An official from Sudan's National Elections Commission (left) helps a voter at a polling station in Juba, Sudan, Apr. 12, 2010. (UN Photo / Tim McKulka)

CTV.ca

In less than six months, Sudan will hold a referendum that experts say could produce a new country or spark a regional war. And as they prepare for the crucial vote, politicians from Africa’s largest country are seeking lessons from Canada.

Eight members of President Omar al Bashir’s ruling National Congress Party and three members of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, which governs the country’s semi-autonomous south, visited Canada this week to learn how Ottawa conducts plebiscites.

Those two parties represent opposing sides of a now quiet civil war, which was fought mainly in the south of the country and claimed more than two million lives. (Another war in the western Darfur region has killed several hundred thousand more.)

Southern Sudan sits atop the country’s vital oil resources, and followers of Christianity and traditional African faiths there have resisted attempts to impose Islamic customs and beliefs on them by the Muslim north.

A 2005 peace agreement helped quell decades of fighting between the two sides. Under its terms, Sudanese authorities must hold a referendum by Jan. 9, 2011, to determine whether the south will secede.

Ottawa hosted the Sudanese delegation as part of an offer of “technical support” for the referendum, Foreign Affairs spokesperson Lisa Monette told CTV.ca in an email.

Over five days, the group stopped in Quebec City, Montreal and Ottawa. They heard presentations from a number of organizations including Elections Canada.

Nelson Wiseman, a politics professor at the University of Toronto, said Elections Canada is often asked to provide advice on democratic processes abroad. Canada is seen as having “a lot of expertise in electoral administration,” he said, and has participated in several hundred electoral missions overseas.

In the case of south Sudan, Ottawa hopes the delegation’s visit will make the outcome of the pending referendum “more likely to be accepted by all parties involved, to produce legitimate outcomes, and thus avoid unnecessary violence,” Monette said.

EJ Hogendoorn, the International Crisis Group’s project director for the Horn of Africa, applauded Ottawa’s offer to share its expertise on secession referendums (Quebec has held two votes on sovereignty).

“Any attempt to try to make this vote as transparent as possible — meaning that the people believe the results are in fact the will of the voters — the better it will be for stability in the country,” Hogendoorn said by phone from Nairobi, Kenya.

Sudan was the largest recipient of Canada’s humanitarian aid in 2008-2009. Ottawa has spent at least $760 million there over the past four years. That represents a “significant” financial footprint in the East African country, Hogendoorn said.

A few dozen members of the Canadian military are stationed across the south, the western region of Darfur and the northern capital of Khartoum as part of United Nations and African Union peacekeeping missions. Eighteen Canadian police officers are training local authorities, and troops deployed from nearby African states drive 105 armoured vehicles borrowed from the Canadian military.

About 60 countries are involved in humanitarian and security work in Sudan, under the auspices of the UN and the African Union. But Hogendoorn said the international community is still doing too little to help the country avoid another war.

“This is the largest threat to regional stability in Africa at the present time,” Hogendoorn said. “And if you were to compare the assistance going to Sudan to the assistance that’s gone to other war-torn countries, such as Bosnia and Cambodia, it’s not nearly as much.”

A months-old national election may hold clues about what to expect from the referendum. Bashir’s National Congress Party won the April vote — a process that election monitors from the Carter Center deemed “chaotic, non-transparent and vulnerable to electoral manipulation.”

More recently, a July report by rights group Global Witness warned that Sudan remains “alarmingly unprepared” for the referendum. Government authorities have yet to pinpoint where the new country’s borders would lie if the south opts for independence. No agreements have been reached on how to divide Sudan’s debt or share its natural resources. Meanwhile the Sudanese armed forces and the Southern People’s Liberation Army are said to be rearming.

www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20100806/sudan-comes-to-canada-100808

A group advocating for Tibetan rights protests the Toronto visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao at Queen's Park on Saturday, June 26, 2010.

A multitude of groups gathered at Queen’s Park early Saturday afternoon, from Greenpeace, who said they mustered close to 200 members, to a collection of Tibetans protesting the Toronto visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao.

When the anti-G20 Peoples First march set off, the mood was festive, even family-friendly. The main concern for thousands in attendance seemed to be how to stay dry in the rain, rather than how to stay safe.

Toronto resident Kathryn Charm, who brought her seven-year-old son Joe along, said she came to protest issues such as global poverty and environmental degradation.

“In the short-term, I’m also enormously pissed off about the expenditure of $1 billion that could have been used for so many other things,” she added. “That was what really sent me here today.”

Riot police line the demonstration route in Toronto's Queen Street West shopping district on Saturday, June 26, 2010.

The demonstrators got their first view of statuesque police in black riot gear as they passed by the heavily guarded U.S. Consulate. By the time the crowd turned west down Queen Street, the atmosphere grew more tense. Riot police were lined up down side streets and protesters began chanting “no G20 on stolen native land.”

Moments later, a group broke off from the main march and charged south through a line of police, towards the security fence and the summit. A brief stampede stopped just short of a second row of police, these ones in riot gear.

Black-clad protesters appeared at the front and tried to smash through the police line. But after a brief skirmish they were forced to retreat to the approved demonstration route on Queen Street and continued west.

Masked protesters clad in black attempt to push through a line of riot police in the direction of the G20 summit on Saturday, June 26, 2010.

Several people were injured in the altercation, according to a paramedic who declined to give his name because he was treating demonstrators without the consent of his employer.

While most of the protesters turned north at the next main intersection and returned to Queen’s Park, several hundred people attempted again to break through police lines to the south, the direction in which the summit was being held.

Jamie Getgood was resting steps from the second standoff with riot police, wearing black and carrying a gas mask. The 21-year-old University of Toronto student said he came to the demonstration because he wanted to see what the government was spending $1 billion on.

