Monday, March 20, 2006

'One in three' roofs gone

By Dylan Welch and David Braithwaite
March 20, 2006 - 5:11PM

One in three houses have lost their roofs and at least 30 people have been hurt in the northern Queensland region where Tropical Cyclone Larry made landfall.

More than half of the houses and buildings in the small town of Innisfail, about 100km south of Cairns, suffered major damage when the category five storm hit about 4am, said Sergeant Gary Burkin of Innisfail police.

Larry has since been downgraded to category two.

"There's some buildings that have totally collapsed," Sergeant Burkin said. "It's greater than 50 per cent [damage] for housing and buildings."

About a third of houses at Innisfail - which has a population of about 8000 - had lost their roofs, said Queensland Counter Disaster and Rescue Services (CDRS) executive director Frank Pagano.

The damage was even greater at nearby Babinda, home to 1200 people, where 80 per cent of homes and 100 per cent of crops had been damaged.

The damage in Innisfail and Babinda was "absolutely huge", said Queensland Emergency Services spokeswoman Kathryn Ryan.

"There have been homes completely destroyed all over the place, the town is completely littered with debris, every tree in the place has been uprooted, there are powerlines everywhere."

There have been 30 casualties, including a fractured leg, a fractured ankle as well as minor cuts and abrasions, across Mareeba, Atherton, Innisfail and Babinda, reported the Counter Disaster Rescue Service at 3pm.

No serious injuries or missing persons were reported. [...]

Security trumps common sense

Mar. 20, 2006. 01:00 AM

How far will the U.S. government continue down the costly, unneeded and unproductive path of ever-greater "border security" at the expense of common sense?

The latest foolishness is a scheme to deploy machine guns on board the 11 U.S. Coast
Guard cutters that patrol the Great Lakes.

The weapons, which fire 600 rounds per minute, were not even imagined when the young republic and the British empire agreed, as part of an 1817 treaty, to keep the lakes demilitarized: neither side, says the Rush-Bagot agreement, will deploy more than four 18-pound cannon on the lakes.

In 2003, we now learn, Washington asked Ottawa to in effect issue a waiver for the machine guns; Ottawa agreed. This could be worse: The United States could have just gone ahead and mounted the rapid-fire weapons and relied on being able to argue they are less than cannon.

But the broader spirit of the accord is falling victim to Americans' security obsession since Sept. 11, 2001. The machine-gun issue is fairly trivial beside the much more worrisome requirement for passports or equivalent for admission to the United States, even for U.S. citizens.

The Conference Board of Canada, a policy think-tank, says the requirement will cost U.S. businesses $785 million (U.S.) a year and Canadian businesses double that amount.

The problem is that many people say they will just forgo cross-border visits, rather than pay for passports. The U.S. is considering a new voluntary identity card for border use by its own citizens. This would cost $55 (U.S.), less than a passport, but would be more secure than a driver's licence. Canada might do something similar.
But how many in each country would still refuse to pay? Survey results suggest at least one-third of those without passports in each country would be less likely than now to cross the border when the new requirement for land crossings kicks in on Jan. 1, 2008.

This passport requirement might well be disastrous for tourism and for small businesses located near the border, on both sides.

Against these costs, what benefits are expected? For Canada, there will be none. For the U.S. there will be, in theory, some additional security, if you presume those of malign intent are incapable of forging passports or otherwise sneaking across the border. In practice, genuine improvements in security seem unlikely.

Over and over the U.S. government has told us security now trumps trade. Well, it's their country. But from gunboats to passports, it looks from here as if our U.S. friends are letting security trump common sense.

Saturday, March 18, 2006

Who made this plan?

Ugly Americans, Dancing Israelis and the crown are endlessly making war on the whole world.

Signs Editorial

By John Kaminski
skylax@comcast.net
March 17, 2006

Americans aren't the good guys anymore. Hollow TV pitchmen still insist our boys are dying for their country, but more and more people know that those lives are being wasted on corporate profits, deliberately squandered for somebody's twisted big score scheme.

