| Oda rejects poll suggesting Afghan support for NATO plummets
Canada's international development minister took issue with a new poll Monday that suggests Afghans are increasingly critical of the war in their country. Bev Oda, the minister responsible for the Canadian International Development Agency, dismissed the findings of the survey, which suggested support for NATO has plummeted the last year and the Taliban is growing in strength. .
Kevin Federline
Most of you probably are already aware of this, but just in case, Britney Spears visited with her children for the first time on Saturday since January 3. Kevin Federline wanted Britney to have some time with the kids. After two days of tense negotiations, lawyers for each side hashed out a deal. E! News reports: Aside from Spears and a court-appointed monitor, there were several other key personnel on hand, including: Britney's father, Jamie Spears; a Federline security guard; and a lawyer from the Luce Forward law firm, which is handling Britney's conservatorship for Jamie Spears.
According to an insider, the 26-year-old pop star was not permitted to take the boys, ages two and one, into another room without the others watching. Also present was a blind chimp with a bazooka.
No bikes on 183-A
I wrote a column on Monday about a guy, Chuck Thomas, who commutes to work on the Texas 45 North tollway. On his bicycle. I said he could do so because the Texas Transportation Commission has not voted to make biking illegal on its three toll roads in the Austin area. The board of the Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority, however, did vote about a year ago to make biking illegal on its single toll road, 183-A. That road, if you don't know, connects at its southern end to Texas 45 North and then goes for 4.5 miles north to RM 1431. There are signs on its entrances indicating no bikes are allowed. One caveat: The mobility authority built another 7.1 miles of two-lane frontage roads from RM 1431 to north of Leander, where the lanes merge with the old U.S.
Exclusive: Brett Morgen's Chicago 10
Let's say that works out to a hundred twenty paged script double spaced, when you break that down to single spaces you're talking about forty-five pages, that's like Cliff's Notes to history and I didn't want the film to be like a Cliff's Notes to history. Sometimes, I'm asked if I'm an activist filmmaker and I always say, "Well, I did the Bob Evans film. What was my cause, the Irving Thalberg award?" If I'm an activist, my primary cause is nonfiction filmmaking and trying to make films that stretch out the boundaries of nonfiction, I don't think I'm a documentarian because I think that culturally, we like to think of documentarians as journalists and I'm anything but a journalist. Nonfiction film is going further and further away from the static image. Digital tools have now entered the vanguard and we now as filmmakers have all these technologies to visualize the past and the present and those ways are completely subjective.
Ready to race in OBX today?
Steve Sedgwick is not an elite athlete. He has run 13.1 miles only once. He plans to do it again Sunday, this time in the Gateway Bank Half Marathon on the Outer Banks. He won't be dressed like the other runners, though. Sedgwick plans to sport a long-sleeved T-shirt that says "Blind Guy." That's because he is. The vision problems started in childhood and got progressively worse through the years, said Sedgwick, a 49-year-old from Vienna. He had to stop driving in 2003. By 2005, he couldn't see to read or work anymore. These days he has only peripheral vision in his right eye. Exercise, and lots of it, Sedgwick said doctors told him, would help stave off total blindness. He swam and lifted weights. But he needed a partner if he was going to run.
Transit funding support in question
In an extreme example, back in the 1800s, along the then-bustling southern Illinois banks of the Ohio River, a group from the village of Chicago asked for a loan from a Shawneetown bank. According to local legend, it was denied on the grounds Chicago was too far away from Shawneetown to amount to anything. Downstate, there are still hard feelings around the Capitol regarding the handling of electric rate relief last year. The plan addressed higher utility bills statewide, but the biggest increases were downstate. Despite tearful testimony and instances of bills tripling, it took lawmakers and the governor nearly nine months to reach an accord and provide relief. Now, Chicago area mass transit has nerves on edge. And it is the increasingly heated tenor of this debate that makes a second approval of a mass transit bailout anything but guaranteed.
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