Last Monday two people were shot and killed by Montreal police. One was intermittently homeless and severely psychologically disturbed. The other was going to work, killed by the ricochet of one of three or four bullets fired by an SPVM constable. News updates pertinent to this story have been spotty and unfortunately eclipsed by F-1 weekend, and the key spokesperson for the SQ has been tight-lipped about how the investigation is proceeding. This week it came out that the constables involved were not interviewed until several days after the fact.
Month: June 2011
Malaria in Montreal…it can happen again
When the Montreal General Hospital first opened in 1823, three percent of the first 3665 medical cases treated were for malaria. Yep, malaria…in Montreal.
Our lovely grey city used to be surrounded by a lot more swamp and marshland than it is now. Cases of malaria stretched from here all the way out to the prairies. And we can still get malaria in Montreal; the host of the malaria parasite is the Anopheles mosquito, who lives here, too.
The decrease in Montreal malaria cases happened because…
Monsanto: The King of Corporate Evil
According to a new report released last Tuesday, industry regulators have known for years that Roundup, the world’s best-selling herbicide produced by the U.S. based Monsanto Corporation, causes birth defects. The report, “Roundup and birth defects: Is the public being kept in the dark?”, says that industry regulators have known since as early as 1980 that glyphosate, the chemical on which Roundup and other herbicides are based, can cause birth defects in laboratory animals. Why am I not surprised…
Flipping off: Germany to abandon nuclear by 2022, activists not satisfied
Despite the fallout from the Fukushima nuclear disaster and renewed fears about the safety of nuclear power, almost no country has taken a position against the controversial energy source, except one. Europe’s economic engine and most populace country, Germany, has bucked the global trend and announced it will shut down all of its nuclear power plants by 2022, at the latest. But ask Jana Wiechmann, Greenpeace coordinator for the northern German city of Bremen, if the battle over nuclear in Germany is won and the answer is simple: no.
Solidarity with posties! Why you should be supporting your postal workers…
It’s on! The Canadian Union of Postal Workers has officially embarked on a series of rotating strikes throughout Canada. The strike, the first in almost 15 years, began Thursday night in Winnipeg. It then continued on to Hamilton, Ontario on Friday and then to Montreal Sunday night. The strike will hit another Canadian city every few days indefinitely until an agreement with the Canada Post Corporation (CPC) is made.
The reasons for the strike concern major issues associated with the corporation’s…
The War on Drugs is Lost
On June 17, 1971 United States President Richard Nixon officially launched the “War on Drugs”. Forty years later the American government alone has spent between one and two and a half trillion dollars to combat drug users, dealers and manufacturers. Millions of otherwise innocent people have been incarcerated as a result…