In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Canada was rocked with its worst public health disaster ever: the tainted blood scandal. After being infused with infected blood product, one thousand Canadian Red Cross patients contracted HIV and twenty thousand more were infected with hepatitis C. Even worse, a federal health employee claimed that it was known by the early 1980s that contaminated blood existed within the system.

In the years that followed, the feds instituted a compensation program for infected patients, and the Red Cross was ordered by the Supreme Court to pay seventy-nine million dollars in settlements. The scandal caused the Red Cross (now succeeded by Canadian Blood Services) to establish one of its most controversial policies: any man who had any type of sexual contact—even once—with another man since 1977 was barred from donating blood products.

This policy is not unique to Canadian Blood Services; it's ubiquitous in blood agencies around the world, despite state-of-the-art tests now employed to screen-out diseased blood. There are also many other conditions that will disqualify potential donors, although the system is only as effective as the applicants are honest. This autumn, however, CBS finally started accepting stem cell donations from gay men. The latest Health Canada guidelines now allow for tissue, cell, and organ donation by gay men, but that change doesn't apply to blood products. Some say that the screening technology is now effective enough that it doesn't pose a significant risk to the hundreds of Canadians waiting for donors, and that the policy perpetuates longstanding myths about gay men; others feel that prohibiting gay men from donating is not discriminatory, but simply a matter of public safety and common sense.

In theory, arcologies are great. They're the absolute antithesis of sprawl, since by their very nature they must be efficient in order to prosper. While today a city can expand by annexing land from rural neighbors and throwing open the floodgates to suburban development - this is pretty much the way Mississauga went from a cluster of small towns to a city of 700,000 in fifty years - adding on to an existing arcology would be a major construction project, extremely taxing in time, effort, and money, and so rewards would naturally stem from working within its limits to the best possible degree. Arcologies would, by necessity, advance the frontiers of knowledge in sustainable living.

[. . .]

Should environmental degradation continue into the future, I can see the concept of the arcology becoming more and more attractive as a means to potentially create islands of social stability. In Oath of Fealty, Todos Santos is portrayed as something of a vampiric parasite on Los Angeles, sucking whatever jobs and wealth from the city it can while constantly planning new methods to come out on top. It might be more appropriate to cast a twenty-first century Todos Santos as the castle of the feudal lord and Los Angeles as a village of serfs, with LA dependent upon the rigidly controlled, self-sufficient arcology for its own stability and survival. In other environments, social stratification and separation between arcologies and neighboring cities could result in rich, powerful arcologies with feral cities, metropolitan centers devoid of central authority or security - effectively, extending Mogadishu to its ultimate conclusion - just beyond their walls.

The unknown insurgent, if he’s still alive and somehow following Canadian politics, must be cracking up at the Canadian chaos he’s unleashed.

The unidentified Taliban fighter, rescued from a severe Afghan beating by Canadian troops more than two years ago, is now threatening to force a public inquiry to be held in faraway snowy Ottawa and may yet terminate a mission-leading cabinet minister.

All this because he was detained by suspicious Canadian soldiers back in mid-2006 with a scratched nose, had his picture taken to prove he didn’t have any serious injuries before being turned over to Afghan police where he was badly roughed up and promptly reclaimed by our sympathetic troops.

This one allegedly isolated situation forced Chief of Defence Staff Walter Natynczyk to mea culpa a humbling correction on Wednesday, admitting this was indeed the Exhibit A of a Canadian detainee surrendered to face Afghan-inflicted torture.

There is now clear and credible evidence that this government has lost deniability on the Afghan torture file and that diplomat Richard Colvin, whose damning testimony was so viciously ridiculed by the government and top generals, is gaining plausibility.

But nobody has taken a harder believability beating than the top military brass.

For the Chief of Defence Staff to suggest he stumbled on incendiary field notes just six hours before his defence minister was placed on the hot seat at a parliamentary committee, a report already published in the Globe and Mail, is beyond logical comprehension.

[. . .]

