RCMP Corporal Ron Macdonald on safe driving on the long weekend. Malcolm Pain and youth from the Artic on Bluenose marathon. Bill Van Gorder on Silver Economy Summit.  

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Weekend Edition- 9 am Hour-May 18th 2013

NS Natural Resources Minister Charlie Parker on Provincial Parks Opening. Ralph McBride on Concerns with Health Care Cuts. Cormac McSweeny on Duffy and the Senate. Business – CPP Returns with Roger Hainault.

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Weekend Edition-10 am Hour-May 18th 2013

Tom Taggart on fracking water. Tech Talk with Matt Corkum. OPEN LINES: QUESTION OF THE DAY – should we get rid of the senate?

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Weekend Edition-11 am Hour-May 18th 2013

Off the leash with Jeremy Webb. Amber Thorpe – Owner adept tattoos/organizer on Maritime Tattoo Festival. Sports with Harv Stewart. Chris Ritkoski on UFOs.

The North fired two missiles Saturday morning and another in the afternoon, South Korean Defence Ministry spokesman Kim Min-seok said by phone. He said the North’s intent was unclear. His ministry said it is watching North Korea carefully in case it conducts a provocation against South Korea.

In March, North Korea launched what appeared to be two KN-02 missiles off its east coast. Experts believe the country is trying to improve the range and accuracy of its arsenal.

North Korea recently withdrew two mid-range “Musudan” missiles believed to be capable of reaching Guam after moving them to its east coast earlier this year, U.S. officials said. The North is banned from testing ballistic missiles under U.N. Security Council resolutions.

Earlier this year, North Korea threatened nuclear strikes on Seoul and Washington because of annual U.S.-South Korean military drills and U.N. sanctions imposed over its third nuclear test in February. The drills ended late last month. This past month, the U.S. and South Korea ended another round of naval drills involving a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier off the east coast. North Korea calls such drills preparation to invade the North.

Analysts say the recent North Korean threats were partly an attempt to push Washington to agree to disarmament-for-aid talks.

This past week, Glyn Davies, the top U.S. envoy on North Korea, ended trips to South Korea, China and Japan. On Friday, an adviser to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe returned from North Korea but didn’t immediately give details of his talks with officials there.

On Monday, North Korean state media showed that the country’s hard-line defence minister had been replaced by a little-known army general. Outside analysts said it was part of leader Kim Jong Un’s efforts to tighten his grip on the powerful military after his father Kim Jong Il died in December 2011.

The United States and Japan are participants in six-nation nuclear disarmament talks along with the Koreas, Russia and China. North Korea walked out of the talks in 2009 after the United Nations condemned it for a long-range rocket launch.

North Korea possesses an array of missiles. U.S. and South Korean officials do not believe the North’s claim that it has developed nuclear warheads small enough to place on a missile. Last week in Washington, South Korean President Park Geun-hye and President Barack Obama warned North Korea against further nuclear provocations.

Tension between the two Koreas remains high after both sides pulled out their workers from a jointly run factory complex earlier this year. The countries remain technically at war after the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce instead of a peace treaty.

Loui Eriksson of the Dallas Stars scored a pair of power-play goals and Henrik Sedin of the Vancouver Canucks added an empty-net goal.

Goaltender Jhonas Enroth of the Buffalo Sabres earned the shutout at Stockholm’s Globe Arena.

The Swedes will face the winner of Saturday’s later semifinal between the United States and Switzerland.

A host country hasn’t won a world title since the Soviet Union in 1976.

Sweden last won a world championship in 2006.

The top-ranked American overcame an early break of her serve to ease past Romanian qualifier Simona Halep 6-3, 6-0 Saturday and reach the Italian Open final, extending her career-best winning run to 23 matches.

Williams is coming off consecutive titles in Miami; Charleston, South Carolina; and Madrid last week.

In Sunday’s final, Williams will face third-seeded Victoria Azarenka, who kept her concentration through two rain delays to beat seventh-seeded Sara Errani 6-0, 7-5.

In the men’s semifinals, six-time champion Rafael Nadal faces sixth-seeded Tomas Berdych and Roger Federer meets 36th-ranked Benoit Paire of France.

