The role of social networking and Hollywood fantasies in a gruesome first-degree murder trial in Canada became apparent 30 and 31 March. Renee Waring, a personal dog trainer from Ohio in the US, testified by video conference on Wednesday March 30, 2011 that she had evidence on the accused, Mark Twitchell, from their Facebook correspondence, in which he told her he had “crossed the line… and liked it.”
Twitchell, from Canada, is on trial for having killed and dismembered Johnny Altinger in a rented garage 10 October 2008, after using an Internet dating service to set up a meeting. He is accused of then disposing of Altinger’s remains by burning them and throwing them into the sewers.
The trial opened 16 March.
Waring became Facebook friends with Twitchell, whose profile boasted the name “Dexter Morgan”, in September 2008. Dexter Morgan is the main character of the television show “Dexter”, a series about a serial killer named Dexter who kills other serial killers.
Waring and Twitchell corresponded via Facebook throughout the fall of 2008, during which time they shared “dark fantasies”. Waring told the accused that she wanted to kill her ex-husband’s new wife and he wrote back disapproving of her chosen methods.
“Although I appreciate your dark fantasy about skeletor, it is impractical,” Twitchell responded to Waring 3 October 2008. “It leaves behind way too much forensic evidence.”
Twitchell explained to Waring that she needed to “prepare a kill room, the same way Dex does”. He proceeded to give her detailed explanations on how to properly disable, kill, dismember, and dispose of a victim.
Soon after Twitchell was charged with Altinger’s murder, Waring turned in the written evidence to Edmonton police.
Twitchell’s lawyer confirmed to the jury that his client was the author of these emails.
Links to other sites: CTV, Toronto Sun, The Globe & Mail
Source: UNHCR, Geneva, 28 March 2011 (click on image to view larger)
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The number of asylum seekers in the world has been halved in the past 10 years, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees says in its 2010 annual asylum report issued early Monday 27 March. Whether this is good news or bad is difficult to judge, concedes the Geneva-based organization’s head.
“The global dynamics of asylum are changing. Asylum claims in the industrialized world are much lower than a decade ago while year-on-year levels are up in only a handful of countries,” notes High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres. “We need to study the root causes to see if the decline is because of fewer push factors in areas of origin, or tighter migration control in countries of asylum.”
He notes that developing countries still host the lion’s share of applications, and asks that other countries continue to support countries like Liberia, Tunisia and Egypt who are hosting large numbers of asylum seekers due to conflicts in neighbouring countries.
The report covers 44 countries that are destinations for asylum seekers.
US remains most popular host country
Switzerland was the 8th most popular country, with 13,800 applicants.
The report states that 358,800 asylum applications were made to industrialized countries last year, a 5 percent fall from 2009, and some 42 percent lower than the decade’s peak in 2001, when almost 620,000 asylum applications were made.
The US is the top destination for asylum seekers, for the fifth year in a row, followed by France, Germany, Sweden and Canada. These five countries accounted for 56 percent of all applications.
US numbers of new applicants were boosted by requests for asylum by more Chinese and Mexicans, while France saw an increase in applicants from Serbia, Russia and Congo. Germany saw an influx from Serbia, notably Kosovo, and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. The UNHCR says the “development is widely attributed to the introduction of visa-free entry to the European Union for nationals of these two countries since December 2009.”
Serbia has highest number of applicants
Serbia was the country with the highest number of applicants, 28,900, which the UNHCR says is almost as high as in 2001, “soon after teh Kosovo crisis”.
Several changes have taken place, including:
- the number of applications from Afghans fell by 9 percent and whereas in the past Norway and the UK were the main destinations, Germany and Sweden have become the top hosts
- Chinese asylum-seekers made up the third-largest asylum group in 2010, partly due to a substantial drop in the number of new applications from Iraq and Somalia
- for the first time since 2005, Iraq was not one of the top two countries of origin of asylum-seekers. It dropped to fourth place, followed by the Russian Federation
- Somalia, which occupied the third spot in 2009, fell to sixth in 2010.
