the proposal as a “set of bullet points designed more for the campaign trail than an actual blueprint for fixing our tax code.”

Hatch expressed particular concern that the proposal had ignored small businesses, noting that small and family businesses accounted for roughly half of U.S. private sector jobs.

“Those families and businesses deserve a stronger, more efficient tax code,” he said.

The National Small Business Association (NSBA) said there were good and bad points in the proposal.

“Although the proposal does include some positive language for small-business tax credits, NSBA believes firmly that the only way to ensure fairness, transparency, and eased complexity of the U.S. tax code is broad reform,” said NSBA President Todd McCracken in a statement. “And that must also include individual income taxes.”

Geithner said the proposal would be seen by some as “politically contentious,” but was designed to start the process of fundamental tax reform.

Geithner noted that he spoke with Rep. Camp and Sen. Hatch and will meet with them to discuss the proposal in coming weeks.

A real estate sign stands in front of a building on May 31, 2011, in Chicago, Ill., in this file photo. According to Freddie Mac data, a 30-year fixed rate mortgage on average was 3.87 percent, the lowest since records were kept in the 1950s. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

NEW YORK—The macroeconomic trends in the national real estate market are making it a real buyers’ market.

According to new reports, January U.S. housing prices on average dropped to their lowest in more than a decade. In addition, sales of existing homes jumped as buyers took advantage of low borrowing rates and a glut of inventory.

A national trade group, the National Association of Realtors (NAR), reported Wednesday that the median U.S. home price in January fell 2 percent to $154,700, the lowest since November 2001, or 11 years ago. This puts American real estate prices at a lower level before the recent housing bubble.

In addition, existing-home sales jumped in January by 4.3 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.57 million. “The uptrend in home sales is in line with all of the underlying fundamentals—pent-up household formation, record-low mortgage interest rates, bargain home prices, sustained job creation, and rising rents,” said NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun.

Recent economic developments such as record low interest rates and decline in housing prices translate to the best buyers market in years. A recent uptick in the nation’s unemployment rate has also increased consumers’ willingness to spend.

The number of first-time buyers increased modestly to 33 percent of all home sales. This is typically viewed as a critical indicator of a healthy economy, although levels above 40 percent are viewed as positive.

Homebuilders have also responded to these signs. Builders have applied for more new home permits in January in anticipation of increased sales. The National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo index of builder confidence rose this month to its highest level since 2007.

Rates Still at Record Lows

The Nakamol Chicago booth at the Jacob Javits center on Wednesday. (Amal Chen/The Epoch Times)

NEW YORK—Looking out at a room packed with booths lined with the trendiest pieces of the season, complete with a spa bar and dining section, you might think you’ve stepped into a high-end fashion gala, but it’s really the backstage for boutiques and department stores across the globe.

The fashion trade shows of Moda Manhattan, AccessoriesTheShow Pavilion, and Fame are showcasing over 900 fashion brands at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center for buyers from almost every state and more than 44 countries.

The event, which opened on Tuesday and will continue through Thursday, is only open to buyers and storeowners, who are purchasing for the fall/winter 2012 season.

Turn out for the February show is moderate, according to the sales representatives at the fashion booths.

“This show overall has been slow for everyone,” said Lauren Robinson, sales assistant of New York-based fashion line sharagano noir.

Nonetheless, she said that the company plans on showcasing every year at Moda Manhattan in the city hereafter. “If people are in town for a little bit longer, they can come to our showroom because it’s so close.”

The Mystree booth at the Jacob Javits center on Wednesday. (Amal Chen/The Epoch Times)

Fame presents contemporary junior selections while Moda Manhattan is a higher priced modern contemporary women’s ready-to wear show. AccessoriesTheShow features accessories from scarves and bags, to different types of jewelry.

“They have a great selection,” said Thuyvan Bui, the owner of Gift Fanatics in Lafayette, La. She also pointed out that the exhibition was less crowded than the many others that she attended in Atlanta and Dallas.

“I like it. It’s not overwhelming, it’s relaxing,” she said.

The trade shows provide free breakfast, lunch, and beverages for the buyers. There is also a beauty spa section toward the back of the exhibition that provides massages and hairdressers doing dry blowouts.

The timing of the trade show is specially selected to follow fashion week to accommodate buyers who live away from the city and flew in for runway shows. Fashion Week for Fall 2012 ended last Thursday.

Chris Carpenter pitched in 10 games in 2011 as a rookie. (Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images)

Nearly four months after the Cubs hired away Red Sox GM Theo Epstein, the two clubs have finally agreed on compensation for the successful executive, according to reports on the two teams’ websites.

Chicago will send 26-year-old pitcher Chris Carpenter (not the Cardinals former Cy Young Award winner) along with a player to be named later to Boston for a player to be named later.

“I think it took so long because it was a unique circumstance,” said Red Sox general manager Ben Cherington. “We talk to teams all the time about trades, and it’s players for players and it’s pretty easy, or easier, to assign value and figure out what’s fair and what’s not fair. In this case, it was just tougher because it involved not just an executive, but a friend.”

A rusty bike with a bent back tire and missing front tire on 34th Street near 11th Avenue. (Amal Chen/The Epoch Times)

NEW YORK—The Department of Sanitation has recently received many complaints about derelict bikes taking up space on the city’s bike racks and creating eyesores.

In October 2010, the Department of Sanitation began cleaning up derelict bikes around the city, including bikes that are crushed and unusable, bikes that are more than 75 percent rusted (including the chains that hold them to public property), or bikes that are missing parts (not including missing front tires or seats which owners sometimes remove to prevent theft).

Oscar statuettes on display at Vanderbilt Hall at Grand Central Terminal on Wednesday. (Dai Bing/The Epoch Times)

NEW YORK—For the upcoming Oscar Awards, New York directors claim 5 of the 10 documentary nominations and New York documentary film producers claim 4 of the 10 nominations in the category.

“Year after year, New York City—not Hollywood—is the unrivaled star performer in one key Oscar category: documentary film,” declares a February report issued by the Center for an Urban Future, a think tank that works on public policy.

Between 2005 and 2011, New York documentary directors have won 7 of the 14 Oscars in the category and New York documentary producers have taken home 10 of the 14 Oscars in that category.

The 84th Oscar Award ceremony will air on ABC on Sunday, Feb. 26.

New York state Sen. Jose Peralta in front of Elmhurst Hospital on Wednesday announced his office will help immigrants who are victims of fraud regardless of their legal status. (Kristen Meriwether/The Epoch Times)

NEW YORK—In the Jackson Heights area of Queens, one of the most culturally diverse districts in America, city officials have recently seen an increase in immigrants coming to their offices reporting various types of real estate, employment, and travel agent fraud.

These immigrants, some of whom are undocumented, feel they cannot go to the police to report these crimes out of fear of their legal status—and the scammers know it. This leaves these crimes unsolved and the scammers free to repeat their crimes.

Assemblyman Michael DenDekker and other members of The Unity Team gathered in front of Elmhurst Hospital on Wednesday to remind their constituents their offices are open to aid in getting scammers off the streets. “When you need help in a case like this, we are here for you. If you are afraid to report a suspected case of consumer fraud or cheating to the New York City Police Department or other law enforcement agency, you can come to us and we will help,” DenDekker said.

