But when the cops arrived, all he had to do was show them the video of the cab ride and he was spared an avalanche of humiliation. Now Yasa is suing all four women for $60,000 each for mental and emotional stress.

“I didn’t touch a hair on their heads, but if I had been charged, what would my wife have thought, or my two kids? “I would have been in the media as an accused rapist. It could have cost me my job and then who would hire me?”

His case has not been proven in court, but Yasa’s statement of claim says four women jumped “uninvited” into his taxi. Just before reaching the destination, his claim says, the women assaulted him and jumped from the cab without paying the $13 fare.

Once out of the car, the women “knowingly and with malicious intent, falsely accused Yasa of sexually assaulting them as the reason for leaving the vehicle.”

Read the rest of the story @ Video saves cabbie’s reputation | Calgary & Alberta | News | Calgary Sun.

Later today, the website Climate Culture is releasing a list of the 2009 Top Green Myths, things that you do – or don’t do – because you’ve read or been told they’re good or bad for the environment – but which, surprisingly, may not be producing the green results you’re expecting.

Lots of these have been argued before — Is local food always greener? Are paper bags better than plastic? — and there’s not always one “right” answer to them. But let’s look at the list and then get your opinion :

1. Green myth: Recycled paper is better for the environment than virgin paper. Fact: Recycled paper can sometimes be more carbon intensive than virgin paper. It depends on where you live. If your home is in the Pacific Northwest or Maine, where much of the electricity comes from hydro power, you may be better off with virgin paper since plants that manufacture recycled paper are often near large metro areas where power is from less efficient sources. The “difference in emissions from electricity use in paper production can be larger than the emissions associated with cutting down the tree to produce paper in the first place,” notes Zeke Hausfather, executive vice president of energy science at Climate Culture.

2. Green myth: Local food is always greener. Fact: “The method of production and type of food is far more important than the distance traveled in determining life-cycle greenhouse-gas emissions. For example, chicken from the supermarket is likely greener than local beef from the farmer’s market.” That said, there are plenty of other reasons to buy locally produced food, Mr. Hausfather admits.

3. Green myth: Washing dishes by hand uses less water than a dishwasher. Fact: It depends. Often, people underestimate how much hot water they use when washing dishes by hand. The most environmentally friendly way: washing your dishes in cold water.

4. Green myth: It’s better to drive to your vacation destination than to fly. Fact: Not if your car is an SUV, station wagon, minivan, or truck. That may be mitigated, though, if you have the entire family in the car, or drive a car that’s fuel-efficient.

5. Green myth: Compact fluorescent lights CFLs result in mercury emissions; incandescents don’t. Fact: “CFLs generally result in less mercury emissions than conventional incandescents, since coal-based electricity generation is the single largest source of anthropogenic mercury emissions and CFLs save a considerable amount of electricity,” says Hausfather. While much has been made of the mercury dangers of broken CFLs, he notes that most of the bulb’s mercury is bound to the glass.

Read the rest of the story @ The Top 10 green living myths | csmonitor.com.

Arlan Galbraith, otherwise known as the “Birdie Madoff” of the poultry world, has attempted to inject a ponzie scheme like paradigm to the pigeon breeding and eating world. While attempting to solidify pigeon as the next great white meat hope, it seems he has erected a rather large questionable business empire, that was doomed to fail, and alas, it has. At a minimal 100k startup costs, with a 50 dollar per bird guaranteed contract in place, this is surely one of the best opportunities to come along for the average farmer. I think, I will look in to this opportunity– too bad it has already failed.

A Canadian businessman behind a multi-million-dollar network of pigeon farms across North America — his empire fuelled by predictions of a post-chicken world ruled by squab — is under investigation after the State of Iowa issued an alert to potential investors that Pigeon King International may be a Ponzi scam.

In a statement sent to CanWest News Service, Iowa’s attorney-general warns that the Waterloo, Ont.-based company, which has attracted hundreds of Canadian and U.S. farmers to its bird-breeding operation despite having no immediate end-market for slaughtered pigeons, may be “misleading consumers regarding the true viability of establishing several large pigeon processing plants” and “providing inventory for new growers in furtherance of a Ponzi type of investment scheme.”

