October 5, 1998

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COVER

OUR DYING SEAS

The marauder first appeared as a bright blip on a radar screen aboard a Canadian Forces Aurora surveillance aircraft. The plane had been in the air for three hours, patrolling the Pacific Ocean near the international date line northwest of Hawaii.

World

Seeking a way out

Bill Clinton and Monica Lewis, it turns out, had more in common than their mutual fondness for socalled intimate contact in the now-infamous little hallway adjacent to the Oval Office. Last Nov. 13, Lewis visited the President in his private study off the hallway. By ANDREW PHILLIPS

Canada

Under the gun

Chris Considine is clear on one thing: he is not out to get the Prime Minister. “I do not have an agenda,” declares the head lawyer for the RCMP Public Complaints Commission’s inquiry into how the Mounties quashed student protests during the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation summit in Vancouver last fall. By JOHN DeMONT

CANADA

Bill Vander Zalm returns to the fray

The most glorious summer the west has seen in years finally came to an end two days after the calendar officially flipped over into fall. And as cloud and rain settled over British Columbia, the worsening economic gloom seemed equally palpable. By CHRIS WOOD

Business

Talk more, pay less

Merle Smith wondered what the heck was happening. When the spry 75-year-old reached for his phone to make a local call one evening last month, the dial tone had mysteriously disappeared. In the days that followed, the telephone went on the fritz for as long as four hours at a time.

COVER

Spain pulls in its nets

Early each morning, long before the sun rises over Vigo’s magnificent bay, the women appear. They are sturdy figures, matrons in broad aprons, with buckets in their hands, rubber boots on their feet. In the predawn gloom, they slip quietly through the maze of cobblestone lanes that wind down from El Berbés, the city’s medieval quarter, to the fishing port that lies at the bottom of the hill. By BARRY CAME

Television

Tussling over the tube

It was the sort of Bay Street brusqueness that might have worked as a line of dialogue for one of the tough-talking stock promoters on the TV series Traders. On the opening day of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission hearings on the future of Canadian TV last week, Scott Cuthbertson, a broadcasting industry analyst for TD Securities Inc., lost patience with the polite debate going on between CRTC officials and TV executives. By JOHN GEDDES

Education

Giant steps for autistic kids

When Yolande L.’s son was only a toddler, he showed signs of being precocious. At 3, he could put together a 50-piece puzzle and read Dr. Seuss on his own. “In the beginning, we thought: ‘Hey, this is a brilliant kid,’ ” says Yolande, a Montreal physiotherapist. By BRENDA BRANSWELL

COVER

Breaking the bonds

In the summer of 1953, using a recently designed version of the Aqua-Lung, I made my first dive beneath the surface of Canada’s great waters. It was a breathtaking descent into a mysterious blue-green world suffused with beauty and home to millions of creatures. By DR. JOSEPH MacINNIS

Canada NOTES

The search for human remains and wreckage from Swissair Flight 111 was scaled back as about 200 army personnel returned to Canadian Forces bases. Searchers, however, recovered an electronic engine control unit whose computer-chip memory may reveal data about the engines prior to the jet crashing in the Atlantic Ocean off Peggys Cove, N.S., on Sept. 2.

September 281998