Back in the middle of March an irate reader of the International Herald Tribune complained about: “How low you have sunk in publishing an editorial on [New York state’s call-girl-using former governor] Eliot Spitzer. … The United States is at war, the economy is on the verge of bankruptcy, confidence in the government and private […]
To call Edison Chen a Canadian boy is pushing things somewhat. He admits he was born in Vancouver and lived in that “fairly safe” city until “about nine.” Then he moved to Hong Kong, where he “learned that the dollar bill rules everything.” In his teens he was in New York City. But he was […]
On Saturday, November 3 Hong Chao (Raymond) Huang was gunned down outside his mansion in Vancouver’s upscale Shaughnessy neighbourhood. Just three days before, on Halloween, Hiep Quang Do, had been killed at a restaurant on Victoria Drive. Then early on the morning of Tuesday, November 6, Ali Abhari and Ronal Shakeel Raj, out driving in […]
Years ago now I was walking up Yonge Street in Toronto with a few friends one night, after some serious discourse in a bar. On a street corner a few blocks south of the subway at Bloor we were very surprised to come across a strikingly beautiful and even well-dressed young woman, squatting on the […]
What can a person who resides elsewhere in the Greater Toronto Area really say about Stephen Colbert Day in Oshawa, Ontario – Tuesday, March 20, 2007? Even (or especially) if you know Oshawa a little, and support the business concept that such places, in all regions of North America, should try to do a bit […]
On March 7, 2007 the UK House of Commons unexpectedly “voted 337 to 224 in favor of pursuing legislation to elect the entire” House of Lords. This “would represent a major constitutional shift.” (It’s also a major embarrassment for Canada, still struggling to elect its federal Senate, which was half-modeled on the British House of […]
As February 2007 heads into its last wintry days, Stephen Harper has been the new Conservative minority prime minister of Canada for just over a year. And for at least the past few weeks he has seemed to be doing almost alarmingly well. Then, very recently, he has also been reminding many Canadian people yet […]
Barack Obama, it was claimed somewhere on TV during the past few weeks, has aptly bemoaned that the problems of America today are so big, and its politics so small. In Canada we sometimes imagine that we are at least accidentally immune to the worst troubles of this sort. (Nothing up here, beyond the raw […]
THURSDAY, JANUARY 4, 2007. The Globe and Mail‘s news of the birth of Pierre- Emmanuel Trudeau, “two weeks ago in a Montreal hospital,” has a perhaps appropriate certain formality to it. Now we the Canadian people know, in any case, that the son of Alexandre Trudeau and Zoe Bedos was born on December 22, 2006. […]
With the serious summer of 2006 now in its very last gasps it is time for a concluding burst of wild abandon, before settling back into the post-Labour-Day grind. And I have been asked to (briefly) discuss who is the hottest – Paris Hilton or Beyonc Knowles? Other names could be added. Osama bin Laden […]