“I don’t plan on looting or rioting or anything like that. It’s just if I’m tear-gassed,” he said, explaining that his clothes were made of synthetic fibre that could help keep his skin from becoming irritated if police deployed tear gas.

Around the corner, police on bicycles had formed a circle edged by a cruiser with several broken windows, after the protesters in black backtracked quickly east down Queen Street, smashing windows as they went. (They had used the crowd and the police confrontations as a diversion to help launch their rampage elsewhere.)

Riot police surround a damaged police cruiser in downtown Toronto, Saturday, June 26, 2010.

“Get in position, they’re coming!” one of the officers yelled. Riot police soon arrived on the scene to keep people back from the damaged vehicle.

By early evening, riot police marched on Queen’s Park. The designated protest site had been declared a riot zone, barring ambulances from entering as armoured police on foot and on horseback charged through the crowd.

Sunday

The streets were eerily quiet Sunday morning. More businesses had boarded up their windows in the city’s Queen Street West shopping district. Many had posted signs saying that they were closed for the day. And there were very few pedestrians on the streets.

Police were trying to conduct “investigative searches” on as many suspected protesters as possible, roaming the downtown in vehicles or on bikes, or standing in groups on street corners in the hope of confiscating anything a person could use to cause further damage.

A woman is searched by police in downtown Toronto on Sunday, June 27, 2010.

A small group of demonstrators and reporters were waiting outside the temporary detention centre where those taken in mass arrests were being held. An hour earlier, police had used tear gas to disperse a group that had gathered to hold a vigil outside the centre.

Bridie Wyrock, a 20-year-old student from Cleveland, Ohio in a tie-dye t-shirt, had just been released and was waiting for a friend she was staying with to come through the gates.

Wyrock had been arrested Saturday evening at a demonstration in the city’s financial district and was held for 19 hours, she said. During her detention, someone came around with cheese and butter sandwiches once, and she was given water three times.

“It was like a hamster cage,” she said.

Wyrock was placed under arrest, charged with breach of the peace, mischief and obstruction of traffic, she said. But police dropped the charges before she was released.

Later Sunday afternoon, a man who gave his name as Dionysos Savopoulos was travelling on foot to the Toronto Community Mobilization Network’s “convergence space,” a hub for protesters during the anti-G20 demonstrations on the city’s west end.

He was wearing a black sleeveless T-shirt with a red bandana around his neck, and a pink bracelet around his wrist indicating he had been detained by police.

Anti-G20 protester Dionysos Savopoulos is detained for a second time by police in Toronto on Sunday, June 26, 2010.

Savopoulos said he was taken into custody with dozens of others at a protest in front of a Novotel hotel on Saturday night. His cell contained bystanders as well as protesters, he said. He was held in handcuffs for 17 hours and given three butter and cheese sandwiches and a cup of water.

“I don’t like the fear that’s been invested into the security,” he said. “I feel very intimidated.”

“There were people with the agenda to cause destruction but they were a very small minority,” he recalled, before being detained by police again minutes later.

Neighbourhood reaction

Across the street, police on bicycles had penned in a number of people who had gathered near the protesters’ headquarters to watch what was going on.

Police "kettle" or surround and detain a group of bystanders in downtown Toronto on Sunday, June 27, 2010.

One of them was Riali Johannesson, a criminal defence lawyer with blonde hair and wearing a baby blue dress, who had agreed to represent a woman taken in the Novotel police sweep.

“I’ve been speaking with the officers at the processing centre pretty much non-stop since around 11 o’clock last night, and they’re not able to give me any information as to where she is,” Johannesson said.

Another of her clients was arrested on Thursday while taking photographs downtown and was charged with assault.

“It sounds to me as though the charges won’t stand up in a criminal court” in that case, she said. “We’ll certainly be pursuing civil action.”

Further down the street, people began chanting at the 50 or so police on the street: “Leave our neighbourhood.”

Officers were subjected to a steady stream of colourful insults from less well-mannered demonstrators from the time they blocked the march from moving to the G20 security fence on Saturday afternoon.

But after the mass arrests began, the most common word hollered at police on Sunday was “shame.”

John Clarke, an organizer with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, speaks at a press conference about next month's G20 summit protests in Toronto on Thursday, May 20, 2010.

CTV.ca

On Wednesday, five organizers involved with planning the upcoming G20 protests were visited at home or at work by security officials in Toronto.

The officials identified themselves as Canadian Security and Intelligence Service agents, according to Syed Hussan, an organizer with the Toronto Community Mobilization Network, which is coordinating next month’s protests.

“It’s random targeting,” Hussan said. “We’re talking about young students, we’re talking about people who are retired.”

Each was asked about “their political work and affiliations” and their views on protest tactics, said Macdonald Scott, a member of the network’s legal team.

A spokesperson for CSIS said that the agency could not comment on anything to do with its intelligence gathering operations. But the questioning sessions appear to represent the latest episode in a game of cat and mouse between security officers and protesters in the lead up to the G20 summit on June 26-27.

For months, Toronto police have been trying with mixed results to speak with protest organizers. The network maintains that CSIS, the agency responsible for rooting out threats to Canada’s national security, is now also approaching them.

Rights issues

The network calls such encounters “police harassment,” and Hussan said the group plans to publish a list of at least 27 documented instances of them next week.

The unannounced police visits have also caught the attention of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, a legal agency that promotes respect for “fundamental freedoms.”

On Friday, the CCLA met in a private law office with the Integrated Security Unit, a hybrid of police and military forces that’s planning the enormous security operation for the international summit.

In a statement released hours later, the CCLA said it was concerned about the “unprecedented” security arrangements being planned for the G20, including “pre-summit interactions with potential protesters.”

“There are powers of the police that should not be used to undermine a legitimate and peaceful protest,” said Nathalie Des Rosiers, a CCLA spokesperson.

The CCLA is also concerned with how sonic weapons will be used during the demonstrations, and under what conditions protesters could be arrested en mass. It’s also worried about the size of the security perimeter around the summit and the creation of a “designated demonstration area.”

