Friday May 09, 2008
Special prosecutor targets polygamy 'epidemic'
The United States has appointed a federal prosecutor to work with state and local authorities on bringing an end to lawlessness in polygamous communities, an investigation that may extend to finding a way to stop the so-called polygamy underground railway across the Canada-U.S. border.
Teen stabbed at school 'over a cellphone'
Luke Thomas had reason enough to work two part-time jobs after school and on weekends. The 16-year-old recently got his first girlfriend. He was also trying to break into the music industry, and spent countless hours and dollars recording his own lyrics for an independent album, according to family.
Cholera stalks Myanmar storm survivors
Cholera began to emerge in Myanmar's devastated villages yesterday as desperate survivors were forced to drink contaminated water from flooded areas where thousands of decaying bodies were floating.It was the latest horrific problem to hit the country in the aftermath of a catastrophic cyclone that is believed to have killed more than 100,000 people and destroyed the homes of another 1.5 million.
Gunfights herald 'declaration of war' in Beirut
Lebanon's fragile national unity appeared to have disintegrated yesterday as pro-government gunmen clashed with fighters from the Hezbollah-led opposition after Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah accused the government of ''declaring war'' on his movement.
Report on Business 
PROBE TARGETS CLASSMATES
Stan Grmovsek and Gil Cornblum have been close friends ever since they met at Osgoode Hall Law School 17 years ago. Although their careers took different directions, they have remained in close contact, attended each other's weddings and frequently socialized with their families.
Boeing delay hinders Air Canada expansion plans
A two-year delay in getting delivery of fuel-efficient Boeing 787 Dreamliners will crimp Air Canada's international expansion plans.The Montreal-based airline will seek compensation from Boeing Co. for the disruption to flight scheduling, Air Canada chief executive officer Montie Brewer said yesterday. He made the announcement after the carrier disclosed that, amid surging oil prices, it lost $288-million in the first quarter, including a $125-million provision related to allegations of cargo price-fixing by an array of global airlines.
Tims eats humble pie to avert PR catastrophe
Tim Hortons Inc. has squelched what could have become a PR disaster over the Timbit Affair. At the same time, the company has been served a stinging lesson on how following franchise rules too zealously can stifle the ability of front-line workers to keep the customer satisfied.
Onex eyes move into gambling
Onex Corp. is ready to place a bet on the U.S. gambling industry, with struggling casino icon Tropicana Entertainment LLC a potential target for Gerald Schwartz's buyout firm.
Manulife's retiring CEO waves the Maple Leaf
It will break Dominic D'Alessandro's heart if Manulife Financial Corp.'s next chief executive, possibly an American, shifts the company to the United States.Like many immigrants (he was born in Italy), Mr. D'Alessandro is passionate about his adopted country - Canada - because things worked out rather well for him here and because he never bought into the notion that London and New York had a lock on global companies. B-team Toronto could have its corporate champions, too.
Globe Sports
NHL: BRUNNSTROM SIGNS WITH STARS
Maybe it was the way the Dallas Stars played against the San Jose Sharks that persuaded him to jump to the Lone Star state. Or maybe it was the barbecue ribs that got to Fabian Brunnstrom.
'Pathetic' sums up Jays' performance
Thirteen innings of baseball lost on a grand slam, but it was the 10th inning - oh, that horrible, bitter 10th - that must surely have made for a glum chartered flight for the Toronto Blue Jays to Cleveland last night.
Red Wings power way to Game 1 win
On the theory that you can't stop what you can't see, the Detroit Red Wings fell back on a simple, well-worn plan to get under the skin of Dallas Stars goaltender Marty Turco last night.
Maple Leafs run into roadblocks on general manager hunt
The Toronto Maple Leafs' 107-day search for a general manager has become a campaign of attrition.A few weeks after the Anaheim Ducks refused to give the Leafs permission to speak to Brian Burke about Toronto's vacant GM portfolio, it has come to light that the Leafs also have been rebuffed by the Detroit Red Wings and San Jose Sharks.
