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Hundreds of people were marching Wednesday night in Baltimore in protest against the death of Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old black man who was fatally injured in police custody earlier this month.

Protesters, many off them college students, marched through downtown and to City Hall calling for swift justice in the case of Gray's death. Many wore black T-shirts that said "Black Lives Matter" — which has become the slogan of a movement against police brutality.

People also chanted, "Tell the truth. Stop the lies. Freddie Gray didn't have to die."

Jacob Kinder, a student at Goucher University in nearby Towson, Md., said Gray's death and the subsequent protests and riots have been a big topic all week on campus.

"I think there's a pretty big fault line between students who think that the protests are justified and the riots are justified and people who don't see race as a problem," Kinder said.

Kinder is white, as were many in the group.

A similar protest was happening in New York City, where several hundred people gathered at Union Square in Manhatta, chanting "no justice, no peace" and "hands up, don't shoot." Some were taken away in handcuffs by police officers.

The demonstrations come as Baltimore tries to get back to normal after riots Monday night. A 10 p.m.-5 a.m. ET curfew was put in place Tuesday, and it will continue for the rest of the week.

Police said Wednesday that they arrested 35 people, including one juvenile, after the city imposed the curfew.

Capt. Eric Kowalczyk said more than 100 people are still waiting in jail to be charged in connection with the riots Monday night. He said police have a 48-hour window to charge them or else they will go free. Another 100 people who were also arrested have been charged.

He says the backlog has occurred because officers have to fill out documents and do other work to file the charges. He says if people are released, they may face charges later after officers review video and social media.

Slow return to normal but protests continue

After the curfew was lifted in Baltimore Wednesday, rush-hour traffic began flowing through downtown, including at an intersection where demonstrators and police had faced off Tuesday night.

There were about 15 officers in riot gear protecting a check cashing business that was trashed.

Elsewhere, schools were reopened and tensions seemed to ease.

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra  played a free outside concert around lunchtime, and dozens of people gathered and sang the national anthem as the orchestra played along. The concert was part of the city's efforts to return to some sort of normalcy after rioters looted stores and burned businesses on Monday night.

In one of the oddest spectacles in major-league history, the Baltimore Orioles played the Chicago White Sox in a stadium with no fans after officials closed the game to the public because of safety concerns related to the riots.

Freddie Gray report won't be released

There were isolated protests in parts of the city, including outside the office of Baltimore's top prosecutor where a few dozen protesters gathered in the early afternoon to demand swift justice in the Gray case.

Organizers said they were rallying in support of State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby, who took office in January and pledged during her campaign to address aggressive police practices.

The protesters chanted "No justice, no peace!" and "This is what democracy looks like!" They say the city needs to return to peaceful protests.

Police have said they will turn over their report on the death of Freddie Gray to Mosby's office on Friday. She will then face a decision on whether and how to pursue charges against the police officers who arrested Gray. Six officers have been suspended during the investigation.

But police made it clear Wednesday they would not be releasing the report publicly as had been previously reported in the media.

"We cannot release all of the information from this investigation to the public because if there is a decision to charge in any event by the state's attorney's office, the integrity of that investigation has to be protected," Kowalczyk said.

Attorney general decries 'senseless' violence

Justice Department officials say they have met with the family of Freddie Gray, who died of a spinal injury days after being taken into police custody, and with an injured police officer who remains hospitalized.

The department says the meetings happened Tuesday.

Justice officials also say representatives from a specialized office that mediates conflict between police departments and communities are also in Baltimore and met with residents who shared concerns about a lack of trust in law enforcement.

Separately, the department says the results of a federal review of the Baltimore Police Department's use of force practices are expected to be announced in coming weeks. The department also has begun a civil rights investigation into Gray's death.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch decried the rioting in Baltimore Wednesday, calling it "senseless acts of violence" that were counterproductive.

In remarks at the Justice Department, she said while the city is in some ways a symbol of the issues the nation has been talking about when it comes to police use of force against black men, it is more than that. It is a city that police are trying to protect, and that peaceful protesters are trying to improve, she said, while "struggling to balance great expectations and need with limited resources."