“The role of the police is also to protect the right of freedom of assembly, not to see this right as an impediment to the meeting or an impediment to security,” Des Rosiers said. “It’s like the Santa Clause Parade. It causes some inconvenience, but it’s a good thing.”

Meaghan Gray, a spokesperson for the Security Intelligence Unit, said that Toronto police are working on guidelines about the use of sonic weapons, which can blast audio messages or emit a painful sound that can immobilize a crowd.

Focus on causes

While many details about the summit’s security have yet to be released, protest organizers held a press conference on Thursday to outline why they want to hold demonstrations.

“After many months of planning, this is sort of our coming out party,” said Claudia Calabro, a spokesperson for the the network.

Nine independent groups who are planning to join in the protests spoke about a range of issues.

Anna Willats, an organizer with Gender Justice for All, criticized the exclusion of abortion funding from Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s maternal and child health agenda for the G8.

A spokesperson for an environmental group noted that Ottawa has refused a request by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to address climate change at the G20 meeting.

Organizers were then asked about the recent firebombing of a Royal Bank branch in Ottawa. But they declined to comment on the incident.

“We’re not here to talk about what happened in another city,” said Lesley Wood, who answered questions on behalf of the network.

That firebombing took place overnight on Monday and caused $500,000 in damages. A group identifying itself as “FFFC – Ottawa” posted a video online of the bank in flames, and claimed responsibility. RBC’s funding of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games and of the oilsands prompted the attack, the group said, adding that it plans to visit Toronto in June.

But the groups involved with planning the G20 demonstrations have a peaceful reputation, according to Janet Conway, the Canada Research Chair in Social Justice at Brock University.

“They have absolutely no history of this kind, and nobody in any activist circle that I know is aware of who this group is in Ottawa,” she told CTV.ca on Friday. “If there’s some window-breaking, or some kind of violent encounter with police, this will be the work of a tiny minority if it happens at all.”

Whatever uneasiness there is among protest groups about the firebombing, organizers of mass demonstrations often agree not to publicly criticize the tactics that other activists use, Conway said, in the hopes of pushing issues they’re concerned with to the forefront.

“That’s not the main story from the point of view of the organizers,” she said. “There’s a sense that national parliaments are not reflective of popular will, and even less so at these gatherings.”

“The growing protests over the last decade reflect that all over the world.”

Demonstrators stand behind a line of riot police in Vancouver during the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. (Kris Krüg)

CTV.ca

While the opening ceremonies of the 20three10 Winter Olympic Games unfolded at BC Place on Feb. 12, about 1,500 people marched through Vancouver’s streets, ushering in days of demonstrations.

Those events are largely remembered with fondness among Canadian protesters because they helped push community issues, such as homelessness and unsettled indigenous land claims, onto the international stage during the Games.

“It was not just to protest the Olympics, it was about tying them to local concerns,” said Harsha Walia, who was an organizer with the Olympic Resistance Network.

“We saw a convergence of social movements,” she said. “The same thing is happening in Toronto.”

Walia added that she and and 50 to 100 other Vancouver residents plan to travel to Toronto for demonstrations against the G20 summit, which is due to be held there on June 26-27.

Activists in Toronto have been meeting for more than a year to plan mass protests aimed at the international meeting. And they say they’ve learned from Vancouver’s anti-Olympics demonstrations.

“There’s a lot of inspiration we’re sharing from there,” said Syed Hussan, an organizer with the 200-member Toronto Community Mobilization Network, which is coordinating the G20 protests. “That was a very successful model.”

Organizers created the TCMN in December to help recruit like-minded groups for the upcoming demonstrations, which are expected to draw protesters from across Canada and the United States. They’re organizing meeting places, booking transportation, setting up lines of communication and gathering food to keep demonstrators energized while they’re on the streets.

As with Vancouver’s Olympics protests, their plan is to “do the local and the global,” Hussan said. Organizers hope to connect popular causes in Toronto’s activist scene, such as poverty and migrants’ rights, with decisions being made by the world’s 20 largest economies.

“The G20 is now a mode for everyone to come together and work towards a concrete point,” Hussan said. “We’re all joining forces, and it’s going to be a major turning point for the city.”

Security concerns

Like the Olympics, a special police unit is heading up security for the G20. It’s staffed by municipal officers, Ontario Provincial Police, RCMP and the Canadian Forces. And it’s responsible for staging what’s being described as the largest security operation in Canada since the Second World War.

For two weeks in June, most of Toronto’s financial district will sit behind kilometres of fence as police work to bolster security around the Metro Convention Centre, where the summit will be held.

“An event of that international size and scope lends itself to a very significant security presence,” said Meaghan Gray, a spokesperson for the Toronto Police Service’s G20 planning team.

“We anticipate that most of the groups that want to protest will do so in a peaceful and responsible way,” she said. “We’re planning of course for any eventuality.”

Police have been trying to talk to protest organizers for the past few months, Gray said. They hope to learn more about what they’re planning, so that the demonstrations and the security operation can work together “seamlessly.”

But many organizers have refused to speak to police, and complain that they’re being harassed.

“Sometimes when you give in to intimidation, it encourages further intimidation,” said Macdonald Scott, an immigration consultant and a member of the protesters’ legal team. “Nobody in Canada is under obligation to speak to the police, unless under arrest.”

Scott travelled to Vancouver during the Olympics to provide legal support during the demonstrations there. In Toronto, he said 40 to 60 “legal observers” will be on the streets to protect protesters. At least six other legal staff will work in an office away from the security zone, and there will be two-dozen lawyers on call.

The job of the legal team will be “to monitor police misconduct,” but also to provide “proper defence” to those who are arrested, and to bail protesters out of jail if need be, he said.

Organizers are also concerned that the scale of the security operations could discourage people from attending planned rallies.