ON TELEVISION
(All times Eastern)AUTO RACING NASCAR Nationwide, Diamond Hill Plywood 200, TSN, 7 p.m.BASEBALL MLB, Toronto Blue Jays at Cleveland Indians, Sportsnet, 7 p.m. MLB, Chicago White Sox at Seattle Mariners, Sportsnet (West, HD), 10:30 p.m.
Globe Life
YOUR MORNING SMILE
Research In Motion mantra: BlackBerrys are always in season.- Mark Foerster, Newmarket, Ont.
Hell on wheels
For a role model, Tyler Deith isn't big on clean living. His dirt yard, situated along a back road in Ontario's Muskoka region, is strewn with engine parts, straw, lumber, car relics and the odd pile of empty beer cans. Visitors are greeted by a Budweiser-swilling pig named Ernie. Mr. Deith himself swore off razors and barber shears all winter, and this spring has taken on what his friend Luke calls ''the Jesus look.''
Facebook to step up security
Social-networking site Facebook announced an agreement yesterday with 49 U.S. state attorneys-general and the District of Columbia to increase efforts to protect its youngest members from sexual predators.
1,000 songs, 1,000 dancers, no sound
During a late afternoon break between exams last month, Queen's University student Molle Dorst stuck her headphones over her ears, switched on her iPod and joined the throbbing, dancing crowd outside the student centre.
It's best to chill after a heavy workout
Alex Hutchinson draws on the latest research to answer your fitness and workout questions in this biweekly column on the science of sport. The QuestionDoes cold really help recovery after a hard workout?
Globe Review
NOW PLAYING
Selected mini-reviews, rated on a system of 0 to 4 stars, by Rick Groen, Liam Lacey, Stephen Cole and Jason McBride. Full reviews appeared on the dates indicated.Caramel
An antidote to GTA's driving and shooting
And now for something completely different. Grand Theft Auto IV set records this week - more than $500-million in sales in seven days - and generated a haze of talk, hype and, I admit, enjoyment for me. But most of the people who chatted with me about it, from salespeople at video-game stores to bus drivers and family members, detailed the reasons they would never play it: the time it swallows up, the complexity of the controls, the violence and, among the dedicated gamers, ennui after a decade in the same gang-infested sandbox.
The voice that launched a thousand films
For too long in her impressive career, singer/actress Marni Nixon was better known as ''the ghost'' (i.e., the person who actually performed the songs) in musicals starring actresses who, whatever their other talents, couldn't carry a tune.
The skinny on slimming down, Canadian-style
Spring is the season for fresh starts and new beginnings, and the inevitable TV reminders to get off the couch and back into shape. The time to start that New Year's diet has finally arrived.
The musicians and the stories behind their music
Welcome to the time machine. In preparing for the 17-episode 1977 series All You Need Is Love, slated for a five-disc DVD release on May 13, British rock critic Tony Palmer and his producers interviewed everyone they could think of who shaped 20th-century popular music, from early ragtime to 1970s rock. Where the subjects had died, the producers found just the right footage, frequently rare - jazz great Charlie Parker playing his sax, or Woody Guthrie singing.
Editorials
A minefield to navigate with care
In theory, carbon taxes can play a useful role in encouraging consumers to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. People do change their behaviour in response to prices. In practice, the federal Liberals are taking political and economic risks by considering the imposition of new taxes on the carbon in all fuels. The extra revenues would be used to fund personal and corporate income-tax cuts, so the Liberals can depict these measures as a simple reshuffling of the tax system. But carbon taxes require careful calibration to make sure that they don't sideswipe domestic producers and low-income consumers. It is particularly difficult to ensure that they don't make cheap imports from the carbon-spewing developing world even more attractive when compared with the prices of Canadian products, both our exports and those we use ourselves.
Unmixed findings
Until recently, Tony Clement simply ignored the reams of research on Insite, Vancouver's supervised injection facility for intravenous drug users. Now, seemingly laying the groundwork for the site to be shut down when its exemption from the Criminal Code expires on June 30, the Health Minister has taken to cherry-picking certain studies and misrepresenting them.
Vive le Canada uni
On the beaches of Normandy yesterday, Nicolas Sarkozy, the President of France, strongly evoked the memory of Charles de Gaulle in marking the anniversary of the end of the Second World War, yet he tacitly disowned one facet of the Gaullist legacy - favourably to Canada.