Mr. MacKay may have repeatedly misled the Commons by saying there were no credible cases of detainee torture, but only because the military insisted that was the case. The chain of command between the military and the minister links at the Chief of Defence Staff’s desk. If he’s in the dark, so is the government.

Yet the way the entire Conservative front bench, including a testy, albeit jetlagged Prime Minister Stephen Harper, remains angrily antagonistic and combative to questions on the file.

The Conservatives attack at every legitimate query as a slur to the uniform, when the opposition is making no such allegation.

The point is worth repeating, because the government clearly doesn’t get it. All evidence suggests Canadian soldiers showed considerable restraint when apprehending Taliban who were, after all, on a mission to kill them.

The political concern is whether anybody in the government or the military were aware of ongoing torture in Kandahar prisons while making ongoing transfers into its cells. If so, that’s called a war crime under international conventions.

The government’s ugly mood is amplified by behavior that has all the optics of obstruction, if not a cover up. They stonewalled a Military Police Complaints Commission probe of the allegations, threatened diplomat Colvin with legal consequences if he testified publicly, unleashed a character smear of his reliability when he did and reluctantly produced a blizzard of blacked-out documentation that, when the odd sentence did appear, conveniently showed no wrongdoing.

he art of cultural diaspora is a genre unto itself: a mainstay of curatorial-studies curriculum and art fairs alike. Spawning a motherlode of postcolonial dreck, the genre also includes the odd dazzler, such as the work of transnational superstar Yinka Shonibare (a British-Nigerian artist residing in London), or Zhang Huan (a Chinese émigré in New York) – artists who have made cross-cultural drift a reigning preoccupation of contemporary art.

It is into this context that the 31-year-old Toronto artist Will Kwan inserts himself. Kwan came to Canada from Hong Kong at age 4, but his work is still backward glancing. These days, he teaches sculpture and art theory at the University of Toronto's Scarborough campus, and his work is the subject of a concise exhibition at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at Hart House, curated by gallery curator-director Barbara Fischer. The show rounds up his major work to date, revealing an artist who articulates sharp cultural observations in the language of conceptual art. Occasionally, the work feels formulaic – his wall installation of ceremonial crimson hong bao gift envelopes emblazoned with the logos of various world banks, for example. Other works, though, are more inventive.

Clocks that do not tell the time (2008), for example, is a curious puzzle, seeming to be a bank of institutional clocks displaying the time around the world. But instead of the customary New York, Paris and Mumbai, we find place names like Alang, Punto Fijo and Bentonville. It's only upon reading Kwan's research (some of which he has pinned to the back of the display wall) that these locations are revealed to be hubs of international corporate commerce and industry. Why Wilmington? It's home to many U.S. head offices, Delaware serving as an onshore tax haven for corporate America. Sonapur? That's where the labour camp is for the 150,000 Asian workers who toil by day to build the glittering towers of Dubai.

Urban affairs activist Glen Murray, who had been mulling a run for mayor of Toronto next year, plans to seek the Liberal nomination to replace Toronto Centre MPP George Smitherman, who is preparing his own run for the top political job in the city.

“This seemed to be the right match,” said Mr. Murray, 52, who aims to succeed the former deputy premier who is expected by late February to join the race to replace Mayor David Miller next fall.Mr. Murray, who will take a leave of absence from his post as president of the Canadian Urban Institute, says he has the endorsement of Mr. Smitherman. Both are openly gay politicians.

Mr. Murray, the former mayor of Winnipeg who ran unsuccessfully for a federal Liberal seat before moving here in 2004, had been seriously contemplating a mayoral bid.

But the certain arrival of Mr. Smitherman as a major contender for mayor and the likely, but still not confirmed, entry of former Ontario Conservative John Tory as a big-name rival appears to sucked political oxygen out of the air for other aspirants.

Mr. Murray is not the only Liberal seeking the nomination, setting the stage for a competitive battle to replace Mr. Smitherman for the plum downtown seat.

[C]ity governments have to take an intergenerational perspective. By that I mean every decision a local government makes should be focused on what impact it will on the environment, economy, health and culture of the city for the next generation.

