Last month, a photo was circulated by email and on blogs that has a pack of pork meat with a sticker saying Halal on it. The packer is a Singapore company and the country of origin is Australia.

Halal حلال is an Arabic word meaning 'permissible', but in non-Arabic speaking Muslim countries it takes a legal meaning derived from Islamic law. Pork is forbidden in Islam, just like Judaism. Hence it can never be "halal" in either sense of the word.

It seems that some bloggers thought it was true, while others thought it was a sick joke.

Congratulations to Sutharsan for doing the 90,000th commit to Drupal.

Nowadays, it is often taken for granted that Muslims are staunch Anti-Semites. Most people in the West either do not know, or deliberately ignore, historical facts to the contrary.

History of Jews in Muslim Lands

Compared to Europe, Jews faired much better in Muslim lands over 1300+ years.

Environment Canada says that winter 2007-2008 will be the coldest winter in 15 years.

Canadians pay one of the highest mobile phone rates in the developed world. This is due to an oligopoly by the triad (Bell, Telus, and Rogers). The OECD says that Canada is 29th out of 30 countries when it comes to cost.

The government has realized this and is now opening the market to competition.

40% of the spectrum will be reserved for new entrants, who would have the right to rent towers from the incumbents at reasonable costs.

According to Jeff Robbins, Moshe is now a verb.  Something can be "moshified"!

Cool! 

Here is another scam. This criminal claims that he is a contractor for the UN in Baghdad, Iraq, and that he found $65 million US dollars, and want help to move the money. 

From    Michael <amark215@yahoo.com>
reply-to    mix215@yahoo.com,
date    Nov 25, 2007 5:19 PM
subject    Can I Trust You ?Wait Your Reply   
   
   
Greetings,

Google has donated $10,000 USD to the Drupal project as part of Summer of Code for 2007. Students who participated got a total of $90,000.

As a mentor for the 3rd year, I got a T-Shirt. Just like the previous two years, it arrived just in time when snow is starting to fall in Southern Ontario.

For the second year in a row, the T-Shirts are black. In 2005, it was dark navy blue.

Here is the front of the T-shirt.

And here is the back. Looks like a face from a Sci-Fi movie (Tron?)

According to a study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Canada's top 1% earners -- families that earn $266,000 or more, paid 30.5% of their income in taxes. Canada's poorest 10% -- families earning less than $13,523 paid 30.7% in taxes.

The full study can be viewed in Eroding Tax Fairness (PDF).

The study proposes some controvertial methods though, such as making capital gains tax the same as income tax.