BRIAN BRENNAN: BRIEF ENCOUNTERS June, 2015 At age 18, Debbie Lori Kaye became the youngest performer in history to have her own variety special on CBC TV. A tiny singer with a big voice, her star had been rising steadily
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JONATHAN MANTHORPE August 27, 2014 The air in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People was heavy with the pungent smell of irony this week as China’s President Xi Jinping greeted his visiting Zimbabwean counterpart, Robert Mugabe, as an old comrade in the struggle
JONATHAN MANTHORPE August 21, 2014 It’s always a bit of a shock when the stern clerics that run Iran display an impish sense of humour. So when Iran’s Foreign Minister, Javad Zarif, was quoted today as offering to help the West’s campaign against
BRIAN BRENNAN: BRIEF ENCOUNTERS August, 2014 In his heyday, singer Frankie Laine was all over the radio, on records and in jukeboxes, and on the soundtracks of movies and television shows. But when he did an interview with me at age 63 in
CHRIS WOOD: NATURAL SECURITY August 1, 2014 It’s one of those authorless pieces of universal wisdom: When you find yourself at the bottom of a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging. In my last installment in this space, I
BRIAN BRENNAN: BRIEF ENCOUNTERSAugust, 2014 My assignment was to interview a 71-year-old grandmother who danced nude while waving a couple of big white ostrich-feather fans like the veils of Salome. She had been a star in 1933 when she created a sensation
JONATHAN MANTHORPE August 13, 2014 Xi Jinping is not content with being the most powerful leader of China since Mao Zedong. He also wants to play God. Xi’s ruling Communist Party announced last week it will write its own version of “Chinese Christian
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JONATHAN MANTHORPE August 6, 2014 Not the least of the problems of finding any kind of solution to the plight of the Palestinians is that the Hamas zealots who control Gaza are incompetent terrorists and jihadis. Hamas’ sole strategic objective, the purpose of
DEBORAH JONES: FREE RANGE August 4, 2014 Every person who fought in World War I is now dead – and yet no one alive today is unaffected. The war consumed much of the globe for, arguably, decades. Many contend that the unresolved
CHRIS WOOD: NATURAL SECURITY August 1, 2014 I shared breakfast recently with a bunch of other guys over 60. With the disinterest of age they surveyed the state of the planet and to a man expressed relief that they were no longer 20.