And you know who's making the money. The very pervs who are orchestrating all these wars. Repeat after me: Carlyle Group.

Maybe the most frightening thing is that so many Americans are going along with the scam. And the more I find out about American history - from George Washington butchering French traders in their sleep on Christmas Eve - maybe they always have.

How many thousands of supposedly responsible Americans are keeping their mouths shut about what really happened on 9/11, or how they knew always the reason for the Iraq war was one big lie?

Lately I've noticed people, particularly convenience store clerks, are looking at me strangely.

Maybe I don't hide so well the worried look on my face.

People want to talk about politics, candidates? I see a one-party system in the United States dominated by nongentile bankers aligned with the forces of Europe's old money, which likely in and of itself is nongentile as well, since the major controlling mechanism of human society - the Rothschild controlled banks, whose emblem is the prototype of the flag of Israel - have dominated the world financial scene since long before they pilfered from American citizens the right to control their own money way back in 1913.

But today's news is worse.

Scheduled start of World War Three was due March 20, when they tried to start up the Iranian bourse (European term for "stock exchange") trading oil in euros in Tehran.

Doesn't it give you a warm feeling when you know the sclerotic, twitching finger of Dick Cheney is fiddling with the nuclear button? Here's a man who has never been stopped, and he can produce the spilled blood to prove it.

Who knows what the latest twist will be in this stranger-then-coincidence confrontation with Iran over another pack of lies? The U.S. picks wars with whomever it wants, and because its citizenry is so drugged-out by bad schools, medicine and food, they roar their drunken approval of these atrocities.

Trouble is, the last pack of lies, implemented with the devil's own fury in the country next door, didn't do Iraq a bit of good, and it looks for all the world that the U.S./Britain/Israel military machine aims to cut a swath of control from Beirut to Baluchistan, and woe to anyone who gets in the way. The southern shore of the Persian Gulf is already firmly locked up with Zionist-financed allies in Jewish-controlled Saudi Arabia, and the 'Stans' between Iran and Russia/China seem solidly fortified with U.S. airbases.

Standing exactly in the way of the new American parking lot now being paved over central Asia is the venerable Iran, modern redaction of the Persian empire, from the whom the Western powers of history took their organizational models.

Now perhaps the world's most vibrant democracy (about the only place remaining I have been able to speak freely on TV and radio now that I have been heavily censored in the U.S.), Iran is a young thriving nation with an honorable tradition, which Israel seeks to smash because it threatens Jewish totalitarian hegemony in the region, a condition Palestinians and Iraqis have long experienced firsthand.

Israel wants to turn the entire Middle East into an unhabitable though industrially feasible dead zone from which profits can be extracted without people - especially people they consider cattle - getting in the way.

Iran has been the only country on Earth to officially challenge the insidious Jewish mindlock on the Holocaust, that meme of memory from World War Two that has been turned into a mental inoculation to prevent discussion of Jewish media ownership, the centuries-old Zionist master plan, and current and continuing Israeli atrocities, which are daily concealed by the Jewish press.

Perhaps it's an important moment in history, as these modern Persians have opened a door to public consciousness of the Jewish attempt to eradicate freedom of speech once and for all throughout the world through rigid enforcement of the Holocaust religion and burying the true facts of Auschwitz with stories about soap and burning in lakes of fire.

Ironic, isn't it, that this is where Judaism started, in the ancient Mecca called Babylon, and now the surrounding countryside is about to be nuclearized, if not vaporized? Fitting tribute to a philosophical school, eh? The Old Testament rag, whose God won't ever really be happy until he sees that mushroom cloud.

This insane worship of a Holocaust that never happened was generated by a half century's worth of public indoctrination from news networks whose message is always polluted by a product purpose. Jewish ownership of American public media dates back to the 1890s with the formation of Hollywood. The U.S. financial system was permanently expropriated by private bankers in 1913, and we have been financial slaves ever since this permanent theft of control over our own money.

