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The Editor of this blog invites other contributors of lead articles, art and poetry etc. Photos welcome. Subject to approval of content etc. While editorially this is a left wing blog with a radical perspective, other opinion is of course welcome to the comments section. Everything being subject to moderator approval of approptiateness to this site.

Saturday, October 28, 2006

A bull moose with his spring velvet antlers just about to branch alongside his ears. (Cropped out of a larger photo, wherein at these photo sizes he would be lost.) We came just about nose to nose with each other, as I was coming out of some trees and he was entering. We scared the bejesus out of each other, and he dashed off to where you see him, until his curiosity got the better of him, and he just had to turn and look around to see who and what I was.

This was taken 80 klicks or so north of Revelstoke, near the same place where I got that black bear photo.

Now, had it been a female with calf, I'd have been in a whole lot more dangerous predicament. She would have been a whole bunch more aggressive, which I've had happen to me. Out of my tractor while doing field work , squated with my drawers down, doing my business in a tree edge. Barely made it back to my tractor in time, which was fortunately only a few steps away, pulling up and holding up my trousers as I fled, with the sound of snapping twigs, and the swishing of leaves and branches behind me. Even swallowed my chew of snoose.

We male critters, on the other hand, just want a little lovin'. :-)

3 comments:

BC Mary said...

Just so ya know ... and no offence intended ... but if I have to climb over somebody taking a dump before I get to the comments, I'm not going to be coming to visit this space much longer.

Yeah, yeah, I've raised kids and understand physical functions but ... jeez.

Wanna hear how I whisked my roaming toddler from the path of a beautiful glossy black bear? Guaranteed, no crap involved.

Coyote said...

Well Mary, nothing said here you won't hear or see all around you in the "modern world" of tv, movies, the blog9osphere and all manner of story telling.

What you do is up to you.

I'm me. If that poses problems for you, you're a free woman.

BC Mary said...

Big fish to fry today ... and this story has appeared in the Globe and Mail and Times Colonist so far today ... a miracle! - BC Mary.
_________________________________________________
RCMP tapped B.C. premier's phone by mistake

[Is the Special Prosecutor fumbling like a fox in this important case involving the sale of B.C. rail and more?]


RCMP tapped premier's conversation by mistake

Their real target was subject of drug probe at legislature
Miro Cernetig
Vancouver Sun - October 31, 2006

After twice being refused by the courts permission to wiretap a B.C. government cellular phone, the RCMP pushed through a third request by not telling the judge the phone was registered at the legislature, B.C. Supreme Court was told Monday.

And that eventually led the RCMP to inadvertently eavesdrop on a private conversation between Premier Gordon Campbell and former finance minister Gary Collins.

That unintended moment happened after the RCMP sought a wiretap in November, 2003, to monitor the conversations of David Basi, formerly Collins' top adviser, who was the subject of a police drug investigation that eventually resulted in the 2003 raid of the legislature, said defence lawyer Kevin McCullough.

But in politics, ministerial staff often hand over their phones to chat to people.

That appears to have happened with Basi, who is in court fighting charges of influence-peddling to help a company mount a $1-billion bid for the publicly owned BC Rail. An incredulous McCullough told the court that he discovered that the RCMP suddenly found themselves monitoring the conversation of the premier and Collins, who never knew the phone was tapped.

No details of the conversation were detailed and neither the premier nor Collins were ever suspects in the case.

But McCullough used the incident to take aim at the RCMP, which he accused of doing a poor job of disclosing evidence that he needs -- and is entitled to -- to mount a defence.

In another revelation, which the defence said it only got after months of requests, McCullough said the RCMP met with Claude Richmond, the legislature speaker at the time, in a hangar at the Kamloops airport. They wanted to explain the reasons for the raid on the legislature and

Richmond asked for a written note, court documents show.

The RCMP also had to get permission for the legislature raid from RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zacardelli. The defence wants to see his correspondence.

McCullough said the fact it took months for the defence to drag these and other facts out of the Crown's evidence cache, is proof of sloppiness and delays. The defence is alleging "significant errors" have "plagued the disclosure" of evidence in the prosecution of the once-influential Liberal insider Basi, along with Bobby Virk and Aneal Basi.

McCullough's courtroom allegation was that the RCMP did not offer full background on their wiretapping requests or the ownership of the telephone to the judge, who authorized the wiretapping of Basi's Ministry of Finance cellphone in Nov. 2003.

In their first two attempts to have Basi's government phone wiretapped in Operation Everywhichway , investigators were stymied by two judges on the grounds it would impinge on "parliamentary privilege" because a ministerial phone was involved, said McCullough.

But on the third try, McCullough said, the RCMP changed the address on the wire tap application from the legislature to another address. He said they never told the judge their previous wiretap requests had been turned down by the court.

The defence is arguing before Justice Elizabeth Bennett that it should now be allowed into the RCMP's "Project Room" to inventory tens of thousands of pages of documents and wiretap transcripts. It argues that the special prosecutor, William Berardino, did not give them a proper inventory of the evidence and that evidence has been "misfile" or overlooked, making it difficult to mount a fair defence.

"The special prosecutor ..." says the defence team's argument, "has delegated the most critical part of the Crown's disclosure obligation to the RCMP."

"The RCMP was controlling the disclosure process," McCullough said, adding he did not want "to eyeball" the evidence but simply "identify" what exists in RCMP files.

Throughout the day, McCullough listed numerous cases over 20 months where he was swamped with tens of thousands of pages at a time on computer discs, without a suitable index and in one case without a proper search function.

Other examples of delays in getting key evidence, he said, were the defence team's difficulty in getting RCMP e-mails and even an investigation by the force into "media leaks."

That report "dealt with the considerable number of media leaks in this case," the defence argued "These leaks resulted in significant publicity, especially with respect to the raid of the Legislature. Such publicity had a profound deleterious effect on the fair trial rights of these accused persons. "

However, Berardino took issue with the allegation that he did not provide "full disclosure" of evidence to the defence team. He said he will prove that he was "prompt" and fair when he presents his argument today.

As well, Berardino noted that any problems with the evidence offered on DVDs was related to a new trend to putting such massive amounts of documentation in a digital form.

"This disclosure package was one of the first large disclosure packages [on DVDs]," he said.

Berardino is opposing the defence's demand to inventory the RCMP evidence by going to the project room. That has prompted McCullough to ask the judge to call the RCMP officer involved in releasing evidence to the Crown, to make sure evidence isn't going missing through accident "unintentional negligence, who knows?"

www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=bc58a9c9-2060-46c7-8aee-709f1589f874&k=52745&p2


Robin Mathews with two colleagues was in the court room. His report will be written up momentarily. But the hearing continues today.