DenDekker, as well as the other Unity Team members, said they will facilitate meetings between the police and citizens, and try to recover lost money if possible, all while keeping the citizen’s immigration status out of the conversation.

The city officials feel immigrants’ distrust of the police stems from fear of deportation and sometimes bad experiences in their home countries. Immigrants are also less likely to know laws, such as not having to pay to apply for a job, or laws against apartment application fees.

DenDekker said there were no official statistics on the number of people being victimized because the crimes are not being reported to the police, the only agency that would keep those numbers. His office keeps a record of people coming into his office and if the issues were resolved, but those records will not be made public.

West Virginia Mine Tragedy: People participate in a candlelight vigil on April 10, 2010 to honor the coal miners that were killed,  a few days before in Montocal, West Virginia. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Federal prosecutors filed charges on Feb. 22 against a superintendent at the West Virginia coal mine where an explosion killed 29 in 2010.

Gary May, 43, of Bloomingrose is charged with felony conspiracy for allegedly telling employees about pending safety inspections and concealing violations at the Upper Big Branch (UBB) mine owned by Massey Energy, according to a statement from U.S. Attorney Booth Goodwin of the Southern District of West Virginia.

“Mine safety and health laws were routinely violated at UBB, in part because of a belief that following those laws would decrease coal production,” the charges said, noting that it is “prohibited for any person to give advance notice” of an inspection.

“Today’s charge is a significant step in the investigation of events at the Upper Big Branch mine,” said Goodwin in a statement. “Our investigation of those events remains ongoing.”

Councilman Robert Jackson joined protesters, including many students, outside One Police Plaza on Wednesday, to express concern over newly released arrests and summonses numbers in and around schools. (Zachary Stieber/The Epoch Times)

NEW YORK—Most of us are used to going through metal detectors at times, such as before embarking on a plane trip, or going into a high-profile building.

Yet going through a metal detector is the beginning of every school day for many students in New York City.

A coalition of students, organizations, and elected officials on Wednesday gathered to protest numbers released showing 279 arrests and 532 summonses occurred during the fourth quarter of 2011—Oct. 1 to Dec. 31—in schools.

At One Police Plaza, outside of the NYPD’s headquarters, the coalition said the number of arrests and summonses are too high, and show an extension of what they say is racial profiling conducted citywide through stop-and-frisk searches.

Racial statistics aren’t kept for summonses. Out of 279 arrests, 167 were blacks. Three-quarters were male.

“Time is long past due for meaningful oversight of school disciplinary practices, and that should start with city council hearings, and an independent audit … and a reassessment of the role of the NYPD in our public schools,” said Donna Lieberman, New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) executive director.

The NYPD’s School Safety Division has approximately 5,320 school safety agents for the 441,300 middle- and high-school students. Legislation passed in December 2010 requires the department provide quarterly statistics on arrests and summonses in and around schools.

“Felonies in schools dropped from 1,577 in 2001 to 801 last year,” Paul Browne, NYPD deputy commissioner, said in a statement. “That 50 percent reduction in serious crime was made through the good work of dedicated school safety officers and police officers.”

Donna Lieberman, New York Civil Liberties Union executive director, speaks to those gathered to protest the number of arrests and summonses in and around schools. (Zachary Stieber/The Epoch Times)

Maishah Salan, a 16-year-old senior at Hillside Arts and Letters Academy in Queens, said that the safety agents and metal detectors detrimentally affect the students in her area.

“I remember in middle school there used to be like one cop for the whole school and we didn’t have any problems then,” said Salan. “Because of zero-tolerance policies they started suspending kids for no reason [other than minor violations]. It’s just a downward spiral.”

Metal detectors often create lines of students, she said, forcing them to arrive more than half an hour before their class starts just so they can make it through the line in time for class.

Both Salan and Councilman Danny Dromm pointed out that schools have more safety agents than guidance counselors, which seems to place more importance on discipline than education.

The Department of Education asked on the phone that questions be emailed to them, but didn’t answer the emailed questions.

Councilman Robert Jackson said that everyone, not only the NYPD, must collectively work to bring a more positive environment into schools.

“What we find is that schools that are most successful at handling this behavior without criminalizing students make education a priority, rather than policing,” said Angela Jones, coordinator of the School to Prison Pipeline Project for of the NYCLU. “They see young people as having potential rather than being potential criminals.”

Eric Weltman, the senior organizer of Food & Water Watch, speaks with a passerby about the dangers of hydrofracking in New York City on Nov. 14. (Benjamin Chasteen/The Epoch Times)

NEW YORK—The first local ban on hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, in New York went into effect on Tuesday when a New York state judge ruled that the city of Dryden in Tompkins County had the right to keep potential frackers out through local zoning laws.

A moratorium still exists on the controversial method of extracting natural gas from shale, but state legislators will likely open the industry up by the end of the year, albeit with regulations, once public comments on the matter have been reviewed.

On a press conference call in July 2011, Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) Commissioner Joe Martens was uncertain if opponents would be able to block fracking through local zoning laws.

He noted that fracking could only take place in the appropriate industrial zones. When asked whether he thought municipalities that are opposed to fracking might block it through zoning laws, Martens replied, “The law is not perfectly clear. … I think we’ll see some legal challenges along the way that will make that clearer.”

Ottawa City Hall. The City of Ottawa has been recognized as being among Canada’s top diversity leaders in the 2012 Canada’s Best Diversity Employers competition. (The Epoch Times)

The City of Ottawa has been recognized as being among Canada’s top diversity leaders in an annual competition that evaluates employers based on a range of workplace diversity and inclusiveness programs.

More than 2,750 employers of all sizes from the public and private sectors across Canada competed in this year’s Canada’s Best Diversity Employers competition.

“The City strives to build diversity awareness among our employees as a direct reflection of the makeup of the community that we serve,” said Mayor Jim Watson in a news release. “This distinction recognizes our continuing commitment to having a workplace that is inclusive and accessible to all.”

Among the initiatives that earned Ottawa the recognition include a partnership with the City for All Women Initiative to help identify barriers to employment and to eliminate discrimination.

The city co-leads a committee with the Ottawa Aboriginal Coalition to work with community groups on finding solutions to issues affecting Aboriginals, and is a member of the Employment Accessibility Resource Network, working with service providers and employers to help persons with disabilities find jobs.

Hire Immigrants Ottawa is another partnership between the city and community groups, focusing on advancing the hiring of skilled immigrants.

A program called Diversity Champion builds relationships between the Ottawa Paramedic Service and minority groups to encourage their members to consider paramedicine as a career.

And the Ottawa Fire Services runs a “female firefighters in training” camp, a mentoring program for young women aged 15 to 19.

“The City is working with the community to ensure that all residents have equal access to facilities, products, services, grants, and employment opportunities,” said city manager Kent Kirkpatrick in the release.

“Our ongoing priority is to eliminate barriers and to generate a culture at the City of Ottawa that is respectful and inclusive.”

