Saturday, September 26, 2009 – Globe and Mail
PAUL KORING, COLIN FREEZE AND ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
WASHINGTON and TORONTO – Najibullah Zazi, the Afghan accused of plotting to plant terrorist bombs in New York, travelled back and forth to Canada and Pakistan, U.S. government prosecutors said yesterday.
The Globe and Mail has confirmed that Mr. Zazi travelled to Mississauga.
“Yeah, it’s the same guy,” said Maimoona Zazi, his aunt by marriage, who said she watched Mr. Zazi, a Denver bus driver, on television as federal marshals escorted him to a court appearance.
Last night, CSIS agents were knocking on the doors of homes of Mr. Zazi’s relatives in Mississauga, even as the government was refusing to say if its security forces were involved in the case.
Friday, September 18, 2009 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
TORONT and O – At his comfortable Toronto home, the star recruit of Canada’s most ambitious graduate public-health program is the perfect host: He pours tea and arranges chairs; his eldest children bring out plate after plate of food, and his youngest daughter entertains guests with living-room acrobatics.
Izzeldin Abuelaish, who made headlines around the world as a peacenik and vocal advocate of Israeli-Palestinian détente, starts teaching today at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health. It’s a hopeful new beginning nine months after a blast ripped his world asunder on the other side of the globe.
The Israeli shell that hit Dr. Abuelaish’s apartment and killed three of his daughters was one of innumerable human tragedies in the midst of Gaza’s bloody conflict last January, which elicited a United Nations report this week slamming both Israel and Hamas for war crimes.
But this particular incident caused a media firestorm that crystallized the conflict internationally.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
Canada’s Afghanistan mission is falling short of its goals as violence and instability continue to worsen in Kandahar and across the country. Critics and military experts are questioning whether those goals can possibly be met by the time Canada ends its military commitment in 2011 – and whether they were realistic to begin with.
A quarterly report released yesterday detailing the progress of Canadian military operations in Afghanistan found Kandahar province becoming more violent, less stable and less secure, and attacks across the country becoming more frequent than at any time since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.
Less than two years before the scheduled end of its military mission in Kandahar, Canada isn’t meeting the benchmarks it set coming out of the Manley commission.
Monday, September 7, 2009
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
All three of them, as children, were hooked on crack cocaine and locked into a life spent selling themselves for money, drugs, food, shelter and the illusion of protection they couldn’t get anywhere else.
All spent years bouncing around Manitoba’s foster-care, youth-correction and child-welfare systems, from one program for at-risk minors to another.
And all were found dead, their bodies dumped on the outskirts of town. No one has been charged in their deaths, two of which have so far been declared homicides.
Cherisse Houle, Hillary Angel Wilson and Fonassa Bruyere, the teenage girls who have become the face of Winnipeg’s epidemic of missing and murdered young aboriginal women, have a lot in common. And they have become, quite literally, on police press releases and bulletin boards across the region, poster children for systemic failure in child welfare and police investigations – what a Manitoba cabinet minister calls a “state of emergency” for the region.
