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Last week, leaders of nations from both the G8 and G20 gathered in Ontario Canada, for meetings in in Huntsville and Toronto. Canadian authorities planning for the event spent an estimated $1 billion, mostly for security. Tens of thousands of protesters descended on Toronto, looking to have their voices heard on a broad range of issues, from indigenous rights to anti-capitalist ideals, to human and animal rights, and much more. Many peaceful marches took place throughout the weekend, but on Saturday, a small group of "black bloc" anarchists became violent, smashing storefronts and burning several police vehicles. Harsher tactics and more arrests by the 20,000 police officers deployed to Toronto soon followed, although many of those arrested were released from a temporary G20 detainment center soon after. (42 photos total)

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A photographer takes pictures as police officers form a line to hold back demonstrators protesting the G8/G20 summits on June 26, 2010 in Toronto, Ontario Canada. (Scott Olson/Getty Images) #

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This group of clowns first entertained and subsequently annoyed police to the point of pushing the clowns (and myself) back two blocks to University and Adelaide.

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The G20 security strategy has been spectacularly successful at cocooning the world’s leading politicians and staggeringly ineffective at protecting the property and peace of mind of Torontonians. And the one, inevitably, led to the other.

By bringing in thousands of heavily armed strangers and throwing up barricades everywhere to regular traffic, frightening off good and decent citizens, Canadian authorities created a ghost town in the heart of our city.

Perfect for the political leaders. Protesters were kept blocks away from where the deliberations were going on.

And most protesters conducted themselves faultlessly as the global good and great met behind rings of gulag-like fencing and battalions of police beating Plexiglas shields with batons in a primitive show of might.

It was, however, less than perfect for the city, its businesses and its inhabitants. The only force that can prevent vandalism and mayhem in a city is the presence of its population. Surely that was the lesson every urban planner learned from looking south to the hollowed-out urban war zones of the United States in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

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The security contractor Blackwater Worldwide tried for two years to secure lucrative defense business in Southern Sudan while the country was under U.S. economic sanctions, according to current and former U.S. officials and hundreds of pages of documents reviewed by McClatchy .

The effort to drum up new business in East Africa by Blackwater owner Erik Prince , a former Navy SEAL who had close ties with top officials in the George W. Bush White House and the CIA , became a major element in a continuing four-year federal investigation into allegations of sanctions violations, illegal exports and bribery.

The Obama administration, however, has decided for now not to bring criminal charges against Blackwater , according to a U.S. official close to the case.

Instead, the U.S. government and the private military contractor are negotiating a multimillion-dollar fine to settle allegations that Blackwater violated U.S. export control regulations in Sudan , Iraq and elsewhere.

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The number one killer of young Americans is the automobile. However, the Secular Humanists dominating our schools refuse to acknowledge that the only safe driving is abstinence from driving. Instead, they advocate courses in “Driver Education,” in which teenagers are taught “Safe Driving,” and no attention is given to traditional values. They are even taught the use of “Seat Belts” (and some classes even give explicit demonstrations of the proper method of applying these belts!) with, at best, a passing mention that the protection provided by these belts is only partial. Clearly, this sends a mixed message to our young people: it appears to condone driving, and the more inquisitive will surely feel encouraged to experiment with driving.

Stop the wanton slaughter! Contact your school board member and insist that driving be taught in the family, in a climate where the moral implications are not overlooked, not in the schools where hedonistic instructors teach driving as a mere form of pleasure.

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The story of a young, handsome PR executive’s quest to save America from a 100-year-old plot to destroy it, The Overton Window was described as "didactic, discursive [and] sporadically incoherent" in the Los Angeles Times, and as "not just a bad book … an instructively bad book because it offers a complete colour-by-numbers picture of the contemporary Wingnut psyche" in the Daily Beast.

"Thrillers often are marred by laughable prose, but few have stumbled along with language as silly as this one," added the Washington Post, pointing to hero Noah’s reaction on meeting his true love, patriot Molly, for the first time: "Something about this woman defied a traditional chick-at-a-glance inventory." The Los Angeles Times agreed. "You really can’t make this stuff up," wrote its reviewer, Tim Rutten, before singling out the same passage: "Without a doubt, all the goodies were in all the right places, but no mere scale of one to 10 was going to do the job this time. It was an entirely new experience for him. Though he’d been in her presence for less than a minute, her soul had locked itself onto his senses, far more than her substance had."

Despite this, Beck’s army of fans sent the thriller racing to the top of the New York Times fiction bestseller list, ahead of the latest outing for Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest.

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Queen and Spadina was one of the epicenters of G20 activity today in Toronto. Jonas Naimark who was there and took the above photo writes:

The last day of the G20, protesters ended up at Queen and Spadina. Soon after stopping the crowd police boxed them in and began grabbing them out 1 by 1 to arrest people. They were standing there peacefully, many people weren’t even protesting they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’m not sure what the police’s plan was. Shortly after this pic was taken it started to poor rain. Many of these people were forced to wait for four hours in the rain in restraints.

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When Oscar the cat lost both his hind paws in a farming accident, it was feared he’d have to trundle around in one of those wheeled-cat apparatuses. But Noel Fitzpatrick, a neuro-orthopedic veterinary surgeon in Surrey, pioneered a groundbreaking technique instead, installing weight-bearing bone implants to create a bionic kitty.

Custom-engineered metal implants — called intraosseous transcutaneous amputation prosthetics (ITAPs) — are fastened directly to Oscar’s little ankle bones, inside his fuzzy little legs. From there they protrude directly through the skin and fur, using a biomimicking design inspired by the way that deer’s antlers anchor to bone and then extend out through the skin. Prosthetic paws attach to the ends of the implants and let Oscar (no relation to Oscar Pistorius) walk normally.