Nations Brands Index: Swiss hold onto 8th place
US still number one, UK, Canada, Australia in top 10
When it comes to tourism, Switzerland is ranked 11th by the NBI (photo, Verbier)
Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Switzerland is still viewed by most of the world in a positive light, says the newly published 2010 Nations Brands Index, NBI, which evaluates the strength and attractiveness of 50 countries. Several countries use it to create public relations campaigns.
The United States continues to have “the world’s most valuable country brand, a top spot it obtained in 2009 after [Barack] Obama’s election,” the index shows.
The annual NBI study bases its result on six categories: governance, investments and immigration, exports, tourism, cultural heritage and population. Switzerland ranks in the top 12 in 5 of these categories.
The study shows mixed results for Switzerland.
Generally speaking, Switzerland enjoys a better image outside Europe than with its neighbours, Germany being the exception. It ranks Switzerland second.
When it comes to the category “Population”, Switzerland is viewed less than favourably by Egypt and Turkey. Turkey places Switzerland 12th.
The Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs notes that in the 2010 index, Switzerland’s “commitment to the environment and its excellent quality of life were once again regarded as [its] greatest strengths. It also received top marks for [respecting] the political rights of its citizens,” it ranked second only to Canada.
An Ontario company that will soon become the world’s largest salt mine, according to the Toronto Sun, is beaming over the heavy snowfalls of recent days. About 80 percent of the salt mined by Sifto Salt Mine goes to salt winter roads, and the end of 2010 has given the company such a bonus of snowstorms that it has taken back 65 of the 80 employees it let go after a less snowy 2009-2010 winter. The company recently invested $75 million in storage facilities and a newer system for bringing salt to the surface, a “skipping system”. It supplies a large part of Canada and the Midwest in the US with road salt.
The British government is considering a radical move to discourage young people from taking up smoking: obliging tobacco companies to drop their logos and other branding from cigarette packages. The proposal, which expected to be part of a white paper on health to be made public within days, is being welcomed by medical groups, reports the Guardian. The idea is to take the glamour out of smoking by giving cigarettes plain wrappers. The proposal was put forth early in 2010, but the new coalition government now appears to be ready to move on it. Tobacco companies are firmly opposed to any such change.
Australia is scheduled to change to plain wrappers in 2012, but the government is facing legal battles, while Canada, like the UK, is considering making the change. The US will begin to show graphic descriptions of diseases related to smoking, on packages, starting in 2012, the government announced last week.
Links to other sites: BBC, Packaging News, UK, Wall St Journal
Nigerian military forces say they freed 19 hostages in an operation in the country’s main oil-producing region.
One French national, a Canadian and 17 Nigerians were freed 17 November by the country’s security forces.
The victims were all taken hostage in recent raids on facilities in the country’s Niger Delta region, the heart of one of the world’s largest oil industries.
The Canadian government says it is “relieved” the hostages were freed.
Omar Khadr, a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, has pleaded guilty to charges of murder, terrorism and war crimes in exchange for serving out the rest of his sentence in Canada, in one year’s time. The youngest Guantanamo inmate, Khadr was detained in Afghanistan when he was 15 years old after killing a US soldier.
Long a thorn in the side of the Bush Administration which refused to grant a minor the treatment accorded them under international law, the military commission trial will sentence Khadr, now 24, to one more year in prison. Then he will be sent back to Canada, his country of origin.
Links to other sites: Christian Science Monitor, Globe and Mail, Miami Herald
Tax cuts due for Canadian pensioners in Switzerland
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Canada and Switzerland Friday 22 October signed an amended double taxation treaty that is expected to go into effect in 2012 as well as an expanded version of their 1975 bilateral aviation agreement. The accords were signed as part of the official visit by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper to Swiss President Doris Leuthard Friday, near Bern.
Harper is one of nearly 70 top officials and heads of state visiting Switzerland for the Francophonie Summit that officially starts Saturday 23 October. Canada has chaired the summit and tomorrow it hands that role over to Switzerland.
