Tristan Dénommée, a third-year political science student originally from Quebec, founded the club in September as a way of promoting the Bloc's separatist ideas on campus.

"The Bloc is an official party in Canada, and we have the right to express ourselves," Dénommée said. "If I can inform students about my cause, it could be a good thing, because most anglophone Canadians don't understand the mentality of French separatist people."

As an official campus club, the group gets $1,000 in subsidies and access to other resources, including free room rentals. Dénommée has recruited 25 members so far but also encountered some resistance from students who don't believe their student fees should support a separatist political group.

[. . ]

Arlaine MacLennan, clubs co-ordinator for the university's student federation, said she's received no complaints about the club being approved.

"They're a political club, and they want to promote Bloquiste ideas on campus, just like there are many other political clubs for other political parties," MacLennan said.

In order for a club to be officially recognized by the student federation, it has to have a minimum of 15 members, 75 per cent of whom have to be University of Ottawa students. MacLennan said there are roughly 200 registered clubs on campus that fall into a range of categories, including philanthropic, political, religious, cultural, academic and recreational.

Dénommée said his club plans to hold debates with other campus political clubs next semester and also hopes to invite Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe to speak on campus.

When Dawood [Mumbai organized crime hotshot] skipped India for Dubai in 1984, few Westerners could have located the city-state on a map, let alone talk authoritatively about the place and its people. Arabs, Iranians, Baluchis, East Africans, Pakistanis and West Coast Indians, by contrast, had a deep historical acquaintance with Dubai. At the end of World War II, it was barely more than a coastal village that had survived largely on its wits, since its only indigenous industry, pearl fishing, had been wiped out by the war and by the Japanese development of cultured pearls.

In the barren years between pearls and petrodollars, Dubai quietly resurrected its trading links across the Strait of Hormuz with Iran and across the Arabian Sea to Bombay. Because of both Iran and India pursued policies of severe protectionism to build up their domestic industries, Dubai’s traders found they could exploit their own light taxation regime by importing all manners of material into Dubai and then exporting it to Iran and the subcontinent. “The bottomless pit that is Indian demand for gold funded many, many people here in those years,” explained Francis Matthew, an ex-pat for decades and editor of Dubai’s largest publishing company. “Almost every Indian woman needs it for her trousseau and her dowry; different kinds of gold, different kinds of plate for the various areas of India.”

[. . .]

In terms of influence, Dubai’s ruling Al-Maktoum family ranked second only to the Al-Nahyans of Abu Dhabi. The discovery of huge oil reserves on Abu Dhabi territory proved a godsend to Dubai and the other five emirates that formed the new state of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 1973 after the British decided to withdraw all its forces east of Suez. (…) Dubai itself has modest oil reserves, which even so account for 15% of the city-state’s income. But thse will dry up within the next decade. In the 1980s, the al-Maktoums decided to diversify (…). Thus they did conceive the plan to build the Jebel Ali port, its sixty-six berths making it the largest marine facility in the Middle East.

While critics scoffed at the grandiose project, the decision to create the new port was quickly vindicated. In 1979, Dubai had learned a valuable lesson from the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan: trouble has its bright side. Frightened by the instability of their own countries, Iranian and Afghan traders moved to Dubai, bringing with them their businesses, thereby bolstering the local economy. With neither income nor sales tax, Dubai steadily developed a reputation for being a safe place in the Middle East to stash your money. Since then Dubai has always boomed during a regional crisis.

[C]ould the feeling of social isolation be socially contagious? The federally funded analysis of data collected from more than 4,000 people over 10 years found that lonely people increase the chances that someone they know will start to feel alone, and that the solitary feeling can spread one more degree of separation, causing a friend of a friend or even the sibling of a friend to feel desolate [Washington Post]. Friends of lonely people were 52 percent more likely to develop lonely feelings, the researchers say, and a friend of that person was 25 percent more likely.

Lonely people, the researchers suggest, become less trusting of others and of their own social skills, and they have fewer interactions as they supposedly move further toward the periphery of their social networks. As the social connections they do have start to fade, the argument goes, their friends begin to feel lonelier and the wave of loneliness begins to spread through the social network.

