First Canadian border guards graduate from firearms school

As seen on CTV July 27, 2007

Some previously unarmed Canadian border guards held graduation ceremonies Friday after three weeks of firearms training and will return to work with sidearms on their hips.

"This is an ongoing step in equipping our border officers with the technology and the training to keep our border safe," Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day said Friday in Chilliwack, B.C.

The plan is to eventually arm all 4,400 guards, a process that's expected to take a decade.

Twenty-four officers in Chilliwack and 28 in Ottawa went through three-week training programs on using Beretta PX4 Storm 9 mm pistols. The RCMP conducted the training, instructing the guards on the responses to threats allowed by the law.

"The work has gotten more dangerous," he said.

In January 2006, a U.S. police pursuit of two fugitives ended in a shootout only metres from the Canadian border at B.C.'s Peace Arch crossing .

If border guards think their safety is in jeopardy, they have the right to abandon their posts. The RCMP are expected to handle potentially violent situations.

The day after that Peace Arch incident, then-justice minister Vic Toews announced that border guards would be armed. Prime Minister Stephen Harper made yet another announcement in September 2006.

The former Liberal government thought arming guards would be too expensive and that having armed guards greeting visitors would send the wrong message. However, a 2005 Senate report found that arming border guards was a good idea.

U.S. border guards have been armed for years.

US Energy Secretary Sam Bodman tours Alberta Oilsand with Shell President

Oilsands work just getting started
Companies have global-level growth plans for Alberta's rich-making resource

As seen in the The Edmonton Journal
Aug 6, 2007

Edmonton / A year after former Shell Canada president Clive Mather gave out a hint, the scale of development on Alberta's horizon is coming into sharper focus.

"What we're saying is this is only the beginning," Mather said as he escorted U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman on an oilsands tour north of Fort McMurray.
"There's an awful lot more to come," Mather said. Syncrude Canada chief executive Charles Ruigrok echoed his Shell peer, saying the province's 141,000-square-kilometre bitumen belt is catching and holding the attention of global industry and finance.

In January and last week, the Athabasca Oil Sands Project gave some answers in applications for regulatory approvals of its growth plans.
The Athabasca group alone -- led by 60-per-cent owner Shell and backed by Chevron Canada and Western Oil Sands with 20 per cent each -- has set its sights on achieving production of 770,000 barrels per day from its 1,200 square kilometres of Fort McMurray bitumen leases by about 2020.

It took the entire industry 67 years and 56,772 wells to build up Alberta output of conventional liquid oil into the 800,000-barrels-a-day range, from the first discovery at Waterton in 1902 until 1969, show records of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

The oilsands are "world class," Texas giant Marathon Oil Corp. added in announcing its $6.5-billion takeover of Western.

Shell emphasized that all its majority share of the Athabasca reserves will be processed in Alberta, yielding maximum value to the firm's Canadian operations and the provincial economy.
Marathon, a 120-year-old American industry mainstay with few Canadian assets, will eventually export most of its minority of the Athabasca bitumen to its seven U.S. refineries and 5,700 service stations.

Chevron has yet to make known plans for all its share of Athabasca reserves, or for an estimated 7.5 billion barrels of bitumen in 730 square kilometres of leases known as Ells River that the firm bought west of Fort McMurray 16 months ago.

But the Shell program alone spells more than a decade of heavy industrial work in the Fort Saskatchewan area east of Edmonton. Forecast expenditures of $22 billion to $27 billion include nearly $8 billion in wages for local workers.

The Scotford mega-upgrader will be built as four 100,000-barrels-a-day plants. It will be a continuous construction project lasting about 13 years provided oil markets, government policies and economic conditions stay favourable.

Shell wrote an invitation to industrial housing builders into its construction applications to the Alberta Energy and Utilities Board and Alberta Environment.
The region could use the sprawling, hotel-like worker complexes known as "open camps" that have sprouted in the Fort McMurray region, the documents predict.

Building each of the four upgrader plants will require 3,000 to 4,000 trades personnel at construction activity peaks.

But the mega-upgrader is just the biggest of many large projects in the 310-square-kilometre Alberta Industrial Heartland district northeast of Edmonton.
Counting all currently known developments "the cumulative construction workforce is expected to remain high, at more than 8,000 workers, from mid-2008 to early 2013, with a peak of about 13,300 workers in late 2011," Shell forecasts.
"Based on an estimated 7,500 local trades people available, additional workers from outside the region or province will be needed."
In highly skilled occupations needed by industrial projects, Edmonton oilsands jobs will be more like careers than the traditional feast-or-famine pattern of construction contracting.
Shell vowed "to use the project's lengthy construction schedule to offer the opportunity of long-term, stable employment as a means of attracting and retaining industrial workers and potentially attracting out-of-region workers."