The amended double taxation agreement, like others that Switzerland has signed in recent months, contains provisions for the exchange of information that are in line with OECD standards laid out in 2009 and affect primarily requests for judicial assistance in suspected tax fraud cases.
But for anyone living in Switzerland who receives a Canadian pension, whether they are Canadian, Swiss who worked in Canada or other citizens who at some point earned a Canadian pension, the revised treaty brings a tax cut.
An informant who in 1999 told Vancouver police a second-hand story about Robert Pickton butchering a woman and storing body parts at his pig farm in western Canada recounted the story publicly for the first time Monday 23 August on CTV News. Pickton was convicted in 2007 of murdering six women, a grisly saga that gripped the nation during his trial. Leah Best, in her 50s, heard the story from a close friend who said she witnessed Pickton cutting body parts. The friend, who received money from Pickton for drugs, refused to acknowledge the story to police and she was not initially considered a reliable witness. Once Pickton was arrested, in 2002, she gave police details and became a star witness in his mass murder trial.
Best, on television Monday, said she believes some of the women could have been spared had Vancouver police acted on the information she gave them. Pickton, age 61, told an undercover police agent he had killed 49 women, and he was charged with the deaths of 20 women in addition to the six murder convictions for which he is spending life in prison, with no possibility of parole for 25 years (Canada’s harshest sentence).
Links to other sites: CTV News, The Globe & Mail
Toronto, Canada (GenevaLunch) – Swiss tennis ace Roger Federer is back in the game and in top shape. Federer beat Juan Ignacio Chela of Argentina 7-6(7), 6-3 at the Rogers Cup in Toronto.
Federer, currently the world’s number three, became the all-time leader at the ATP World Tour Masters 1000. Andre Agassi had held the record from 1990 to 2006 with a 209-73 mark.
“I felt like I had to win the game three times” said Federer who considers normal being a bit “rusty.” This was his first game after a month-long break. “It was a bit of a dog fight,” he added.
The youngest Guantanamo detainee is to go on trial today 10 August. Omar Khadr was arrested when he was fifteen years-old in an Afghanistan battlefield.
Khadr is a Canadian citizen, now 23, who according to his defense attorneys, was forced into war by a family with close ties to Osama bin Laden.
According to reports, his father, an Egyptian-born Canadian is an alleged terrorist financier.
Also in: The Vancouver Sun, Al Jazeera English
Archaeologists in Canada have located a British ship that wrecked during a rescue mission in 1854.
The 19th Century HMS Investigator was found in Mercy Bay.
The rescue mission’s objective was to reach Sir John Franklin, and his entire crew which had perished in the frozen Arctic. However, the Investigator’s ship itself also wrecked and had to be abandoned.
Getting to the ship was difficult because the bottom of the bay is usually covered with ice.
Additional details: CBC
The pilot of a CF-18 fighter jet that crashed spectacularly during a practice run before a Canadian air show in Alberta, is in hospital, but his injuries are not life-threatening say officials. He ejected just seconds before his jet nose-dived and the pilot, who has “vast experience” with the plane hit the ground hard about 100 metres from the ball of flame. Bystanders who witnessed the accident, interviewed by CNN, were clearly shaken.
Video, CNN
[Video] The Iroquois lacrosse team, ranked fourth in the world, may have to forfeit its opening game against England at the World Championships in Manchester in the UK due to a snag in new passport rules. The team, with members in the US and Canada (the Iroquis nation covers parts of both) has always travelled on Iroquois Confederacy passports to insist on its Iroquois identity: the Native American tribe is generally credited with inventing the game of lacrosse. Stricter US passport rules, however, brought the team up against the US State Department and it was only with the intervention of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that the US members of the team would be able to travel on their confederacy passports. Britain, however, has now said they will not be able to use them to enter the country.
