- Latest Popular Stories, Instablogs Community by Conor27

Swiss court rejects Polanski release bid

Conor — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 12:31:44 +0000

Roman Polanski’s three decades as a fugitive are coming back to haunt him.

Noting his previous escape from U.S. authorities, Switzerland’s top criminal court on Tuesday rejected Polanski’s appeal to be released from prison because of the “high” risk that the 76-year-old director would try to flee again.

Polanski’s offers of bail, house arrest and electronic monitoring failed to sway the tribunal. Even a Swiss chalet in the luxury resort of Gstaad was brushed aside as insufficient collateral to guard against Polanski fleeing the country, as the United States seeks to have him extradited for having sex with a 13-year-old girl in 1977.

Environmental heroes who went down swinging

Conor — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 05:31:03 +0000

RESTORING INTEGRITY TO THE NATION’S environmental and public-lands agencies will be one of the first challenges our next president faces. Over the past eight years, President George W. Bush’s political appointees to the EPA and the...

Fractured NATO risks remaining a Cold War relic

Conor — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 11:44:47 +0000

A battalion of elite French paratroopers may help stiffen Canada’s commitment to fighting in Afghanistan, but the war against Taliban insurgents is far from won.

The Harper government had threatened to quit Afghanistan unless 1,000 more soldiers were sent to Kandahar, the Taliban heartland where Canada’s hard-pressed troops are insufficient to wage a successful counterinsurgency operation.

The French troops are expected to deploy in eastern Afghanistan, allowing an equal number of U.S. troops to take the lead in Kandahar.

While that solution eases the most immediate threat to the alliance’s solidarity, NATO still faces two grim realities: that it isn’t winning the war in Afghanistan and deep divisions continue to stymie efforts to morph from a Cold War relic into a force fit for the 21st century.