Livability is one of the biggest factors in where people decide to live and where creative people decide to live is where investors look to put their money.

Cities have to have activist city governments that can invest in innovation, design, art, sports, entertainment and support local culture.

Let’s take Winnipeg where you and I lived. The redevelopment of the exchange district and Corydon in Winnipeg are examples. They are places with a vibe or buzz. Rezoning the district to a mixed use lie-work precinct, introducing tax credits equivalent to the difference between the market rents generated by a heritage building and the cost of restoration and maintenance triggered the redevelopment of 36 properties.

Free transit in the district, major increases in arts and cultural funding, theatre and festival programs and a strong commitment to public safety with defensible space design initiatives and 21 new dedicated police offices in the downtown all helped begin to restore the historic heart of the city.

The relocation of Red River College's creative and design programs to the Exchange and the support given to the local special effects and multimedia cluster and nascent film industry all contributed to the formation of a creative media cluster in the Exchange and the return of construction cranes and shops to the streets.

Public works as public art are also important to place-making and projects like the inhabited pedestrian bridge or new downtown library are examples of this concept.

Collaborative governance was also critical and the success of Centre Venture, a development agency that facilitated private and public sector collaboration, was an essential ingredient. Unfortunately, the city government disengaged from this approach four years ago.

City leaders need to facilitate research and development by supporting a strong university and business network to accelerate the movement of ideas to market. This is important to a city’s capacity to generate innovative and interesting employment.

Economic development initiatives in biomaterials and aerospace were example of this approach in the Peg. The success of RIM (BlackBerrys) in Waterloo is an excellent example of the dynamic of innovation at work in a mid-sized city.

Activist government partnerships to mobilize capital from the private sector and co-ordinate government investment are also essential. In Winnipeg, the Hydro building, MTS Centre, library, baseball park, Thunderbird House, the residential district on Waterfront Drive, the Forks and the Human Rights Museum are examples of how quickly these things can happen with a partnership approach.

Quebec sovereigntists have wasted no time pouncing on the climate change issue as the latest argument to break up Canada, making their case at the very outset of a major UN summit.

The Parti Québécois issued the sovereigntist call to arms on the hot-button issue Monday as Prime Minister Stephen Harper prepared to attend the environmental conference at Copenhagen.

The PQ argued in an open letter that if international sanctions are eventually imposed on environmental laggards, "Canada's irrresponsible position" could wind up hurting Quebec industry.

That opening salvo underscored the national-unity minefield Harper will be wading through in Denmark as he searches for safe ground among the competing interests of Canada's provinces.

In her letter Monday, PQ international affairs critic Louise Beaudoin said "the non-sovereignty of Quebec has a price" — and that the cost of staying in Canada will grow with time.

"Quebec must get out of this regrettable position as quickly as possible," Beaudoin wrote in Montreal newspaper La Presse. "And to do this there's only one solution, getting complete independence."

[. . .]

The Bloc Québécois has already accused Harper of being soft on Alberta, whose economy is based on fossil fuels, at the expense of less-polluting provinces.

One political scientist said the climate-change issue may have presented sovereigntists with an ideal wedge to drive between Quebec and Canada.

"There is a distinct disconnect here between the Quebec position and the federal position based on interests that are very easy to identify and understand," said Pierre Martin of the Université de Montréal.

While it's still possible to turn things around, Martin said the issue could be useful to sovereigntists if it festers because it's a new angle and it's easy to understand.

Although the environment hasn't proven pivotal with voters before, he said the game-changer would be any sanctions on poor performers.

Because it would be included in Canada's tally, Quebec could still get nailed even though it has achieved major emissions reductions in recent years, Martin noted.

"Quebec's exports would be taxed just as if the greenhouse gas emitting operations were taking place on our own territory," Martin said. "There is a potential for a potent economic issue that people can easily understand and that makes sense."

Martin said Premier Jean Charest could fend off the sovereigntists in Quebec by being tougher on the federal government, entrenching himself as the best defender of Quebec's interests.

