Word: passport
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...first suspected Russian spy nabbed in Canada in a decade is stirring memories of cold war espionage in North America. The alleged Russian agent, known only as Paul William Hampel - the name on his bogus Canadian passport - was arrested Nov. 14 at Montreal's Pierre Elliott Trudeau airport under a national security certificate signed only five days earlier by two senior Cabinet ministers in charge of public safety and immigration...
...Hampel's arrest sent red-faced Canadian officials scrambling to defend what should have been beefed-up measures, including the Canadian passport system, put into place after 9/11 and after the 1999 arrest of Ahmed Ressam, the so-called Millennium Bomber who obtained a passport in Montreal using a forged baptismal certificate. When Hampel's detention was disclosed through a media leak, passport officials referred reporters to Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day's office, which declined to comment on grounds that the case is now in court...
...Before Hampel was hustled off to a Montreal jail last week, agents with the Canada Border Services Agency seized his bogus Ontario provincial birth certificate, the passport that had been obtained with the phony birth certificate, $7,800 in five different currencies, encrypted prepaid cellphone cards and index cards containing information on Canadian history and civics. Hampel claimed to be a former lifeguard and travel consultant living in Montreal since 1999. Journalists found a website he had set up where he described his extensive travels abroad and published photos of the countries he visited, primarily in Eastern Europe...
...hope that a day will come that it will be so, but you can’t disregard the political realities in the world, even if your ideas are very good.”Practical concerns also include the fact that travelers with Israeli stamps in their passports cannot enter Lebanon or Syria, and vice versa.Essrae Cherim, executive administrator to Ury, allows that passport complications and exclusivity of religious sites remain problems. “This project is taking a very long-term approach (hopefully this path will be in existence hundreds of years from now),” writes...
Whatever sententious hoo-ha Babel is freighted with, however, there is a larger point in it and its butterfly-fiction cohort that cuts across political boundaries: that in the globalization, global-warming, global-terror era, other people's problems are our own, and class privilege and a U.S. passport are no force field. (Indeed, Babel's story of Americans in mortal peril among foreigners even echoes, if inadvertently, a Bush Administration refrain: that we are no longer protected by two big oceans.) You can argue the politics and the art of Babel and company. It is harder to argue their...