[NEWS] Some Thursday links

[rfmcdonald]

• The Irish church's decision, as reported by Business Week, to ask parishoners to pay the cost of sex abuse settlements has a lot of Irish unhappy.


• When Ann Coulter came to Canada, the expected controversy over freedom of expression materialized.


• Rwanda, The Times reports, is shifting with haste from being an outside of la francophonie to being a thoroughly Anglophone Commonwealth member-state integrated with its East African neighbours.


• Thomas Walkon in the Toronto Star argues that pretty much all of Canada's current political elite save the current Conservative government belong to the "Red Tory" tradition of well-considered conservatism.


• The Canadian Press' Jessica Murphy reports on how the sainthood of Québec's Brother André has inspired a sort of national pride in the first Québécois saint.


• Over at the Globe and Mail, John Allemang writes about Nell Painter's recently published study on the changing definitions of the "white race," which at one point or another in the Anglo-American tradition excluded everyone from the Irish to the Jews to the Germans (!).


• The Globe and Mail explains Québec's very strong opposition to the niqab in public spaces as a reaction to the province's own history of reactionary anti-woman religion.


• In Ukraine, the New York Times reports on the many priests of the Ukrainian Catholic Church--an autonomous church linked with Rome--and who seem to be doing quite well.
  
• New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island want to start exporting their lobsters to China.


• GM's Brazilian branch is expanding its manufacturing capacity in Brazil, part of a plan to grow its market share in an increasingly prosperous South America.


• The New Scientist reports that Neptune may have acquired its oddly orbiting and rather large moon Triton through a collision with another, smaller planet.


• Reuters reports that Israelis are attracted to settlements in the West Bank to the west of the separation fence for economic reasons like cheap land.