Lynch, the former federal prosecutor for portions of New York City, was sworn in Monday to replace Eric Holder, becoming the first African-American woman to serve as the nation's top law enforcement official.

Address underlying social issues: Obama

President Barack Obama said Wednesday that the Baltimore riots show that police departments need to build more trust in black communities.

In an interview broadcast Wednesday on The Steve Harvey Morning Show, Obama said his heart went out to the Baltimore officers who were injured by rioters. He said there's no excuse for that kind of violence and that Baltimore police showed "appropriate restraint."

But he is calling on police departments "to hold accountable people when they do something wrong." He said Lynch is reaching out to mayors to let them know what resources are available for retraining police and providing body cameras to hold them accountable.

Obama said problems will continue if the response is only to retrain police without dealing with underlying social issues such as poor education, drugs and limited job opportunities. He says tackling those problems will require a broader movement.

The first time I heard my father say it, I was trailing along behind him, licking an ice cream on a warm summer night in a Glengarry County town not far from our farm.

"Good evening, officer," he said, as we passed a uniformed patrolman. "Lovely evening tonight."

The cop smiled back and said something kind and reassuring, and the lesson was complete.

The rule in our house was clear: the police protect us and deserve our respect.

The heavens would fall on any of us overheard calling them "pigs," the word the hippies were using where the counterculture was flourishing, in places far from Glengarry.

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Another popular phrase back then was "police brutality," words my father also regarded with suspicion and hostility. (Remember, there were no iPhone videos back then, just he-said, she-said newspaper stories.)

Just recently, I was walking from the White House to the CBC bureau a few blocks away, and as I passed a uniformed Secret Service officer, the old reflex kicked in: "Good afternoon, officer."

This cop, though, stared straight ahead through his sunglasses, wordless, barely acknowledging the greeting.

Clearly, if he was going to speak, it would be to issue some sort of order. Everything in his stance said I am authority. Move along.

Baltimore's turn

Or at least that's how it seemed to me. I don't mind saying it: America's police now frighten me.

Their power and their impunity frighten me. And I'm a white, 58-year-old middle-class man. I can't imagine what I'd be feeling if I were a black or Latino kid in Baltimore.

Baltimore crackled with violence and rage this week. The governor declared a state of emergency and called in the National Guard after rioting erupted following the funeral of Freddie Gray, yet another black man who died in police custody.

The times really haven't changed so much. Gordon Lightfoot once wrote a famous song about another governor who did the same thing 48 years ago in Detroit.

The public conversation isn't much different, either.

Liberals are worrying about what triggered the rioting ("And they really know the reason, it wasn't just the temperature and it wasn't just the season ...").

Conservatives are pointing out the shameful looting and the rocks and fire, telling us we should be grateful we have brave police to stand between us and anarchy.

Turning the tables

But the reality the modern surveillance society is providing us is impossible to ignore.

Just as the authorities use technology to collect unprecedented data on the citizenry, the citizenry is constantly crowdsourcing video evidence about the authorities, and it's ugly.

It used to be the cop's word against the perp's. Now it's the cop's word against clear video evidence, and the cop still usually prevails.

In Baltimore, as is most often the case these days, bystanders recorded Freddie Gray's takedown by police on their smartphones. Sometime afterward, his spine was nearly severed. He perished in hospital.

But it's improbable that anyone will answer for the killing — that's what it was, after all — in a court of law.

A recent investigation by the Washington Post and Bowling Green State University stated that of the "thousands of people" shot dead by police in America during the last decade, only 54 officers have been charged.

And most of those who were charged were acquitted.

The series examined cases ignored by the national media: a lot of them unarmed people shot at point-blank range. The officers involved always claimed they feared for their lives; juries almost always took their word, even when the victim was shot from behind, execution-style.

The system doesn't really want to document police crime; governments are for obvious reasons reluctant to keep statistics on such shootings ("not necessarily considered an offence") and police close ranks.