Yes, this is the topic of discussion that got all those U.S. presidents assassinated. And how Piper proved the Mossad hit JFK.

But Jewish control of the money supply is concealed in myriad different political labels - Communism is Judaism, is the big one that counts. Now it is masquerading as a capitalist predator society and hiding behind a misleading patina of labels and trivialities, reinforced by psychoactive drugs, telekinetic frequencies, scheduled sedatives and carcinogens in what we consume, and a media diet to keep you pinned to the electronic rodeo and swilling the beer of your choice.

How many Americans have gone down the rabbithole morally in recent years? Yes, America has always been a cesspool of rape and plunder largely covered over by those who write the history books. There may never have been a time in history when the populace got the straight scoop from the powers that be.

It seemed, though, in the last half of the 20th century in which I spent the better part of my life, that I grew up with a degree of confidence in a system that could produce people like Edward R. Murrow and Joe McCarthy, a world that could conduct a civilized debate and arrive at a logical solution.

Perhaps I was naive. Once upon a time, I loved my country. Now I am very afraid of it.

At the outset of the 21st century, I began to see major cracks in the veneer of American history as it was presented to me by a jowled Mr. Gula in high school history class in 1962.

America's founding fathers were brigands and crooks who never quite got themselves clear of the European money supply. We're turned our Colonial Days into amusement parks and covered up the acknowledgment that the business world runs on legalized criminality. This assault on American freedom has been largely engineered by Jewish bankers, who control publishers and educators.

That's exactly what has taken us to where we are today, with a world exploding in blood for profit. And why we are all in danger of losing our lives in the immediate days ahead.

John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida, whose new collection of Internet essays, "Recipe for Extinction," is available at http://www.johnkaminski.com/

Halliburton Detention Camps For Political Subversives

Paul Joseph Watson/Prison Planet.com | February 1 2006

In another shining example of modern day corporate fascism, it was announced recently that Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root had been awarded a $385 million dollar contract by Homeland Security to construct detention and processing facilities in the event of a national emergency.

The language of the preamble to the agreement veils the program with talk of temporary migrant holding centers, but it is made clear that the camps will also be used "as the development of a plan to react to a national emergency."

Discussions of federal concentration camps is no longer the rhetoric of paranoid Internet conspiracy theorists, it is mainstream news.

Under the enemy combatant designation anyone at the behest of the US government, even if they are a US citizen, can be kidnapped and placed in an internment facility forever without trial. Jose Padilla, an American citizen, has spent over four years in a Navy brig and is only just now getting a trial.

In 2002, FEMA sought bids from major real estate and engineering firms to construct giant internment facilities in the case of a chemical, biological or nuclear attack or a natural disaster.

Okanogan County Commissioner Dave Schulz went public three years ago with his contention that his county was set to be a location for one of the camps.

Alex Jones has attended numerous military urban warfare training drills across the US where role players were used to simulate arresting American citizens and taking them to internment camps.

The move towards the database state in the US and the UK, where every offence is arrestable and DNA records of every suspect, even if later proven innocent, are permanently kept on record, is the only tool necessary to create a master list of 'subversives' that would be subject to internment in a manufactured time of national emergency.

The national ID card is also intended to be used for this purpose, just as the Nazis used early IBM computer punch card technology to catalogue lists of homosexuals, gypsies and Jews before the round-ups began.

Section 44 of the Terrorism Act in Britain enables police to obtain name and address details of anyone they choose, whether they are acting suspiciously or not. Those details remain on a database forever. To date, 119,000 names of political activists have been taken and this is a figure that will skyrocket once the post 7/7 figures are taken into account. At the height of the Iraq war protests, around a million people marched across the country. However, most of these people were taking part in a political protest for the first time and as a one off. Even if we take a figure of half, 500,000 people being politically active in Britain, that means that the government has already registered around a quarter of political activists in the UK.