Since 2002, the City of Ottawa has had a policy in place to ensure equitable and inclusive recruitment practices. It also offers an award that recognizes employees who have worked to advance diversity initiatives within the government.

The City of Ottawa also ranked among Mediacorp’s list of Canada’s Top 100 Employers in 2012.

In addition to diversity, Mediacorp runs several other national competitions to recognize employers for excellence in issues of special interest, such as family-friendly workplaces, environmental values, young people, and older Canadians.

Children in the small Dixon Creek Primary School some 50km north-east of Melbourne. (Paul Crock/AFP/Getty Images)

A new report says Australian governments must adopt a new funding model for schools, expected to cost an additional $5 billion a year, that involves a set dollar amount of funding per student.

The Gonski report released on Feb 20 also recommends more funding for schools with high numbers of disadvantaged students, to address factors such as low socio-economic background, indigenous background, disability and poor English skills.

It says that such factors have contributed to a “significant” gap found between the highest and lowest performing students, and a general decline in the performance of Australian students.

“Particularly compelling is the evidence that suggests that all students, regardless of their own background, seem to perform better in schools with a higher average socioeconomic background,” the report says.

The report was released after 18 months of extensive research led by businessman David Gonski and is the most far-reaching review of school funding since 1973. It has found the current system “unnecessarily complex”, lacking “coherence and transparency” and lacking coordination between governments.

In response to the report, the federal government has promised a round of consultations on the recommendations, while stressing that the first priority is to get the budget back in surplus.

The Opposition says adopting Gonski recommendations may discourage private investments in schools, and that the current funding system is fine.

Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum has surged ahead of former front runner Mitt Romney in the GOP race, building on his three-state sweep earlier in the month, where he won Colorado, Missouri, and Minnesota.

While Romney presently leads Santorum in Arizona, Santorum is ahead of the former Massachusetts governor in national polls by 6 points, according to an average of five polls compiled by RealClearPolitics.

Santorum has 33.8 percent support in those polls to Romney’s 28 percent. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is third at 14 percent and Texas Rep. Ron Paul follows at 12.2 percent.

Santorum also leads in Michigan, Romney’s home state, but that lead has been cut by 15 percentage points over the last week, according to a Public Policy Polling survey (PPP) that notes the tightening is more a function of Romney gaining than Santorum dropping back.

All four candidates will be preparing for a critical national CNN debate to take place on Feb. 22 in Mesa, Ariz. It will be the 21st debate in the GOP race and the last before Super Tuesday March 6.

Michigan a Test

In Michigan, where the auto industry is the backbone of the state, Romney is paying a high price for taking a strong position on the government bailout of auto giants Chrysler and General Motors in 2008.

There are an estimated 150,000 workers employed by the auto industry in the Great Lakes city and 93 of the top 150 auto suppliers in North America are headquartered there, according to a report by the Michigan Economic Development Corporation.

In a 2008 op-ed piece published in the New York Times, Romney maintained his conservative credentials by decrying government intervention, saying the auto industry should be left to go bankrupt.

“A managed bankruptcy may be the only path to the fundamental restructuring the industry needs. It would permit the companies to shed excess labor, pension and real estate costs,” he wrote.

The bailout turned out to be a success story with the auto industry now booming and locals in Michigan gainfully employed after looking down the barrel of what could have been years of unemployment.

Outside Michigan’s Farmington Hills Manor, where Romney was speaking at a luncheon organized by the Greater Farmington Area Chamber of Commerce on Feb. 16, a small group of demonstrators made that point holding up a banner stating “Mitt Romney said: ‘Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.’”

Ironically, Santorum had also opposed the auto bailout but defended his position at an address in Detroit last week by turning the debate around to Romney.

“Governor Romney supported the bailout of Wall Street and decided not to support the bailout of Detroit,” Santorum said. “My feeling was that we should not support—the government should not be involved in bailouts, period. I think that’s a much more consistent position.”

Romney-Santorum Contest

With U.S. economic indicators presently on an upward spiral, Romney has lost traction with his message that Obama has been a failure at managing the economy and he, as founder and CEO of international venture capital company Bain Capital, is the better option to manage the U.S. economy.

Rick Santorum’s rise in the polls and his focus on conservative social issues also coincided with Obama’s controversial legislation requiring insurance coverage of contraception, added to a change in the campaign narrative and gave Santorum additional exposure.

Whether Santorum can maintain his momentum and prevent Romney from winning Michigan will be critical to the Romney campaign. As the youngest son of George Romney, the former chairman and president of American Motors, and much-liked governor of Michigan in the 1960s, Mitt Romney was born and raised in Detroit. Losing his own state could deliver a crushing psychological blow.

The stakes are high and both Romney and Santorum “SuperPacs” are already strafing the air waves with attack ads in Ohio, Michigan, and Arizona, according to the Huffington Post, but Michigan has by far the greater focus.

Politico’s Maggie Haberman reported Feb. 20 that the phones had been running hot in the offices of favored Republican presidential candidates New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, brother to past President George W. Bush.

All three have reportedly maintained their position not to contest the Republican presidential nomination this year—for now at least.

Vanessa Rios contributed to this report

“We were the beginning of the industry. We were rockstars back then,” says Henk Rogers, founder of Blue Planet Software, the Hawaii-based distributors of “Tetris.”

Rogers has plenty of stories to tell. He helped Alexey Pajitnov, the creator of “Tetris,” escape the Soviet Union so he could get paid for his work. He helped build “Tetris” into a game that gets 15 million players on Facebook each day. And his first game, “The Black Onyx,” introduced role-playing games to Japan and shaped the industry we know today.

In 1976, when computers were still a faraway concept, Rogers moved to Japan not knowing he would soon find himself on the launchpad of modern gaming.

Five years later, the personal computer came out, and after another year, “there were enough of them where you could actually sell a game and make money. So that’s when I jumped in,” he said. “I just happened to be there.”

The gaming market was still small. Developers were mainly independent programmers, and Rogers was no exception. He coded the game himself for nearly a year.

But partly from passion, and partly from a misjudgment of Japanese interest, Rogers was doing something far different from other programmers in the country. He was making a role-playing game (RPG).

Now, RPGs made their debut largely through the release of “Dungeons & Dragons” in 1974, created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. Before video games, they were played through storytelling. Players would roll dice to put things to chance, and record their progress with pen and paper.

RPGs were extremely popular among gamers in the United States. Games like “Ultima” and “Wizardry” were top sellers in the American market, but in Japan few people had ever heard of them.

Before moving to Japan, he spent four years in Hawaii where he found his love for RPGs. It was a time when the works of J.R.R. Tolkien were under the arm of all well-informed gamers, and imagination was still king.

Rogers was part of a group called ARRGH (the Alternative Recreational Reality Group of Hawaii) that would get together each weekend for extended sessions of “Dungeons & Dragons.” “We would start Friday and finish Monday morning. We would take time off and have water balloon fights and eat to break the tension, but that’s what we did,” he said.

But when Rogers finally finished “The Black Onyx” in 1984, he was in for a surprise. “I assumed a lot of things about Japanese people back then. I assumed they played role-playing games, which they didn’t,” he said. “It was a rude awakening after working on this game for nine months.”