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In about a fifth of the cases where charges were laid, prosecutors accused police of planting or destroying evidence.

Crimes of passion?

One needs only consult the iPhone video of the South Carolina cop shooting the fleeing man in the back a few weeks ago, then appearing to plant a Taser on his corpse, to see how it happens.

That officer was charged with murder, but only after the video emerged. A conviction will be another matter entirely.

"To charge an officer in a fatal shooting, it takes something so egregious, so over the top that it cannot be explained in any rational way," said Philip M. Stinson, a criminologist at Bowling Green who participated in the Washington Post investigation.

And even then, juries tend to give the police officer the benefit of the doubt.

Stinson, a former officer himself, suggested that many of these police shootings are really "crimes of passion."

"They are used to giving commands and people obeying. They don't like it when people don't listen to them, and things can quickly become violent when people don't follow their orders."

Today, though, even the conservative voices that have for so long defended law enforcement are wavering.

Take some time and browse the libertarian Cato Institute's online National Police Misconduct Reporting Project. 

It's a scholarly work, and evidence gathered is weighed carefully; in fact, the last full year for which they have issued a definitive report is 2010.

That report identified 4,861 formal incidents of police misconduct involving 6,613 law enforcement officers and 247 civilian fatalities for that year alone.

If just a fraction of those fatalities were criminal, then the inescapable conclusion is that more people have been murdered by police in America in the last 10 years than by terrorists.

Of course, we are told, we don't know how many terrorists have been thwarted by vigilant behind-the-scenes enforcement.

Well, true. But given the minuscule number of prosecutions, let alone convictions, neither do we know how many of the people who are supposed to be guarding us have gotten away with murder.

An unexpected outburst of legal wrangling over admissible evidence has forced Ontario Superior Court Justice Charles Vaillancourt to put the trial of suspended Senator Mike Duffy on hold until next week.

At issue: whether Duffy's defence lawyer, Donald Bayne, should be permitted to question witnesses on a 2010 report from the Senate internal economy committee on the findings of an independent audit into senators' office and travel expenditures,

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The document at the centre of the dispute is the Annual Report on Internal Audits 2009-2010, which was tabled Dec. 15, 2010.

That report included the findings of three audits that had been carried out over the previous year by independent auditing firm Ernst and Young — including one that dealt specifically with senators' office expenditures.

In its report to the committee, the auditors noted the Senate "should provide clearer guidance and criteria on which activities constitute a parliamentary function."

No 'clear guidance'

"For example, there is no clear guidance made between partisan activities relating to Senate business (allowable expenses) and partisan activities on behalf of political parties which may not be eligible," it notes.

"This issue affects Finance staff responsible for processing claims as well as the level of understanding of the rules by Senators' offices and can lead to inconsistent interpretation and processing of reimbursements."

The audit also recommended:

• Revising the Senate's Living Expenses Policy to "reflect requirements for senators to provide supporting documentation for private accommodation expenses."
• Providing "clearer guidance" on the use of the office research budget, including "criteria on what constitutes a consulting service and a personnel service."
• Ensuring policy changes related to Senate travel, as well as new rules on the use of the travel card, be properly and formally communicated to "all relevant stakeholders," including senators and administration.
• Keeping better records of hospitality expenses, including documenting "the details of each hospitality occasion."

Finally, it called on the Senate to "give consideration for a second-level approval" for senatorial expense claims — which, it notes, is "normal practice within private and public sector organizations."

'Second-level' approval rejected

That particular recommendation was roundly rejected by the Senate committee.

"It was felt that the Senate's rigorous expense claim review process was adequate and that there are effective mechanisms in place to mitigate the typical risks associated with expense claims," the report concludes.

As for the other recommendations, the committee noted "an action plan" had been developed, including a new public disclosure system for all travel, office and hospitality expenses to come into force in January, 2011, new rules for the "timely submission" of travel expense claims and a revised policy on National Capital Region living expenses.

"The Internal Economy Committee is confident that, once all initiatives have been completed, the audit recommendations will have been adequately addressed," the response concludes.

