U.S.’s ‘keep your DAM water’ sign blames Canada for flood

 
By Tim Switzer
REGINA —Frustrated over flood waters in the Souris Rover that travelled from Saskatchewan into their city earlier this summer, some residents of Minot, North Dakota, put up a billboard this week to — as the Oscar-nominated songs says — blame Canada.
On Thursday, a billboard briefly appeared in Minot that read, “Canada . . . next time keep your DAM water,” in reference to the record level of water that flowed down the Souris from Saskatchewan and into Minot, flooding hundreds of homes in both jurisdictions.
But the billboard disappeared almost as quickly as it went up. After pressure from City of Minot and tourism officials, the company that owns the billboard, Newman Signs, had it down by the late afternoon.
The billboard showed up around six weeks after rumours of Canadians being mistreated in Minot surfaced north of the border. Those rumours proved to be unfounded, but the billboard proved there are at least a few in the city who held some animosity toward their neighbours to the north.

Facebook sex scandal with girl, 16, topples German conservative politician

Christian von Boetticher, Schleswig-Holstein's Christian Democratic Union leader and top candidate for regional state elections in 2012, wipes tears as he gives a statement to the media after a board meeting in Kiel, Germany. Photo: Reuters

BERLIN — German voters may be willing to tolerate a politician's having an affair with a teenager, but not when that politician — a leading conservative, no less — met her on Facebook, where he also flaunted immodest details of his life.
Christian von Boetticher, 40, the successful state legislator at the top of the Christian Democratic Union's ticket in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein, resigned as head of the party there during a tearful news conference on Sunday. He admitted to the affair, which was legal under German law, and to making a misjudgement, but insisted that he had nothing to be ashamed of because it was "a very unusual love".
It is also an unusual scandal — not only because of the girl's age, which was at the border of permissible and punishable, but also because of the role played by the social-networking site.

In some ways, the fact of her youth was less strange to conservative voters and colleagues "than that a grown man with more important things to do would spend so much time playing around on this network with nothing better to do than trade messages with a young girl," said Rudolf Koetter, director of the Centre for Advanced Ethics and Science Communications at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany.

Survey’s surprising finding: tea party less popular than atheists and Muslims

In an op-ed article in the New York Times, Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard, and David E. Campbell, a political scientist at Notre Dame, say they have collected data indicating that the tea party is "less popular than much maligned groups like 'atheists' and 'Muslims.'"
But Campbell says the tea party was really an afterthought in their research.
"We didn't go into this study to look at the tea party," Campbell said in an interview with The Ticket.
The professors were following up on research they conducted in 2006 and 2007 for their book "American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us" and decided to add the tea party and atheists to their list of survey queries. By going back to many of the same respondents, the professors gleaned several interesting facts about the tea party.