“It’s a fear tactic — people are being scared to shut up,” Hussan said. “And I think the only way to organize in that is to have hope, share, and build community.”

Changing tactics

The expansive security operation being staged for the G20 summit is part of an international trend, according to Lesley Wood, a professor at York University who studies globalization and social movements.

“At any of these demonstrations, the vast majority of people are not arrested or hurt in any way,” she said. “But the optics of it are that it’s going to be a war.”

“The tactics of the protesters are not really radicalizing, and yet you’re seeing this constant militarization of the policing.”

The focus of mass protests in North America has evolved too, she said. During the height of anti-globalization demonstrations from 1999 to 2001, activists took aim at multinational corporations, and the idea of “summit-hopping” was in vogue.

Today, big protests tend to be more concerned with attacking governments for failing to deal with local problems, and with building networks of groups that want to address those problems.

Since the 1960s, social movements have come in waves that typically last a few years, she said. The fallout from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks largely quashed the protest movement that had been on an upswing on the continent since 1999.

“I think that may have worn off,” she said. “There hasn’t been a lot of mobilization against the economic crisis. Looking at history, one would expect much more outrage.”

“Perhaps this is going to be the time when it emerges.”

Customers checking out at Sonic Boom Music, a 14,000-square-foot record shop in Toronto, April 15, 2010.

CTV.ca

A key episode in Jay Ferguson’s music career came about when, at age 12, he landed a job at a small record shop in Halifax.

“Another guy got fired while I was in the store,” Ferguson recalls. “So the owner looked at me and was like ‘do you want a job?’”

He worked at the store for the next four years, immersed in music by artists such as Elvis Costello, The Kinks and The Who. Those years changed his life.

“Working in that environment opened up a whole other world of music to me. I just really fell in love with it and wanted to play in a band ever since,” Ferguson said. “Everything else went by the wayside.”

Nearly three decades later, Ferguson and his bandmates from veteran power-pop quartet Sloan are joining dozens, perhaps hundreds of bands around the world by playing a free in-store concert on Saturday, in a collective gesture of support for the embattled neighbourhood record shop.

The performances are being held as part of Record Store Day, an annual campaign held on the third Saturday of April. This is a day to remind music listeners that, in the face of changes wracking the recording industry, independent music retailers would love their support.

More than 1,400 stores are participating in this year’s festivities, mostly in the United States and Britain. About 70 Canadian shops are taking part, including Vancouver’s Zulu Records and Sonic Boom in Toronto, where Ferguson will be playing with Sloan.

Record Store Day was dreamed up three years ago by Chris Brown, an employee at a New England indie music shop. Since then it has grown into a major international undertaking.

A long list of industry giants including The Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Velvet Underground, R.E.M. and Emmylou Harris are marking this year’s event with limited edition releases available only at independent record stores.

“It seems to have grown at a phenomenal rate,” says Spencer Hickman, a spokesperson for the event who runs Rough Trade East, a three-year-old record shop in London, England. “But I work in a busy store so I know how much people love record shops still.”

Industry changes

The Internet has visited sweeping changes on the recording industry, changes that are still playing out and that no one seems to fully understand yet.

Many specialized independent record shops, particularly in major cities, say they’re doing well. Others are closing their doors due to competition from music piracy, online retailers and big-box stores.

The number of indie record shops in Britain dropped from 734 in 2005 to 269 last year, according to the Independent Retailers Association. An estimated 3,000 stores sell recorded music in the United States, down from 12,000 a decade ago.

In Canada, sales of compact discs and vinyl fell nearly 7 per cent last year while digital sales jumped 42 per cent, mirroring changes in other markets. Business is quickly migrating online to outlets like iTunes, which boasted in February that it had sold an astonishing 10 billion songs.

Phil Gallo, an American journalist who has been writing about music for 25 years and co-authored a new book called “Record Store Days,” says neighbourhood music retailers are still coping with industry decisions that were taken more than a decade ago.

In the 1990s, the major labels embraced large chain stores as a way to sell huge volumes of “hit” CDs, ignoring small independent shops, Gallo said. Then the Internet collapsed the market.

But record labels such as Warner Music are starting to pay attention to small retailers again, he said, because they’re learning that such shops “drive the pace, either in the types of music or how it’s sold.”

“I think they’re starting to realize how vital they are to telling them what consumers want.”

Bouncing back?

If the 21st century has been tough on brick-and-mortar music shops so far, Record Store Day might be a sign of better times ahead.

EMI, Universal Music and Warner Bros. Records are among the event’s sponsors in the U.S., and Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said the date will be officially recognized in New York City.

Audiophiles are also turning to vinyl records in greater numbers, a format that many independent music shops never stopped stocking. In the U.S., vinyl sales shot up 33 per cent last year, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Still, in the Internet age, big questions loom over many independent retailers, particularly those outside major markets like Toronto or Montreal.

“We’re a dying breed,” said Chris Boyne, an employee at Encore Records in Kitchener, Ont. “I mean it’s sustainable for now. But who knows?”

On Record Store Day in 2009, there was a line-up out the door of the 29-year-old shop, he said. But overall, sales have been dropping since he started working at Encore six years ago.

“We all love good music, and we like to try and share it with people,” Boyne said. “You can find that stuff on the Internet by yourself. But it’s not the same — it’s really not.”

An oilsands processing plant near Fort McMurray, Alta., Sept. 7, 2008. (Rodrigo Sala)

CTV.ca

The meeting of Arctic states held in Chelsea, Que. earlier this week was billed as a way to spur international efforts concerning global warming and the Far North.

Instead, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton criticized Ottawa for failing to invite more foreign governments and other stakeholders, such as aboriginal groups, that are concerned with Arctic issues.

“We need all hands on deck because there is a huge amount to do, and not much time to do it,” Clinton said in a prepared statement. “What happens in the Arctic will have broad consequences for the Earth and its climate. The melting of sea ice, glaciers and permafrost will affect people and ecosystems around the world, and understanding how these changes fit together is a task that demands international co-operation.”