Study author John Cacioppo argued back in 2006 that loneliness raises heart rate and makes people unhealthier. But lest he be accused of picking on individuals, he says that’s not the case. “Society tends to think of it as an individual characteristic — there are just loners,” he says. “But that’s the wrong conception of what loneliness is. It’s a biological signal motivating us to correct something that we need for genetic survival. We need quality relationships. We don’t survive well on our own” [MSNBC].

Still, if you’re suspicious of these social network studies suggesting that happiness, loneliness, fatness, and lots of other attributes spread like the plague, you’re not alone—some scientists feel the same way. Says Jason Fletcher: “It is unclear whether their statistical model will ‘find’ social contagion in every outcome they examine because of the limitations.” … He and a colleague conducted a similar analysis using data from a large federal survey to show that acne, headaches and even height could appear to be spread through social networks if not analyzed properly.

China's most popular politician publicly rebuked Prime Minister Stephen Harper for long ignoring China while Harper privately challenged China's top leaders on their human rights record.

But after discussions that Mr. Harper described as "frank and respectful," the leaders of both countries issued a joint statement that they say heralds "a significant new era" in relations between China and Canada.

[. . .]

"The public rebuke shows that there's work to do on Canada's part," said NDP Leader Jack Layton. "The new tourist designation and the consulate in Montreal are an important gesture by the Chinese, now it's our turn."

Liberal MP Bob Rae, his party's foreign affairs critic, says a tourism deal is long overdue.

"We've paid a price," Rae told reporters outside the House of Commons. "The fact is we've paid a price for four years of not just living on the margins but actually deliberately disregarding china. This was not benign neglect.

"This was a deliberate decision on [Mr. Harper's] part to ignore the relationship and to assert that it had no particular importance for him."

[. . .]

The Chinese government, through the state-controlled media here, ran articles and editorials as Mr. Harper arrived noting with disapproval that, although he was elected in 2006, he had never visited China and was the last G8 leader to do so.

Indeed, that sore spot was Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao's starting point for his hour-long meeting with Harper.

"This is your first trip to China and this is the first meeting between the Chinese premier and the Canadian prime minister in almost five years. Five years is too long a time for China-Canada relations and that is why there are comments in the media that your visit is one that should have taken place earlier," said Mr. Wen, who is the country's second most powerful politician after President Hu Jintao.

The premier's words were unusually strong for the man who is considered to be the "nice guy" in the Chinese government and is often referred to as Grandfather Wen.

Both the state-owned media in China, as well as independent media in Canada, had criticized Mr. Harper for waiting until he was nearly four years into his term before visiting Canada's second-largest trading partner after the United States.

John Hearnshaw (University of Canterbury, Christchurch) reports in a recent post on Cosmic Diary that the university’s Mt. John Observatory has begun a program to search for Earth-mass planets around Centauri A and B. Although the observatory is heavily invested in microlensing technologies (working with the Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics collaboration), the new efforts will put radial velocity methods to work using the Hercules spectrograph.

The program is a joint effort with Stuart Barnes at the Anglo-Australian Observatory and Mike Endl at the University of Texas (Austin). And as Hearnshaw notes, the problem is a formidable one, given that an Earth-mass planet in the habitable zone around Centauri A creates a ‘wobble’ of only 10 cm/s (slightly larger for the less massive Centauri B). Yet the observatory is banking on Hearnshaw’s statement that 30,000 spectra of Centauri A or B over three years can detect a habitable zone ‘Earth.’

The habitable zone around Centauri A should be found at about 1.2 AU, while 0.75 AU is calculated for Centauri B. What else do we know about the primary Centauri stars? Earlier work has demonstrated that no gas giants as massive as Jupiter can exist there — Doppler studies would have found them by now. But the case for Earth-mass planets remains open.