Williams’ only title at this clay-court event came in 2002, when she beat Justine Henin in the final. That was also the year she won her only French Open title. Last year in Paris, Williams lost in the opening round of a major for the first time, falling to 111th-ranked Virginie Razzano of France.

Roland Garros starts next Sunday.

“I love the clay. I haven’t had many wins at Roland Garros but I do love it. I love to slide,” Williams said. “My goal is just to win a match there this year.”

Williams has twice won 21 in a row before, although both of those runs came a decade ago, in 2002 and 2003.

Martina Navratilova established the longest women’s win run in the Open Era at 74 matches in 1984.

At 31, Williams is back at the top of her game after missing 11 months in 2010 and 2011 with a right foot injury and a pulmonary embolism.

The 64th-ranked Halep entered with an impressive run herself, having beaten former top-10 player Daniela Hantuchova to qualify then 2009 French Open champion Svetlana Kuznetsova in the first round. That was followed in succession with wins over fourth-seeded Agnieszka Radwanksa, 13th-seeded Roberta Vinci and two-time Rome winner Jelena Jankovic.

Solid off both sides and an agile mover, the 2008 French Open girls champion took a set off Williams in their only previous meeting in the second round of Wimbledon two years ago. Halep tested Williams again at the start of this match, angling baseline shots to the corners to force the 15-time Grand Slam winner into errors.

Halep broke to take a 2-1 lead in the first set, but Williams broke right back and cruised from there as she gained the measure of her opponent and began to win the longer rallies.

Williams went directly to the practice court after winning.

“I was unhappy with some things today,” she said. “I want to do well here as well as (in Paris).”

It’s Azarenka’s first final since beating Williams for the title in February at Doha, Qatar. That followed her Australian Open victory. Since then, Azarenka has been slowed by right ankle and left foot injuries.

Errani reached last year’s French Open final and was the first Italian semifinalist in this tournament since Raffaella Reggi won the 1985 event in Taranto.

Azarenka did well to take the Foro Italico crowd out of the match early on, and never trailed in the second set.

Merkel spoke privately for 45 minutes with the pope at the Apostolic Palace, after exchanging cordial greetings in Germany.

Her Christian Democrat party depends heavily on support from Protestant and Catholic voters, and the chat and photo opportunity could be a welcome campaign boost for a leader largely identified by Europe’s economically suffering citizens as a champion of debt reduction even at the cost of painful austerity across much of the continent.

On Thursday, Francis blasted what he called a “cult of money” in a global financial system that ends up tyrannizing, not helping, the world’s poor.

Asked whether they had also talked about the pope’s recent criticism, Merkel said that they spoke about the regulation of the financial markets.

“The regulation of the financial markets is our central problem, our central task,” said Merkel, who met with reporters on the Vatican grounds. “We are moving ahead, but we are not yet where we want to be, where we could say that a derailment of the guard rails of social market won’t happen again.”

Merkel added: “It ought to be like this: the economy is there to serve the people. In the last few years, this hasn’t been the case at all everywhere.”

Italy, Spain, Ireland, Portugal and especially Greece, have seen governments concentrate on debt reduction while slashing state spending. With growth stymied, unemployment, especially among young people, has soared. Businesses, many of them family-run in southern Europe, have failed as bank lending dried up.

The chancellor also said the pope had stressed that the world needs a strong and just Europe and described the overall conversation has encouraging.

Merkel is currently campaigning for re-election in September’s general elections. Half of Germany’s population is Catholic. In Bavaria especially, there is a strong conservative and Catholic tradition.

According to a Vatican statement, Francis and Merkel concentrated on topics of “common interest, including the socio-political, economic and religious situation in Europe and in the world.”

“In particular, they spoke about safeguarding human rights, about the persecutions faced by Christians, about religious freedom and of international collaboration to promote peace,” the Vatican said.

Francis, who is Argentine, has picked up on campaigns by the two previous popes, the Polish John Paul II and German Benedict XVI, to reinvigorate what the Catholic church sees as flagging religious enthusiasm on a continent with Christian roots, including dwindling number of churchgoers in much of Western Europe.

The Vatican also uses papal visits with major leaders to seek allies in its lobbying on behalf of Christians who face discrimination and in some cases physical violence in parts of the world.