The statement, issued last week by the office of Iowa’s Attorney-General Tom Miller, added: “We believe that potential investors/buyers should be very cautious and examine the situation very carefully — especially the question of whether there is a realistic and independent market for pigeons now and in the future.”

Pigeon King president Arlan Galbraith defends his enterprise, insisting Iowa authorities have been misled by critics blinded by “jealousy and envy” over his firm’s rise to riches.

Praising the pigeon’s growth rate — “They multiply their weight 60 times in 28 days” — Galbraith added “pigeons don’t get avian flu and they don’t spread it.

“Avian flu has the potential to destroy the chicken industry. At that point in time, pigeons will be a very valuable source of meat protein,” Galbraith said in an interview Monday with CanWest News Service.

Jim Clark, head of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s avian influenza working group, said scientific experiments have shown pigeons to be uncannily resistant to the bird flu. But he added that recent studies of a virulent new Asian strain of the H5N1 virus show it does infect the species.

Clark added that Canada and other countries have established controls to prevent the poultry industry from being devastated by avian influenza.

Read the rest of the story @ Iowa warns investors off Pigeon King International.

And one little-noticed provision of the draft bill would give one of the coalition’s co-founders a lucrative exemption on a coal-fired project it is building.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman, both of California, were among the Democrats — then in the minority — who slammed Vice President Dick Cheney for holding closed-door meetings to draft energy policy early in the Bush administration.

Republicans “invited energy lobbyists to write the energy bill that gouges consumers with big payoffs to Big Gas and Big Oil,” Mrs. Pelosi said in 2005. “They have turned Washington, D.C., into an oil and gas town when it is supposed to be the city of innovation, of new, of fresh ideas about our energy policy.”

But the sweeping climate bill Mr. Waxman and Rep. Edward J. Markey, Massachusetts Democrat and chairman of the panel’s key environmental subcommittee, introduced at the end of March includes a provision that benefits Duke Energy Corp., a founding member of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership USCAP, whose climate plan released in January the lawmakers have frequently called a “blueprint” for their climate legislation.

Read the rest of the story ” EXCLUSIVE: Lobbyists help Dems draft climate change bill – Washington Times.

When nurses finally told Piper she was free to leave, no discharge papers for her son were brought out. Instead, she faced a parade of inquisitive official visitors, including uniformed police, a social worker, a psychiatrist, and assorted doctors and nurses. Her baby had been placed on medical hold while government investigators considered whether Piper was fit to take Luke home to Prince George’s County, the authorities said. She had failed to bond with her baby, a nurse told Piper.

For three days, Piper fought through a bewildering nightmare of lawyers, investigators from the District and Prince George’s, and hospital officials. A night nurse reported that Piper had declined an opportunity to breast-feed her baby, according to the mother and her lawyer. “I was so groggy, I don’t even remember that incident,” Piper says.

A psychiatric intern asked Piper to spell “world” backward. A nurse-practitioner told Piper that it was awful that a new mother could be disappointed not to have had a girl. “She told me the burden was on me to prove that I should be allowed to take my baby home,” says Piper, a lawyer who works at the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Read the rest of the story @ Marc Fisher – Marc Fisher: Child Protection System Puts New Mother Through the Wringer – washingtonpost.com.

When Prince Charles claimed thousands of Indian farmers were killing themselves after using GM crops, he was branded a scaremonger. In fact, as this chilling dispatch reveals, it’s even WORSE than he feared.

The children were inconsolable. Mute with shock and fighting back tears, they huddled beside their mother as friends and neighbours prepared their father’s body for cremation on a blazing bonfire built on the cracked, barren fields near their home.

As flames consumed the corpse, Ganjanan, 12, and Kalpana, 14, faced a grim future. While Shankara Mandaukar had hoped his son and daughter would have a better life under India’s economic boom, they now face working as slave labour for a few pence a day. Landless and homeless, they will be the lowest of the low.

Shankara, respected farmer, loving husband and father, had taken his own life. Less than 24 hours earlier, facing the loss of his land due to debt, he drank a cupful of chemical insecticide.

Unable to pay back the equivalent of two years’ earnings, he was in despair. He could see no way out.

There were still marks in the dust where he had writhed in agony. Other villagers looked on – they knew from experience that any intervention was pointless – as he lay doubled up on the ground, crying out in pain and vomiting.