When finished, the chain of four upgrader plants is expected to create 1,438 permanent jobs including 1,138 full-time staff and 300 contractor positions.

Since the Edmonton area already has a population of more than a million, Shell predicts it will absorb the upgrader people without repeating the notorious boomtown trauma of Fort McMurray.

Refuge in the Frontier - $ 23.8 million - BC interior working ranch

As seen in the National Post
Saturday, August 04, 2007

"" ALEXIS CREEK, B.C. -One of Canada's largest working ranches is up for sale, and folks in this dusty hamlet are guessing who might cough up the $24.8-million asking price. Best bet is a stranger, someone not from these parts. Someone with a private jet and cash to burn.

The attractions are obvious: The open range, vast forests, pristine rivers, glacier-fed lakes and crisp, starlit nights. Fishing and hunting at one's pleasure. A come-as-you-wish crack at the cowboy life. The high plains of the B.C. interior, north of Kamloops, are playgrounds for the moneyed set.

Attractive to a Saudi sheik, perhaps. An American celebrity or industrialist. A Euro-royal, romanced by silver screen images of the Old West. Or a reclusive eccentric, looking for refuge on what's left of the frontier. The locals are already familiar with these types; they are the new neighbours.

Ironically, the last person expected to buy the old Alexis Creek Ranch -- 4,000 hectares of deeded property, access to another 101,000 hectares of prime grazing land, and 1,000 head of hardy stock cows and 50 purebred Black Angus bulls -- is an honest-to-goodness cattleman: They are few and far between these days.

The current owner is Bruce Blakey, a septuagenarian marine electronics magnate from Seattle. He bought Alexis Creek 14 years ago from a German, one Richard Wittgenstein, a.k.a. HH Prince Richard Casimir Karl August Robert Konstantin of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg, and son-in-law to the King and Queen of Denmark.

Prince Richard didn't amble about the ranch that much, apparently. Mr. Blakey snapped it up in 1993 when land prices were lower, but his primary motive was the improvement of his health. He wanted to take on something physical, and got his money's worth. Mr. Blakey began travelling to the ranch from his Seattle home every second week. He built a new irrigation system to pump water from the Chilcotin River and then over 725 hectares of hay and silage, perfect homegrown fodder for the cattle. He built a five-bedroom ranch house.
The new airport is his crowning touch. It comes with a paved runway and a massive hangar that easily accommodates Mr. Blakey's Citation jet. It also boasts private quarters for his own flight crew.

Mr. Blakey is an intensely private individual who would not participate in an interview for this story. Instead, he dispatched his Vancouver-based realtor to show me around the sprawling property, about an hour's drive west of Williams Lake.

"I'm selling a first-class airport with a ranch around it," declares Irv Ridd. A good line, made only half in jest. Without the modern airfield, he notes, Alexis Creek might not attract the right kind of buyer. "Qualified people," he calls them. "Persons of great wealth."

"Alexis Creek is a turnkey operation and everything is included in the price, down to the salt and pepper in the shakers," says Mr. Ridd, as we drive up to the ranch house. "But the person who will buy this ranch will do it because of the airport. And because he wants to do something interesting with [his] money. He probably already owns commercial real estate, like a shopping centre or something. But this is different."

The ranch went on the market three weeks ago, and while some potential buyers have expressed interest and have even flown in on their own aircraft to inspect the place, closing a deal could take many more months. The present owner is determined to sell to someone committed to maintaining the cattle operation, which requires at least four full-time cowboys plus farmers and mechanics.

And there's the rub: Running a large cattle ranch in B.C. is not exactly lucrative. Mr. Ridd says the Alexis Creek herd, while relatively small for a ranch this size, does generate an annual profit. But precise figures are closely guarded; financial statements are reserved for prospective buyers, who must sign off on confidentiality agreements before they see them.
Margins have to be slim. Beef prices have long been stagnant. Meanwhile, the cost of labour and fuel keeps rising. Doug Sinclair, a Vancouver architect who owns an organic cattle ranch nearby, says that "trophy ranches" such as Alexis Creek have trouble breaking even.

"Conventional cattle ranching in Canada cannot be sustained much longer," he says. "A calf sold for $500 in 1951. How much does a calf sell for in 2007? $500. Meanwhile, everything else has gone up in price."

