Senator’s wife spends first anniversary in court after mid-flight fracas

amp Leave a comment

ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY AND GLORIA GALLOWAY

Tuesday, Aug. 28, 2012 – Globe and Mail

A year ago, Maygan Sensenberger was resplendent at the head of a Parliament Hill wedding procession, having pictures taken with her groom by the political photographer who’d captured images of Pierre Trudeau, John Turner and Jean Chrétien.

The Collingwood, Ont., native was 22 when she married Liberal Senator Rod Zimmer in Ottawa’s Christ Church Cathedral. He was 68.

They spent their first anniversary Monday under a court order forbidding contact. The closest they got was the sightline between a prisoner’s box and a courtroom gallery.

Continue reading →

Canada’s prisons brace for shrinking spending and a growing population

amp Leave a comment

ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

Monday, August 20 – Globe and Mail
Corrections Canada faces years of big budget cuts even as its resources are stretched increasingly thin.

The federal agency must trim $295-million in spending by 2015 as part of the Conservative government’s deficit-reduction program. This is the first time the agency has had to cut its budget, year to year, since 2006.

Continue reading →

Corrections Canada plans electronic anklets for parolees despite flaws

amp Leave a comment

ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

August `17, 2012 – Globe and Mail

Correctional Service Canada plans to roll out electronic anklets to monitor parolees – even though its own pilot project found the devices did not work as hoped.

The idea is to ensure that offenders follow the conditions of their release. A tiny proportion of parolees breach those conditions or reoffend, although the number has been getting smaller for four years.

Continue reading →

Canadian scientist eager to begin ‘detective work’ with Mars rover

amp Leave a comment

Sunrise on Mars

ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

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.

Continue reading →

NASA scientists faced 20 seconds of dread before Mars rover triumph

amp Leave a comment

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.

Continue reading →

Canadian scientists discover world’s first moving animal – our ancestor the slug

amp Leave a comment

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.

Continue reading →

The making of a murderer – and how to prevent it

amp Leave a comment

J.P. Moczulski

This is Joe’s story.

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

Continue reading →

Greenhouse idea takes root in Far North

amp Leave a comment

Katherine O’Neill

ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

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.

Continue reading →