In truth the number is probably above half because we are not factoring in those already on MI5 'subversive' lists and those listed after the 7/7 bombings, when the powers were used even more broadly.

Concurrently in the US, a new provision in the extended Patriot Act bill would allow Secret Service agents to arrest and jail protesters accused of breaching any security perimeter, even if the President or any other protected official isn't present. The definition of 'free speech zones' can be shifted around loosely and this would open the floodgates for protesters to be grabbed and hauled away in any circumstance at the whim of the Secret Service.

During the 2004 RNC protests, thousands of New Yorkers were arrested en masse in indiscriminate round-ups and taken to Pier 57 (pictured), a condemned, asbestos poisoned old bus depot, where they were imprisoned without charge for up to 24 hours or more.

The existence and development of internment camps are solely intended to be used to round up en masse and imprison 'political dissidents' (anyone who isn't prepared to lick government boots) after a simulated tactical nuke or biological attack on a major US or European city.

Friday, March 17, 2006

Harold Pinter: Theater's angry old man

At the Prize of Europe, the playwright is all politics

By Porter Anderson
CNN
Friday, March 17, 2006 Posted: 1824 GMT (0224 HKT)

[...] Harold Pinter -- one of a handful of English-language writers whose work has powerfully affected two generations of European and North American theater -- was onstage Sunday in the ornate 300-year-old Teatro Carignano to receive the 10th Premio Europa per il Teatro, or Prize of Europe in Theater.

[...] But if anyone thought this London-born son of a dressmaker would rhapsodize on the career that began in 1948 with his arrival at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, they were surprised.

The task of Europe, he told the assembly, "is to resist the power of the United States" -- a political and cultural force so virulent, Pinter said, that it may "destroy" Europe. [...]

And in "Art, Truth & Politics," a lecture Pinter created for his receipt of the Nobel, the man's terms finally were clear and harrowing, both for the United States and for his own British government.

The United States, Pinter wrote in that lecture, is "brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless." It "no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favor. It quite simply doesn't give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain."

"How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal?" he asked in his text. "One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice."
[...]

Despite such bleak visions, Pinter's determination embraces hope: "There does seem to me to be more public awareness now," he says, "... of what actions our societies and our countries actually take and have taken. And what it means. And what torture actually is."

And in the winter of his illustrious career, the playwright likes to talk of his characters having lives of their own. "They surprise me."

The role he has assigned to himself, the artist-adamant, may at times surprise him, too. But he wryly insists he's earned his stance as the angry old man of modern theater.

"I've written 29 damned plays," he cracks. "Isn't that enough?"

Suing Himself? Man Sues After Hitting His Car

POSTED: 2:39 pm EST March 16, 2006

LODI, Calif. -- Curtis Gokey has only himself to blame for an accident, but he sued anyway.

Gokey is suing the city of Lodi for driving a dump truck into his car. The only thing is, he was the city employee driving the truck.

Gokey was driving the truck when he backed into his own car. He filed a $3,600 claim for damages, which the city rejected.

City attorneys said Gokey was essentially suing himself.

Now, Gokey's wife is filing a claim in her own name, saying she's the one who uses the car. The city has rejected her claim, too. But Rhonda Gokey isn't giving up so easily. She said she's not as nice as her husband. She insisted she has "the right to sue the city because a city's vehicle damaged my private vehicle."

Rhonda Gokey's claim is for $1,200 more than Curtis'.

Thursday, March 16, 2006

Iraqis say US raid on home killed 11 family members

If there remains any doubt that the US military are nothing but a bunch of cold blooded murderers, let the following story put the matter to rest...

Wed Mar 15, 2006 2:40 PM GMT

By Amer Amery

TIKRIT, Iraq (Reuters) - Eleven members of an Iraqi family were killed in a U.S. raid on Wednesday, police and witnesses said. The U.S. military said two women and a child died during the bid to seize an al Qaeda militant from a house.