Links to other sites: BBC, The Globe & Mail
AP video
Protestors make their presence felt in Toronto in worst of a week’s clash with police
There won’t be a master plan that all G20 countries will follow to ensure economic recovery: the group of the world’s 20 largest economies met in Toronto over the weekend and agreed that a diversified set of solutions makes the most sense for global economic recovery. Overall, however, they agreed to halve European government’s deficits by 2013 and to push for higher capital requirements for banks.
Protestors clashed with police Sunday 27 June, the worst in a week-long series of marches and meetings against world leaders’ management of their economies. The Toronto Sun reports that what started out as a peaceful march by 4,000 people suddenly turned into a riot, with police cars set on fire and heavy destruction of buildings and other property.
Links to other sites: Bloomberg, Financial Times, Toronto Sun
Video, Reuters
A Quebec judge has ruled that Montreal’s Loyola high school, a private Jesuit school, has the right to teach ethics from a Roman Catholic perspective. His strongly worded ruling is a setback for the province’s government, which has promised to give education a more secular face, and it has said it will appeal. Judge Gérard Dugré wrote in his decision that “The obligation imposed on Loyola to teach the ethics and religious culture course in a lay fashion assumes a totalitarian character essentially equivalent to Galileo’s being ordered by the Inquisition to deny the Copernican universe,” reports The Globe & Mail.
Canada is expected to release a report on the 1985 bombing of an Air India flight, en route to India, which crashed into the Atlantic killing all 329 people on board.
The four-year investigation lead by a Canadian commission is to be released in Ottawa on 17 June.
Canadian authorities say independentist Sikh militants are to blame and in 2005 two Canadians were tried and found not guilty.
The report is expected to put the spotlight on Canada’s failure to bring to justice those responsible for the deadliest bombing of an airliner in history. The Canadian Broadcasting Company, CBC, says it has learned that the report shows national security continues to be badly organized between the Mounties and Canada’s spy agency.
Link to CBC
International sports, ice hockey
The Swiss and Germans fight it out on the rink (video)
Not much cheering left - Photo Matthew Manor HHOF-IIHF Images
Mannheim and Cologne, Germany (GenevaLunch) – Canada and Switzerland were eliminated in separate games last night from the 2010 IIHF World Championship.
Canada, the current Olympic champion, was eliminated 2-5 by Russia who played to win from the beginning of the match.
The Maple Leaves team was not able to overcome the Russian team which seeks its third straight championship. Russia will now play host Germany in the semi-finals this weekend.
Switzerland, which had been playing well and was one of the favourites to advance to semi-finals, lost 0-1 to the German squad that was relentless in its attack, fueled by a full stadium: 12,500. Philip Gogulla scored the sole goal that crushed the Swiss hopes to play in the finals. The Swiss-German rivalry goes back 100 years and is the oldest on ice, according to the International Ice Hockey Federation. (See the winning goal).
The Royal Bank of Canada has raised the interest rate on mortgages to 6.25 percent on five-year closed mortgages, the third increase in a month. RBC is the country’s largest bank and others are likely to follow, says The Globe & Mail, with the national bank saying that its key lending rate will rise in June.
Meanwhile, the prices, at least in Vancouver, are enough to raise the roof, reports McLeans.
Two brothers in Newfoundland, Canada, a year apart in age, separated and then adopted when young, have found each other after years of looking. They had been living on the same street for two years. Each began looking for the other for medical history reasons and knew that since they’d been adopted by families in the same part of Canada there was a good chance they would not be too far apart. Ironically, when the adoption agency phoned to give the name and address of the other brother to one of them, he was looking out his window at his brother’s house – but despite their physical proximity, the two had never spoken.
Links to other sites: The Western Star, Canada, The Globe & Mail, Canada
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/biological-brothers-find-each-other-across-the-street-after-30-years/article1522019/
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – A reminder to people in Switzerland and neighbouring areas that if you have friends, family or work connections in Canada, Mexico or most of the United States, they are now one hour closer to you, for two weeks: daylight saving time, also known as summer time, went into effect Sunday 14 March. Greenwich Meantime provides a schedule for the changes, 2007-2015.
Switzerland goes onto summer time 28 March at 01:00.