Yet when it comes to understanding how the climate of the Arctic will change in coming years, scientists say Canada is falling off the map.

Last week, a climate research centre at the University of Montreal, known by the acronym ESCER, warned that such groups are being forced to close across the country.

A lack of federal funds for climate and atmospheric science has “sounded the death knell for research groups working in this field in Canada,” Rene Laprise, ESCER’s director, wrote in a statement.

His centre has lost two staff, who found government jobs after learning that their salaries would not be guaranteed past September 2010, Laprise told CTV.ca by email. Five others are expected to leave “any time,” he wrote.

Climate scientists across the country say they’re in a similar situation — with dwindling funds and poor prospects to secure more money, they’re preparing to shut down major projects while their staff seeks jobs abroad.

Financial woes

Laprise and other scientists in his field are frustrated that the 2010 federal budget, made public last month, set aside no new money for the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, the main source of federal funding for climate-related research.

CFCAS was founded in 2000 and has doled out $116 million on 198 research grants at universities from Victoria to Halifax.

Canadian scientists who have contributed to international initiatives such as the World Climate Programme and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change rely on the foundation for a large part of their research money.

And while CFCAS’s mandate runs to March 31, 2012, it hasn’t received any new cash since 2003, and the money it has received was “fully committed” two years ago.

“There are no more funds to be distributed,” Kelly Crowe, a spokesperson for the foundation, told CTV.ca by email. “Our researchers are all looking at wrapping up their projects for good.”

A spokesperson for Environment Canada said that last year, the ministry received a funding request from CFCAS for $50 million to be spent over three years. But the request hasn’t been approved.

“The government will continue to consider this proposal, in the context of our current fiscal constraints,” Tracy Lacroix-Wilson wrote in an email. “We cannot speculate on any future funding at this time.”

Brain drain

Meanwhile, climate and atmospheric science researchers have begun to leave the country.

In December, Katrin Meissner quit a tenure-track position at the University of Victoria and moved her family to Sydney, Australia. She now studies climate change at the University of New South Wales, with two other researchers who also recently left Canadian universities.

“The possible closing of the CFCAS was certainly part of it,” Meissner said, referring to her decision to leave.

Theodore Shepherd, a veteran physicist at the University of Toronto who studies atmospheric dynamics, said people like Meissner are pulling up stakes because the international landscape for climate-change funding no longer favours Canada.

When CFCAS was created in 2000, Shepherd said Canadian universities began attracting climate scientists from Europe who would otherwise have gone to the U.S.

But economic stimulus programs introduced in the wake of the recession injected cash into climate-change research in the U.S. and in many European countries. That’s made them more attractive destinations for scientists in related fields.

The situation is changing “partly because they’ve got more money, partly because we’ve got no money,” Shepherd said.

He admits he has started to look for opportunities abroad, due to persistent funding problems in Canada.

“Not super actively,” he said. “But I’m realizing it’s going to be very hard to do what I want to here.”

Atmospheric research on the Arctic, an area that experts say will be hit particularly hard by climate change, is also being threatened by federal funding problems.

James Drummond is an Oxford-educated physicist at Dalhousie University, and the principal investigator for the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory, located 1,100 kilometres from the North Pole.

He expects the lab will be forced to close unless Ottawa announces additional public money to pay for salaries and operational expenses.

“At the moment, we’re operating on the principle that something will turn up,” he said by phone from Halifax. “The reality is that the funding stream has been broken.”

In recent years it has become harder to get federal money in all areas of atmospheric science, Drummond said. And while many scientists in that field don’t expect to run out of funding until later this year or early 2011, he said they need new money now in order to map out their work next year.

“It’s not research that can be turned on and off like a tap,” Drummond said.

With no additional money, he added, the issue of brain drain has become “very real” in the world of Canadian atmospheric science.

“And once those people leave it will be very hard to get them back, because they’ll say ‘well, look what happened last time.’”

The sign outside Google China headquarters in Beijing, adorned with flowers and notes from local Internet users. (Mike Dong)

CTV.ca

For nearly two months, Internet users in China have been waiting anxiously to find out whether the world’s largest online search engine will close in their country.

As ecologist Xiong Zhenqin told the journal Nature recently: “Research without Google would be like life without electricity.”

The Internet giant announced in January it was reassessing whether to continue its operations in China, where 384 million people surf the Web under tight government controls.

Google discovered that hackers had broken into its popular Gmail application. The attacks appeared to originate from mainland China. The culprits were looking for information about Chinese human rights activists and that suggested government involvement, Google alleged.

Citing concerns over security, human rights and freedom of speech, the California-based Internet giant said it would either find a way to stop censoring its search results in China or leave.

Whether Google and Beijing are in negotiations is unclear, but the company has made no public decision on the matter. Meanwhile the cyber attacks, which Google said hit at least 20 other firms, have reverberated through Washington.

The U.S. National Security Agency probed where the hackers were based, tracing the attacks to servers in Taiwan, then reportedly to a pair of Chinese schools. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also demanded that Chinese authorities conduct a thorough and transparent investigation.

“The Google attacks were taken extremely seriously — more than just an incident of potential industrial espionage but a major body blow to the American political system,” said Ronald Deibert, a cybersecurity expert at the University of Toronto.

Deibert is one of the people Google has been soliciting advice from in its dealings with China. He delivered a presentation about the rise of cyberspace control at Google’s headquarters a week before the company uncovered the hack. And officials informed him of their discovery before they went public.

Deibert told CTV.ca the hackers went one step further than was widely reported, ostensibly trying to access directories of data that Google collects, as required by U.S. national security laws.

The company tapped Deibert’s expertise after he co-wrote a 2009 study into cyber attacks against the office of the Dalai Lama. Researchers uncovered an extensive online spy network dubbed GhostNet that they traced back to China. It had compromised 1,295 computers across 103 countries — including some in Canada.