“Nobody knew what a role-playing game was,” he said.

In an attempt to break into the Japanese market, they decided to advertise. They used the game’s cover art, which Rogers describes as a “sort of Frank Frazetta copied image with a Conan the Barbarian standing on a heap of monsters swinging his sword.” The type of image was familiar to the American market, but Japan was another story.

“We made a full page ad in a couple of magazines—blowing our entire advertising budget—and we got one phone call asking, ‘What is your game?’” he said.

Things only went downhill from there. Softbank promised to buy 3,000 copies of “The Black Onyx” for Christmas, “but they did a little bit of research and found out nobody really had any idea what was going on. So we thought this was it—this was the end and people in Japan didn’t play role-playing games, I’ve had it.”

But rather than just give up, Rogers decided to take matters into his own hands. The problem, he figured, was that RPGs were too foreign, and so he decided to change this.

“I went to every game magazine and I taught them how to play ‘Black Onyx,’” Rogers said.

“Every single magazine went nuts over my game, and by March all the issues of every gaming magazine had huge stories,” he said.

That April, they sold 10,000 copies, and sales poured in like this for more than two years. 

Changing the Market

“The Black Onyx” was Japan’s number one game in 1984, and the number two game in 1985—a factor Rogers attributes to the fact that “The Black Onyx” was so different from every other Japanese game of the time. “We had a long reign before the others figured it out.”

The success of “The Black Onyx” and the RPG genre was something fundamental. It introduced a level of depth that was nearly unheard of in Japanese gaming at the time, due to hardware limitations.

It had a currency system, shops, customizable characters, an in-depth story, systems of leveling and growing characters, and a karma system that punished or rewarded players for their choices.

Games at the time were limited to 64k of space (smaller than most digital photographs). “The Black Onyx” was a 40-hour game on a cassette tape—a format he chose over a 5-and-a-quarter floppy disk drive because it gave him an extra 10k to work with.

Developers had to weigh things carefully, since even a sentence of conversation text would drain space. “It was counting bytes,” Rogers said. “The Black Onyx” used around 28k for the basic program, 4k for the maps, 20k for the different character graphics, and the rest filled in the technical parts.

Rogers made a conscious decision of how to stretch the technology to allow this level of depth. Other developers in Japan were mainly creating action games—similar to Mario (who debuted in “Donkey Kong” in 1981), where players would typically run and jump over obstacles.

The problem with this, however, was that the animations took up nearly all the space that programmers were working with. Creating a jumping animation, for example, would take around five different images.

“If you have 64k or less, if you have animation in your game, you just used up all of your graphics space for animation, and that’s it,” Rogers said. “So I made up my mind that I wasn’t going to do any animation because I didn’t want to use up all the memory.”

The extra space meant he could create more characters and a significantly deeper game. This was something RPG developers in the United States were also doing. “Wizardry,” which has a similar style to “The Black Onyx,” had a basic, wireframe world. “Hack,” another RPG released around that time, took an even simpler route with text-based graphics. The main character might be an @ sign, the world would be formed by dashes and brackets, and other characters would be represented by letters.

Rogers said someone made a program that would squeeze the code of a game, and found he had just three bytes of unused memory. “I wasted a couple of bytes in there as a joke to other programmers or hackers who would hack my code—I knew that was going to happen,” he said.

Due to the success of “The Black Onyx,” RPGs remain one of the most popular game genres in Japan.

Rogers compared it to the recent emergence of social media games. “All of the sudden it was a huge change in the market and everybody was paying attention. Now everybody is scrambling to make social games,” he said.

“That was sort of everybody’s wake-up call and they all said ‘we have to make a role-playing game,’” he said.

(L to R) Liberia's President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President of Togo Faure Gnassingbe, Gabon's President Omar Bongo and President of Nigeria Goodluck Jonathan meet on Feb. 18. The African leaders gather for talks on insecurity in northern Mali. Hundreds of thousands have been displaced in Mali and have been flowing into the surrounding countries. (Wole Emmanuel/AFP/Getty Images)

Around 120,000 people have been displaced in Mali since Tuareg rebels launched attacks on government forces last month to create an independent state, according to Reuters, citing United Nations figures.

Many of the rebels had fought alongside forces loyal to slain Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi in the country’s civil war last year. Many weapons that were in Libya prior to the civil war have found their way into rebel hands.

The U.N. estimates that 60,000 Malians have had to seek refuge in neighboring countries including Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Algeria due to the fighting, according to Reuters.

“As the influx continues, our teams are stepping up assistance for refugees who have taken refuge in makeshift shelters in villages bordering Mali,” U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees spokesperson Melissa Fleming said in a release last week. 

“Humanitarian assistance is all the more critical because the Sahel region is facing a severe food crisis due to several years of drought,” she added.

Around 15,000 have streamed across the border into Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world and is affected by drought.

Fatima Alhacen, a refugee from Mali who now resides in the village of Chinagoder, told the Inter Press Service that the situation is “gradually improving.” 

“We now have mats, blankets, cooking utensils and a bit more to eat, thanks to the food aid that the Nigerien government brought for us at the beginning of last week,” she said.

Bo Xilai, Secretary of Chongqing Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China, in March of 2011. (Feng Li/Getty Images)

In the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), family ties count. Bo Xilai is not only a “princeling,” a child of the founding generation of the CCP, his father, Bo Yibo, is one of the Eight Elders, eight CCP veterans who held great power in the 1980s and 1990s. Perhaps because of his privileged birth, Bo has displayed a sense of entitlement to rule.

Born in 1949, Bo was a Red Guard, and his student organization was directly mobilized by Mao Zedong. Criticism of his father gave Bo Xilai the chance to prove his revolutionary zeal—he beat Bo Yibo, breaking three of his ribs.

In a memoir written by Yang Guang, a survivor of the Cultural Revolution, Bo’s father is quoted as saying “when Jiang Qing [a member of Gang of Four] declared me a traitor, my son Xilai beat me down to the ground. … When I saw that he was not afraid to cut his ties with family members, I knew he was good material for the next generation of the Party leadership.”

Click this tag to read The Epoch Times’ collection of articles on the Chinese Regime in Crisis. Intra-CCP politics are a challenge to make sense of, even for veteran China watchers. Here we attempt to provide readers with the necessary context to understand the situation.

In 1976, Mao’s death marked the end of the revolution. Bo then returned to school and graduated with a master’s degree in international news in 1982. As his father rose to power again, Bo Xilai’s path as a politician was smooth. Within a few years after graduation, he gained key roles in the central committees of Liaoning Province and became the mayor of its major city, Dalian, in 1993.

While in Dalian, Bo gained a reputation for corruption. Jiang Weiping, a veteran journalist, published a report on Bo describing him as a frequent visitor to prostitutes while drinking. One of the cases Jiang included was the imprisonment of the owners of Dalian’s high profile restaurant chain Daily Hub in 2001. After learning that the owners were involved in a personal conflict with the husband of his mistress, Bo arrested them on tax crimes and put them in jail. Bo also rebuilt government buildings as a modeling school for his mistress. After the report was published, Jiang Weiping was arrested and sentenced to eight years in prison.