Television pictures showed 11 bodies in the Tikrit morgue -- five children, two men and four women. A freelance photographer later saw the bodies being buried in Ishaqi, the town 100 km (60 miles) north of Baghdad where the raid took place.

The U.S. military said in a statement its troops had attacked a house in Ishaqi early on Wednesday to capture a "foreign fighter facilitator for the al Qaeda in Iraq network".

"Troops were engaged by enemy fire as they approached the building," U.S. spokesman Major Tim Keefe said. "Coalition Forces returned fire utilising both air and ground assets.

"There was one enemy killed. Two women and one child were also killed in the firefight. The building ... (was) destroyed."

Keefe said the al Qaeda suspect had been captured and was being questioned.

RUBBLE

Major Ali Ahmed of the Ishaqi police said U.S. forces had landed on the roof of the house in the early hours and shot the 11 occupants, including the five children.

"After they left the house they blew it up," he said.

Another policeman, Major Farouq Hussein, said all the bodies had gunshot wounds to the head.

Pictures of the house targeted in the raid showed it had been reduced to rubble, while next to it lay the burnt-out wreckage of a truck.

Iraqi police said the U.S. military had asked for a meeting with local tribal leaders.

Photographs of the funeral showed men weeping as five children were wrapped in blankets and then lined up in a row next to freshly dug graves.

Police in Salahaddin province, a heartland of the Sunni Arab insurgency and the home region of Saddam Hussein, have frequently criticised U.S. military tactics in the area.

In January a U.S. air strike on a house in Baiji, further north, killed several members of a family. In December U.S. fighter jets dropped two 500-pound bombs on a village, also in the region, killing 10 people. The U.S. military said the people targeted had been suspected of planting roadside bombs.

(Additional reporting by Ghazwan al-Jibouri in Tikrit and Aseel Kami in Baghdad)

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

The weight of demons


9/11 hoax, phony Iraq war,
poison media propaganda
wind up justifying torture


By John Kaminski
skylax@comcast.net

We need to take the blame — now.

How many more lies do we need to hear that cost thousands of lives and take away our Constitutional rights? How much more poison do we need to have shoved down our throats by official government agencies? How many more friends do we need to see killed by government functionaries doing business as rabid dogs?

How few of us have looked into that deep dark place in ourselves and seen the connection that travels from the sweetest part of our own souls — you know, that stuff we give our families — to the little girl lying dead in the street in Baghdad. And a thousand other dusty towns turned bloody by the shadow that lurks in the hollow of our own wallets.

And don't forget the big new wall that circles the heart of Jerusalem with its shadow of fear, and spreads its crippled cancer into the minds of every human on this planet through toxic electronic fantasies better known as mass media. Already firmly constructed in your own mind from a lifetime of American public schools, that same wall is being constructed in your own town — in New Orleans, for instance, in a thousand places on this planet, at this moment. The war for human freedom is definitely on.

Just turn on the TV and see. Then turn it off quickly and hit the Web, where you can choose your path with care, function, and discernment. Try to ignore the recent news that half the American population can't read a simple sentence.

Those who can read may wish to take note of the top ten pieces of news reported on the Internet over the past four years:

• 9/11 was an inside job hoax, perpetrated by the very men you see on TV sending young boys off to war. Psychopathic brain entrainment that kindles mass hatred of strangers is used in all wars. Killing people and stealing their assets remains the most venerable human tradition. However, deliberately killing one's own people, as happened on 9/11, is a different matter. It too has a tradition — Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, Gulf of Tonkin, USS Liberty, Waco, OKC are only the well-known wounds the United States has inflicted on itself for the purpose of mass death profits.