We know that Alpha Centauri “A” has a dominant pulsation period that’s about 5 minutes, just like the sun. I’m not really worried about periodic variations of minutes. We’ll be able to average right over that kind of noise. But no one knows whether or not there are long period variations in “A” or “B”. We do know that “A” is probably not as stable as “B”. People have measured pulsation periods in “A”, and in general we find that more massive stars have more active atmospheres. So yeah, I agree that “B” is a better bet. And if you told me that I could only observe one star, I’d choose B. But we’re studying both stars. And it turns out that this strategy of looking at both stars is pretty critical in ensuring a solid set of data.

Storytellers would travel from town to town with their butai (miniature stage) on the back of a bike. The setup was reminiscent of a Punch and Judy show, but instead of puppets the narrator would slide a series of poster boards with watercolor illustrations in and out of the box. He would act out the script, which was written on cards placed on the back of a board.

Each show consisted of three stories of about 10 minutes each: an adventure for boys, a domestic drama for girls and then a simple comic story. The majority of performances ended in a cliffhanger, forcing eager audiences to return the next day.

[. . .]

“A lot of attributes seen in anime are present,” [writer Eric P.] Nash said, “such as giant robots and monsters from outer space.” He also mentions the “manga-sized eyes,” wide and oversized, meant to convey emotion found in popular characters such as Jungle Boy. Golden Bat, created in 1931, was considered to be the world’s first true comic superhero. Although visually resembling Captain America’s nemesis Red Skull, Golden Bat and Superman share more commonalities: the red cape, skill of flight, superhuman strength and a fortress of solitude, albeit in the Japanese Alps.

Kamishibai artists departed from traditional Japanese line art drawing by creating a cartoon-like style and applying “chiaroscuro,” the Western style of contrasting light and dark, providing depth and mass.

Astronomers have identified a massive supernova as a new type of violent stellar explosion predicted by physicists to exist, but never before seen.

Researchers say that the supernova 2007bi, first observed 2½ years ago, was the result of the collapse of a star 200 times the size of the sun and the resulting nuclear explosion.

The supernova took place in a dwarf galaxy about 1.35 billion light-years away.

Avishay Gal-Yam of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and his colleagues say that the supernova's extreme brightness and its evolution over time are best explained by a pair-instability supernova. Their research is published this week in Nature.

The type of supernova is predicted to occur in super-massive stars that don't form a dense iron core but an oxygen core.

Particles of light — photons — in the oxygen core interact with the nuclei of atoms to form electrons and their equivalent anti-matter particle, positrons.

The conversion of photons to pairs of electrons and positrons causes a violent contraction in the star, leading to a runaway nuclear explosion.

Stars as big as the one that led to this supernova are thought to have been common in the early universe, so pair-instability supernovas may have played an important role in determining how the young universe evolved.

Another supernova, 2006gy, the brightest ever recorded, is also speculated to have been a pair-instability supernova.

Astronomers have discovered hundreds of Jupiter-like planets in our galaxy. However, a handful of the planets found orbiting distant stars are more Earth-sized. This gives hope to astrobiologists, who think we are more likely to find life on rocky planets with liquid water.

The rocky planets found so far are actually more massive than our own. Dimitar Sasselov, professor of astronomy at Harvard University, coined the term "Super-Earths" to reflect their mass rather than any superior qualities.

But Sasselov says that these planets – which range from about 2 to 10 Earth masses – could be superior to the Earth when it comes to sustaining life.

[. . .]

The fear today is that too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will lead to global warming. Yet too little carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would make Earth a much colder place, and the photosynthetic plants and algae that rely on CO2 would perish. The demise of these oxygen-producing organisms would leave us all gasping for breath.

According to Sasselov, Earth's mass helps keeps tectonics in action. The more massive a planet, the hotter its interior. Tectonic plates slide on a layer of molten rock beneath the crust called the mantle. Convective currents within the mantle push the plates around. For smaller planets like Mars, the interior is not hot enough to drive tectonics.

