Opinion

A new study shows that tequila causes pregnancy. No, there isn’t such a study. It’s an in-joke among science researchers to suggest how cause and effect - and profit motive - can be manipulated to produce new health headlines. This has been a big year for new health studies that ostensibly debunk long established wisdom...

My obsession with observing closely the personalities and machinations at the heart of the monied classes and political power, came through a provincial employers’ grant in the early Eighties. Winnipeg's toniest men’s boutique, then as now, was Hanford-Drewitt, a long-established club of sorts for the city’s best-heeled men. And “everybody who was anybody” shopped there:...

Since my earliest political involvement in the late 1980s, I've been struggling to understand why people aren't more engaged in federal politics. I still haven't figured it out, but over twenty plus years of political engagement, I've developed a couple of notions. First, most people just don't know how government works and if you don't...

6 A.M. is early enough to begin with, but 6 A.M. and 2000 people in Spandex tights is another thing entirely. There isn’t enough coffee in the world to adjust that sight — especially when all 2000 of those people are soaking wet and crammed into a giant rodeo barn. The Ride to Conquer Cancer...

Thomas Mulcair, leader of the federal NDP is coming to Kamloops on Tuesday, September 1.  Good news for the local candidate Bill Sundhu. Sundhu will have additional local media coverage because of Mulcair’s visit, and will also share the national spotlight with Mulcair. And good news for Kamloops too. It will mean the press corps...

You may have heard the ads from the Canadian mint to sell $20 silver coins honouring Bugs Bunny. Sounds Goofy. But what better way to make money . . . than to make money? That’s what sets the Canadian Mint apart from other federal institutions. By law, the mint conducts its business “in anticipation of...

“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. Let us all act according to national customs.” Sir Charles Napier is famously credited with the above quotation in reference to...

In 1986, upon the evening of the summer solstice, Larry Harvey, Jerry James and a handful of other Haight-Ashbury beatniks gathered on Baker Beach in San Francisco, California and set a nine foot wooden man and his little wooden dog on fire. The dog has since been taken out of the equation, but the wooden...

I’ve been asking a lot of questions about herons lately, and whether or not they were in a grove of trees that got chopped down in advance of a housing development. I don’t know if the birds were ever there, but the City of Vernon, which issued the removal permit, seems pretty confident they weren’t....