National Post

NASA chief warns of solar tornado season as storms dance across the sun
The weather in space could have a real adverse effect on the Earth, and since it’s tornado season on the sun, we should be on the lookout.

That’s what NASA chief Charles Bolden said late last week when addressing members of the Space Weather industry forum.

“This conference shines a spotlight on another naturally occurring phenomenon that can be just as punishing as a tornado — space weather,” Space.com reported him saying. (Photo: NASA)

‘I’ve lost everything’: Their son was killed on a Toronto street five years ago — and the parents will never forget
Five years after two gunshots blasted their world apart, Susan Martin and Alan Dudeck are moving out, but not moving on.

They’ll leave behind their red brick house on a leafy street in Rosedale this month — their home of 25 years where their four children were raised, a haven for their son’s friends even if he wasn’t there. There’s too much space, too many memories. And their son is never coming home.

“It won’t help,” Ms. Martin said of the move, while sitting around her backyard patio table. Moving house is forcing her to pack, to go through Oliver’s things. The other day she found a little box that held his baby teeth. “I couldn’t,” said Ms. Martin. “I just had to put it back and close the drawer.”

At 12:08 a.m. on Friday, June 13, 2008, Oliver Martin and his best friend, Dylan Ellis, were shot dead, side-by-side, strapped into the front seat of a Range Rover parked on Richmond Street. Their deaths have become one of Toronto’s most shocking and high-profile murders, largely because they remain a mystery. Police investigators — at least one who has worked more than 150 homicide cases — are baffled to this day. (Photo: Darren Calabrese/National Post)

A cry for help inside Chinese labour camp hidden inside Halloween decoration, read 8,000 kilometres away
The cry for help, a neatly folded letter stuffed inside a package of Halloween decorations sold at Kmart, travelled 8,000 kilometres from China into the hands of a mother of two in Oregon.

Scrawling in wobbly English on a sheet of onionskin paper, the writer said he was imprisoned at a labour camp in this northeastern Chinese town, where, he said, inmates toiled seven days a week, their 15-hour days haunted by sadistic guards.

“Sir: If you occasionally buy this product, please kindly resend this letter to the World Human Right Organization,” said the note, which was tucked between two ersatz tombstones and fell out when the woman, Julie Keith, opened the box in her living room last October. “Thousands people here who are under the persicution of the Chinese Communist Party Government will thank and remember you forever.”

The letter drew international media coverage and widespread attention to China’s opaque system of “re-education through labour,” a collection of penal colonies where petty criminals, religious offenders and critics of the government can be given up to four-year sentences by the police without trial. (Photo: AP Photo/John Leicester,File)

‘Because you’re Canadian’: Teen allegedly bullied by teachers for being Canuck drops out of U.S. school
Mocked for his red-and-white gym gear and derided for hailing from a nation of seal clubbers, an Ottawa-born teenager says he dropped out of a Christian school in Upstate New York because staff relentlessly teased him over his Canadian background.

“I think it started as joking and then it went too far,” said Noah Kilpatrick, speaking by phone from Watertown, New York.

Attending Faith Fellowship Christian School was otherwise fine, said Noah, but in class the teacher would often lampoon Canada as a cartoonishly small country filled with communists and people who club seals for fun.

“History class and sometimes math class … they were stereotyping Canadians and saying we were all stupid — it was offensive,” he said.

When Noah paid for his school lunch with a toonie after forgetting to bring greenbacks (the two currencies were at par, he noted later), the same teacher, who is also the school’s principal, allegedly held up the coin at an assembly to publicly remind students that toonies are not legal tender. (Photo: Tina Kilpatrick)

Two Canadian journalists arrested in Turkey as thousands of black-robed lawyers join protests
Two Canadian journalists were detained by police Wednesday while covering the ongoing protests in Istanbul

Sasa Petricic and Derek Stoffel, who work for CBC, have made contact with their employer and “say they’re OK,” the broadcaster reported.

Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird has called the Turkish ambassador to express his concerns. A tweet sent from Petricic’s account just before noon on Wednesday said “Arrested.” He later tweeted: “All good so far. Going through the Byzantine (literally) process! Thanks everyone.”