Knowing that Jiang Zemin’s support was vital for a central position in the leadership, Bo followed closely the then-chairman’s steps in persecuting Falun Gong. In 2001, Bo was appointed the governor of Liaoning Province.

Bo allocated 1 billion Yuan (US$160 million) to rebuild prisons. One area that Bo focused on was Masanjia Labor Camp. The camp was extended until it became China’s first “prison town.”

It became known as a hellish place for Falun Gong practitioners. The Falun Gong website Clearwisdom would carry regular accounts of practitioners there being beaten and shocked with electric batons. On one occasion, 18 female Falun Gong practitioners were stripped naked and thrown in with male criminals, who gang raped them. Female practitioners were also raped at the Liaoning Women’s Prison and Dalian Forced Labor Camp, according to Clearwisdom.

The author Ethan Gutmann has described Liaoning Province as the epicenter of forced organ harvesting in China. This atrocity was first discovered in Sujiatun, a suburb of Shenyang City, the capital of Liaoning Province, where Bo was governor from 2001-2004. Wang Lijun, who would be Bo’s right-hand man in Chongqing, spoke in public about overseeing thousands of organ harvesting operations when he was the head of the public security bureau in Jinzhou City in Liaoning.

A cable from the U.S. Consulate in Shanghai released by WikiLeaks quoted Gu Su, a liberal political philosopher at Nanjing University, as saying that Premier Wen Jiabao criticized Bo for having been sued in several countries for his cruelty toward Falun Gong practitioners.

Wen’s opinion “found fertile soil among officials who still harbor resentment against Bo for his treatment of his family, particularly his father, during the Cultural Revolution,” said Su as quoted in the cable.

In 2007, Bo, then the minister of commerce, was transferred by his competitors from the center of China’s political stage to a position far from Beijing—he became the Party head of the troubled, province-level city Chongqing in central-western China.

In Chongqing, Bo revealed his ambition for a leading role in the CCP. He launched a political campaign, something that has always been the prerogative of the head of the CCP, never of a provincial leader.

“Singing the red and hitting the black” involved, on the one hand, singing Mao-style communist songs and was meant to inspire the common people to be loyal to Bo. On the other hand, “hitting the black” was said to be an anti-Mafia campaign, and was initially welcomed by the people of Chongqing who have suffered at the hands of the triads. But among those targeted were independent businessmen whose fortunes were expropriated, and CCP officials who were loyal to Bo’s predecessor.

Bo also showed he had developed strong ties to the military in the Chongqing region, organizing military exercises while Hu Jintao was at the APEC meetings in November 2011. Bo’s doing so was understood by some China watchers as a suggestion that Bo could launch a coup if he wanted to do so.

A Portrait of Lindy Chamberlain with husband Michael and children. In 1980, Lindy Chamberlain reported that her baby had been taken by a dingo. A new report offers evidence supporting her case. (Patrick Riviere/Getty Images).

Lindy Chamberlain, the Australian mother who famously blamed a dingo for her baby’s death more than 30 years ago, will submit new evidence in the case, according to media reports.

Stuart Tipple, lawyer for Lindy and Michael Chamberlain told the Herald Sun newspaper that he will submit a report that offers more proof that a dingo took the couple’s nine-week-old infant, Azaria, in 1980.

“The significant thing that has basically happened since the last inquest is that there have been at least 12 significant attacks, three deaths,” Tipple told the paper.

Tipple said the evidence proves that dingoes may be a danger to humans.

“There are still a lot of people out there who don’t understand the danger that dingoes present to humans, particularly in the situation where they have been conditioned by human contact,” he told the Australia Broadcasting Corporation.

Lindy Chamberlain said she saw her daughter being taken away by a dingo from their tent. “I could have lost three children that night—it could have been worse,” she said in a recent interview with the Sydney Morning Herald.

She was convicted for Azaria’s death but the verdict was overturned three years later when her daughter’s jacket was found around two miles from the campsite.

Michael Chamberlain said that the government may have had a hand in the trial because if it were proved that dingoes could attack children, then tourism in the Australian backcountry would take a hit.

“I think someone said to them ‘Fix this up—it might affect tourism, you have to get a conviction because you can’t have dingoes, or the fear of them, running around killing kids,’” he told the Morning Herald.

 The case was massive news in Australia and earned worldwide fame after the 1988 Meryl Streep movie about the case, “A Cry in the Dark.” One of Streep’s lines from the film— “a dingo ate my baby”—has become immortalized in pop culture. 

Magic Johnson (Andy Kropa/Getty Images)

Magic Johnson to Launch Cable Network

Basketball Hall-of-Famer turned business leader Magic Johnson will launch Aspire—a new cable network that aims to portray “positive, uplifting images of African Americans,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

Johnson told the newspaper, “This is big for myself, for the African American community and the African American creative community. I wanted a vehicle to show positive images and to have stories written, produced and directed by African Americans for our community. Aspire—that’s how I’ve been leading my life.”

The network is expected to hit airwaves June 30.

Paramount Launches ‘Godfather’ Lawsuit

Film studio Paramount Pictures is suing the estate of Mario Puzo (author of The Godfather) in an attempt to stop the publication of a new Godfather novel, claiming its release may tarnish the “legacy and integrity” of the film franchise, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The estate’s attorney told the publication the claims were “utter hogwash,” saying the original agreement with Paramount excluded book publishing rights.

Stars Celebrate Muhammad Ali’s Birthday

Lonnie Ali,Muhammad Ali, Sean Combs (Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

Legendary boxer Muhammad Ali celebrated his 70th birthday this past weekend surrounded by numerous celebrity friends, all in the name of charity.

In attendance were Stevie Wonder, Snoop Dogg, Sugar Ray Leonard, Evander Holyfield, LL Cool J, Sean Combs, Samuel L. Jackson, and David Beckham among others.

The Power of Love Gala was held on Feb. 18 at the MGM Grand Garden Arena. The annual event in its 16th year raised funds for Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health and the Muhammad Ali Center, according to LookToTheStars.org.

Compiled by Barbara Danza.

William Shatner in front of a photo of him in the role as Captain Kirk from the iconic TV series “Star Trek.” (Joan Marcus)

NEW YORK—William Shatner, probably best known for his roles in the television shows Star Trek and Boston Legal, has the masterful ability of making audience members feel that they’re the only other person in the room with him. This is a great asset in his utterly enjoyable one-man show, Shatner’s World: we just live in it… now at Broadway’s Music Box Theatre.

Eschewing the technique of “beaming” onto the stage, he simply walks out and holds the audience in the palm of his hand from the moment he appears.

As the title suggests, this is a show about Shatner, or more specifically, his five-decade-plus career as an actor, producer, reality show host, television pitchman, recording artist, and more. What makes the show work so well is Shatner’s easy amiability and his manner of never taking himself too seriously.

At the same time, he is quite serious about his work. He shares how hard it is to be funny, a concept that he first came to understand while attending burlesque shows as a high school student in Canada. There he became fascinated with the comics working the circuit, and he saw the pressure they were under to always get a laugh.