Super Earths, with a larger and hotter interior, would have a thinner planetary crust placed under more stress. This probably would result in faster tectonics, as well as more earthquakes, volcanism, and other geologic upheavals. In fact, Sasselov says the plate tectonics on Super Earths may be so rapid that mountains and ocean trenches wouldn't have much time to develop before the surface was again recycled.

Canadian Jaime-Leigh Fairbrother (a.k.a jaimeleigh) is supposedly a Tumblette: young, sexy and an over-sharer. The Tumblette — a vogue-ish tag for a female type who blogs on the website Tumblr — “lifecasts” with an edge.

[. . . ]

On her “for the story goes” Tumblr, the Toronto-based Jaime-Leigh Fairbrother bares all daily — from a series of self-point-and-shoot photos the 20-something blond snapped for a Semi-Naked-Picture-Day, to a controversial posting that included a spreadsheet mapping her bed-hopping history.

“People have a weird love for these sexual things,” says Fairbrother, who in person, is surprisingly demure. “We all talk about it... yet if you’re honest and shameless about it, you’re judged.”

At first glance, Fairbrother’s Tumblr is a female version of Tucker Max, whose drunken bro-ish hijinks recently made it to the big screen in I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell.

It’s made Fairbrother a love-her-or-hate-her Tumblette: She’s garnered a cult of 800 to 900 active followers and, last week, was ranking higher than other micro-celebrities and fellow oversharers, like Internet star Julia Allison.

Fairbrother’s quick to recognize her Tumblr began over a year ago as a lonely, soliloquy-ing stream.

Her postings quickly garnered followers, especially through Tumblr’s unique re-blogging feature — the re-posting of content allows users to trace how one post is amplified or subverted by other users — which created a dialogue that would bounce between her, her followers and even non-followers.

russiamagazine

Consider this, for example. We enjoy accumulating followers, seeing ourselves referred to, commented to, and otherwise being made visible. Doesn’t matter whether this involves acknowledgment, recognition, or validation; the point is that the medium does create a kind of social visibility. Call it, for simplicity’s sake, “being paid attention to.”

Well, attention doesn’t correlate with actually engaging in conversation. Many of us sometimes ignore a request for communication, for whatever reason. It’s part of daily life; in real life it’s called “civil inattention,” and is handled by acknowledging others in ways that also indicate to them “I see you, recognize you, but I’m not available to interact.” Simply put, politeness.

Now, consider the social media space. Attention paid to others may not be visible to them. But if it’s given, such as by taking any action recorded and captured by the medium and surfaced by design, then this action can have two social outcomes, not one. This is the power of the medium, and the net effect of the doubled audience mentioned above.

For all of our talk about “the world watching”, what good did social media actually do for the people of Iran? Did the footage out of the country actually change the outcome of the elections? No. Despite a slew of YouTube videos and a couple of thousand foreign Twitter users turning their avatar green and pretending to be in Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is still in power. It’s astonishing, really. Despite how successful ten million actual voters marching through Washington, London and other major cities in 2003 were in stopping the invasion of Iraq, a bit of entirely virtual cyber-posturing by foreigners didn’t lead to real change in Iran.

And so it was at Fort Hood. For all the sound and fury, citizen journalism once again did nothing but spread misinformation at a time when thousands people with family at the base would have been freaking out already, and breach the privacy of those who had been killed or wounded. We learned not a single new fact, nor was a single life saved.

What’s most alarming about Moore’s behaviour is that she probably thought she was doing the right thing. Certainly, looking at her MySpace page and her Twitter account (before the army finally forced her to lock it down) we see the portrait of a patriot. Someone who clearly cares a great deal about others, and who – despite the rhetorical question “remind me why I joined the army again” on her profile – is proud to serve her country. In tweeting from the scene, and calling out the media for not reporting the rumours from inside the base, I’m sure she genuinely believed she was helping get the real truth out, and making an actual difference.

And that’s precisely the problem: none of us think we’re being selfish or egotistic when we tweet something, or post a video on YouTube or check-in using someone’s address on Foursquare. It’s just what we do now, no matter whether we’re heading out for dinner or witnessing a massacre on an Army base. Like Lord of the Flies, or the Stanford Prison Experiment, as long as we’re all losing our perspective at the same time – which, as a generation growing up with social media we are – then we don’t realise that our humanity is leaking away until its too late.