19 Greenpeace protesters managed to climb two of the Parliament buildings and unfurl huge banners in broad daylight.

The activists, dressed in blue coveralls and white hard hats, scaled the West Block and the entrance to the Senate in the Centre Block - below the iconic Peace Tower - at about 7:30 a.m. Monday.

Some of them then rappelled off the steep roof of the West Block and hung massive banners in English and French reading: Harper/Ignatieff Climate Inaction Costs Lives.

It was a message to the prime minister and the Liberal leader to support tougher greenhouse-gas emission cuts, timed to coincide with the start of the big UN climate-change conference in Copenhagen.

[. . .]

Officers eventually escorted the activists from the roof and used an aerial ladder to remove others dangling on the side of the West Block.

The 19 protesters and an organizer were arrested without incident and turned over to Ottawa police. They will likely face charges of mischief, a police spokesman said.

"How did they get in?" asked security expert Bertram Cowan of Competitive Insights Inc.

"There was definitely a lapse, no doubt about it. It may be even as embarrassing as the people who crashed the president's dinner party. That's supposed to be a pretty secure area."

Cowan, a former officer with the RCMP and CSIS, was referring to a Virginia couple who slipped past security to attend U.S. President Barack Obama's first state dinner last month, even though they weren't on the guest list.

"Somebody is probably right now on the carpet, trying to explain what happened," Cowan said.

Security on Parliament Hill has been beefed up since the September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States.

RCMP cars guard the entrances to Parliament Hill and patrol the grounds. Anyone entering the Parliament buildings must go through at least one metal detector. Surveillance cameras cover most areas. Only authorized vehicles are allowed on the Hill, and parking in the nearby lots is restricted.

[H]ere I am [in Toronto], watching the astonishing spectacle of a beautiful, cultured nation turning itself into a corrupt petro-state. Canada is slipping down the development ladder, retreating from a complex, diverse economy towards dependence on a single primary resource, which happens to be the dirtiest commodity known to man. The price of this transition is the brutalisation of the country, and a government campaign against multilateralism as savage as any waged by George Bush.

Until now I believed that the nation that has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement was the United States. I was wrong. The real villain is Canada. Unless we can stop it, the harm done by Canada in December 2009 will outweigh a century of good works.

In 2006 the new Canadian government announced it was abandoning its targets to cut greenhouse gases under the Kyoto protocol. No other country that had ratified the treaty has done this. Canada was meant to have cut emissions by 6% between 1990 and 2012. Instead they have already risen by 26%.

It is now clear that Canada will refuse to be sanctioned for abandoning its legal obligations. The Kyoto protocol can be enforced only through goodwill: countries must agree to accept punitive future obligations if they miss their current targets. But the future cut Canada has volunteered is smaller than that of any other rich nation. Never mind special measures; it won't accept even an equal share. The Canadian government is testing the international process to destruction and finding that it breaks all too easily. By demonstrating that climate sanctions aren't worth the paper they're written on, it threatens to render any treaty struck at Copenhagen void.

After giving the finger to Kyoto, Canada then set out to prevent the other nations striking a successor agreement. At the end of 2007, it singlehandedly blocked a Commonwealth resolution to support binding targets for industrialised nations. After the climate talks in Poland in December 2008, it won the Fossil of the Year award, presented by environmental groups to the country that had done most to disrupt the talks. The climate change performance index, which assesses the efforts of the world's 60 richest nations, was published in the same month. Saudi Arabia came 60th. Canada came 59th.

In June this year the media obtained Canadian briefing documents which showed the government was scheming to divide the Europeans. During the meeting in Bangkok in October, almost the entire developing world bloc walked out when the Canadian delegate was speaking, as they were so revolted by his bullying. Last week the Commonwealth heads of government battled for hours (and eventually won) against Canada's obstructions. A concerted campaign has now begun to expel Canada from the Commonwealth.

64 per cent of respondents to a Canadian Press Harris-Decima survey said rich nations have a responsibility to commit to higher and harder targets than developing countries.

Most also want to see a binding agreement come out of Copenhagen, and 81 per cent said Canada should act independently of the United States.

