86 posts by sk15admin

So Joe Ramia, developer of Halifax’s new, significantly publicly financed $500-million convention-centre-hotel-office-residential-retail behemoth, is suing Heritage Trust and its 27 volunteer directors for what could be tens of millions of dollars for their “persistent efforts to quash downtown development” — especially his. Last week, 300 of Halifax’s self-anointed finest—“just rattle your bracelets,” as John Lennon said—cheered […]

Peter MacKay is the columnist’s gift that keeps on giving. Even on the edge-of-summer, eve of a national holiday when newsmakers worth their spin doctors know better than to do anything newsworthy… Peter MacKay never lets us down. You may remember Peter, he of the “I solemnly swear” never to merge the Progressive Conservative Party […]

Let me begin with this. I don’t believe Lyle Howe was convicted of sexually assaulting a 19-year-old woman because he was black, or that “those that represent the white power structure” conspired to put down an uppity black lawyer. David Sparks does. Sparks is spokesperson for a group planning a rally outside the law courts […]

In the end, of course, Baillie’s management style may turn out to be less significant than his discredited, thoughtless, cut-public-sector-jobs-reduce-corporate-taxes-leave-it-all-to-the-private-sector political philosophy.

Bayou of Pigs By Stewart Bell HarperCollins 344 pages (paperback) ISBN 978-1-4434-2764-7   In early April, the Associated Press reported that USAID — the United States Agency for International Development, whose website advertises its lofty goal “to end extreme global poverty and enable resilient, democratic societies to realize their potential”  — had concocted a hare-brained […]

Even as they slowly, reluctantly come around to the notion that swapping the three remaining members of the Cuban Five for Alan Gross could be an acceptable solution to an otherwise intractable problem, Gross’s media supporters continue to repeat the long-since discredited argument that Gross was a “humanitarian do-gooder” who just happened to end up […]

There was the opening two-day conference focusing on the future of US-Cuba relations and featuring participants from around the world… a kick-off press conference at the National Press Club that generated interviews with the Washington Post, NPR and CCTV, not to forget lots of coverage in international media… a concert headlined by the well-known political […]

Credit where credit is due. When he was still the opposition leader, Stephen McNeil met with former residents of the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children. He listened to their claims that, as mostly black and often orphaned children, they’d been subject to physical, sexual and psychological abuse at the hands of their mostly black […]

We begin June as we ended May. With more questions than answers. Item: Enterprise Cape Breton President John Lynn got fired after hiring four Tories with connections to federal Justice Minister Peter MacKay — without benefit of documentation or competition. The federal integrity watchdog uncovered  a “pattern” that created an “appearance of patronage.” But he […]

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the famed Colombian novelist who died April 17, 2014, played a fascinating cameo role in the story of the Cuban Five. In the spring of 1998, he carried a secret message about a terrorist plot against Cuba from Fidel Castro to Bill Clinton. That session led to an unprecedented sit-down between the […]