November 9, 2009

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NATIONAL

MONTREAL IS A DISASTER

It says something about a city when tales of bravery in the face of organized crime are apparently a prerequi site to governing it. Five weeks into an increasingly bizarre election cam paign dominated by scandal, graft and good, old-fashioned backstabbing, Gérald Tremblay wants it known that he is scared for the well-being of his family. By MARTIN PATRIQUIN

THE BACK PAGES

2012 ARE YOU READY?

r taste Delicious pawpawsP.55 stage Booing at the opera P.56 books A very eerie short story P-57 bazaar The-110° spa treatmentP.58 help Yes, you can train catsP.59 steyn Barack the Balloon Boy P.60 Even though there are still three years to go, give or take a few months, before the end of civilization as we know it, Hollywood has decided to cash in now with 2012, director Roland Emmerich’s $200-million love letter to special effects. Perfectly reasonable plan. By BRIAN BETHUNE

MAIL BAG

I CONSIDER your “Swine flu fiasco” story (Health, Oct. 26) to be reasonably well-balanced and informative. But I am disgusted by your cover, which was obviously designed to sell magazines, as opposed to discussing proper treatment of an issue that concerns and confuses most Canadians.

Society

CAMILLA CANQUERS ALL

Happy endings are for storybooks, not real life. But when Prince Charles arrives in Canada on Nov. 2 with his wife, Camilla, duchess of Cornwall, few Canadians can doubt that something like this has happened to their future king. Not long ago, Charles and the woman dubbed “the Rottweiler” by his then-wife incurred such global disapproval that even his mother had to keep him at arms’-length. By ROSALIND MILES

NATIONAL

AFGHANISTAN: NOBEL FIGHT LOST CAUSE?

Paul Wells: Andrew, last week I spent a day with soldiers of the 2nd Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group at Petawawa while they trained for deployment to Afghanistan next spring. I was impressed as always by the seriousness and professionalism of our troops.

WORLD

LIKE OLD Tl

This summer, in a year that marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, 22 Eastern and Central European intellectuals and former political leaders sent an extraordinary open letter to the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama. By MICHAEL PETROU

INTERVIEW

Q: Why, after six years in Afghanistan, did you leave in May? A: My wife and I left because we had a child and the children of UN employees in Afghanistan have to live elsewhere. Had that rule not existed, we might have stayed, because we felt it was a very welcoming environment for babies. By KATE FILLION

BUSINESS

THE NEXT FRONTIER

When Ken Dulaney and three other tech visionaries set out to build a tablet computer nearly a quarter century ago, the idea seemed like a no-brainer. Tablets were, after all, a key piece of equipment in the 1960s television series Star Trek, which would ultimately have a decent track record of predicting future technologies such as wireless communication, biometric identification and non-invasive medical procedures, if not interstellar space travel. By CHRIS SORENSEN

NATIONAL

NOT SO FAST, KARZAI

For much of this fall, the most pressing question in world affairs— preoccupying leaders from U.S. President Barack Obama to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon—was how to sort out the messy aftermath of Afghanistan’s Aug. 20 election. As charges of massive voting fraud mounted, so did the stakes. By JOHN GEDDES

THIS WEEK

NEWSMAKERS

When Ross Rebagliati tested positive for a banned substance at the 1998 Winter Games, the callowness of youth became the basis of his defence. The substance was marijuana, and Rebagliati was a snowboarder from Whistler. What youngster ever ventured forth in that town without inhaling a little second-hand THC?

November 22009