Shatner equates the principle of comedy being sort of like a wave (“or maybe it’s a particle”) to an appearance he made at a tribute to George Lucas, of Stars Wars fame, realizing that if Lucas didn’t laugh, no one else would.

The show is also helped by the avoidance of the standard chronological method of telling about one’s life. Instead, Shatner continually uses one moment in time as a bridge to another elsewhere. For example, he mentions an appearance on Broadway and then segues into a cautionary tale about the dangers of a giving a child a tool set without properly supervising the child.

In a somewhat refreshing turn, Shatner takes pains not to talk about things well covered elsewhere. “Star Trek,” for example, has a strong place in the show but not a major one. Theater audiences will especially love his reminiscences about understudying for Christopher Plummer in Henry V and the backstage drama that occurred in the Broadway show The World of Suzie Wong.

Shatner doesn’t always have an easy command of the tale he’s imparting, stumbling over words more than once, losing his place in the narrative, or talking a bit too fast. Yet at the same time, his off-the-cuff-sounding presentation actually serves to make him appear more personable and realistic.

In between humorous anecdotes, Shatner delves into more serious subjects, such as being a divorced dad, dealing with the death of his father, as well as the death of his wife; the last being an incident that eventually led him to meet his current spouse.

Also touched on is his coming to terms with the persona of Captain Kirk and the importance of playing the character’s death scene correctly after living with him for so long.

Shatner, who is a professional horse breeder and competitive rider, also tells a very touching tale about a horse he once owned and the responsibility one must have for animals.

There are numerous moments in his career that Shatner does not talk about, though to do everything justice would have required the performance to run more than three hours. As it is, it’s amazing how much information he’s able to squeeze into the time allowed.

Look for an especially amusing mention of his reality show Rescue 911, and the honor he felt in being asked to make the final wake-up call for the final U.S. Space Shuttle. Shatner also acknowledges his recording career, and his infamous 1960s album The Transformed Man, using that effort to talk about some of the other musical projects he’s worked on since, including a wonderful closing moment that brings everything full circle.

Direction by Scott Faris is excellent, masterfully pacing the show and allowing Shatner to take and hold the audience’s attention whether he’s sitting in a chair, walking about, or running back and forth to make a point.

Scenic design by Edward Pierce is plain but effective, while lighting by Ken Billington and sound design by Peter Fitzgerald nicely set the mood. The show also makes good use of still photos and film and video clips worked into the various tales being told.

Shatner’s World is a very nice place to visit, the show offering the chance to see a true cultural icon in the flesh. Always heartfelt, it will definitely leave you wanting more; and if you can’t catch it in its all-too-brief New York run, there’s always the upcoming U.S. tour.

Judd Hollander is the New York correspondent for the London newspaper The Stage.

Buddy Roemer speaks at the National Press Club in Washington in this file photo from Aug.15, 2011. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Presidential candidate Buddy Roemer is leaving the Republican Party, but not dropping his bid for the White House, according to a statement from his campaign on Feb. 22.

Roemer, the former governor of Louisiana and a four-term congressman, said he will run as an Independent candidate.

“As the GOP and the networks host debate number 20-something this evening, they have once again turned their backs on the democratic process by choosing to exclude a former governor and congressman,” Roemer said in a statement, referring to himself.

He has not been invited to participate in any of the Republican debates due to his low support in the polls.

Roemer, who said he would make tackling special interest groups in Washington a priority, said he would now seek the nomination from Americans Elect, which is an independent group seeking ballot access across the United States. He also said that he is seeking nomination with the Reform Party.

Dr. Amir Amedi wearing one of the SSD devices developed as the result of research in his lab. (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

Sensory substitution devices (SSDs) can provide visual information via other senses to people who are born blind, enabling them to “see” and identify objects.

Scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have developed a visual-to-auditory SSD involving headphones attached to a camera. The images taken by the camera are converted into sounds through a known algorithm.

With brief training as part of a lab study, users interpreted these “soundscapes” to describe objects, locate people, and read words, even after lifelong blindness.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) revealed that the sounds activated the visual cortex in the brain of the congenitally blind, despite a lack of visual sensation from the eyes.

Interestingly, the activation is organized according to the two visual processing pathways in the brain—the ventral and dorsal streams. The ventral stream is linked to the visual processing of form and to identifying objects and colors, while the dorsal stream focuses on object location and vision-movement coordination.

When SSD users identify an object’s location, the dorsal stream is activated, and when they are asked to identify an image’s shape, the ventral stream is activated. This process is similar to how a normal sighted person sees an object, and suggests that the visual cortex does not solely depend on visual sensation to interpret data and that it may be more task-specific.

The findings also imply that other areas of the brain could extract information from the external world in the absence of input, such as touch or smell, from normally corresponding sensory organs.

“The brain is not a sensory machine, although it often looks like one; it is a task machine,” concluded research leader Amir Amedi in a press release.

The study was published in the journal Cerebral Cortex.

Silver bullion and coins are offered for sale at the Chicago Coin Company May 11, 2006, in Chicago, Ill. Researchers say that the available silver supply is limited, and there will be no in-ground silver available in about 25 to 30 years. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

The London Fix Silver prices have been on a roller coaster ride over the past few years, ebbing and flowing up and down, rising from an annual cumulative average of $14.6733 per ounce in 2009 to an annual cumulative average of $20.1928 in 2010. It rose to $35.1192 in 2011, and from Jan. 1 to Feb. 15, the annual cumulative average fell to $31.7844, according to historical data on the Kitco Metals Inc. website.

In 2009, the highest daily London Fix price was $17.9900 on Oct. 13 and the lowest $10.5100 on Jan. 15. In 2010, the highest daily London Fix price was $30.7000 on Dec. 30 with the lowest at $15.1400 on Feb. 8. In 2011, the highest daily London Fix price was $48.7000 on Apr. 28, and the lowest was $27.1000 on Jan. 26, moving up and down throughout the year.

Between Jan. 1 and Feb. 15 this year, the highest London Fix price was $33.8400 on Feb. 13, and the lowest was $28.7800 on Jan. 3.

The London Spot Fix is the price per ounce fixed daily at 10:30 a.m. and 3 p.m. during a conference call in London by the five members of the London Gold Pool: ScotiaMocatta, Barclays Capital (a division of Barclays Bank PLC), Deutsche Bank AG, HSBC Holdings PLC, and Société Générale S.A.

“There are two times in the day when we know for sure that the gold price [and other precious metals, including silver, platinum, and palladium] is being set in a clandestine procedure that is controlled by just five bullion banks,” states an article on the Market Force Analysis website, suggesting that the precious metal “market is not ‘fixed,’ it’s rigged.”

Silver Price Predictions

“For silver, BNP Paribas [based in France] increased its 2012 estimate to $37.50 from $36.75, and in 2013 to $52.00 from $49.75 per ounce. Over the four quarters of 2012, the firm predicted silver will average $31.90, $34.95, $39.30, and $43.80, respectively,” according to a Feb. 15 article on the GoldAlert website.

