ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
August 7, 2012 – Globe and Mail
Health Canada has turned down funding for an HIV/AIDS charity for fear it might result in advocacy – an indication of a growing tendency within the Conservative government to steer clear of groups pushing causes out of step with its policies.
Sunrise on Mars
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August 7, 2012 – Globe and Mail
With Curiosity safely landed on Mars, the real work begins. And this is where Canadian expertise comes in.
Designed by a University of Guelph professor, funded by the Canadian Space Agency and built by Canada’s MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates Ltd., the Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer is a key part of gleaning information on Mars’s ancient history, and maybe the secrets to life on other planets.
Peter Ilott hugs fellow engineer Ann Devereaux as they celebrate the Mars science rover Curiosity’s successful landing on Monday night.
(Brian van der Brug/Reuters)
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
August 7, 2012 – Globe and Mail
Barely two minutes before an enormous, sophisticated space robot touched down on Mars, Peter Ilott spent 20 seconds consumed with dread, convinced the entire mission had been lost.
As he monitored NASA’s communications link with the rover Curiosity, he and a colleague sitting beside him at Mission Control noticed a fatal signal coming through, indicating a failure substantial enough to cripple the rover and derail a $2.5-billion mission eight years in the making.
Fossilized burrows of prehistoric slugs (Photo courtesy University of Alberta)
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
July 28, 2012 – Globe and Mail
On the cusp of the 30th Olympiad, as the world gawps at the apex of human movement, a team of Canadian scientists has published breakthrough research on the first creatures to move at all: prehistoric South American slugs.
Researchers from the University of Alberta have unearthed the oldest evidence yet of animals capable of self-propulsion. Earlier life forms, such as sponges, had to stay put.
As well, the 585-million-year-old slugs could be the first bilaterians – creatures with a front, back and sides. And they are the immediate ancestors of all locomoting animals, humans included.
J.P. Moczulski
At age 18, he was convicted of second-degree murder, accused of stabbing another boy to death.
Joe’s name isn’t real – police changed it to protect his privacy. But his story is. Police in Prince Albert, Sask., use it to illustrate their strategy.
This timeline traces Joe’s run-ins with police and social services through an infancy marked by domestic violence, alcoholism and abuse, a violent childhood and a series of petty-crime charges.
Early intervention, police maintain, could have prevented the murder years before it happened. The crime-prevention program is working so well, Anna Mehler Paperny reports, Toronto is adopting the same one in a new pilot project
Katherine O’Neill
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July 17, 2012 – Globe and Mail
There’s nothing quite like the humid, so-thick-you-can-taste-it air of a teeming greenhouse – especially when it’s 40 degrees below freezing and you’re plunged in darkness for months.
That’s the kind of unlikely oasis planners want to bring to Canada’s hardest-to-feed communities. They have got their work cut out for them.
Janet Hamlin
Saturday, July 14 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
Omar Khadr’s Canadian lawyers are asking a federal court to order Public Safety Minister Vic Toews to make up his mind on whether to bring the Canadian convict back to serve time in Canada.
In an application filed on Friday, John Norris and Brydie Bethell asked judges to review what they argue is an unreasonable delay in deciding on Mr. Khadr’s transfer application. The 25-year-old was eligible to return to serve the rest of his sentence in Canada as of October, 2011.
Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
Thursday, July 12 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
Public Safety Minister Vic Toews says he has no problem with the number of federal inmates sharing cells built for one.
And even as he reiterated his commitment to building 2,700 new cells in existing prison facilities, he said those additional units aren’t meant to alleviate the pressures caused by double-bunking – because there’s no need.
Michelle Siu for the Globe and Mail
Saturday, July 7, 2012 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
Ontario is “strongly urging” the federal government not to let generic brands of the popular painkiller OxyContin into Canada once Purdue Pharmaceuticals’ patent runs out this fall.
The expiration of Purdue’s OxyContin patent on Nov. 25 opens the door for other companies to manufacture cheaper generic versions of the controlled-release oxycodone. Purdue will continue to make a new, tamper-resistant patented drug – OxyNEO – introduced to replace OxyContin earlier this year.
Friday, July 6, 2012 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
Financial showdowns between police and the cities paying them can be nasty. And they’re getting nastier: Across Canada, budgetary games of chicken are playing out between cash-strapped cities and police forces that argue they’re taking on more than they ever have – and need the cash to back it.
The mayor of Peterborough, Ont., has been locked out of two meetings of the police board, on which he sits, after a rare move by council to reject a funding request and slice the force’s budget on its own. Reports this week suggested the board may have asked Ontario’s Civilian Police Commission to remove the mayor entirely.
a business of misfits 