Sun News has published and broadcast information about the two Canadians being held in Egypt which paints them, not as innocent tourists caught up in local events, but as militant activists who support the Muslim Brotherhood. The men are Dr. Tarek Lubiani and John Greyson, referred to for many weeks in the media simply as a physician and a filmmaker. The Sun News contention, as detailed by Michael Coren (inset) is that these titles may be  correct in a narrow sense, but they provide no context to explain why the two men are being held by the Egyptian Army. Coren says that Dr. Loubiani is an extremist who has disrupted government news conferences in Canada to complain that he is a Palestinian refugee. He is, according to Coren, no such thing. The facts as stated by the Sun are rather remarkable. Mr. Greyson, says Coren, is a “leader of the extremist group called Queers Against Israeli Apartheid.” These previously unheard statements, if true, explain a lot about the difficulty the government is having getting the two men returned home.  Sun News.

Pictures from a remote camera in an isolated nature reserve in Russia have revealed an attack by a golden eagle on a young deer. In a sequence from the wild quite probably never before recorded, the bird is seen sinking its talons into the struggling sika deer. The camera is intended to monitor Siberian tigers. The three photos were released by the London Zoological Society. The society’s Linda Kerley said she first realized something was up when she approached the wildlife-monitoring device — also called a camera trap — and found a mangled deer carcass nearby. “Something felt wrong about it,” she said in a statement accompanying the photographs. “There were no large carnivore tracks in the snow, and it looked like the deer had been running and then just stopped and died. “It was only after we got back to camp that I checked the images from the camera and pieced everything together,” she said. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.” Golden eagles are large birds. Their wingspan tops more than 6 ½ feet and, while they typically eat small birds, mammals, or snakes, they’ve been known to target larger animals as well. The eagles are trained by Russian hunters who sometimes send them after prey in flocks The zoological society said the photos were shot in the Lazovsky State Nature Reserve in the Primorye region of Russia’s Far East on Dec. 8, 2011. The pictures were released only after the publication of a scholarly article by Kerley and co-author Jonathan Slaght of the Wildlife Conservation Society in the Ohio-based Journal of Raptor Research earlier this month.

Yes, it’s time for a new sign. That’s seems to be the sense of Richard Byford’s assessment of the old one at the store at 1536 Bayview Ave. So a new one is coming. It will be among the last of the renovations required after the fire that destroyed Leaside Cleaners at 1540 Bayview in the fall of 2011. Bonnie Byford Real Estate had to do extensive renovating to eradicate smoke damage. Since the fire there have been changes adjoining the former cleaning premises. Sport Clips, the specialty hair cutting business has gone into the former money exchange at 1538 and Smokin’ Cigar has taken over at 1540.  Old reliable,  The Flower Nook is still at 1542 but it had to move out for a while to repair smoke and collateral fire damage. As you may recall, that fire was caused by a lightning strike to a transformer mounted on a utility pole right outside the cleaning store.