Domestic appeal

Deibert says Canada needs to confront the issues of censorship and government intrigue on the Web that incidents like the Google hack raise.

In a paper published on Feb. 22 by the Canadian International Council think-tank, he called on Ottawa to develop a cyberspace strategy that includes:

• Fixing Canadian laws that foreign governments could use to justify controlling the Web, such as with content filtering or online surveillance
• Scrutinizing whether Canadian technology exports are being used by foreign governments to restrict Internet access
• Encouraging “arms control in cyberspace” by, for example, proposing a UN treaty to make the Web more open and peaceful

The idea of “arms control” may seem extreme, but governments have started using the Internet to help them wage war.

During the 2008 conflict in Georgia, hackers took down key government websites in the capital of Tbilisi while Russian tanks rolled across the border. Military powers including France, Israel and the U.S. have adopted such cyberwar tactics as part of their defence policies.

The Internet is “entering a dangerous and chaotic phase, essentially a cyber-arms race,” Deibert said, and that’s led to spiralling computer espionage and computer network attacks.

“We need at least some government to stand up and say ‘how are we going to restrain this?’”

Policy ‘vacuum’

Stephen Harper’s Conservative government pledged, in this week’s throne speech, to create a cybersecurity strategy that would protect Canada’s “digital infrastructure.”

So far, however, there has been a “surprising vacuum in Canadian policy around cyberspace generally,” Deibert says.

Ottawa has been considering legislation on the issue. “The Investigative Powers of the 21st Century Act” was tabled last June. It proposed that Internet service providers be required to hand over data and personal information about their customers to police. But the bill hadn’t become law by the time Parliament was prorogued.

The federal government’s existing cybersecurity efforts are organized around Public Safety Canada. For example, CSIS and the RCMP’s technological crime unit probe Web-based threats or attacks and report to Public Safety.

The department is also “leading cross-government efforts to produce a cybersecurity strategy,” David Charbonneau, a spokesperson for Public Safety Canada, told CTV.ca by email.

The strategy will incorporate input from private companies and foreign governments, Charbonneau wrote, “and will build on significant efforts that have been underway.”

Meanwhile south of the border, U.S. President Barack Obama appointed a White House cybersecurity co-ordinator in January. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security created a similar position in 2005, and Washington unveiled a national cybersecurity plan in 2008.

As governments in North America and elsewhere develop policies on cyberspace, they’re influencing how the Internet will evolve.

“The dominant trend right now is the growing militarization of cyberspace,” Deibert said. “That leads down a path towards islands of territorialized Internet that are not connected to each other.”

“Another path I’d prefer to see is one where there’s perhaps a treaty articulated by countries of the world that lays out basic principles for how cyberspace should be governed,” he added. “Hopefully that would be in an open, public way.”

For the time being, efforts to keep the World Wide Web peaceful and open are centring on China, which passed a new round of Internet controls last week.

Without an international cyberspace treaty, the U.S. government is considering whether to lodge a complaint about China’s online censorship with the World Trade Organization.

But China isn’t alone. The list of countries where Internet censorship has become a hot-button issue has grown to include democracies like Germany, France and Australia.

CTV.ca

Ancient earthworks recently discovered in the Amazon that are challenging assumptions about the region's history. (Courtesy of Denise Schaan)

One of the many Hollywood films that will hit theatres this year is “The Lost City of Z,” in which a group of explorers set out to find a colleague who vanished in the Amazon rainforest.

Based on a true story, the movie stars Brad Pitt as Percy Fawcett, a world-famous British explorer who disappeared in 1925, during an expedition to find the mythical city of El Dorado, which Fawcett codenamed “Z” to keep his plans secret.

The premise of the movie, and its name, are taken from a book by David Grann, who retraced Fawcett’s route through the Amazon to investigate what happened to him.

Along the way, Grann learned of a group of archeologists who are unearthing evidence that, just as Fawcett believed, there were indeed large communities thriving in the Brazilian rainforest before Europeans arrived.

As the evidence mounts, it’s challenging conventional wisdom of the Amazon as a place so inhospitable it could only support small, nomadic tribes.

Instead it seems that large, complex societies may have tamed parts of the Amazon centuries before Spanish explorers sailed across the Atlantic. As that idea gains momentum, it’s also gaining more attention beyond archaeological circles.

“There is now becoming, not just in the scientific and academic work but in the public world, a sense of the breadth of these discoveries,” Grann told CTV.ca from New York. “They’re transforming our view of what the Americas looked like before Columbus.”

“It’s finally kind of breaking through.”

Turning point

Last month, a major archeological find was published in the British journal Antiquity. Using Google Earth and other satellite imagery, researchers found 260 geometrical shapes dug into a now-deforested 250-kilometre stretch of the upper Amazon basin.

“We know they’re spread over this wide region and they display very similar construction techniques,” said Denise Schaan, an archeologist from Brazil’s University of Para who co-authored the study. “So if it was not a single people building them, they had a kind of culture or religion that was spread over that territory.”

“We want to know who built these structures and for what reason,” Schaan added, speculating that they could have been fortified villages or ceremonial centres.

Some of the earthworks may date as far back as AD 200, a millennium before the Incan empire was founded. As many as 60,000 people lived in or near the “perfect circles, rectangles and composite figures” carved into the ground, the researchers reported. And many were linked by bridges or “avenue-like” roads.

What’s more, Schaan and her colleagues suspect there could be 10-times as many earthworks in surrounding areas, where the jungle is still standing.

The people who inhabited the sites disappeared around the same time that Spanish conquistadors ventured into South America, suggesting that diseases from Europe may have wiped them out.

A number of earlier discoveries suggest the Amazon was by no means virgin rainforest before the Age of Discovery began.