The Conservatives insist Canada must tie its policy to that of the U.S. because of the countries' extensive economic relationship.

The Harper government says it's waiting for the Obama administration to come out with a suite of policies to which Canada can synchronize its own.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency took a big step Monday toward regulating greenhouses gases, concluding that pollution from burning fossil fuels should be regulated.

The action, which lets the U.S. government control greenhouse gases without having to push legislation through Congress, appears timed to give a boost to the Copenhagen talks.

"This is a clear message to Copenhagen of the Obama administration's commitments to address global climate change," said Sen. John Kerry, a Democrat and lead author of a climate bill before the Senate. "The message to Congress is crystal clear: get moving."

Canadians had a similar message for the Harper government. The Harris-Decima survey shows that 46 per cent of respondents would like to see Canada play a lead role in Copenhagen.

"The number of people in society who feel like this is something that requires action is high," said Doug Anderson, senior vice-president of Harris-Decima.

"But most Canadians are still not at that emotional, 'I'm willing to step out of my house and go to a protest' kind of a situation on this. Yet that's not to say that they are not interested in seeing a pragmatic solution.

"It's no longer a situation where people say for the most part that this isn't something that's a concern, or this isn't something that requires action. It's both of those for most Canadians."

The telephone poll of just over 1,000 Canadians was conducted Nov. 26-29 and is considered accurate to within plus or minus 3.1 percentage points 19 times out of 20.

The men left the country without a word of warning. They range in age from early 20s to early 30s and all worshiped at the Abu Huraira mosque in North York, community leaders say. Two or three have since called home to say they travelled to Kenya, but didn't say whether they ever plan to return to Toronto. The language they used in the phone calls is similar, an indication that they may have been told what to say.

Security officials believe the missing men have crossed Kenya's northern border with Somalia to join al-Shabab – literally “the youth” – an al-Qaeda-inspired Islamist movement that has swept across southern and central Somalia.

“Somalia's fragile coalition government appears helpless against a widespread Islamist insurgency that is gradually tightening its grip,” RCMP Commissioner William Elliott said in a speech last month. He added he was particularly concerned about the jihad spreading to “Somali-Canadians who travel to Somalia to fight and then return.”

On Thursday, a suicide bombing believed to be the work of the al-Shabab ripped through a graduation ceremony in Mogadishu, killing three Somali cabinet ministers, several journalists and more than a dozen students. Similar bombings have been perpetrated by Somalis raised in Europe and the United States.

In Somalia, and increasingly in Canada, community leaders view such attacks as war on their own futures. The refugee communities that fled the civil strife 20 years ago had hoped that generations raised in the West would break the cycle of bloodshed, poverty and anarchy. The cruel twist is that a handful of youth within the Somali diaspora are being pulled back to their homeland to perpetuate it.

[. . .]

Last month, U.S. prosecutors charged a group of American Somalis with recruiting at least 20 of their own kinsmen from the Minneapolis area to join the al-Shabab, including some who have become suicide bombers. Until recently, no one in Canada thought Toronto would be the next target.

“We used to argue with our American friends. We would say, ‘We will never have this extremism in Canada because we are a tolerant society.' … None of our mosques were known for spreading an extremist message,” said Abdurahman Jibril, head of the Somali Canadian National Council, a group that lobbies to improve social services for Somali immigrants.

What's most troubling for Somali-Canadian leaders is that these are not young men who struggled to adjust to life in the West. At least two were born in Canada. The others were educated here from primary school onwards. They are the children of respected families who have found work and integrated into the broader community, leaders say. They attended either college or university. Most of the missing men can't even speak Somali, the community leaders add.

[. . .]

A further contradiction is that they may have joined a movement based primarily in Somalia's south, in the city of Kismayo, even though four of the five men are descended from families from the relatively stable northern province of Somaliland.

Somaliland was overseen by the British during the colonial era, while the south was run by the Italians. Somalis generalize by describing northerners as more reserved, and southerners as more outgoing. Northerners live primarily in the Scarborough area, while southerners dominate the area known as Little Mogadishu, around Kipling Avenue and Dixon Road. The bulk of Toronto's 50,000 Somalis live in the apartment towers and public-housing projects that dot that corner of Etobicoke.