Individualized gazes do not create global social movements for peace or democracy. That still takes old-fashioned organizing. these videos do not translation into social actions but greater social attention on social media platforms for those fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time. They might be interviewed on television and see their Twitter following scores swell along with the number of comments for their videos on YouTube.

A small, private company launched New Zealand’s first rocket into space to cheers from about 50 people gathered on a small island off the country’s coast.

As the noise of the blastoff sent sheep running, the 18-foot rocket raced into the sky, reaching beyond the Kármán line, 100 kilometers (62 miles) above the Earth’s surface, which is traditionally considered the dividing altitude between the upper atmosphere and real space.

The Atea-1, named after the Maori word for space, was built by Rocket Lab. It’s the first privately built rocket launched from the Southern Hemisphere to reach space.

“It’s not trivial sending something into space,” Mark Rocket, Rocket Lab director and former internet entrepreneur, told local media. “This is a huge technological leap for New Zealand.”

After the sub-orbital vehicle entered space, it turned back toward Earth and splashed down. The Rocket Lab team is currently trying to locate the rocket, which was expected to fall into the Pacific Ocean about 30 miles northeast of Great Mercury Island, a privately owned resort and the rocket’s takeoff point.

If you happen to be in the area and see the payload, don’t go scooping it up, Rocket Lab warned through its Twitter feed.

“IMPORTANT: Marine traffic in the Coromandel, do not recover payload, it contains delicate scientific instruments & is potentially hazardous,” the Lab wrote. “If found please mark the payload location, and relay the GPS coordinates to Rocket Lab ASAP.”

[I]t can often be the case that the more a writer adheres to autobiography, the more fantastical the narration becomes. Witness Huysmans and DeQuincey as obvious exmaples. One might also note that the division Shields draws between etoliated artifice and the crudity of raw experience is surely a false one; as John Bayley's The Uses of Division : Unity and Disharmony in Literature was at pains to point out, the most interesting work of many realist writers is often their more fragmented and inchoate. For me, writers like Lawrence, Eliot and Hardy are great precisely because of how untidy their novels often are. With all of that said though, in the end I probably sympathise more with Shields than with Smith. From Isherwood and Pessoa onwards to Coetzee and Sebald, writing that defies the division of reality and invention has become a hallmark of the age. Equally, it's difficult not to notice that if our age has any genre it has obsessively explored, it would have to be biography, even those of people who are still living and have done apparently little to merit the attention. Put simply, we live in an age where experience is a heavily circumsribed or heavily mediated concept.

The concept of mandarin is Ringer's shorthand for "influential educated elite." Humanistically educated in a system that emphasized literature, classical languages, and philosophy, the mandarins played the role of the educated and powerful elites of late nineteenth-century Germany, as officials, professors, and other highly educated professionals. These were men of letters who played key roles in German social and political life. Ringer concentrates on one important segment of this elite group: Germany's professors and university leaders, primarily in the humanities and social sciences.

The first kind of intellectual influence is unconscious and invisible. The second is closer to being conscious to the thinker. And the third is analytical and intentional on the part of the thinker. These frameworks bear some analogy to the three perspectives mentioned above -- "logical", "traditional", and "ideological" explanations. But the correspondence is not exact. We might say that the three perspectives correspond to the three different ideas about how thought corresponds to the world: that thought reflects social reality; thought advocates for social position; and thought interrogates social reality. Ringer echoes this in his coda on Weber by suggesting that Weber was able to transcend the limitations of perspective and interest to some degree, permitting him to exercise some independent critical intelligence:

Max Weber and a few other leading social scientists in the modernist camp hold a special place in the intellectual history of the mandarin community. They apparently shared some of the emotions with which the majority of their colleagues viewed the social transformations of their time. But their intellectual response to these changes far surpassed the orthodox norm in subtlety, critical control, and precision. Though never without a certain pessimism, they put their ambivalence at the service of analysis. They became at least partly conscious of their own situation. (180)

What is particularly tragic in Ringer's account is how poorly this mandarin culture prepared universities and academics for the onslaught of National Socialism and antisemitism in the 1930s. The nostalgia and pessimism that were the dominant themes of the mandarin social psychology left intellectuals unequipped for the struggle against fascism within the university and within German society. Their ideas and emotions left them ready for "conservative revolution" during the Weimar period, and provided no positive basis for mobilizing society against fascism when the time came.