Report could bolster defence case

Given how much emphasis Duffy's defence team has put on its assertion that the Senate's rules were confusing and unclear, it's not hard to see why they would want to see this report added to the body of evidence on which the judge will ultimately base his ruling.

Not only does it bolster their case by repeatedly acknowledging the need for "clear guidance" in several of the areas from whence the charges against Duffy originate — particularly travel claims related to partisan activities and living expenses — it also demonstrates the committee itself was aware that even policies that were in place weren't always communicated to senators, Senate administrators and other "stakeholders."

The Crown, meanwhile, has already signaled it will challenge the report's admissibility on the basis that, despite being a published report by a parliamentary committee, it should still be viewed as hearsay, and as such, not appropriate to put before witnesses during questioning.

The judge has indicated that, while he's prepared to hear arguments next Monday, he likely won't deliver a ruling on the matter until June, when the trial is scheduled to resume following a three-week hiatus set to begin May 9.

Senate Internal Economy Committee - Annual Report on Internal Audits 2009-2010

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Ancient temples brought to their knees. Foreign rescue teams combing great piles of rubble in search of survivors. And funeral pyres burning 24 hours a day as the dead are counted and cremated.

There are a lot shell-shocked faces wandering the streets of Kathmandu, Nepal, as people struggle to make sense of what's happened here.

A young woman from Calgary is one of them. Jacq Warrell and her husband, Cam Dobranski, were married in Nepal just two days before the earthquake hit.

When it did, they say, they had little time to think of anything beyond survival.

'When we were calling from the mountain, trying to save our lives, they just put us on hold and gave us an email [address].'— Jacq Warrell and Cam Dobranski

"We were at about probably 3,300 metres on the side of the mountain when the quake struck, and we were actually pretty lucky where we were. We watched a lot of rock slides happen around us, and we crawled over rock slides to get out," said Warrell. 

"We've been in refugee camps and watched people die, and it's time to go home."

'We walked, ran, crawled, scrambled'

The pair were hiking in the Langtang region of Nepal, which stretches north of Kathmandu up to the border with Tibet.

"The mountains literally shook," said Dobranski. "It was like Jell-O. You had to lie down."

Five days later, they have made it down from the mountain.

"We walked, ran, crawled, scrambled," they said, until they made it here — to a city they expected to be flattened.

Their time on the mountain was an informational black hole, they said.

They were not impressed with Canada's services for citizens abroad, despite managing to get through to the emergency help line when their cellphone found a signal.

"But when we were calling from the mountain, trying to save our lives, they just put us on hold and gave us an email [address] to email them," they said.  

The consular service is much better now that they're in the city, they said.

"To sit on a mountain and have no information. Everybody's scared. There's people screaming, dying. It's scary," said Dobranski. "We know of four Canadians still out there."

Hard-to-reach areas wait for help

The focus on trekkers in Nepal has so far been on those trapped near or on Mount Everest. But the Calgary pair say there are many hikers — not to mention the local population — stuck in the Langtang Valley.

People from nearby villages helped the couple, offering them food, even though their own homes had been swept away.

The Calgary couple's testimony paints a picture of the devastation wrought by the quake in areas still difficult to access.  

"All the houses are destroyed." said Dobranski of the village they had been staying in. "It looks kind of somewhat normal here. [But]

everything where we were is destroyed … every village is destroyed, every house is destroyed or damaged."

The couple had decided to leave Nepal on a commercial flight instead of the military plane offered up by the Canadian government, which will fly citizens to New Delhi. But that flight fell victim to congestion at Kathmandu's tiny airport and was cancelled.  So Wednesday night, along with 96 other passengers of different nationalities, they boarded the C-177 sent by Canada.

How will they remember their wedding?

"Maybe in 10 years for our anniversary, we'll come back and complete the trek," Warrell said.

For now, their thoughts are with those they met on the trail who didn't make it and for the people of Nepal.

"We get to leave, we get to get on a plane and get home … but to think about all the people who are still here and have to deal with the devastation and rebuild … that's hard," Warrell said. 