BNP Paribas’s Anne-Laure Tremblay, analyst at Paribas, was quoted to have said that the price of silver is determined by a given price for gold, as well as how much risk an investor is willing to take. During upward movement of both gold and silver prices, silver is a preferred investment, according to Tremblay.

“Gold and silver forecasters are probably too cautious about the outlook for 2012. This is not surprising after the volatility of 2011 which saw record highs for both metals but a collapse later in the year that left gold up 10 per cent and silver down around the same amount for the year,” suggests an article on the GoldSeek website.

HSBC doesn’t agree with BNP Paribas and believes that silver prices will remain at the status quo, according to an article on the Gold Price website. It predicted that silver prices would hover around $34 per ounce in 2012 and at $32 per ounce in 2013.

“We are bullish on silver, based on solid retail investment demand for coins and small bars. We expect silver ETF demand to recover this year, and based on HSBC Economics’ forecasts of industrial production, demand for silver from manufacturing should grow moderately,” said James Steel, precious metal analyst, as quoted on the MarketWatch website.

Continued on next page … Quantifying Above Ground Silver

Indian Foreign Minister S M Krishna (L) shakes hands with Zhou Yongkang, ranked ninth in the hierarchy of the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC) and member of the influential Politburo Standing Committee in-charge of Political, Legal and Legislative Agenda prior to a meeting in New Delhi on Nov. 1, 2010. (Prakash Singh/AFP/Getty Images)

Before entering the world of politics, Zhou Yongkang (b. 1942) worked in the oil fields for almost 30 years.

It is widely believed that after his first wife died in a car accident, Zhou’s prompt marriage to former president’s Jiang Zemin’s niece greased the wheels on his path to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) leadership. In 1998, Zhou left his position as the head of China’s national petroleum company, and was appointed the minister of land and resources. One year later, Zhou became the Party leader for Sichuan Province.

Also in 1999, then-president Jiang Zemin vowed to eradicate Falun Gong in three months through a nationwide campaign. As a relative and a trusted companion in the leadership, Zhou assumed key roles in carrying out the persecution against Falun Gong (also known as Falun Dafa).

While he was the Party leader for Sichuan Province, Zhou ordered financial rewards for individuals from prisons, labor camps, and public security bureaus who were particularly active in torturing and brainwashing captured Falun Gong practitioners, according to the Falun Gong website Clearwisdom. With at least 217 confirmed deaths of Falun Gong practitioners due to torture and abuse, Sichuan Province is one of the provinces with the most severe human rights abuses related to the persecution against Falun Gong.

According to Clearwisdom, official documents leaked from the 610 Office—the Party organ set up by Jiang Zemin for the purpose of eradicating Falun Gong—show that as director of the Political and Legislative Affairs Committee Zhou Yongkang (2007–present) and Luo Gan (1998–2007) each gave permission to police to “perform medical treatments while transforming Falun Gong practitioners if necessary.” At least 11 Falun Gong practitioners are known to have died of injections with drugs that damage the central nervous system. During his visit to the United States in 2001, Zhou was sued for crimes against humanity.

Because of his active participation in Jiang’s persecution of Falun Gong, in December 2002, Zhou was promoted to the position of minister of the Department of Public Security, though he had no experience in the field. When he was also appointed in November 2001 assistant director of Central 610 Office, Zhou brought his Sichuan-style strategies against Falun Gong to a nationwide level, according to the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong.

At the same time, Zhou successfully entered the central organs of the regime. As a member of the Politburo and the secretariat of the Party’s Central Committee, Zhou was involved in personnel decisions for both the Party and the state.

In 2007, Zhou was promoted to the head of The Political and Legislative Affairs Committee of the Communist Party, overseeing all legal enforcement authorities including intelligence, law and order, security, detention, and judicial and procuratorial agencies. In this position, Zhou’s tasks have been varied. Zhou has been involved in silencing the protests of parents of children who were trapped under poorly constructed school buildings in the 2008 earthquake, initiating taking troops to Tibet after widespread reports of protests by self-immolated monks, and sourcing overseas Chinese students for intelligence work.

Seen through the windshield of a car, members of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) take position in Idlib in northwestern Syria on Feb. 22, 2012. (BulentKilic/AFP/Getty Images)

Two Western journalists and one local cameraman became the latest victims of the unceasing violence in the Syrian city of Homs on Wednesday. Activists say at least 20 more people were killed in the city.

An activist in the Bab Amro neighborhood of Homs told Al-Jazeera that Marie Colvin, a journalist for the U.K.’s Sunday Times newspaper, and Remi Ochlik, a French photographer, were killed when a building they were staying in was shelled by Syrian forces. Another nine people were also killed in the shelling, which has been ongoing for nearly than three weeks.

A third journalist, local videographer Rami al-Sayed, also died covering a bombardment on Tuesday, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe summoned the Syrian ambassador in France, demanding that Damascus “provide safe medical access in order to assist the casualties with the support of the International Committee of the Red Cross,” according to a statement.

Colvin, 55, was considered one of the world’s pre-eminent war correspondents, according to CJP. She covered events in many war-torn countries and lost an eye while covering the civil war in Sri Lanka.

She worked for the Sunday Times for two decades and said in her final report on Wednesday that the shelling in Homs was constant.

“Almost every building is pock-marked after tank rounds punched through concrete walls or rockets blasted gaping holes in upper floors. The building I was staying in lost its upper floor to a rocket last Wednesday,” she wrote, adding that “there are no telephones and the electricity has been cut off.”

Syrian Information Minister Adnan Mahmoud said via state television that they had no information about the two journalists entering the city. Citing Mahmoud, state television said, “All foreign journalists who entered Syria illegally to refer to the nearest immigration department in the areas of their presence to regularize their status according to law.”

“Our colleagues Marie Colvin, Remi Ochlik, and Rami al-Sayed gave their lives to report a story of grave importance, a story the Syrian government has sought to choke off from rest of the world,” said CPJ Deputy Director Robert Mahoney, in a statement from Cairo. “The deaths of these local and international journalists illustrate the escalating dangers to independent journalists working in Syria and the unacceptable price our colleagues are being forced to pay.”

A total of seven media professionals have been killed during the unrest in Syria.

“We condemn in the strongest terms this threefold crime. The Damascus government … has decided to punish the entire population collectively and to use the most violent means to silence those journalists who witness its excesses,” said media watchdog Reporters Without Borders in a statement.

Supporter of Sea Shepherd, Dutch environmental activist Erwin Vermeulen (C) speaks next to Sea Shepherd membrer Scott West (R) after he was found not guilty of a charge of assault against a man in dolphin-hunting town Taiji, western Japan, on Feb. 22. (Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images)

A Japanese judge cleared a Dutch activist with the anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd of a minor assault charge in the town of Taiji, the group announced on Wednesday.

Dutchman Erwin Vermeulen was held in jail for two months after being indicted for allegedly punching—or by some accounts, pushing—a man in Taiji, historically considered a dolphin-hunting town. He allegedly was trying to enter an off-limits area where dolphins were purportedly being kept.

In a statement, Vermeulen said the “judge showed great courage in going against public opinion and ruling fairly.”