I met some very special people in this bizarre parallel world of Oxford we all inhabited. We know of Philip Pullman’s parallel world of the Northern Lights but this was – and is – another parallel world there of ordinary people to whom an extraordinary thing had happened – an HIV diagnosis – which had changed our lives forever and which we dared not share with anyone. If we had survived a train crash or a bomb attack, God forbid, all arms of support would have been there for us. But we hadn’t. We had HIV. Of course, the human spirit being what it is, extraordinary resilience emerged and I was touched by so many whom I met. There were the wonderful team at OXAIDS, for a start, and the Bishop of Oxford and Mrs Harries, who opened up their home for us for a retreat day each summer. There was the lovely Kim, an elf-like creature, a young former drug user from Scotland, who had moved South, with the huge courage to break away from her friends and the drugs, to kick her habit and start a new life working with horses, which she loved. But then she realised that a legacy of those days had come with her, in the form of HIV. She soon slipped away and died and I found myself in a lonely cemetery somewhere in the West Country questioning the senselessness of her loss. There was a lovely African couple, highly able students in Oxford, full of life and laughter. Then AIDS caught up with them. He died suddenly first, and a year later she too was gone and I found myself at her funeral also, full of devastated mourners, not sure again who knew what and daring therefore to say nothing. There were wonderful gay young men who had grown up struggling with their sexual identity, who had faced the rejection of their families through being gay, now having the double rejection of HIV to deal with. They too just wasted away and died. There was Dave, of Body Positive. He died too and I just couldn’t manage to go to his funeral – we all kept wondering which of us would be next.

These events forced me to address and deal seriously with the really big questions facing all of us in our lives, no matter who we are or where we come from. These questions included: who am I? who are we? what is life about? what is death about? what are gender, sex, our belief systems, our values, our relationships with those around us about? But then slowly I began to rebuild my life, realising that I needed to be there for my older children, that maybe I wasn’t meant to give up just yet, that maybe there was something very important to be learnt from all these experiences. Even though those years were so deeply painful, with all our otherwise perhaps unlikely friendships across new overlapping circles quickly getting torn up by the roots through sickness, rapid deaths, and just too many funerals, there was still a shared sense of wonder amongst us of this unreal journey into reality that we were all making together, deeply aware as we were of our shared borrowed time, our shared mortality, our shared humanity.

[. . .]

All of us in the world are dying, from the day that we arrive in this world. But most of us spend most of our lives imagining that death will never happen to us. We fear death and dying and the suffering that they will bring. Those of us with children especially quite naturally weave all the magic that we can into our lives, to protect ourselves from death before they have grown up, and to protect them from death also.

But I think many of us agree that this diagnosis, maybe especially because it is one which we have experienced in secret, gives us a sudden and immense new perspective on reality. It has made me realise how fragile life is and to try to treat each day and each relationship with far more care.

The Canadian government, a local university and Loblaw Cos (L.TO), the country's biggest supermarket chain, said on Tuesday they will spend C$60 million ($57.5 million) to transform the downtown building, opened in 1931, into a retail and recreation complex.

Maple Leaf Gardens was home to the Toronto Maple Leafs until the team moved to the more modern Air Canada Centre near the Lake Ontario waterfront in 1999.

It became an always sold-out hockey institution during the Depression when games were broadcast across the country on radio. Later it was home to Hockey Night in Canada television broadcasts on Saturday nights.

The Leafs won the Stanley Cup, the NHL championship trophy, 11 times while they played there, the last one in 1967.

