Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming - Renée Fleming and the Mormon Tabernacle C...

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On intoxication and consent

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In the past 36 hours, social media has exploded over a controversial headline in The Telegram. The story, by court reporter Rosie Mullaly, covered the first day of testimony in the trial of Carl Snelgrove, an RNC officer charged with sexual assault against a young woman to whom he offered a ride home in the wee hours of the morning. (Some have also condemned CBC's and NTV's television and online reporting of the trial.) Before we get to that, this is what's known so far through evidence presented in court. The constable saw the complainant on a street downtown. She was intoxicated He offered to drive her home. She accepted. After that, the woman says, everything is hazy. She vaguely remembers the officer helping her in through a basement window because she couldn't find her key. She evidently let the officer in the house. Then things go pretty well blank, although she has a fragmented recollection of him engaging in anal sex. And the man's DNA was found on her fu...
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Into the lion's den: respected climatologist survives attempted mauling unscathed

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Climatologist Michael Mann is barely able to hide his incredulity as he fends off asinine attacks in Washington on March 29, 2017. Last week's Committee on Science, Space and Technology hearing in Washington should have been a sober discussion about the latest findings on climate change and the direction the U.S. should take towards mitigating the damage. Instead, it was about as productive as a World Wrestling Entertainment match. Lots of melodrama and smackdowns with no real winners, but one very real loser: the truth. At the bottom of the scrum was Michael Mann, a mild-mannered paleoclimatologist who works with proxy data to map historic temperatures. He and his colleagues produced a graph in 1998 that took the world by storm. It was dubbed the "hockey stick" graph because the sharp upward turn in the past century or so resembles the blade of a hockey stick. An extended version of the graph was incorporated into the Third Assessment Report by the UN's In...
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'It all begins here!'

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Actually, it began quite a bit before this, but if there ever was a moment that perfectly captured the hubris of the Muskrat Falls delusion, this Dec. 17, 2012 spectacle was it. You can picture then-premier Kathy Dunderdale the night before, carefully honing every mixed metaphor and tired cliché in front of a mirror. I don't think she wrote the speech, to be honest, but it was certainly an amazing piece of work. And by amazing, I mean gob-smackingly bad. With today's announcement of an independent inquiry into the lower Churchill development — one that has mushroomed in cost and is proving to be an economic albatross around our necks — I immediately thought of this speech. I remembered how clownish it seemed at the time, and how I knew it would come back to bite these people in the ass in the not-too-distant future. Minister Jerome Kennedy (right) seems to be genuinely enjoying the absurd hyperbole. On the other side, Nalcor boss Ed Martin looks a little uncomfortable. Pe...
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