By Brian Brennan Today is Persons Day in Canada. I was reminded of this, not by a story in the Canadian media – which by now has become blasé about this annual commemoration of women’s rights – but by an opinion column
There’s a fuss in Britain and North America over plastic shopping bags. Compared to all the critical local and world issues it’s just silly. And it’s also an example of individual consumer “rights” being defended to the nth degree, trumping common goods
At Halloween this year, Jim McNiven’s thoughts turned to his grandson – and a tour he took with the nine-year-old boy at a museum in the American Southwest. The Titan Missile Museum – built during the Cold War to launch nuclear-armed intercontinental
The world’s first ATM capable of swapping bitcoins for any official currency started operating this week in a coffee shop in Western Canada. Bitconiacs, a storefront currency exchange owned by three 20-something entrepreneurs, claims to be first in the world to set
This essay in the New York Times, Slaves of the Internet, Unite, is a fine defence of the value of writing, art and, yes, journalism. Tim Kreider, an American writer and cartoonist, quotes Vladamir Nabokov: “Let us not kid ourselves. Let us remember that
In most of the world polio is a mere bogeyman, a shadow that drifts through our awareness every October 24, the day global health agencies call World Polio Day. Few suffered, or now recall, the polio epidemics that menaced cities from the
There are strange doings in Alberta, the Canadian province that’s often compared to America’s state of Texas. Alberta has been characterized by its Go-Get-‘Em attitude, cowboy hats, and an economy based on oil and gas extraction, especially the oil sands in its
In the perpetual debate about whether humans are good, greed scored another point. Researchers in Europe and North America invented a game in which players had to cooperate to receive both individual cash and a reward for achieving a public-good – the
By Brian Brennan Today is Persons Day in Canada. I was reminded of this, not by a story in the Canadian media – which by now has become blasé about this annual commemoration of women’s rights – but by an opinion column
By Deborah Jones As the United States shutdown nears its bitter end, the global flood of American-induced hysteria is subsiding – but beneath the tainted waters a new current is gathering force, one directed away from American shores. Call it Plan B. The
By Deborah Jones A commentary that accompanies a new report on Iraq’s war dead is more poignant than the statistics cited. The study links nearly half a million “unexpected” deaths in Iraq to the American-led invasion, between 2003 and 2011. Most of the deaths