“My arrest and two-month detention generated worldwide publicity for the dolphins in Taiji and I would like to thank the Wakayama Prefecture police and prosecutors for generously donating Japanese taxpayers money to bring attention to the dolphin slaughter,” he added.

Judge Satoshi Shibayama admitted in the Wakayama District Court that he could not rule out Vermeulen’s claims that the victim gave a false statement.

According to the Kyodo news agency, the judge said, “There remains doubt over the credibility of the testimony, which is the only evidence.” Vermeulen’s defense argued that there was no way he could push or punch the man because both his hands were occupied.

Sea Shepherd accused police of being incompetent in handling Vermeulen’s arrest and investigation, saying that they were forced to pursue “a flawed case” because of Vermeulen’s association with the anti-whaling activist group.

Every year, Sea Shepherd sends a fleet of ships to the Southern Ocean to disrupt the annual Japanese whaling harvest, which Tokyo claims is for scientific purposes. The group has launched projectiles at whaling ships and disrupted the movement of the vessels, while crew on Japanese whaling ships have fired water cannons at activists and tried to fend them off with long bamboo poles.

Over the past several years, Sea Shepherd has attempted to raise awareness about the dolphin slaughter in Taiji, which was also documented in the 2009 Oscar Award-winning documentary, The Cove. Fishermen have defended the hunt of dolphins as a cultural tradition.

A restaurant overlooking the ocean in Sidi Bou Said, a town about 20 kilometers from Tunis. Credit (Valerian Mazataud/The Epoch Times)

It was last January that the Jasmine Revolution ousted Tunisia’s President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, eventually leading to free and democratic elections and the drafting of a new constitution.

A year later, Tunisia is in the midst of restructuring but is completely safe for travelers. Between the bar and the mosque, wearing shorts or the veil, both worlds seem to coexist in harmony, inspired by the new democracy that is being built.

The mild climate in winter is a good time to choose to become familiar with Tunisia, when the country becomes a haven away from the regular tourist traffic and visitors can experience its rich and varied cultural heritage at a lower cost than in the high season.

Beautiful and peaceful, the coastal capital of Tunis should be visited in winter to experience all it has to offer in relative quiet.

At the onset of winter, Tunis opens up like a flower. Tourists are also greeted in perfect French, the second most commonly spoken language in the country after Arabic. Being Francophone, for us this was really the icing on the cake!

Agriculture is the largest industry in the country, and the cuisine varies from one region to another. However, Tunisian resorts offer many other amenities aside from gourmet eating.

Cultural Journey

Tunisia has the largest collection of mosaics in the world after Italy, which illustrates the cultural wealth of the country. The Bardo National Museum in the western district of Tunis is dedicated entirely to the mosaics.

The mosaics have been carefully restored, forming several meters of frescoes dating back to the Carthaginian, Roman, and Arab invasions, moving through prehistory to the Muslim period. The museum remains open to the public despite renovations that will add two additional floors to accommodate its extensive collection.

Visiting the House of Crafts is a must in Tunis. Whether shopping for ceramics, rugs, baskets, bird cages, leather goods, engraved plates, or embroidered dresses, prices are amazingly low and profits go directly to the artisans. The state subsidizes a portion of the rental spaces to encourage crafts, the heart of tourism.

If you are looking for pottery, Nabeul, a town 67 kilometres southeast of Tunis on the south coast of the peninsula of Cape Bon, is the place to be.

At the onset of winter, Tunis opens up like a flower.

The Bourguiba Mausoleum in Monastir. Habib Bourguiba is known as the father of Tunisian independence. (Valerian Mazataud/The Epoch Times)

Pottery company Kerkeni offers visitors a guided tour punctuated by demonstrations of pottery-making. Through the help of the National Association of Crafts, Karkeni also offers training to students from Japan, Saudi Arabia, and France. The impressive variety of pottery and terracotta objects, of which Tunisians are known masters, deserves to be discovered.

Driving toward the fortified tower of Sousse, located 140 kilometers from Tunis, we marveled at the breathtaking panoramic view of the city and its famous Medina, the oldest section of Tunis.

A visit to the Bourguiba Mausoleum in Monastir is an adventure in itself. The mausoleum’s sumptuousness, the chandelier overlooking the imposing tomb of the deceased, and the long passage to reach the main room (several graves were displaced to install this) are a sight to behold.

Built in 1963, the mausoleum is the burial place of Habib Bourguiba, the first President of the Republic of Tunisia, who introduced pro-Western reforms during his presidency.

The Sahara

A camel ride in the Sahara in winter as the sun gently covers the sand dunes is an unforgettable experience, as it combines the pleasure of the trip with silence and meditation inspired by the desert.

Enjoying a camel ride through the desert in the Tunisian part of the Sahara as the sun rises. (Valerian Mazataud/The Epoch Times)

Douz, known as the Gateway to the Sahara, is a starting point for desert treks by camel, motorcycle, or four-wheel-drive vehicle.

Douz is home to the Museum of the Sahara, which showcases displays of the traditional nomadic desert culture of the Mrazig people who now mostly live a settled life in the town. Every year, the town hosts the International Festival of the Sahara, a four-day celebration of traditional desert culture.

A camel ride in the Sahara in winter as the sun gently covers the sand dunes is an unforgettable experience.

As for water restrictions and swimming, some hotels have pools of salt water for a quick dip. The good news is that in winter, it is not uncommon to have the water privileges all to yourself.

Thalassotherapy, the use of seawater as a form of therapy which has been popular in France for years, is now widely available in Tunisia and highly sought out by tourists.

The next item on the agenda for us was true spa relaxation combined with a massage before heading back through the oases to enjoy the diversity offered by Tunisia.

Safe for tourists

The Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has advised travelers to exercise a “high degree of caution” when visiting Tunisia, but on the ground things are calm despite some ongoing demonstrations.

“Since the protests began, no tourist has been killed or injured,” said Ferid Fetni, marketing director at the Tunisian National Tourism Office in Montreal.

However, tourist traffic has declined drastically in many parts of the country.

According to the Ministry of Tourism, between January and October 2011, patronage decreased by 41.9 percent and revenue by 36 percent compared to the same period in 2010.

Some hotels are taking advantage of this break to renovate and introduce new services.

The Hotel Africa’s parent company is building a new spa center and surgical clinic in Sousse on the east coast in order to attract customers wishing to take advantage of lower costs—particularly from Europe.

Tunisia is fast becoming the favored destination of Europeans seeking plastic surgery, according to Dr. Hassem Nouira, the medical and technical director of the Amen Clinic in Mutual Amen City, an upscale neighborhood of Tunis.

“People stay an average of one week and have access to the most skilled surgeons. We maintain an ISO international standard that will be in effect next month,” said Dr. Nouira.

During our trip, the sun never missed a day in the pleasantly warm but not-too-heavy climate.

In the Tunisia of today, visitors can enjoy the atmosphere of optimism and peaceful involvement that characterizes the country, and encounter a culture that is reinventing itself while imbued with the history of several millennia.

For more information, contact the Tunisian National Tourist Office in Montreal at 514-397-1182 or visit www.bonjour-tunisie.com.

This article was written during a press trip paid for by the Tunisian National Tourist Office.