What a wild, weird week! The bodies from the Parliament Hill shootings and the Quebec murder-by-car had not been buried, their meaning not yet processed, when the CBC announced last Sunday it was severing ties with its most famous radio host, Jian Ghomeshi, for reasons unspecified. By that evening, Ghomeshi had specified his version in […]
- 11/03/2014
- StephenKimber
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Last Wednesday, I was glued to CBC radio’s coverage of the Ottawa shootings while trying — and failing — to focus on making notes for my upcoming class. At 12:54 p.m., as a CBC reporter relayed the shocking news shots may have been fired inside the Rideau Mall — meaning there might be “more than […]
- 10/27/2014
- StephenKimber
- 1 Comment
The Halifax Mooseheads should have known. On Tuesday, Oct. 7, at 10:50 p.m., Halifax Regional Police responded to an accident on Freshwater Trail near Dartmouth’s Russell Lake. One car had smashed into a second, parked vehicle, causing extensive damage. Sources say there was an open bottle of alcohol in the first car, and police charged a young man they […]
- 10/20/2014
- StephenKimber
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I suppose if the Harper government can commit us to a war without borders — Iraq, maybe Syria — or actual end goals on the strength of a few hours of debate in the House of Commons on a Monday night in October, we should be grateful Stephen McNeil took a full week to ram […]
- 10/06/2014
- StephenKimber
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On Thursday, in the warm afterglow of a Throne speech that zeroed in on “unsustainable [public sector] wage increases” and promised a “hiring slow down and steps to achieve a more sustainable wage pattern,” Health Minister Leo Glavine was clear as glass. Premier Stephen McNeil’s government had had it up to here with recalcitrant health […]
- 09/29/2014
- StephenKimber
- 3 Comments
“The Atlantic Institute for Market Studies in Halifax has not responded to questions.” That nugget was nested in the last line, last paragraph of a Globe and Mail story last week about the Harper government’s efforts to “intimidate, muzzle and silence its critics.” Ottawa is spending $13.4 million so its tax auditors can descend, lotus-like, […]
- 09/22/2014
- StephenKimber
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Stephen Kimber’s book, What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five, has won the 2014 Evelyn Richardson Award for Nonfiction at Canada’s East Coast Literary Awards. The Five were members of a Cuban intelligence network sent to Florida in the 1990s to infiltrate Miami exile groups plotting terrorist attacks against Cuba. […]
- 09/20/2014
- StephenKimber
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Here is the text of the letter: Dear Minister Findlay, Recently, we were informed through reports in a number of newspapers that the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) has undertaken an audit of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) on the grounds that it allegedly engages in politically partisan, biased and one-sided research activity. While we understand […]
When I arrived back in Halifax on September 14, 2014 from giving talks in Washington about the case of the Cuban Five, there was an envelope waiting for me. It was from the “U.S. Department of State” and there was a sticker on the manila envelope that warned: “To be opened by addressee ONLY.” The […]
- 09/15/2014
- StephenKimber
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One of the key moments in the story of the Cuban Five occurred on the morning of May 6, 1998, when Nobel-prize-winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez arrived at the White House in Washington carrying a secret message from Cuban President Fidel Castro. That message — about an exile terrorist plot to blow up an airplane […]
- 09/15/2014
- StephenKimber
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STEPHEN KIMBER, a Professor of Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax and co-founder of its MFA in Creative Nonfiction Program, is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He is the author of two novels and eight non-fiction books. Buy his books
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