Standing up for Canada
Peter McKay is supposed to be hobnobbing with Condi Rice this weekend - do you think this family's case is likely to come up? Or will he be too busy trying to get to first base?

Canadian boy caught in Texas detention

Aircraft's chance landing in U.S. calamitous event for 9-year-old, his Iranian parents

Feb 16, 2007 04:30 AM

Michelle Shephard
Rick Westhead
Toronto Star Staff Reporters

A 9-year-old Canadian boy is in a Texas detention centre after his flight to Toronto made an unscheduled stop and U.S. officials detained his family.

Now the boy's Iranian parents are pleading with Canadian officials to help secure the family's release from the immigration holding facility, which has come under fire for allegedly detaining children in sub-standard conditions.

"All the time he is asking me, `Why am I wearing the uniform? Why I am here?'" the boy's mother said, as she sobbed during a telephone interview from the detention facility yesterday.

"We didn't do nothing. My child is innocent."

The parents, who have no status in Canada, asked that their names not be published out of fear of eventually being returned to Iran, where they say they were previously imprisoned and suffered physical and sexual abuse.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes
Some updating going on in the blogroll and elsewhere. We bid a sorrowful adieu to three fantastic blogs: Michael Berube, Billmon's Whisky Bar and I am Eating My Husband's Soul. All three seem to have retired from the blogosphere and we are all the poorer for it. Prof. Berube, as a prominent academic and semiprofessional pundit, can still be read here and there, and we can only pray that Billmon will come back someday (or that the New York Times will come to its senses and use him to replace the odious David Brooks) ---I don't know what happened to the author of I am Eating My Husband's Soul, but I suspect legal trouble with the Denny's chain could conceivably been involved.
In their place, we bring you Indexed, where you can find math and chart comedy along the lines of the this:



A list of good Japan blogs is in the making and I'm also looking into adding a list of podcasts, so if you have suggestions, by all means leave them in the comments.

Additionally, we have joined Blogshares -- a sort of stock market game where blogs are substituted for companies. Dave Monroe of the must-read Dave's Snarky Northern Canadian Blog (see blogroll) has generously given me his holdings in The Woodshed, which I will be splitting with him as long as he doesn't mind me trying to acquire a few more shares in his joint. So click on the link and come and drive up the share price --- we'll all get rich I tell ya! Fabulously wealthy!

And you just know they voted Republican
Some people really never get past the mental age of three and still think the universe revolves around them. Follow the link and scroll way down to read about people who think the notion that the Earth revolves around the sun, or that it moves at all is based on Jewish Kabbalistic propaganda and responsible for the French Revolution and Communism. No, really.