Walking into the old control room is like opening the "hatch" on the TV show Lost. Inside, there are dot matrix printers, floppy disks, even a tape drive. The manual for this reverse osmosis water desalination plant is dated 1993.

"This is state-of-the-art early-'90s technology here," says Santa Barbara's manager of water resources Joshua Haggmark. He points to the computer. "The hard drive in here is smaller than what's in my iPhone. So needless to say we won't be re-utilizing this this time around."

The city of Santa Barbara built the Charles E. Meyer desalination plant in the 1990s during the last long drought.

They ran it for four months. Then the drought ended, so they mothballed the plant but didn't take it apart. Just in case.

"Even though it wasn't producing water for the last 20 years, it was still an existing facility. We kept its permits up," says Santa Barbara's mayor Helen Schneider. "Because we know that drought is going to happen again. It's a cyclical thing."

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That's why the city is reactivating a plant that was shut down when the last Canadian team won a Stanley Cup. They kept it for a worst-case scenario. Which is now.

"It's the four driest years of California history," Schneider says. "We are in the most exceptional drought I think we've ever experienced.

"One of our main sources of water, Lake Cachuma ... it's under 28 per cent capacity. Another water source is effectively dry. In a year and a few months, we would need the desal plant for 30 per cent of our water supply."

Cheaper than a new plant

For Santa Barbara, a coastal city of over 90,000 about 150 kilometres north of L.A., the problem is that parts of the plant are so old they can't be re-used. The filters that remove all the major particulates, for instance. And of course, as Haggmark points out, the computers.

"All of this technology will be pulled out, we'll be using more state-of-the-art technology," he says.

Some may laugh at the idea of recycling a decades-old plant, but even at $40 million US to refurbish and another $5 million a year to run, it's a lot cheaper than building a new one.

"If we had to start from scratch, find the patch of land where it could go, do all the piping behind me from scratch," Schneider says, gesturing at the kilometres of fibreglass pipes that surround her, "we'd be looking at two, three times as much to put a desal plant together."

Still, despite the high cost of building and operating desalination plants, this historic drought means that for some desiccated California communities they've become a good investment.

"These systems will work," says Bill Croyle, the drought manager of California's Department of Water Resources. "It does come down to that unit cost of water provided to the end user.

"But I think when you don't have water, the unit cost of water becomes very valuable and then those projects become more viable."

A dozen new plants 

California Governor Jerry Brown recently announced the state would provide $270 million to help build more water recycling projects. California is already evaluating more than a dozen proposed desalination plants.

"The desalination process doesn't need to be just for those large urban areas along the coast," Croyle says. "It can be used inland in various sectors to deal with critical water needs."

But for every gallon of drinking water these plants create, there is another gallon of super-salty brine water, which is piped back into the ocean and can threaten marine life.

Hence the frequent lawsuits from environmental groups hoping to stop them, notes Sarah Sikich, the vice-president of the Santa Monica-based Heal the Bay environmental group.

"Many of the desalination proposals we're seeing in California rely on what's called an open ocean intake," Sikich says. "This is basically just a pipe straight out into the ocean, and in doing so it's drawing in sea water but also all the marine life associated with that seawater."

Santa Barbara's water manager shows me a copper filter with holes the size of your average window screen.

"It will keep any significant marine life from being sucked into the tube line," Haggmark says. But Sikich says these types of screens haven't been tested in an ocean environment. And she believes even a small filter could still create big problems.

"We're concerned about the things getting stuck on that pipe," Sikich says. "So the fish eggs, the fish larvae potentially getting stuck up against those pipes, clogging it."

Instead, she's calling for slant wells, which run underneath the ocean and rely on water to percolate down.

Santa Barbara is studying the feasibility of this system when it awards a contract to reactivate the facility in June. Schneider says they will do what they can to minimize the environmental impact. But the city waited 25 years to re-start this, she says, it can't stop now.

"We need to be prepared," Schneider says, "so that we don't go into this crisis mode of decommissioning, recommissioning, and look long-term."