• "We can turn this constant barrage of threats into a conscious effort to better ourselves as people. I wonder what Osama would think about that?"
• "The terrorist target list was a confidential list of the US State Department and that’s where it should have stayed. That terrorists might want to pose a threat to Canadians is one thing, but it’s worse to list the top sites in black and white for those brutes to see. They might get ideas they didn’t have before."
• While all 22 Canadian targets are painfully obvious, please take into consideration that frightening us Canadians will provide a lot of more young, impressionable Canadian volunteers for the American war machine, who think they are defending their own country."
• "Are we so gullible or naive that we’ll listen to everything that comes from the US that remotely resembles a story?"
• "If Toronto was obliterated, most Americans would not even bat an eyelash. Canadians should not worry or give in to the hype that Canada could be a terrorist target."
They say that our young people today are smarter and know a lot of things because of modern technology. They are constantly using the Internet, e-mail, mobile phones etc. etc. Wrong! Maybe they know about 007, Madonna, Eminem and other useless information but they generally don’t know what happened and what’s happening to the world.
This fact was confirmed recently by a survey conducted by the National Geographic Society. Over here, Canadian troops are poised to join a possible war initiated by the United States against Iraq, yet barely one in 10 college-age Canadians can find the Middle East country on a map.
That kind of performance placed Canada near the bottom in a ranking of 18 to 24-year olds from nine countries. The last time a similar survey was conducted, only the United States and Mexico fared worse. It is a consolation though know that only 13 percent of young Americans got the Iraq question right. But the most appalling is the fact that more young Americans could identify the island setting of tv’s current "Survivor" than they could Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Israel.
The survey also found that fewer North Americans use the Internet to get news. The survey revealed that young people who get their news primarily through television achieved notably poorer marks than those who supplemented it by reading newspapers and magazines and listening to the radio.
Here’s the big question — If young people today can’t even find places in the map and lack awareness of current events, how can they understand the world’s cultural, economic and natural resource issues that confront us?
According to Statistics Canada, tourism is getting back on its feet after the post 9/11 travel chill. More Canadians headed out of country in September for the fourth straight month as more foreigners visited, around 3.7 million.
The Foreign Affairs Department warned Canadians travelling anywhere in the world to exercise caution because of the Iraq dispute and terrorist threats. Canadians were advised to maintain a high level of personal security awareness at all times as the security situation could deteriorate rapidly, without advance notice. The advisory stressed that extreme caution must be made, particularly in commercial, public and tourist areas frequented by foreigners.
At last, a beauty contestant that made sense and with high principles, not the typical bird brained pageant variety. Miss Canada (Lynsey Bennett) walked out of the Miss World Contest that started four days of bloody religious rioting. She did not wan to be part of the "trigger" that set the violence off in Nigeria. Welcome back home Lynsey, we’re proud of you.