Why, then, do people still get into ranching?
"I'm asking myself that every day," Mr. Sinclair says .

Some ranch owners rarely even visit. About 100 kilometres south of Alexis Creek sits the historic Gang Ranch. For reasons all his own, a billionaire industrialist from Saudi Arabia quietly bought the place in the late 1980s. Reportedly, Ibrahim Muhammad Afandi has set foot on his 15,000 hectares only twice. No one paid him much attention until 2002, when a list of alleged al-Qaeda benefactors surfaced in Bosnia. Mr. Afandi's name was on the list.

Further south, near the town of Merritt, lies the more famous Douglas Lake Ranch. A massive, 514,000-acre spread, it was once owned by Bernie Ebbers, the Edmonton-born co-founder of WorldCom Inc. Mr. Ebbers was convicted of fraud for his role in the WorldCom collapse and is serving a 25-year prison sentence in Louisiana.

The ranch was sold to U.S. billionaire Stanley Kroenke in 2004 for approximately $93-million. No one has ever suggested he bought the Douglas Lake Ranch because he loves the cattle business. Mr. Kroenke is a trophy hunter. He owns a handful of professional sports franchises, including the NHL's Colorado Avalanche and the NBA's Denver Nuggets.

"The real lift for big ranch owners is the appreciation in land prices," acknowledges Mr. Ridd. "The rest, including the cowboy lifestyle, is gravy." ""

John McCain Interview - Authors @ Google May 4, 2007

Senator John McCain in conversation with Google CEO , Eric Schmidt as part of the Authors@Google series. This event took place May 4, 2007, at Google Headquarters in Mountain View, CA

link to video

Top 20 markets - Home Value Changes

As read in Daily Real Estate News
August 2, 2007


The annual growth rate in prices of existing single family homes across the United States continued to decline for the 18th consecutive month in May, according to the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller Home Price Index.

Overall, the top 20 cities in the index declined 2.8 percent year-over-year, although five of the cities showed increases.

Cities measured by the index where values have increased in the 12 months are Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas, Portland, and Seattle.
Detroit continues to lead the metro areas in growth rate declines, down 11.1 percent from a year ago.

Here are the top 20 metropolitan areas and the percent of change in their real estate values over the last year:

Atlanta: 1.7 percent
Boston: -4.3 percent
Charlotte: 7 percent
Chicago: -0.6 percent
Cleveland: -2.8 percent
Dallas: 1.8 percent
Denver: -1.4 percent
Detroit: -11.1 percent
Las Vegas: -4.1 percent
Los Angeles: -3.3 percent
Miami: -3.3 percent
Minneapolis: -3.5 percent
New York: -2.3 percent
Phoenix: -5.5 percent
Portland: 5.7 percent
San Diego: -7 percent
San Francisco: -3.4 percent
Seattle: 9.1 percent
Tampa: -6.7 percent
Washington, D.C.: -6.3 percent

— REALTOR® Magazine Online

Foreclosures Up 55% in First Half of 2007

As read in Daily Real Estate News

July 30, 2007

" There was one foreclosure filing for every 134 U.S. households during the first half of the year, according to RealtyTrac’s midyear report.

The report shows that foreclosure filings — including default notices, auction sale notices, and bank repossessions — rose to 925,986 for the first six months of 2007. That’s an increase of more than 55 percent over the same time last year, and a jump of 30 percent over the last half of 2006.

“Despite a slight drop in June, foreclosure activity shows no sign of slowing down,” says James J. Saccacio, CEO of RealtyTrac, an Irvine, Calif.-based company that manages an online database of foreclosures.

“Based on the rate of foreclosure activity in the first half of 2007, we could easily surpass 2 million foreclosure filings by the end of the year, which would represent a year-over-year increase of over 65 percent.”

Nevada, Colorado, and California posted the highest foreclosure rates.

Nevada’s rate doubled from the prior six months to a total of 25,208 filings — or one filing for every 40 households.

Colorado was slightly better, at one filing for every 60 households.

California had the third-highest rate, with one filing per 69 households, but topped the list for the total number of foreclosures filings: 189,560.

Other states in the top 10 include Michigan, Florida, Ohio, Georgia, Arizona, Connecticut, and Indiana. "

A complete state-by-state listing is available on RealtyTrac's Web site.Source: RealtyTrac; Irvine, Calif

You Tube Video's from Elliot Wave International website

Here is a collection of videos on the housing crisis......