Omar Kireh, administrator of the Abu Huraira mosque, where the men prayed, said it's strange that northerners would join a southern insurgency. But nothing is predictable with the younger generation, he added, who know little of the country's fractious tribal politics.

Nearly a year ago—in the course of cajoling people into joining the ubiquitous social network—I marveled at Facebook's astonishing growth rate: The site had just signed up its 150 millionth member, and about 370,000 people were joining every day. "At this rate," I wrote, "Facebook will grow to nearly 300 million people by this time next year." I confess, though, that I didn't think it was possible for the site to keep growing at that rate. Every hot Web site begins to fade at some point, and back then, the tech world was enamored of an upstart that was gaining lots of attention from celebrities and the media—Twitter. Even Facebook seemed scared of the micro-blogging site. In June, it redesigned its user pages to display updates as quickly as Twitter does, a move that prompted a barrage of threats to quit.

Those threats were empty. And so, it seems, was any threat posed by Twitter. Facebook's growth rate has actually accelerated during the past year. In September, it announced that it had reached 300 million members, and this week, it passed 350 million. About 600,000 people around the world now sign up every day. Twitter hasn't released any recent usage numbers, but traffic to its site is flattening. Indeed, it's likely that Twitter has fewer members than the number of people who play the Facebook game FarmVille (69 million!).

With Facebook Connect, the company is expanding its footprint beyond Facebook.com, spidering into every far-flung corner online. You can now update your Facebook status, add comments, or chat with your friends while surfing CNN, the Huffington Post, Yelp, Digg, and Slate, among other sites. On Wednesday, Yahoo announced that it would integrate Facebook Connect with all of its services. Though Yahoo hasn't explained how the partnership will work, you'll presumably be able to share your photos between Flickr (owned by Yahoo) and Facebook or comment on stories at Yahoo News using your Facebook profile. This huge partnership will bring Facebook closer to becoming what has long been a holy grail in the Web business—a kind of universal sign-on service, the one place that stores the world's social information.

Facebook's continued rise prompts several questions. Why do people keep joining? Will it peak and begin to decline, like so many social networks that came before? And more importantly, do we want a universal sign-on service, a single Web site that stores all our relationships, comments, pictures, and status updates?

Yes, I think we do. In fact, I'd argue that's why Facebook keeps growing and won't peak anytime soon—it is becoming part of the infrastructure of the Web, every bit as indispensable to our daily wanderings as Google or e-mail. When I pushed people to join Facebook in January, I reasoned that the site had become "a routine aid to social interaction, like e-mail and antiperspirant." In the months since, that has only become more true. It's the first place you think of to find new pictures of your nephew, to share an amusing anecdote with your college friends, or even to look for a job. The New York Times' Nick Bilton points out that Facebook's mutual-friends list transforms new relationships: "When I go to a meeting or party, I take a minute to look up who's attending and quickly explore friends we might share," he writes. "It's the perfect digital icebreaker."

Grey squirrel, St. Michael's College
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Black squirrel, St. Charles/Isabella parkette
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Eastern grey squirrels Sciurus carolinensis commonly occur in two colour phases, grey and black, which leads people to think—mistakenly—that there are two different species. Black is often the dominant colour in Ontario and Quebec, toward the northern limits of the species’ range. Farther south the black phase is less common and is not found at all in the southern United States. This may indicate that the gene responsible for black coloration has some cold-weather adaptation associated with it.

[. . .]

The eastern grey squirrel spends most of its life in trees, where it moves about with great agility. When it comes to the ground to feed or store food in hiding places to eat later, it also has great mobility and can reach speeds of up to 25 km per hour. In climbing or descending a tree trunk it moves head first, and when danger threatens it sidles inconspicuously around the trunk of the tree, keeping just out of sight of the predator. Another protective device is to remain motionless against the bark, which makes the animal difficult to see.