Merkel told reporters she had reflected during her flight to Rome earlier in the day how both she and Francis has spent part of their lives in countries once under dictatorships — her native East Germany under Soviet-influenced communist rule, and the pope’s Argentine homeland, which had formerly been ruled by a bloody military dictatorship.

Francis and Merkel also exchanged views on Europe, which the Vatican described as a “community of values” with responsibilities in the world, “urging commitment by all secular and religious components toward favouring development based on the dignity of the human person and inspired by the principles of assistance and solidarity.”

There was no immediate indication if Francis would visit Germany, which Merkel said she invited him to visit.

She left him with gifts including a boxed set of 107 CDs of classical music directed by German maestro Wilhelm Furtwaengler. “I don’t know if you will have time to listen” to them all, Merkel told him in German. Francis also seemed pleased by the other gift, three volumes of poetry by Friedrich Hoelderlin, a poet he is known to enjoy.

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AP Writer Kirsten Grieshaber contributed from Berlin.

The statement called for urgent investigations to find the source of the virus and how it is infecting people. And it reminded countries they have a duty to the international community to rapidly report cases and related information to the WHO.

The worrying appraisal of the situation was echoed in a revised risk assessment issued Friday by the European Centre for Disease Control. It warned hospitals in Europe to be on the lookout for coronavirus cases coming in by air ambulance, saying the numbers of such patients may rise if the public in affected countries are afraid to seek care in their own hospitals.

The warnings come as health leaders from around the world are gathering in Geneva for the World Health Assembly, the annual general meeting of the WHO. The eight-day meeting begins Monday.

Though other nations have not publicly pressed leaders of coronavirus-affected countries for more transparency to date, it is likely that concerns about the virus and the opaque way investigations into it are being handled will be aired during the meeting.

“There is no formal agenda for novel coronavirus but I would be surprised if it didn’t come up,” WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl said in an interview.

Saudi Arabia, after all, is the home of Mecca. The holy site draws roughly three million Muslims from around the world every year to the Hajj, a mass pilgrimage Muslims are meant to perform at least once in their lifetimes. As well, nearly one million international tourists travel to Mecca during Ramadan — the Muslim month of fasting — to take part in another pilgrimage called Umrah.

Ramadan starts in the second week of July this year. And the 2013 Hajj will take place in mid-October, only five months from now. Experts watching the coronavirus situation are already worried about the potential for spread of the new virus, both within Saudi Arabia and internationally.

“I don’t think anyone necessarily knows for certain what is or isn’t happening,” said Dr. Kamran Khan, an infectious diseases specialist at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. In his research, Khan tracks global travel patterns as a tool to predict and interpret spread of diseases.

“I’m not sure that there’s an easy way to get at this information unless it’s more forthcoming from within Saudi Arabia or any of the partners that are working with Saudi Arabia inside the country.”

To date, the WHO has been notified of 40 confirmed infections with the virus, which has been recently named MERS, for Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome coronavirus. Of those cases, 20 have been fatal.

The bulk of the infections have occurred in Saudi Arabia, which is investigating a large and potentially ongoing outbreak in the eastern part of the country, near the Persian Gulf.

In its statement, the WHO said two of the cases in that outbreak have no links to either other coronavirus patients or a hospital where some transmission is known to have occurred. These unconnected cases suggest two possibilities. They could have contracted the virus from its as-yet unidentified reservoir, which is thought to be one or more animal species. Or these cases could be a signal that undetected human transmission is happening there.

“The continued appearance of cases that are not part of larger clusters, and who do not have a history of animal contact, increases concerns about possible community transmission. This possibility is being investigated by authorities in Saudi Arabia,” the WHO statement revealed.

Other countries that have reported cases are Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Germany, Britain and France. But the infections in the European countries all had their origins in the countries on the Arabian Peninsula.

The statements from the WHO and the ECDC both underscored how little the world has learned about the new virus since its existence was first publicly announced last September.

“It is unusual to have such a degree of uncertainty at this stage in an outbreak,” the European health agency’s statement noted. It called the information that has been shared about the cases, including the current Saudi outbreak, “insufficient.”

