December 23, 1985

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CANADA/COVER

TRAGEDY AT GANDER

Icy rain fell from the dark, predawn sky, but at Newfoundland’s Gander International Airport, young American soldiers were in high spirits. After a sixmonth tour with the multinational peacekeeping force in the Sinai Desert they were making the final refuelling stop before taking off for Ft. Campbell, Ky., and a Christmas homecoming.

COVER

Aviation's deadliest year

It was already a record year in the history of civil aviation. Even before Arrow Air’s DC-8 exploded in the barren Newfoundland forest outside Gander last week, air disasters around the world had killed 1,692 people. And more than half that number died in one two-month period which began with the mysterious disappearance of Air-India Flight 182 over the Atlantic Ocean last June 23 and ended on Aug. 12 when Japan Airlines Flight 123 slammed into a mountainside north of Tokyo—the worst single-plane disaster ever. By JOHN BARBER7 min

BUSINESS

Britain’s newest press baron

The events had all of the elements of a classic Fleet Street story: a venerable British-owned business fighting desperately to avoid being swallowed up by a brash young foreigner. But this time the takeover target was one of Fleet Street’s own —the 130-year-old Daily Telegraph, the staid and patriotic unofficial flagship of Britain’s governing Conservative party. By ROSS LAVER6 min

IMAGES OF ’85

A Year Of Contrasts

It was—stop me if you’ve heard this one before—the best of times and the worst of times. It was the year of Steve Fonyo and of earthquakes; it was a year of economic boom and bank collapses; of joy for stockbrokers and disaster for farmers. It was the year President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev met and talked and apparently liked each other and the year when South Africa threatened, once more, to explode. By Walter Stewart6 min

COLUMN

Dilemma of the working parent

Last week I sat with a woman just like me in a London, England, fertility clinic. She had just learned she would never have a baby. The doctor who had been treating her did not break the news himself. He sent her instead to the nurse-adviser trained to deal with weepy women. By Barbara Amiel5 min

MEDIA WATCH

A high-tech fix for Fleet Street

According to Audit Bureau of Circulations figures current in midsummer, 1,230,127 people on average took the Daily Telegraph —more than Britain’s other so-called “quality” national newspapers, The Times, The Guardian and The Financial Times could claim together. By George Bain5 min

CANADA

A slow start for the frigate program

For two days last week a team of federal government experts sat in a conference room of Saint John’s Delta Brunswick Inn and questioned the men in charge of building the six most expensive ships Canada has ever decided to buy. Officials representing the Canadian Navy, Supply and Services Canada, the department of regional industrial expansion and the department of justice fired questions at executives of Saint John Shipbuilding Ltd. about progress over the past three months on the six patrol frigates that the New Brunswick company is contracted to deliver to the navy beginning in 1989 at a current cost ceiling of $3.87 billion. By CHRIS WOOD5 min

COLUMN

Red ink and Toronto’s Lord Black

If there is one thing this admiring department admires, it is a chap who can adjust his aim. Some of us, told that the turnips are off the menu, can switch to carrots instead. A tire is flat? Take the bus to work instead. These are the mighty choices most of us have in life. By Allan Fotheringham4 min

BUSINESS WATCH

Why Gerald Bouey should resign

Canadian life has been based, forever it seems, on the sanctity of the three pillars that sustained our individual and collective sense of well-being: the family, God and our chartered banks. One of the pillars in this confidencesustaining tripod collapsed during 1985, and from now on Canadian bankers will be regarded as nothing more than just another bunch of professionals—like chicken pluckers who didn’t quite meet their quotas. By Peter C. Newman4 min

48d

Brief encounters

Last year’s hit comedy Romancing the Stone chronicled the adventures and the unlikely love affair that transformed Joan Wilder (Kathleen Turner) from a dowdy romance novelist into a heroine right out of her own writings. As The Jewel of the Nile opens, six months have passed since Joan sailed off with her lover-adventurer, Jack Colton (Michael Douglas), and there is trouble in paradise: Jack is unable to make an emotional commitment to Joan, who, disillusioned by the disintegration of their affair, cannot complete her latest love story.

December 161985