Comment
Getting to the heart of the matter
Sheila Fraser and her colleagues are auditors, but of a particular kind.They're not really like the auditors who check a company's books and report to shareholders whether the money in and out adds up. By statute, the Auditor-General's group must do ''value-for-money'' auditing, a very wide mandate to decide, at least implicitly, if money is being well spent.
Seeing the truth in the prison that is Myanmar
The last time I flew over the Irrawaddy delta, I was amazed by the variety of colours I saw below me: half a dozen hues of green, particularly the bright emerald of new rice shoots; rich reds and ochres of fields being turned or lying fallow; hundreds of shimmering silver and blue tributaries and ponds. Now, after the devastation wreaked by cyclone Nargis, part of that landscape has disappeared altogether and the rest of it is drowning in muddy water.
Canada's 'invisible minorities' must look to Obama
Only a treasonous Canadian could deny the American Republic's blood-soaked history of racism. Indeed, we true patriots can recite, by heart, the indelible crimes of those allegorical regicides to the south: the enslavement of Africans, the lynching of blacks and the massacres of ''Amerindians.''
More to Jews than Israel
Media coverage of Israel's 60th birthday has gone on for more than a week. Almost all of it was celebratory, though there were sympathetic references to the Palestinian nakba, or catastrophe, that weren't often included in coverage of Israel's 50th or 40th. Even the National Post, among dozens of articles, had one by Jeet Heer on the ''ethnic cleansing'' of Palestinians, which a Post editorial rebuked the same day.
Obituaries
Air Canada skipper moonlighted as chief pilot of warplane museum
Peter Gutowski was a pilot all his adult life. He flew everything from a Boeing 747 jumbo jet to a Corsair, a powerful single-engine fighter from the Second World War. Although too young to have flown against the Axis, he performed in hundreds of air shows as chief pilot for the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum in Hamilton.
EDDY ARNOLD: SINGER
Eddy Arnold's mellow baritone made him one of the most successful country singers in history. His vocals on songs such as 1965's Make the World Go Away, one of his many No. 1 country hits and a top-10 hit on the pop charts, were folksy yet sophisticated, and he became a pioneer of the ''Nashville sound,'' a mixture of country and pop styles. His crossover success paved the way for later singers such as Kenny Rogers.
LAST WORDS
We are the first victims of American fascism!Ethel Rosenberg, executed for espionage, 1918-1953
Globe Real Estate
In Rosedale, making an effort to fit in
Iain Morris and Fiona Macfarlane lamented the one-of-a-kind Vancouver home they left behind even as they celebrated the career moves that brought them to Toronto.The couple had spent three years building a contemporary family home with a spectacular view over the water. But they had scarcely settled in when Ms. Macfarlane was lured to Toronto by an enticing position with an international accounting firm.
A luxury home built to suit Lawrence Park's evolving tastes
41 STRATHEDEN RD.WHAT: A newly built home in Lawrence Park, complete with professionally designed interiorsLIVING SPACE: more than 4,800 square feetLOT SIZE: 65 by 135 feet
Old neighbourhoods never die - do they?
Are there ghosts in the machines at Canada Post? More specifically, ghost towns or even ghost neighbourhoods?About a year ago, I was sitting on the patio of the Wexford Restaurant at Lawrence and Warden avenues with Scarborough Historical Society member Jeremy Hopkin. He remarked that a letter addressed to a street in the area followed by ''Wexford, Ontario'' would arrive at its destination.
For backyard swimmers, the tide is changing
The idea of a salt water swimming pool evokes visions of an exotic spa that combines sensual pleasure with health benefits. For the growing number of people who have these pools, that Dead Sea image isn't so far-fetched, however.
A good, solid, community-minded building
More than any other building type, schools define their communities. When schools close, as will happen increasingly with our aging society, it hurts all, regardless of age or stage on the family cycle. When a fine school opens to the public, it is a joyous occasion, like the arrival of a new child.
Education
Shutdown of school bus fleet causes ordeal for parents
Getting students to and from school proved to be an ordeal for parents on Prince Edward Island yesterday after the province's entire fleet of school buses was pulled off the roads for inspection.