Archaeologists came across a series of 127 granite blocks on a Brazilian hilltop in 2006. Some of the blocks appear to be arranged astrologically, and may have been placed there as long as 2,000 years ago. The site has become know as the Stonehenge of the Amazon.

In 1996, American archaeologist Anna C. Roosevelt, a great-granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt, found a series of 11,000-year-old wall paintings in a Brazilian cave. The paintings are so old they’re challenging long-held assumptions about when the Americas were first settled and by whom.

More to come?

Technology may be one of the things driving these cascading discoveries. Grann says a lot of the archeologists who are investigating the Amazon’s pre-Columbian settlements are using high-tech tools such as satellite imaging and ground-penetrating radar.

Excavating ancient ruins is still important, but it’s now being aided by space-age tools.

And the trend isn’t limited to the Amazon. Growing numbers of archeologists around the world are using satellite imagery, according to Sarah Parcak, a professor of archaeology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Multispectral satellites, which can provide images in a range of light including infrared, were first launched in 1972. Parcak said her fellow archaeologists are realizing just how useful the devices may be for their research.

“They give us this ability to see beyond what we normally see,” Parcak said, adding that she has discovered hundreds of ancient sites in Egypt using satellite images. “They allow you to differentiate between ancient and modern pretty easily.”

Members of the Kuikuro tribe, who American archeologist Michael Heckenberger believes are the descendants of a much larger Amazonian people. (Tiago Brandao)

During Grann’s trip into the Amazon to find Fawcett, he met with an American archeologist named Michael Heckenberger, who had been living for years with an aboriginal tribe near to where the British explorer disappeared in 1925.

Heckenberger has used satellite images to help identify nearly two-dozen ancient settlements in the southern Amazon. He believes the tribe he was staying with is made up of their descendants.

Time will tell whether the movie adaptation of Fawcett’s Amazonian quests will touch on the ancient societies that eluded the explorer, and are now being discovered.

But a world away from Hollywood, archaeologists appear to be on the cusp of rewriting the Americas’ ancient history.

Saudi Arabia's Assistant Minister of Defense and Aviation arrives at the Pentagon for talks on Yemen, Nov. 17, 2009. (DoD / R. D. Ward)

CTV.ca

It’s a pattern that governments fighting Islamic extremism don’t want to see repeated — success cracking down on militants in one country boosts terrorism elsewhere.

In Afghanistan, for example, the U.S. invasion prompted al Qaeda’s leadership to seek shelter in the tribal areas of Pakistan, beyond the reach of the central government in Islamabad.

Similarly, experts say al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula, the group that claimed responsibility for the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound flight on Dec. 25, was formed in Yemen partly because of Saudi Arabia’s success at abolishing militant groups next door.

Saudi authorities have been waging a campaign to rehabilitate, imprison or kill suspected extremists since a wave of terrorist attacks wracked the country in 2003 and 2004. But some militants fled south to Yemen, where AQAP was created last January.

“There was a balloon effect,” said Letta Tayler, a terrorism and counterterrorism researcher with Human Rights Watch. “It’s a much more hospitable environment for al Qaeda than Saudi Arabia was following the crackdown.”

The American military had been helping Yemen combat al Qaeda before Umar Farouq Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian who had taken Arabic classes in Yemen, allegedly tried to detonate a bomb on board Flight 253.

Earlier in December, the U.S. military assisted with two air strikes on Yemeni territory. They were reportedly aimed at suspected al Qaeda leaders and killed several dozen civilians. The second strike took place a day before Abdulmutallab boarded a flight to Detroit.

The U.S. also provided nearly US$70 million in military aid to Yemen in 2009. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, has said the Department of Defense will double that amount this year.

Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that his government, along with the U.S., will help Yemen fund a new counterterorrism force.

Later this month, the British capital will also host two simultaneous international conferences, one on Afghanistan and the other on Yemen.

Tayler said that countries seeking to combat radicalization in Yemen would do well to learn from U.S. General Stanley McChrystal, NATO’s top commander in Afghanistan.

To defeat the Taliban and keep al Qaeda from returning to Kabul, McChrystal has recommended that U.S. troops use “courageous restraint.”

“At the end of the day, the success of this operation will be determined in the minds of the Afghan people,” McChrystal said last month. “It’s not the number of people you kill. It’s the number of people you convince. It’s the number of people that don’t get killed. It’s the number of houses that aren’t destroyed.”

As with Afghanistan, experts say there’s no easy solution to countering al Qaeda in Yemen.

Joost Hiltermann, deputy program director with International Crisis Group’s Middle East and North Africa arm, warned that military intervention could weaken the central government, allowing al Qaeda more free rein there.

“In a situation as fragile as in Yemen, to put a major external military force could be fatal,” Hiltermann told CTV.ca. “The country may not be able to sustain it.”

Complex problems

Yemen is a semi-mountainous country on the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula with a fast-growing population of some 22 million people.

One of the least developed countries outside sub-Saharan Africa, the UN Human Development Index estimates that 35 per cent of Yemenis live in poverty. Malnourishment is a common affliction for children and nearly half the population is illiterate.

Oil, which brings in three-quarters of the national income, is running out. Tourism was touted as a possible alternative revenue generator (Yemen houses four UNESCO heritage sites). But visitor numbers have dropped due to attacks on foreigners, and political instability.

About 150,000 people have been displaced by a civil war that has been raging intermittently near Saada, in the north of the country, since 2004. The Yemeni government has been accused of indiscriminate bombing in the conflict, which Hiltermann says “is clearly escalating.”

In the south, a secessionist movement flared up last spring, bringing hundreds of thousands of protesters into the streets.

A female Yemeni SWAT team on a training exercise. (BBC World Service)

“The bottom line is, the country’s in chaos,” Tayler said. “There are no prospects for youth and most citizens are concerned about how to get the next meal.”

As Yemen’s troubles mount, President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s government is losing more control. His reach, which doesn’t extend to many parts of the country, is weakening further.