An avalanche on Boulder mountain near Revelstoke, British Colombia in Canada has killed three people and injured 17 but several others are missing and a search is underway, say the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The avalanche occurred during the Big Iron Shootout snowmobile contest, an annual event that has sparked controversy and raised tensions with local residents in the four years it has been running, partly because of safety concerns.
Links to other sites: CBC, CNN, RCMP, Vancouver Sun
Vancouver, Canada (GenevaLunch) - Canada celebrated a famous victory as they beat the USA 3-2 in the final to take gold. Canada scored once in the first period. In the second period the Americans could not take advantage of their first powerplay advantage and conceded a second goal shortly afterwards. Ryan Kesler scored for the USA with seven minutes left of the second period. Canada twice hit the frame early in the third period and dominated most of the play but were kept out by US goalie Ryan Miller.
Vancouver, Canada (GenevaLunch) - Canada started the Vancouver Olympics with an unfortunate record: the only country to have hosted the Olympics without winning a gold medal. The 2010 team have changed all that, currently heading the gold medal table with 13, ahead of Germany’s ten and nine for the USA. Switzerland lies sixth with six gold and three bronze medals. In a fit of political correctness the Vancouver 2010 site lists countries firstly by the total number of medals, implying all are equal, and puts the USA at the top.
© Chappatte, distributed by Globe Cartoon. More cartoons on Chappatte’s web site. Geneva-based Patrick Chappatte works for the International Herald Tribune, for Geneva newspaper Le Temps, and for NZZ am Sonntag. All cartoons reproduced with permission.
Vancouver, BC, Canada (GenevaLunch) – Switzerland held its own against Canada in ice hockey 18 February in the Winter Games, giving Canada a 3-2 victory, but in a penalty shootout. The Canadians were widely expected to win easily: they have a strong young team, are skating on home territory and they were still bruised from their 2006 Winter Games loss to underdog Switzerland in Torino.
Background, Washington Post
Swiss Finance Minister Merz confirms no automatic data exchanges
Canada initials agreement, France confirms Davos “understanding”
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Switzerland’s push to build up its stable of bilateral tax agreements in line with OECD standards moved ahead last week. Among other moves, a new agreement with Canada was signed, the same day that a Mafia boss in Montreal pleaded guilty to hiding $5 million in three Swiss bank accounts from the Canadian taxman.
Monday 15 February Figaro newspaper in France published a list of 18 countries that France is calling its black list of governments that are not cooperative in fiscal matters, with the bulk of them in Latin America. Switzerland does not figure on the list.
Switzerland's air force provides air space security during the Davos WEF meeting which brings in world leaders
Update 23:00 Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper was given the unusual privilege, according to news agency Canadian Press, of an honour escort guard by two Swiss military jets as he left Switzerland Friday 29 January. The jets suddenly appeared, about 30 metres from the wingtips of the Airbus A340 carrying the prime minister, his team, security guards and media. For the Canadians, the honour guard is a sign of close friendship between the two countries. The Swiss have not made an official announcement about the flight (image on CTV Canada)
Harper was in Switzerland for the Davos World Economic Forum, but he also used the visit to meet with Swiss President Doris Leuthard.
Saskatoon, Canada (GenevaLunch) - Switzerland was a pale shadow of itself Tuesday in Canada, losing to Sweden, 11-4 in the M20 World Junior Championship match for the bronze title. The US took the championship title in a surprise overtime win, defeating Canada 6-5.
Links to other sites: 20 Minutes (Fre), NHL videos
An award-winning journalist from Calgary and four soldiers died in a blast in Afghanistan, in Canada’s third worst day in Afghanistan. Five others, including one Canadian civilian, were injured by the explosion on the edges of the city of Kandahar. “The attack came during a community security patrol to gather information on the pattern of life and maintain security in the area,” reports the CBC. Journalist Michelle Lang had been in Afghanistan only two weeks and was gathering material for a series of articles on the work of Canadian soldiers.
Links to other sites: CBC, Vancouver Sun
