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News
News in brief
Co-ops and neutron bombs
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Spread the Co-op to houses
Co-op housing companies first appeared on the scene in a big way in Vancouver 25 years ago. The schemes worked by creating a co-op board populated by inhabitants of the building, which then took out a favourable mortgage held by Canada Mortgage and Housing.
Now, 25 or so years on, those mortgages are being paid off in full by the co-op societies.
This could spell much-reduced rates for co-op members. But since co-op members are already paying rates they feel comfortable with, there are those who feel the current rates should be maintained and the extra income should be put to some other good purpose.
That good purpose could well be to expand the stock of co-op housing in Vancouver, which has proven to be the only reliable method by which the cost of housing has been kept at affordable levels in a highly desired and rapidly growing city like Vancouver.
The breakthrough in thinking comes when you realize that co-op ownership doesn’t necessarily have to be restricted to apartments in a single building. It could extend to various houses spread around the city, connected to each other in no other way, not even geographically—or perhaps even to individual condos situated inside otherwise ordinary buildings.
If a lot of co-op building societies pooled their extra post-mortgage incomes into a house buying scheme, the stock of co-op-owned rate-controlled housing in Vancouver could be inexorably expanded. It could be done even without the participation of any government agency, like the federal government’s CMHC, which can become hostile to co-ops, depending on who forms government.
Neutron bomb at Baghdad airport?
Rumours sparked by a fugitive former Iraqi Red Guard Chief of Staff allege that sometime between April 5 and April 8, 2003, US forces, struggling against serious resistance at Baghdad airport during the initial invasion, used a neutron bomb to wipe out up to 3,000 Iraqi Red Guard soldiers.
A reporter at the airport claims to have seen bodies melted into tar-like pools. The airport was closed for nine months after the completion of the US invasion.
Reporting by CNN and other networks on the night of April 6 was highly confused and contradictory, but all told of how nearly the entire American 5/7 Calvary was wiped out by surprise Iraqi resistance. An Indian reporter tells how witnesses report that the American 5/7 Calvary, having secured the first two floors of the airport without meeting resistance, first found the upper floor suddenly flooded with gasoline and the lower floor with water. The upper floor was then set alight and the lower floor was electrified. Losing control of the situation at the airport, the Americans, it is alleged, then deployed at least one neutron bomb.
A neutron bomb, first developed in the 1970s, releases less of a blast wave and less heat than the usual nuclear bomb and does much less damage to concrete and steel buildings, but it is very effective in destroying soft tissue, such as what humans are made of.
The next day, all media carried the false story of the supposedly heroic recapture of Private Jessica Lynch, and later in the week, media was preoccupied with a staged tearing down of a statue of Saddam Hussein by US forces.
Reports say that the American use of a neutron bomb without warning was sufficient to convince all Red Guard commanders to end resistance to American forces then entering Baghdad, for fear more neutron bombs would be dropped on the heavily populated capital.
Later, US Pentagon personnel, asked to comment on what happened to 3,000 much-feared and highly trained Republican Red Guard units at the airport, said “They just vanished into thin air.”
It was, at the time, regarded as a phrase of speech.
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The Republic of East Vancouver masthead
The Republic of East Vancouver supports no party, advocates
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