For one thing, a willingness to kill one’s own people means that no one anywhere is safe. That is the situation in America today

The trail is clear for those with courage. The World Trade Center towers were not knocked down by airplanes, they were demolished professionally. Hundreds of websites can prove this. Hundreds of witnesses heard the pre-collapse explosions in the towers. Top theories converge around the time the towers took to fall as the chief piece of evidence proving official complicity.

They simply fell too fast. The buildings couldn’t have fallen in the way they did simply by being struck by airplanes. The stories told by government officials about what happened simply are not true.

But there are plenty of other pieces of evidence to choose from, beginning with impossible cell phone calls and ending in the constant and continuing litany of lies that spews forth from both the White House and its corporate spin machine.

Were the real facts of that sad day to become common knowledge, thousands of top leaders in the U.S., Britain and Israel and its financial overlords in Britain and Israel would face capital charges of treason, mass murder, and obstruction of justice.

But we know the system doesn’t work that way and never has.

Those who have the money make the rules. And woe to the rest of us.

Yet the inside job nature of the 9/11 caper is an established fact, hammered home by the following items.

Cell phone calls from 35,000 feet couldn't have been used on the fateful day because the technology had not been installed on planes at that time. Those great media heroes, in actuality, were contrived characters designed to deceive the public and mobilize opinion for an all-out war against the Islamic world.

There is no evidence that there were hijackers. Those CIA “cutouts” constructed for public consumption were ludicrous. Nine are still alive; nobody's sure of any of the names. The videos of them were fake, just like the videos of Osama bin Laden.

The string of lies, the phony investigation, and the destruction of the evidence were all blatant violations of U.S. Constitutional law, yet the combination of a corrupt judiciary and complicit media combined to anesthetize the American conscience, which has in its coma now accepted the disturbing normalcy of the practice of torturing other human beings for fun and profit.

Yet the time the towers took to fall — virtually free fall speed — and the countless videos of tiny white shape charge plumes that seem to pull the giant black monsters the Twin Towers became right down with them, remains the top piece of evidence. That WTC7 fell later in the day without having been struck by a plane is clear evidence of an obvious demolition.

Not a single Congressperson has ever contemplated breaking this coverup, all of them being paid by the very same people who perpetrated the crime, and now plunder the world.

Thus was 9/11 the trigger that has brought us to the nadir of the modern world, in which a tyrannical superpower bribes the whole world into its fantasy fetish and treats even its own people like cattle, a prescribed policy so chillingly described in certain of the world’s so-called holy books. Extinction for dozens of reasons is staring us in the face, and the wars for lies stretch out in front of us as the poison cola froths in our veins.

9/11 was the public moral justification for the United States and its killer allies to declare war on the whole world, and squeeze the life out anyone who doesn't play along. The basic Old Testament formula.

The carnage to human body and soul it has produced in its twisted implementation is truly a tragedy of profound proportion, a spreading stain on human consciousness that threatens to engulf us all in supporting senseless slaughter.

And as a result of the success of this colossal government psyop, Americans have lost their free speech, their right to a fair trial, and their right to object to being enslaved by this New World Order murder machine. Speaking of which ....

• The Iraq war is a totally phony deal. It's mass murder for maximum profits. Americans who abdicate their responsibility to speak honestly do not deserve the freedom they thought they had. All Americans are complicit in this folly that has already killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

The Downing Street memos proved for all to see that the war against Iraq by the U.S., Britain and Israel was a hoax more than cruel and beyond logic. President Bush, his lackey Powell admitted, fixed the facts around the policy. That’s called lying.

A half million deaths later, no single American politician possesses the courage to call him out, probably because most politicians voted for the war based on the paranoid and manipulative lies that have been told to all Americans.

• In a matter of days, some cyberwonks say, the U.S. is going to bomb Iran over this trumped-up charge of WANTING to build nuclear weapons. The magnitude to which the flames from this bogus provocation will spread will be interesting to observe. In a large part of the world, this means your house is at risk, and your life as well.