Illustrating the problem, Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Health changed the count on its coronavirus website Friday, adding another case — which brings the global total to 41. The ministry revealed only that an infected person had been found in the eastern region and was receiving care.

The ECDC statement also said at this point it cannot exclude the possibility that the virus is acting in a SARS-like manner, especially given that outbreaks in hospitals have now occurred in several instances.

Hospitals played a key amplifying role during the 2003 SARS outbreak, with undetected cases infecting other patients, visitors and health-care workers. The MERS virus is from the same family as the SARS virus.

The criticisms and concerns embedded in the two statements might appear mild but in the world of public health diplomacy, they are unusually frank.

One expert called the WHO statement a shot across the bow for the countries that have been the sources of MERS infections.

“When you see those words you realize that this is not being handled,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Centre for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

“The WHO statement and the ECDC both — they’re really important statements.”

But even at that, Osterholm fears the time for carefully worded warnings may be running out.

“You’ve got to kind of call the code,” he said. “Either there is going to be an intensive effort made to understand what’s going on in the Middle East and appropriate control measures brought to bear or potentially we’re going to be asking a lot of questions one day as to why we didn’t do more.”

Neither the WHO nor the ECDC is currently calling for the type of travel advisory the WHO levied on Toronto during the SARS outbreak. At the height of SARS, the WHO urged world travellers to stay away from afflicted areas, including Toronto.

But the ECDC said European travellers to the Arabian Peninsula and surrounding countries should be informed of the infection risk. And companies that operate medical evacuations should be reminded of their responsibility to try to prevent transmission of infections across borders.

It suggested that mapping the medical evacuation routes from that region would help to identify which centres in Europe might be at greatest risk of receiving unidentified coronavirus cases.

The nation’s tax agency has admitted to inappropriately scrutinizing smaller tea party organizations that applied for tax-exempt status. But the IRS largely maintained a hands-off policy with the much larger, big-budget organizations on the left and right that were most influential in the 2012 elections and are organized under a section of the tax code that allows them to hide their donors.

“The IRS goes AWOL when wealthy and powerful forces want to break the law in order to hide their wrongful efforts and secret political influence,” said Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat who is among a small Senate group pushing campaign finance reform measures that would force these big outside groups to disclose their donors. “Picking on the little guy is a pretty lousy thing to do.”

Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS and the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity were among those that spent tens of millions of dollars on TV ads and get-out-the-vote efforts to help Republicans. Democrats were aided in similar fashion by Priorities USA, made up of former Barack Obama campaign aides, and American Bridge 21st Century Foundation, an opposition research group led by a former adviser to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

And yet those groups so far have escaped investigations into whether they have crossed the blurry line under the law between what constitutes a tax-exempt “social welfare” organization that is free from donor reporting requirements and a political committee subject to taxes and disclosures.

Watchdog groups and lawmakers who have sought more disclosure and restrictions on such groups claim an injustice. They say the IRS saga over the targeting of smaller groups shines a bright light onto the agency’s failure to guard against the flood of secret money into the political system through the creation of the deep-pocketed groups.

Yet other advocates of reform worry that, in light of the IRS disclosure of targeting small groups, government regulators will be less likely to scrutinize the tax-exempt status of the bigger, more powerful groups out of fear that they will appear to be targeting groups for political reasons.

“We expect that opponents of disclosure will try to use the recent developments to allow the groups that are misusing the tax laws to hide donors to continue misusing them. But that’s a battle that we will engage in,” said Fred Wertheimer, founder and president of watchdog group Democracy 21.

Since a series of court decisions including the Supreme Court’s ruling in the 2010 Citizens United case, the IRS has seen an influx of applications — from 1,735 in 2010 to 3,357 in 2012 — by so-called social welfare groups wanting to form under section 501(c)(4) of the federal tax code. That section grants tax-exempt status as long as the primary mission of these organizations is not politics and influencing elections. The IRS makes that determination. Such nonprofits can keep secret the names of their donors, which are not subject to traditional campaign finance limits.

The rules are fuzzy. The law says that these groups can only be involved in social welfare activity and not politics. But IRS regulations give the groups leeway to conduct political activities — as long as that is not its “primary activity.” That conflict opens the door to potential abuses and different interpretations of what is allowed and what is prohibited.

