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 MANTHORPEPublished: November 8, 2013 Miyako Island, usually known as Japan’s best beach and snorkelling holiday destination, is now on the front line of the increasingly militarised confrontation with China as Tokyo orders the deployment of anti-ship missiles to the island. The
JONATHAN MANTHORPEPublished: November 6, 2013 No end is in sight to the torrid and bloody turmoil that has engulfed Thailand’s public life for almost a decade, as the country’s senate prepares to reject an amnesty law that would allow ousted prime minister
CHRIS WOOD: NATURAL SECURITYPublished October 29, 2013 United Nations demographers forecast1 that by mid-century — in 37 years — there will be more than nine billion humans on the planet, about two billion more than the roughly seven billion of us now.
JONATHAN MANTHORPEPublished: October 25, 2013 Threats of a return to one of Africa’s most brutal civil wars came to a head this week when government troops in Mozambique overran the mountain forest base of opposition Renamo rebels. Afonso Dhlakama, 60-year-old leader of
JONATHAN MANTHORPEPublished: October 23, 2013 Piracy and ship hijackings have spawned a worrying boom in largely-unregulated security companies offering armed mercenaries to protect merchant ships plying dangerous waters. However, the perils of having freelance guns-for-hire roaming the high seas have been again
By Deborah JonesPublished Oct. 20, 2013 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
JONATHAN MANTHORPEPublished: October 18, 2013 Canada’s Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, does not come across as a man who is much concerned whether or not he has allies for his political stands. However, Harper may not welcome India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh coming
JONATHAN MANTHORPEPublished: October 16, 2013 The hermit kingdom of North Korea is in the grip of an epidemic of addiction to the highly addictive and damaging drug methamphetamine, that the authoritarian regime of Kim Jong-un appears powerless to control. A new report by two
CHRIS WOOD: NATURAL SECURITYPublished Oct. 14, 2013 In Alberta rivers downstream from certain Intensive Livestock Operations – better-known as feedlots, where hundreds and even thousands of cattle are crowded together in foetid paddocks of manure and urine the more economically to supply
JONATHAN MANTHORPEPublished: October 11, 2013 When a young mainland Chinese women was hit by a truck in Hong Kong and died in hospital on Tuesday, the territory’s social media networks throbbed with messages not of sympathy, but with hatred of everything she