Church officials alerted to pornography allegations against bishop 20 years ago

amp Leave a comment

Tuesday, October 6, 2009
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY AND OLIVER MOORE

TORONTO and HALIFAX — Two decades ago, a young man poured his heart out in Rev. Kevin Molloy’s Portugal Cove rectory.

Father Molloy said he was “appalled” to hear about the pornographic images the man allegedly found, as a teenager in the home of a fatherly clergyman, who would befriend boys at Newfoundland’s Mount Cashel home and often take them out to movies or to his home for the weekend.

“Just the fact that he was a priest and this young boy would find this kind of material in the priest’s rectory appalled me terribly,” Father Molloy told The Globe and Mail in an interview last night.

Father Molloy immediately told then-Archbishop Alphonsus Penney about the allegations about what had been found in Rev. Raymond Lahey’s house. Then he phoned Father Lahey, who was in Cornerbrook at the time.

“I said, ‘Bishop Lahey, I’m calling you on a very serious matter…’ He was quite aware of what I was saying.”

Continue reading →

Suspect in N.Y. terror plot has Canadian connection

amp Leave a comment

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.

Continue reading →

A father’s loss in Gaza, a major win for Canada

amp Leave a comment

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.

Continue reading →

Canada in Afghanistan: Mission becoming impossible task

amp Leave a comment

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.

Continue reading →

In death, three women shine light on Manitoba’s epidemic of missing natives

amp Leave a comment

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.

Continue reading →

A haunting road for hitchhikers

amp Leave a comment

Saturday, August 29, 2009 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

A sinuous stretch of British Columbia’s Highway 16, which snakes from Prince Rupert’s rocky coast to Prince George in B.C.’s northern interior, has become synonymous with heartbreak and grisly mysteries.

The lonely, 718-kilometre winding ribbon of road is the only driving route connecting the string of isolated communities nearby. It passes through rugged mountainous and forested terrain, most of it deserted.

Buses on the rural thoroughfare are non-existent, the train often expensive and vulnerable hitchhikers many – even decades after an epidemic of disappearances and murders began, spawning a trail of grainy headshots and missing-person posters plastered on telephone poles across the province, but little in the way of answers or closure.

Continue reading →

The search for a nuclear graveyard

amp Leave a comment

Tuesday, August 25, 2009 – Globe and Mail

ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

Wanted: Friendly, open-minded community in need of jobs and a whack of infrastructure cash. Must be willing to play host to nuclear waste, perhaps until the end of time.More than six decades after joining the nuclear club, Canada is home to 22 nuclear reactors, 18 of them in operation, producing about 15 per cent of the country’s electricity. Canada also has 40,000 metric tonnes of radioactive waste – and counting.

For years, the issue of how to best dispose of this waste has plagued policy-makers, scientists and citizens. Suggestions have included shooting it into outer space or exporting it to the South Pole.

Now, Canada is preparing to get rid of its nuclear detritus once and for all – by burying it.

Continue reading →

Horror and relief after storm

amp Leave a comment

Saturday, August 22, 2009 – Globe and Mail
Anna Mehler Paperny

DURHAM, ONT. — For 30 minutes, in the twisted metal wreckage of a flimsy shelter, Rick Coveyduck tried to revive the prostrate 11-year-old-boy.

“It was so devastating, trying to bring that boy back to life,” Mr. Coveyduck, 57, told The Globe and Mail yesterday of his attempts, along with those of the boy’s mother, to perform CPR. “It was horrific. Devastating. Unexplainable.”

The young camper, identified last night by residents as Owen MacPherson, was the only direct casualty of a tornado that snaked a devastating path through Durham, Ont., tossing birds, people and cars like snow-globe confetti and leaving roofs ripped asunder, walls shredded and trees uprooted. It was one of an estimated four tornadoes to touch down across Southwestern Ontario on Thursday, destroying hundreds of homes and buildings and leaving tens of thousands of people without power.

Continue reading →

In Nunavut, the problems are familiar – and so are the solutions

amp Leave a comment

Tuesday, August 18, 2009 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

It took a photo of two boys sleeping on the pavement in Iqaluit to show Canada the face of a young population in crisis.

But the problems behind that crisis, and the steps needed to remedy them, were painstakingly laid out in a 92-page document released in 2006.

Three years later, little has changed. The problems the report outlines as urgent concerns are still prevalent. The steps it recommends to address them are in the early stages, if they exist at all.

Continue reading →

Building the Arctic

amp Leave a comment

Anna Mehler Paperny
Monday, August 17, 2009 – Globe and Mail
Billions of dollars have been pledged to develop Canada’s North, but in much of Nunavut, the most basic needs remain unaddressed, leaving the territory with ‘stone-age’ infrastructure

When Prime Minister Stephen Harper visits Pangnirtung, Nunavut, later this week, he’s sure to get a warm greeting. After all, his government is contributing $25-million to the 1,300-person community to build a new small-craft harbour aimed at bolstering the local fishing industry.

The harbour, whose designation as a “priority project” in the federal budget in January came as a welcome surprise for Pangnirtung, is an important plank in the Harper government’s commitment to building much-needed infrastructure in Nunavut.

But Monday, the Prime Minister arrives in Iqaluit, where the welcome may be a little cooler. There has so far been no infrastructure money to replace a gravel wharf in the 7,000-person territorial capital, where it takes up to a week for the most basic goods to be offloaded from boats bringing them in – “stone-age” infrastructure, as the territory’s transportation planning director calls it.

Continue reading →