An IRS inspector general’s report released this week recommended developing for the first time specific guidelines to measure the primary activity of social welfare organizations, and some in Congress have shown a willingness to review big groups like the non-profit Crossroads GPS and its sister super PAC, American Crossroads. They spent a combined $176 million in the last election cycle, much of it on television advertisements to benefit Republican candidates.

A Senate investigative panel led by Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan and Republican John McCain of Arizona has been reviewing the use of social welfare groups for political causes for the past year and now is examining the agency’s handling of the tax-exempt reviews.

And in a letter to congressional investigators Thursday, Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., urged the House Ways and Means Committee not to ignore the influx of groups that may be abusing the tax code as part of its upcoming IRS probe, saying: “I hope we can remove the incentive for any group, regardless of its political orientation, to seek 501(c)(4) tax-exempt status to engage in significant political campaign activities while hiding their donors.”

Despite the bipartisan outcry over the IRS scandal, there’s little incentive for lawmakers on either side of the aisle to push for reforms because Republicans and Democrats alike benefit from these big outside groups.

In fact, just the opposite may be happening.

Some congressional Democrats, fearful of being tied to the scandal, are backing the push for more aggressive enforcement of these groups. And some conservative leaders and Republican donors are using the IRS scandal to help protect the status quo while preparing to pump hundreds of millions of dollars — raised anonymously in many cases with no contribution limits — into the next election cycle, just as they did last fall.

“I would hope that this new information about the politicization of the IRS should put the brakes on any sort of disclosure of donors who wish to remain anonymous,” said Charlie Spies, who helps raise money for several conservative organizations and previously led the super political action committee that raised more than $140 million to benefit Mitt Romney’s presidential bid. “We’re now seeing exactly what the risk is for donors to be disclosed.”

At least some tea party groups are unwilling to trust the agency with more enforcement power in the wake of such damaging revelations.

“The IRS’ integrity is shattered,” said Jenny Beth Martin, chairman of the Tea Party Patriots, which was among the largest non-profit conservative groups the IRS targeted. She said that now, more than ever, donors need freedom to give money anonymously “without fear of retribution” from a politicized IRS. In the meantime, she says her organization’s influence is growing, fueled by anonymous unlimited donations.

Wertheimer, of Democracy 21, said the “laundering of secret money into elections” will become a greater scandal than IRS misconduct unless something is done.

“There will be efforts to sweep this under the rug,” he said. “They may succeed on a temporary basis for a relatively short period, but they are not going to succeed in the long term.”

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Peoples reported from Boston.

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Follow Ken Thomas on Twitter: http://twitter.com/AP_Ken_Thomas

Follow Steve Peoples on Twitter: http://twitter.com/sppeoples

Raleigh holds its ninth annual Tour D’ Coop event on Saturday. The one-day tour of chicken coops and urban farms collects food and money for Urban Ministries, a non-profit that helps the homeless and hungry.

This self-guided tour provides the opportunity to see over 20 coops, from tiny urban gardens to sprawling suburban lots.

Raleigh was one of more than a dozen U.S. cities that last year staged tours of backyard chicken coops, most of them in the West.

His signature means the first gay marriages may be celebrated in France within about 10 days. Hollande’s office said he signed the bill Saturday morning, a day after the constitutional Council struck down a challenge to the law.

Hollande, a Socialist, had made legalizing gay marriage one of his campaign pledges last year. While polls for years have shown majority support for gay marriage in France, adoption by same-sex couples is more controversial. The bill prompted months of widespread protests, largely by conservative and religious groups. Some were marred by clashes with police. It became a flashpoint for frustrations at the increasingly unpopular Hollande.

The head of the emergency response team at PT Freeport Indonesia, Nurhadi Sabirin, said Saturday that rescuers have not detected any signs of life in several days.

A tunnel collapsed last Tuesday when 38 workers were undergoing training inside an underground classroom. Ten miners were rescued and five bodies were recovered.

Sabirin said “as more time passes, the possibility of there being any survivors becomes less likely.”

More than 20,000 workers are employed at the mine in Papua province owned by Phoenix, Arizona-based Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc.