Five hundred dead ducks in the toxic sludge of a Syncrude Canada Ltd. tailings pond have dealt a major blow to Alberta’s $25-million campaign to sell the booming oilsands as eco-friendly. Company and government officials confirmed Wednesday that only five ducks were saved after a flock of mallards landed Monday morning on the partially frozen pond filled with oilsands wastes.

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Finally, the Cool One throws a little heat, shows a little fight. Here is a radical notion: this is exactly what Barack Obama needed. Clearly, he needed to stiff-arm Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but more than that he needed to show some outrage and maybe even a little bit of rage. He needed to show that he is capable of action when action is what is called for.

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The first time I noticed the term "ren rou sou sou" on a Chinese website, I was taken aback. "Human flesh hunting" is a literal translation, but the term, applied to the Internet, means a search engine that runs on people power - "human flesh searching engine." In December 2007, a 31-year-old Beijing woman named Jiang Yan jumped off the 24th floor balcony of her apartment. A post on her blog before her suicide blamed her death on her husband’s extra-marital affair. News of this "death blog" spread on the Chinese Internet and soon, a mass of outraged netizens launched a "human flesh search engine" to track down the guilty parties.

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The report to the city Police Commission is greeted with skepticism. ‘This is not a racist department,’ Chief Bratton says in defending the report. Los Angeles Police Department officials announced Tuesday that they investigated more than 300 complaints of racial profiling against officers last year and found that none had merit — a conclusion that left members of the department’s oversight commission incredulous.

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In a bid to reduce the number of hospital beds being taken up by the homeless and drug addicts in Vancouver, doctors will soon be making house-calls to those who live in single room occupancy (SRO) hotels in the Downtown Eastside. Many residents of the Downtown Eastside are seriously ill, often the result of drug use and hard living on the streets, said Lorna House, the director of mental health for the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority. By the time they get to a hospital, she said, they often need long-term care.

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Leaders of the country’s most effective youth arts centers talk about building power of youth through cultural expression, and why it is the best way to engage young people in politics.

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Good allies are in short supply. So the question becomes how does one become a good ally? In pondering this question, I realized that there are some people who could benefit from this information but would never ever use the term ally. For example, I have friends who will not ever consider themselves allies to the GBLTQ2 community because of their religious upbringing. However, the people who are my friends also realize that persecuting people for who they are is not right and they will not condone it.

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As a person who devotes quite a bit of time to fighting her own prejudices, this month gave me a whole lot to think about. I think that people tend to overlook how hard it is to change your thinking and how hard it is to let go of ingrained ideas - not just about external forces, but about the self. We tend to think that we see the world accurately. We tend to think that our views are right, and not question where we got them from. We tend to believe that if someone is attacking us, it’s because they are being a jerk - not because we are wrong. So when we run up against something that pushes back on us, takes us to task for something we have failed to do, part of the reaction is to protect the self.

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The cheering would begin soon enough. Dressed in a slim-cut gray suit and green tie, Van Jones ascended to the stage grinning and blowing kisses to the crowd. Jones, 39, a 6-foot-1-inch Yale Law grad, was appearing at a summit in San Francisco called "Advancing a New Energy Economy in California." The city’s charismatic mayor, Gavin Newsom, was among the presenters, along with corporate bigwigs such as PG&E chief executive Peter Darbee. But no one would outshine Jones.

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With just two months to go before its doors may be closed by the Conservative government, operators of North America’s only supervised injection site for users of illegal drugs have gone to court to stay open. The facility saves lives, reduces harm to drug addicts and increases their motivation to seek treatment, lawyers argued in B.C. Supreme Court yesterday. As a result, they said, federal drug laws against possession of heroin and cocaine should not apply there. "The criminal approach leads to death. Harm reduction leads to life," said John Conroy, representing the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users.

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