Marisa L. Porges, an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who advises on counterterrorism for the U.S. Department of Defense, travelled to Yemen in the fall.

“There are so many domestic problems that al Qaeda isn’t a top priority,” Porges said by phone from Washington.

“In private conversations, many officials say ‘we’re already there — the state has failed.’” she added. “This is the pervading sense now.”

Confronting al Qaeda

AQAP launched several attacks last year, including an attempt to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s counterterrorism chief, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, and two attacks against South Korean tourists and dignitaries — all using suicide bombers.

But the attempted Dec. 25 airliner attack seems to represent the group’s first plot against a target outside the region.

While that incident focused the international community’s attention on AQAP, experts say it will be hard if not impossible to keep such groups off Yemeni territory without addressing the country’s other problems.

Jane Novak, an American analyst and expert on Yemen, warned that President Saleh may simply use military aid from the U.S. to oppress his opponents, while the country goes down.

“It’s such a complex situation,” she said. “It’s very difficult in Yemen to find anyone there to work with.”

Convincing Saleh, who has ruled the country for three decades, to implement political reforms could help make the country less hospitable for terrorist groups by boosting loyalty to the government, Novak said.

“Basically in Yemen they consider (the Saleh regime) a tyranny, and an incompetent one as well,” she said. “To reduce the instability, the ungoverned regions, they need to somehow force power-sharing and the respect for civil rights.”

Tayler echoed that view, saying policies that reduce oppression and boost faith in the government are needed to fight al Qaeda there effectively.

“You need a holistic approach,” Tayler said. “Otherwise, the counterterrorism policy will simply backfire — whether it’s Pakistan, whether it’s Yemen, whether it’s Afghanistan.”

A boy sits on a piece of rubble somewhere in or near Gaza City, February 2009. (Andreas H. Lunde)

CTV.ca

After flying to Cairo and bussing a few hundred kilometers eastward, Montreal engineer Ehab Lotayef will try to enter the Gaza Strip from a border crossing at Rafah, Egypt, on Dec. 28.

For months, the 52-year-old Canadian-Egyptian has been helping to organize a massive trip to the Palestinian territory that will include some 1,300 people from 42 countries.

The trip, which is the brainchild of American peace group Code Pink, has won celebrity endorsements from the likes of Alice Walker, Oliver Stone, Gore Vidal, Naomi Klein and Alexandre Trudeau.

Organizers hope to hold a demonstration in Gaza City on Dec. 31, alongside thousands of local residents, to commemorate the war last year and to demand Israel lift a blockade against the movement of goods in and out of the territory.

“It’s an accumulated problem,” Lotayef said by phone. “No one is really supporting the Palestinians’ rights as they should be, to guarantee peace for both sides.”

Lotayef’s concern has been echoed by a number of rights groups and United Nations agencies over the past year, which have called attention to worsening living conditions inside the 10-by-40-kilometre strip.

In September, the UN Environment Programme issued a report warning that the aquifer that 1.5 million Gazans drink from, and grow crops with, is failing. Overuse is making the water supply saltier, it said, and pollution from sewage and fertilizers is high enough to put young children in jeopardy of nitrate poisoning.

Last year’s fighting — in addition to killing 1,300, injuring 5,300 and creating 600,000 tons of rubble – “exacerbated environmental degradation that has been years in the making,” the report stated. Repairing the water system will require US$1.5 billion over two decades, the agency estimates.

According to Joe Stork, deputy director of Human Rights Watch for Middle East and North Africa, such difficulties are made worse by the Israeli blockade because it keeps vital goods such as cooking oil and diesel fuel from reaching Gazans.

Stork said the blockade represents a violation of international law because it punishes Palestinian civilians as well as militants.

“There’s been next to no allowance for construction materials to get in,” he added. “So you have people in some cases still living out in the open, in the sense of not being in any kind of permanent shelter.”

The Red Cross has been equally critical of Israel keeping humanitarian and reconstruction supplies out. In a June report, it said neighbourhoods in Gaza that were badly damaged in the war, “will continue to look like the epicenter of a massive earthquake unless vast quantities of cement, steel and other building materials are allowed into the territory.”

Canada’s role

Last January, Ottawa pledged $4 million to help rebuild Gaza, and issued several statements expressing concern about the war’s effect on people living there.

But New Democrat MP Libby Davies, who travelled to Gaza in August as part of a Parliamentary delegation, told CTV.ca that many people she spoke to during the trip were worried Canada would cut aid to the Palestinians this year.

Women and children in a Gaza Strip refugee camp named Karama (Dignity), February, 2009. (ISM)

“When we spoke to various representatives in the West Bank, they were very concerned that Canada is going to in effect default on its spending commitment to UNRWA,” Davies said, referring to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which assists refugees in the territories.

An official at the Canadian International Development Agency told CTV.ca in an email that, as of Dec. 14, the agency had approved $20 million for UNRWA in 2009. That’s 28 per cent less compared to the 2008 total of $28 million.

Critics charge that, because the blockade is contributing to harsh living conditions, cutting aid to Gaza would leave Ottawa’s record on human rights open to criticism.

Tom Woodley, who heads a national non-profit group that’s been lobbying Ottawa to change its policies on various Middle East countries, said protecting that record in Gaza and elsewhere is key to protecting Canada’s international influence.

“Diplomatically, Canada needs to firmly support international law,” Woodley said. “It’s not just because we’re nice guys. It’s also because it’s in our best interest. On the world stage we’re a little guy. If someone tries to infringe on Canadian rights in the far north some day, we’re not going to be able to oppose them militarily. We’re going to have to call on international law.”

Similarly, Lotayef sees the trip to Gaza this month as an opportunity to press Ottawa to change its position on the conflict.

“Our government should take a more objective, more balanced position,” Lotayef said. “At this point in time we should increase our funding and at least contribute what we committed to contribute, to the Palestinian people.”