Bush’s slow thaw
San Francisco Chronicle
CURIOUSLY, on the same day President Bush was serving up hollow rhetoric about reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2025, Bay Area business leaders and Gov Arnold Schwarzenegger were expressing their determination to achieve the state’s more defined and rigorous goals to fight climate change. Bush’s ‘major announcement’ came with no teeth and no specifics Wednesday. His administration remains mired in the mindset that global warming is less than a matter of urgency….
Gov Arnold Schwarzenegger emphasised his business-friendly credentials and the importance of a healthy environment to a vibrant economy. He observed that the ‘misconception’ that slowing global warming is a hindrance to business ‘is changing’.
Assembly Bill 32 … has set California on a path to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. Schwarzenegger has gone a step further by calling for an 80 per cent reduction by 2050.
“The real headline over [Wednesday’s White House] announcement should be: ‘Bush pledges to do nothing before Jan 20, 2009’ — the day he will leave office,” observed Rep Ed Markey, D-Mass.
Fortunately, the three remaining major-party candidates to succeed him grasp the moral, humanitarian and economic imperative of taking on climate change. — (April 18)
It’s the Toronto 11
The Toronto Star
WAS it absolutely necessary that Qayyum Abdul Jamal spend 17 months in detention as a suspected terrorist, 13 of them in solitary confinement, only to have the Crown stay the charges against him? Was there no better way to handle his case?
It is hard to know, given the secrecy that shrouds the prosecution of the ‘Toronto 18’. They are the 14 men and four youths who were rounded up in 2006 because they were suspected of plotting to storm parliament, behead the prime minister and bomb sites around Toronto. And now they are only the ‘Toronto 11’. The serial collapse of the Crown’s case … invites some serious soul-searching on the way security cases are being handled.
In the 9/11 era, CSIS and the police may feel obliged to cast a ‘wide net’ around suspected terror cells to disrupt any planned attacks…. Yet while the ‘wide net’ approach may protect the public, it imposes a special obligation on the Crown to be cautious from the outset in laying charges, given the real risk that innocent people may be swept up in the net. It’s hard to discern that caution in Jamal’s case…. It took more than a year for a bomb charge against him to be dropped.
The justice system risks being discredited when people are charged on thin evidence, then held in detention for long periods, only to have the charges stayed. There must be a better way.
OTHER VOICES
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