This species is mostly active during daylight, although it can sometimes be seen feeding by the light of a full moon. In summer, activity is greatest early in the morning and in mid-afternoon. Eastern grey squirrels do not hibernate and in winter are most active around midday, perhaps to take advantage of the warmest temperatures.

The eastern grey squirrel is a tolerant species and exhibits little aggressive behaviour. The dominance hierarchy in both females and males is maintained by a bluffing show of force or chasing rather than by actual fighting. Each animal has a home range where it does most of its foraging for food, makes its nest, and rears its young. The home ranges of males are larger than those of females. There is little territorial behaviour and many home ranges may overlap. Individual squirrels are often seen feeding close to each other without any aggressive activity, and in winter several animals may share the same tree den.

[T]he squirrel, in its ubiquity, has become a symbol of our city. On any given day, you can find tourists snapping shots of the black ones because they are unknown overseas. Squirrels are so cool that Brampton has replaced its former mascot, "Millie the Millennium Techno Bug," with Sassy the Sesqui Squirrel. When Brampton is biting you, you know you're onto something good.</i>

A month-long study of how 101,000 articles published by 157 newspapers proliferated around the Internet found that more than 75,000 sites reused 112,000 almost exact copies without authorisation. A further 520,000 articles were reprinted in part.

The study, conducted by Attributor, a content tracking business, will form a critical part of upcoming negotiations between the news industry and online advertising networks, which publishers want to use to claw back the ad revenues being made by unauthorised redistributors.

[. . .]

Although the Attributor and the Fair Syndication Consortium has not estimated what the unlicensed content in its latest study might be worth, an earlier study that it conducted with 25 of the largest US publishers in January estimated that they were missing out on a possible $250m in revenue.

The study’s findings indicate that publishers are likely to hold Google and Yahoo responsible for clamping down on the unauthorised use of their content.

They are also set to push the the search groups to divert some of the revenue that would have gone to sites using newspaper content without permission back to publishers.

The study found Google accounted for 53 per cent of the advertising being run alongside unlicensed stories, and Yahoo accounted for a further 19 per cent. Bloggers, often the primary target of publishers’ anger about how their stories are disseminated online, accounted for less than 10 per cent of the unauthorised reuse.

Jim Pitkow, chief executive of Attributor, told the Financial Times that under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, ad networks were obliged to respond if publishers notified them that their ads were running alongside unlicensed content. Instead of telling ad networks to see that the content is taken down, however, the consortium wants a share of the revenues from advertising that is run alongside it.

“Ad networks [asked us to] prove to us that publishers care and prove to us this is a large enough issue for us to pay attention,” he said. “I think this data will be used to make a lot of cases.”

“You’ll start to see folks taking action around this in 2010,” he added, saying that the first two quarters of the year would be when “the rubber will really hit the road”.

mouseworks

[H]is romantic life sounds complicated. Brother West is a reminder of Samuel Johnson’s description of remarriage as the triumph of hope over experience. One paragraph of musings following his third divorce obliged me to put the book down and think about things for a long while. Here it is:

“The basic problem with my love relationships with women is that my standards are so high -- and they apply equally to both of us. I seek full-blast mutual intensity, fully fledged mutual acceptance, full-blown mutual flourishing, and fully felt peace and joy with each other. This requires a level of physical attraction, personal adoration, and moral admiration that is hard to find. And it shares a depth of trust and openness for a genuine soul-sharing with a mutual respect for a calling to each other and to others. Does such a woman exist for me? Only God knows and I eagerly await this divine unfolding. Like Heathcliff and Catherine’s relationship in Emily Bronte’s remarkable novel Wuthering Heights or Franz Schubert’s tempestuous piano Sonata No. 21 in B flat (D.960) I will not let life or death stand in the way of this sublime and funky love that I crave!”

No doubt this is meant to be inspirational. It is at any rate exemplary. Rendered more or less speechless, I pointed the passage out to my wife.

She looked it over and said, “Any woman who reads this needs to run in the opposite direction when she sees him coming.”

Returning to the book, I found, just a few pages later, that West was getting divorced for a fourth time. Seldom does reader response yield results that prove so empirically verifiable.