Turkey has experienced nearly two weeks of protests that began in Istanbul after a violent police crackdown on a peaceful sit-in by activists objecting to a development project. (AFP/Getty Images; CBC)

‘I’m neither traitor nor hero. I’m an American’: NSA leaker breaks his silence
The former CIA employee who revealed himself as the source of top-secret leaks about U.S. surveillance programs says he did so to reveal “criminality.”

“People who think I made a mistake in picking [Hong Kong] as a location misunderstand my intentions. I am not here to hide from justice; I am here to reveal criminality,” Edward Snowden told the South China Morning Post Wednesday. “I’m neither traitor nor hero. I’m an American.”

He also said he would fight extradition to the U.S., although the country hasn’t yet filed for one. Snowden also said he fears for his family. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)

Ariel Castro pleads not guilty to 329 charges in Cleveland kidnapping case
A man accused of holding three women captive in his Cleveland home for about a decade pleaded not guilty Wednesday to hundreds of charges, including rape and kidnapping.

Ariel Castro is charged with kidnapping the three women and keeping them — sometimes restrained in chains — along with a 6-year-old girl he fathered with one of them.

Castro, 52, didn’t speak during the arraignment, which lasted less than a minute. He stood motionless, dressed in an orange prison outfit, and looked toward the floor as the plea was entered. (AP Photo /Tony Dejak)

Man with two kilos of cocaine taped to his legs arrested at Toronto airport
man carrying two kilograms of cocaine taped to his legs has been arrested at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport, according to the Canadian Border Services Agency.

The man, who arrived at Pearson on a flight from Antigua on June 1, was nabbed after guards swabbed his belongings and got a positive test for cocaine. (CBSA / Handout)

‘Significant concerns’: Canada’s privacy watchdog launches probe into sweeping U.S. spy programs
Canada’s privacy watchdog, expressing “significant concerns” about reports Canadians may have had their global telephone and Internet use monitored by spy agencies without their knowledge, will be digging for more information.

The world learned last week that the U.S. government had been conducting a secret surveillance program, called Prism, that collected telephone records as well as electronic communications such as emails and documents between individuals around the world.


‘Significant revelations’ coming soon from NSA leaks: Journalist who broke the story
The journalist who exposed classified U.S. surveillance programs leaked by an American defence contractor said Tuesday that there will be more “significant revelations” to come from the documents.

“We are going to have a lot more significant revelations that have not yet been heard over the next several weeks and months,” said Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian.

Greenwald told The Associated Press the decision was being made on when to release the next story based on the information provided by Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old employee of government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton who has been accused by U.S. Senate intelligence chairwoman Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California of committing an “act of treason” that should be prosecuted.

Taliban behead two boys, 10 and 16, for spying after finding them searching trash for food: Afghan officials
The Taliban have beheaded two boys they accused of spying, according to authorities in the southern Afghan province of Kandahar.

The youngest, aged 10, was known in the area for accepting food from police officers to feed his poverty-stricken family and was killed on Sunday.

The second boy was aged 16, according to details released by the governor of Kandahar, who condemned the killings as inhuman and un-Islamic. (AFP / Getty Images files)

Calgary eliminates letter grades for students up to grade nine in an attempt to save children from failure
The Calgary Board of Education is moving to save children from failure. Under a proposed new marking scheme, the board is to relabel such students as “support required.” If they improve, their skills will be upgraded to “emerging.’’

The Calgary board is doing away with letter-grade assessments for children between Kindergarten and Grade 9, and is also eliminating personalized comments. On a draft of the new report card protocol, traditional letter grades and percentages have been replaced with a four-point system: “exemplary,” “evident,” “emerging” or, “support required.”

School official hope the assessments will offer additional precision, but critics don’t buy it. ‘‘I’m still searching for the benefit to the children,’’ argues Peter Cowley, director of school performance studies at the Fraser Institute. He said phrases like “evident” or “emerging” don’t seem to give parents any clearer understanding than a letter grade. (Illustration by Mike Faille/National Post)