After its facelift is completed in 2011, the revamped Gardens will feature a new ice rink for Ryerson University teams, an athletic centre for Ryerson students and a supermarket on the ground floor.

"We needed to do something special with Maple Leaf Gardens," Loblaw Executive Chairman Galen Weston told a news conference on Tuesday. "This is a great example of how business, academia and government can work together to deliver a great result."

Loblaw bought the arena from Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment in 2004.

Maple Leaf Gardens was built during the Depression by then Leafs owner Conn Smythe at a cost of C$1.5 million. Tickets for the opening night game between the Leafs and the Chicago Blackhawks ranged between 95 Canadian cents and C$2.95.

Since then it has hosted Elvis Presley, the Beatles on three occasions, and the 1972 Summit Series between Team Canada and the Soviet Union's national hockey team.

They are Europe's Least Wanted – reviled for their unorthodox ways, hounded by white supremacists. Now the sudden arrival of Roma "gypsies" in Ontario has teachers here grappling to connect with some of the most perplexing students in the world.

With no English, limited education and an often shaky regard for school, the wave of Roma children give fresh urgency to the term "at-risk." Schools across Toronto and Hamilton, caught largely by surprise, are rushing to educate staff, hire more ESL teachers and find Hungarian and Czech interpreters for everything from report cards to welcome kits.

"We've got major problems with this wave of students and we need help – we've had more than 100 kids show up this fall and our staff are scrambling," said Trustee Irene Atkinson at a recent crash course on Roma culture organized by the Toronto District School Board, one of several this fall in Toronto and Hamilton.

"We need to develop curriculum for Roma teenagers in Grade 10 who are working at a Grade 4 to 6 level," she said.

Puzzled teachers say many Roma children seem unfamiliar with routines such as the school bell. Some plunge into fist-fights, show little respect for teachers, ignore homework and skip school for days at a time, even in elementary grades.

Not all feel this way; more than 25 Roma parents jammed into a breakfast meeting Friday at Queen Victoria Public School to learn, through a Hungarian interpreter, about the report cards and parent-teacher interviews coming next week.

But Czech translator Jan Rotbauer also was asked to visit a Scarborough grade school Friday to translate for Roma parents the importance of sending children to school each day.

"I have done this many times because teachers are asking for help," he said. "Roma parents do love their children, but education has not been high on the priority list."

"It is one of the reasons we came; our children were being treated badly in the Czech Republic because they are Roma," said Katarina Polyakora, through translator Rotbauer. Her children are in Grades 3 and 8 at Precious Blood Catholic School in Scarborough.

"Our younger child has darker skin and was called racial slurs like Blackface – even the teacher would sometimes rip up her artwork," said Polyakora, whose family came here in February from the Czech Republic seeking refugee status.

"Our older child has lighter skin, so they did not discriminate against him until they discovered he was Roma, and then they kicked him off the school soccer team," she said.

"But here in Canada, the children are friendly. Everyone is friendly. It is a multicultural country."

"It's been six weeks and I'm starting to notice an improvement; less talking to each other, less fighting and better attendance," said Reutter.

There now is a waiting list for LEAP classes across Toronto fuelled by the arrival of Roma refugee claimants, said program coordinator Betty Ann Taylor.

"Roma children don't face gaps in their learning," she said. "They face craters."

Roma parents back home have also faced accusations of pushing their children into street crime rather than schooling. Rotbauer chose carefully which documentary he showed during a recent sensitivity session for about 100 teachers.

"The National Geographic one was okay, but a BBC documentary about Roma parents putting children out to rob people at ATM machines? I thought it was too negative and not balanced."

Such highly charged cultural baggage should not matter to Canadian schools, said Paula Markus, coordinator for English as a Second Language at the Toronto District School Board. "Our job is to help children who, through no fault of their own, have had gaps in their prior schooling, whether it's from war or persecution," she said.

"One student wrote the most touching composition about how great it is they're not beaten up in Canada just for being Roma.

"That's why people come here."