Here is a quick overview of notable encounters between humans and wildlife in Canada for 2006.

Bear

In July, A man canoeing in Northern Ontario killed a bear with a knife when it attacked his dog.

Bison

In August, a North West Territories community is suffering from bully bison.

Cougar

Later in August, a boy was attacked by a cougar on Vancouver Island. The boy's father kicked the cougar and saved his son, who suffered only a deep wound in the scalp.

Homaidan al-Turki, 37, is a Saudi student in Denver Colorado. He recently was on trial in Denver Colorado for keeping an Indonesian servant at home paid below minimum wage, as well as sexually assaulting her. He was sentenced to 28 years in prison, but later the charges were dropped.

Basic Muslim behaviors?

The press is reporting the news in a way that implies that al-Turki describes these acts as "traditional Islamic behaviors". This has been picked up by blogs as such, and used as an attack on Muslims and Islam.

For example, one blog says:

From the meaningless numbers are fun to talk about department ...merlinofchaos (Earl Miles) committed the 40,000 change to the Drupal CVS repository. Note that these are not all the commits to Drupal, since commit #1 by Dries is only dated Aug 20, 2004. So, this number is when a new issue tracking/commit cross referencing system was in effect.

Mohamed Taha Mohamed Ahmed, the editor in chief of the Sudanese Al-Wifaq newspaper was sadly kidnapped and beheaded.

Last year, Taha was charged with insulting religion. Despite calls for his execution and extensive demonstrations, the charges were dropped.

The charges stemmed from an article that was reprinted by Taha that questioned the ancestry of Prophet Muhammad.

Many news media stated that Taha merely reprinted material from books by the famed 14th century Egyptian historian and prolific author, al-Maqrizi المقريزي. For example, the BBC, BBC Arabic, ABC Australia, and Asharq al-Awsat (in Arabic, with one user comment correcting the Maqrizi). It was also picked up at face value by academics, such as Howard Friedman who says:

A typically Egyptian fruit seems to have its origin from faraway places.

Known as Harankash حرنكش or الست المستحية or الست المستخبية (the shy woman), it is sold by street vendors. It has an orange color, and sweetish taste that has a tangy sour tone.

The scientific name is Physalis peruviana It belongs to the Solanacea family, and is closely related to the tomatoes. Its native land is Central America, Peru and Chile, from which it has been transplanted to parts of Africa, including Egypt.

The fruit is wrapped in a papery husk, giving it its name. It is eaten as a casual fruit in Egypt, and said to be on the menu for diplomatic receptions, as a distinctive Egyptian fruit.

One of the less common fruits in Egypt is the sycamore fig, known locally as gemeiz جميز. In English, it is known as Sycamore, Sycomore, Fig Mulberry. In Turkish, it is known as cumbez.

Botanical Information

The Sycamore fig tree should not be confused with other trees called sycamore in northern Europe, which are actually maples.

The sycamore fig tree (Ficus sycomorus sycomorus, and F. sycomorus gnaphalocarpa) belong to the fig family, which includes the common edible fig (Ficus carica), and the Banyan tree.

An Orthodox Hasidic Jew was removed from an Air Canada Jazz flight from Montreal to New York City on September 1.The man started to pray when the flight was heading to the runway. In normal Jewish manner, the prayer involved the man covering his head with a shawl and "rocking back and forth" while reading from a book.A passenger said:

"The attendant actually recognized out loud that he wasn't a Muslim and that she was sorry for the situation but they had to ask him to leave".

The poor man spoke neither English nor French and hence could not communicate with anyone.

These are some statistics on top downloads from drupal.org.

It is separated by category, rather than have them all grouped together.

The BBC has an interesting set of graphs showing how America changed after September 11.Defense spending went up and maintained that trend ever since. Hate crimes against Muslims had a sharp rise that went down afterwards, but is still many ordered of magnitude more than before September 11.Presidential approval rating went briefly up then continued a steady slide.

British journalist Peter Taylor comes to the conclusion that no matter what Tony Blair says, terrorism in Britain is all about the invasion of Iraq.

He also notes that dialog worked with the IRA and ETA, and asks why not Al-Qaeda.

He quotes Michael Scheuer, a CIA veteran, former head of the Bin Laden unity, and author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West is losing the war on terror, who identifies Iraq's invasion as a major recruiting propaganda for Al-Qaeda.