Pope Francis marked the fourth anniversary of his election to the papacy on Monday of this week, and the debate is on as to what he has or has not accomplished in those four years. Aside from this important anniversary for Francis, it would appear that March 2017 arrived at theRead More

Doing Well By Doing Good “Activist and fundraiser” Dan Pallotta will speak during the Community Impact Summit, an anti-poverty gathering to be held in Sydney next Wednesday and Thursday. The summit will bring together “business, government and non-profit sector leaders [emphasis theirs]” to “commit to specific, positive actions to helpRead More

The Cape Breton Regional Municipality, having survived into the early years of the 21st century without a communications person, suddenly needs two of them. Mayor Cecil Clarke, who made history (and by-passed municipal hiring rules) by tapping Christina Lamey as his own personal “Communication Advisor” now wants to hire a second flak forRead More

On March 27, over 130 states will meet at UN headquarters in New York to commence negotiations, mandated by the General Assembly last December, on a treaty outlawing nuclear weapons. This country, alas (see my January column, ‘Divided Nations: Canada Ducks Disarmament Challenge’), will be joining most of its NATORead More

BCB Board Business Cape Breton (BCB), the Cape Breton Regional Municipality’s “economic development entity” has finally gotten around to updating its listing with the Nova Scotia Registry of Joint Stock Companies. It now has nine directors, having added Jim Kehoe and Darren McFadgen and lost Alastair MacLeod. Parker Rudderham isRead More

The world we find ourselves in today is often difficult, sometimes frightening and frequently disturbing. It’s hard to watch the evening news and then sleep well at night or even follow our Facebook newsfeeds without realizing that our friends have sharply divergent and incompatible political views which mirror the disagreementsRead More

Occasionally, it takes us a while to accept something that is hard to understand, does not jibe with our script of the world, or plainly, just doesn’t make any damn sense. And I am here to say now, finally, over a month into this springtime of our discontent, that IRead More

As kids, we weren’t very impressed by our mother’s “war stories” of walking six miles to school after feeding the chickens and having a big bowl of porridge (she hated it so much we were never forced to eat it). She didn’t talk too much about her life as aRead More

Old King Coal I was so puzzled today when I reached into my mailbox and pulled out a 1720 edition of The Cape Breton Post.  “King coal” screamed the headline on the front page. Hallelujah, a coal mine has opened on the island! I searched excitedly to see what otherRead...

In my October column, “Roads to Hell: Nuclear Waste on the Move,” I reported on legal efforts to block shipments of highly-radioactive liquid waste from the Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories in Ontario to the Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina, a journey of over 2,000 kilometerss passing the GreatRead More