• The U.S. government, or maybe it’s the world government now, has begun a campaign to reduce the population of the planet.

Some of the ways this is being accomplished include:

• Mad cow or chronic wasting disease is a time bomb waiting to kill most of the earth’s human population in 20 years.

• Biotech food, which will not reproduce, makes mass starvation inevitable in certain areas of the world.

• Chemtrails drop blood-borne products container designer diseases on unsuspecting populations.

• Most medicines prescribed by doctors contain toxic compounds. This practice is now protected by law. Redress for victims is now prohibited.

• Depleted uranium ammunition, which is deliberately destroying the American army from within, guarantees lifelong battles with cancer and other more serious diseases to both the winner and the loser of wars fought with it.

• Slick school curricula and clever media manipulation have produced a population essentially incapable of asking questions to challenge the lies it has been told.

• The air you breathe, the food you eat and the water you drink are now deliberately hypercharged with disease-producing compounds.

And as the media-created politicians with proper bloodlines and unlimited cash deploy new ways to further torture all those deemed ineligible for membership in our new predator society, ordinary people can only sit and cry at the mutilated corpses of their loved ones, and the mangled hopes of their dearest dreams.

The weight of demons that makes us so afraid to challenge the lies we have been told guarantees that all these deceptions will continue until the last feeble whimper about the injustice of it all disappears for the last time.

Because we have done the same thing ourselves as we watched faraway people slaughtered for corporate profit, we will get no sympathy from anyone who hears us cry for our world, because we were the ones who created the problem in the first place.

Adieu, America. You have become a monster.

Show this story to a cop you know. His reaction to it will tell you if he’s your friend or somebody who may be the one who one day will come and kill you.


John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida. His latest collection of Internet essays, “Recipe for Extinction,” is available at http://www.johnkaminski.com/

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Warmest winter in Canada since '48

Toronto had 7th hottest in its history
Climatologist warns of summer bugs, viruses

Mar. 14, 2006. 05:06 AM
ASHLEY JOANNOU
STAFF REPORTER

Temperatures across Canada between December and February were the warmest recorded since 1948.

Weather officials say that during those three months — the three Environment Canada defines as winter, the temperature across the country was 3.9 degrees Celsius above normal. That's almost a full degree above the previous record back in 1987.

"We didn't just break the (winter) record, we smashed it to pieces," said David Phillips, senior climatologist with Environment Canada.

"Even those of us who are paid to study this stuff were surprised."

In fact, the entire year, from February to February was the warmest 12-month period in Canada's history.

Spring 2005 was the third warmest in Canadian history, summer was the 12th warmest and this fall was the second warmest ever.

Although Toronto didn't break its weather record this year, residents had no reason to complain.

It was the seventh warmest winter in the city's history — about 2.5 degrees Celsius above the average for the last 30 years.

This is good news for most people.

"People have probably saved at least 10 to 15 per cent on their heating bill," Phillips said.

"Not to mention the extra shopping people probably have done since they can go outside."

But in a month, the warm weather might not be something to cheer about. Phillips predicts an increase in viruses and insects once summer rolls around.

"Winter usually gives as a clean slate — if we have to suffer though the winter so do the bugs and viruses," he said.

"If these bugs managed to not only survive the winter but thrive, we could see a huge increase this summer."

Phillips won't go as far as calling this weather a sign of global warming.

"I think it's a mistake to say something like that this early," he said. "We'll have to study it more."

Aside from yesterday's unseasonable temperatures, Mother Nature also brought thick fog in the evening, forcing cancellations or delays of many flights at Pearson airport.

And the wacky weather might not be over just yet.

Phillips warns not to pack away those ski jackets and pull out the sandals just yet.

Today, a storm coming out of Michigan will bring strong winds, cold weather and possibly snow to Toronto.

"Mother Nature definitely still has some cold weather up her sleeve," he said.

"We haven't seen the last of it yet," Phillips said.