Moaning, he crawled on to a bench outside his simple home 100 miles from Nagpur in central India. An hour later, he stopped making any noise. Then he stopped breathing. At 5pm on Sunday, the life of Shankara Mandaukar came to an end.

As neighbours gathered to pray outside the family home, Nirmala Mandaukar, 50, told how she rushed back from the fields to find her husband dead. ‘He was a loving and caring man,’ she said, weeping quietly.

‘But he couldn’t take any more. The mental anguish was too much. We have lost everything.’  Shankara’s crop had failed – twice. Of course, famine and pestilence are part of India’s ancient story.

But the death of this respected farmer has been blamed on something far more modern and sinister: genetically modified crops.

Shankara, like millions of other Indian farmers, had been promised previously unheard of harvests and income if he switched from farming with traditional seeds to planting GM seeds instead.

Read the rest of this story @ The GM genocide: Thousands of Indian farmers are committing suicide after using genetically modified crops | Mail Online.

There is one upside to all this camera technology. The cell phones, and tiny hand held cameras, have shifted the power to the people. The Rodney King video seems to have been the first notable case of the police being watched by bystanders with video cameras. It’s not about the content, by his own admission, Mr. King was a troublemaker, and a misfit, but its about the culture of policing. Since then, thousands of cases of police abuse, and mistakes, have been captured. This should not serve as a way to persecute individuals, who have made mistakes, because we all do, but should serve as a way to re-tune the very way law enforcement is done, and to weed out certain psychological profiles, who seem apt to be caught up in a “power trip”

In this video, a UK policeman is clearly annoyed by Mr. Tomlinson, who walked by lazilly with his hands in his pockets. The problem is that he was on his way home from work, and “happened” upon this G20 protest rally. The annoyed cop drills him in the gut with his baton, and blindsides him to the ground. Unfortunately, it looks like internal bleeding and stress led to his death. This type of behaviour has gone on as long as there have been police forces, but it has never gained any notoriety, because it was never seen, and easily deniable. The next great social fight is going to be the battle between police, and the right of bystanders to take pictures and video. There are already cases of police trying to confiscate phones. We need to be careful, and not allow such laws to pass here, as we will loose all of the advantages of this technology, while yielding own own privacy to state owned cameras.

I assume that everywhere I go, I am being watched by a camera, and thus I am not likely to behave in a manner that I am not proud of. It’s time the police realize that someone is watching, and they need to dance like they know.

As a Canadian, a business owner, a husband, a father of 4, a farmer, and a parent who has a child with incredible medical hurtles to leap, I take a certain comfort in knowing that my socialized medical system is there in the background, and is not in jeopardy no matter how messed up our family business, or finances become.  My 13 year old daughter waits for a heart transplant, or major reconstructive heart surgery, with the economic mess spinning all around us, yet there is no worry about taking care of that aspect.  There will be financial stress, as all of the ancillary costs such as hotels, travel, and other related costs will have to be borne, by us, and as I struggle to restructure our financial circumstances, and make preparations to weather the storm, it’s one worry that I take for granted in not having, and one that no American, should have to have either.  This is the richest nation on earth, yet their most powerful class is under attack.  The middle class will not stand by and watch the “hyper-wealthy” be bailed out once again by tax dollars.  There will be change.

I kept my COBRA going, but at $538/month, it became unsustainable. I let it lapse four months ago. Last month, I couldn’t refill my high-blood pressure medications and I took my last thyroid pill on Saturday. I didn’t know what I was to do. Kaiser wouldn’t even let me PAY for my medications as I wasn’t a member now.

I remembered Wal-Mart had these walk-in clinics. In desperation and fearing the worst, I went on Easter Sunday. The clinic was spotless, the doctor was a retired UCD Medical Center Professor who just wanted to keep his hand in and see patients, there wasn’t any wait, the cost was only $59, and my prescriptions were only $9 each for a 100 days supply. Total with Wal-Mart: $86. With my Kaiser, I would have paid a $25 copay for the doctor visit and three $25 copays for each medication. Total with Kaiser: $100, but AFTER I paid $538/month to remain a member. Before Wal-Mart, my blood pressure was 123/186, today it is back down to 84/124.

My recession looks like law school in the Fall and medical care at Wal-Mart.

See many of Andrew’s great observations at: The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan.