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One of the top three leaders of Mexico's most powerful drug cartel, considered a founder of the country's massive methamphetamine trade, has died in a gunfight with soldiers.

The Supreme Court of Canada will rule Friday on whether convicted serial killer Robert William Pickton will get a new trial.

Eri Yoshida made history in Victoria this week, but BC has long been a field of dreams for pro women ball players.

Pull in here next 10 Fridays for some great Canadian verse. First up: 'Creation Song' by Max Middle.

'At potlatches they speak in our language. I've no idea what's going on.' Fifth in a reader-funded series.

How did a film about lesbian parents and sex end up so very old-fashioned?

This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.

Name: slydial

Quick Pitch: slydial is a free voice messaging service which connects you directly to someone’s mobile voicemail.

Genius Idea: If you’ve ever dreaded making a phone call and anxiously wished for a voicemail greeting as you dialed, you know exactly why this app is a genius idea. It strips away the awkwardness of a voice-to-voice call while still letting you claim to have attempted direct communication.

How perfectly passive-aggressive! We can imagine this app going over well for:

• Breakups,
• Firings,
• The-morning-after apologies,
• Stalling on or avoiding a meetup,
• Making excuses to a boss,
• “Duty” calls to chatty friends and relatives,
• “Just touching base” reminder/nagging calls,
• 3 a.m. calls that don’t need to be wake-up calls, as well,
• And ever so much more.

Essentially, the app “creates the illusion of communication” without making you actually have to listen to other people, play politics or hear someone else’s side of an argument. In theory, it works just as well for the incurable narcissist as for the cripplingly antisocial.

Before you protest, it’s true that slydial isn’t the Ghandi of applications. But it plays into a powerful part of the human psyche: Our desire to avoid conflict. The makers of slydial have paved the path of least resistance beautifully, and we can imagine that quite a few people will be traipsing down that path in the months to come.

To use slydial, which is free and audio-add supported, just dial 267-SLYDIAL (267-759-3425) and enter the mobile number of the person you want to leave a voicemail. You can also try slydial’s mobile apps, which include offerings for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile.

We gave slydial a try, and it worked just as promised; the other person’s phone didn’t so much as twitch while slydial connected me to the voicemail box in question.

What do you think of this app? It is something you’d use when you don’t have the personal fortitude or wherewithal to make voice-to-voice contact?

[img credit: djou]

Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark

BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

Entrepreneurs can take advantage of the Azure Services platform for their website hosting and storage needs. Microsoft recently announced the “new CloudApp()” contest – use the Azure Services Platform for hosting your .NET or PHP app, and you could be the lucky winner of a USD 5000* (please see website for official rules and guidelines).”

More About: App, Mobile 2.0, slydial, voicemail

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Have you ever searched for a way to make a WordPress.com blog more robust? How about a way to make a WordPress hosted blog or site more secure and simpler to set up and maintain?

A few WordPress superstars have teamed up to create WPEngine, a new and very exciting platform that promises to do all of the above and more.

WordPress has become the killer platform for many bloggers, small businesses and developers/consultants with multiple clients.

However, there’s a middle ground between a WordPress.com blog and a hosted WordPress site that a few apps are attempting to cover. This middle ground includes people who don’t have the technical skills of a WordPress developer or even a website administrator but who still want to take advantage of a greater part of the WordPress ecosystem of plugins and other benefits.

About the Product

WPEngine offers a WordPress VIP-type experience for smaller-scale websites, and it includes top-notch support, one-click backups, optimization for speed and scalability, and security features that include automatic software upgrades. Also, you’ll be able to use any WordPress plugins, themes, custom CSS or JavaScript you like.

The platform gives users a set of specially curated plugins that have been vetted for security and have the WP Engine team’s absolute recommendation. “If there is a plugin that isn’t in our list,” reads the site, “you should feel empowered to use it anyway.”

Most of all, WPEngine promises its users simplicity and a seamless transition and integration experience.

The platform seems like it will work for bloggers, for businesses, and also for small dev shops that need to keep an eye on several WordPress-based sites.

About the Team

While the product sounds fabulous and, indeed, just what the WordPress ecosystem needs, product is only part of what makes a good startup; the company also needs to have a great team. WPEngine was developed by Aaron Brazell, a well-known figure in the WordPress universe who authored The WordPress Bible; blogger and developer Jason Cohen; and Cullen Wilson, an Austin-based developer. The startup is also under the wing of Ben Metcalfe, who has made a habit of picking good bets in the startup world. His last pick, NutShell Mail, experienced the Silicon Valley version of a Cinderella story and was acquired recently by Constant Contact. Altogether, it’s a bit of a dream team for a WordPress product.

Finally, the platform got the following 140-character thumbs-up from WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg this afternoon: “I think it’s a nice complement to first-party solutions, especially for businesses that use [WordPress] as a CMS.”

About Signup and Migration

We talked a bit with some of the WP Engine team today about migrating blogs — including themes, customized TypeKit fonts, comments and more — over to the WP Engine platform, and it’s a process we’re eager to test. We’ll be trying it out soon, and we will report back on the results.

In the meantime, if you’re interested in learning more, sign up for WPEngine’s beta program. The platform will be open to the public very soon. You can test the platform for 15 days free of charge, and it costs $50 per month thereafter. There are no contracts, and you’re free to move your blog elsewhere at any time.

What do you think so far? Is this something you’d be interested in trying? Do you think it will be useful for businesses and WordPress developers? Let us know in the comments.

More About: aaron brazell, ben metcalfe, Wordpress, wpengine

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It is becoming clearer, that prisons are where a lot of people living with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) are ending up. And prison is the last place they should be to find the support and interventions they need.

Stark Raven spoke with Vancouver lawyer, David Boulding about FASD and its relationship to the criminal justice system.

David became an advocate and educator on FASD, after many years of making mistakes working with clients in the system who had FASD. In the past decade he has done dozens of workshops, presentations and written papers on FASD and the law.

For more information on his work, check out davidboulding.com

A popular evangelical pastor in Montreal accused of owing hundreds of thousands of dollars to his parishoners denies any wrongdoing.

Jean Swanson is the co-writer of Carnegie Community Action Project’s new report, Assets to Action:  Community Vision for Change in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and the author of Poor Bashing:  The Politics of Exclusion.  Am Johal interviewed her in Vancouver.

Am Johal: The Carnegie Community Action Project has been organizing in the Downtown Eastside for some time.  The gentrificiation pressures have continued to escalate.  What were the main findings of your recent report? 

read more

If you’ve ever been snickering over the latest YouTube viral video on your smartphone in the evening and ended up frustrated by slow load times and a congested network, you’re not alone — and that’s exactly the problem.

New research from mobile web optimization firm Bytemobile shows that more and more of us are making demands of our devices, our mobile carriers, and video-hosting sites such as YouTube by consuming large amounts of video content on our phones. Our video consumption tends to peak around 10 p.m., at which point bandwidth takes a nosedive and stalling cripples our viewing experience.

In other words, we get the worst possible experience exactly when we want most to have a good experience.

This viewing experience is even worse when videos aren’t optimized for mobile devices. In these cases, for a 60-second video, the average viewer on a 3G network connection would have to deal with around 10 seconds of stalling.

Video optimization, the report said, can reduce stalling to almost zero seconds per minute of video.

End users have been dealing with stalling by choosing to view lower-quality videos in exchange for faster load times. Around 95% of mobile video viewers watch at resolutions between 176×144 and 640×480. Less than half a percent of mobile video viewers are watching what could be considered high-quality videos.

According to these findings, Flash is by far the most popular mobile video format, accounting for a full 90% of total video traffic. That’s one strike against Apple’s no-Flash marching orders. Another is the stats on adult content; four of the top 10 video sites accessed from mobile phones contain only adult content. So much for “freedom from porn.”

However, even when you include adult content sites, YouTube is the most popular video content site, accounting for 36% of mobile views. A distant second is Google Video, which grabs just 6% of mobile video views.

If you watch videos on your phone, do these finding match up with your viewing experiences?

[img credit: larskflem]

Reviews: Google Video, YouTube, video

More About: Mobile 2.0, mobile video, report, stats, video

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The Oregon government is suing a Calgary mother for the cost of keeping her son in foster care for two years while she fought for his return to Canada.

A Frenchwoman who admitted suffocating eight of her newborns and concealing their corpses in the garden and garage of her home has been charged with manslaughter.

Oil that spilled from an Enbridge pipeline into a southern Michigan waterway is not expected to reach Lake Michigan, U.S. officials say.

A London, Ont., woman is recovering in a Wyoming hospital after a near-fatal bear attack late Wednesday night in a U.S. national forest.

We’ve been reading reports tonight that the popular European music service Spotify has hit yet another delay in making an entry in the U.S. market.

According to Billboard, Spotify’s negotiations with U.S. record labels have broken down and are “back to square one.” Apparently, the startup is still aiming for a 2010/early 2011 U.S. launch, but there’s no telling how long label negotiations could take or if they will be successful at all.

When we last heard from Spotify CEO Daniel Ek at SXSW 2010, he projected a Q3 U.S. launch and the unveiling of several new mobile applications. And while the service’s social and music features just keep getting better, the company is actually farther from a U.S. debut than they were this spring.

In Europe, Spotify operates under a freemium model. Users can get unlimited streaming music in an ad-supported interface. Users can also choose to pay for an ad-free experience that also includes mobile access. But elements of this model have been sources of contention for the major record labels stateside, notably Warner Music Group, according to Billboard’s sources.

In the meantime, Spotify competitors abound — Pandora in particular stands out as having been able to navigate political and record-label hurdles to keep itself operational and profitable. And Google and Apple are both rumored to be working on streaming music solutions, too.

Perhaps the larger question is whether American music lovers will still care about Spotify once it finally comes to our shores… if, indeed, it ever makes it here.

What do you think: Will Spotify’s leadership be able to play nicely with American record labels and launch their highly anticipated app in the U.S. this year? How about next year? Feel free to share your speculations in the comments.

Reviews: Google, Pandora, Spotify

More About: music, spotify, Warner

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Ford Motor Co. will lay off nearly 400 workers at its engine plant in Windsor, Ont.

An evacuation order at Bonaparte Lake, north of Kamloops, B.C., has been partially lifted.

A transgendered Nova Scotia woman who is originally from Ireland said she will claim refugee status if immigration officials try to send her home.