Author’s Note: In a future edition I hope to review Christopher Nolan’s movie of the moment, Oppenheimer, exploring the rise and fall of J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the top-secret Allied ‘Manhattan Project’ to build the Atomic Bomb. In a July 26 interview in Nature, nuclear historian Richard RhodesRead More

Editor’s Note: I heard Oona Johnstone-Laurette interviewed on CBC Information Morning Cape Breton recently and was so struck by what she had to say about unions—she had recently participated in an all-ages panel discussion hosted by Unifor—that I reached out to her to see if she might be willing toRead More

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” James Joyce, The Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man   On June 25, in the dazed wake of the aborted rebellion by a mercenary army, the Wagner Group, against Russia’s military and political leadership, the BBC’s MoscowRead More

Every once in a while, if I’m in the microbiology lab in A wing at Cape Breton University, I remember the late Dr. Erwin Zodrow, walking by with a fossil or microscope slide in his hand. In his last few years of research at CBU, he had a geology researchRead More

Everett Knickle of Cossitt Heights Development Limited appeared before CBRM council on Tuesday, a delegation of one asking the municipality to change the terms of the 2012 purchase and sale agreement under which the company bought the 120-hectare Cossitt Heights Industrial Park on Sydney’s Upper Prince Street with the statedRead More

I have read multiple local court reports recently in which the sentence included an order that the convicted person “submit a DNA sample to the national registry” and it struck me that it’s been six years almost to the day since I first wrote about Canada’s National DNA Data BankRead More

Now that I’ve worked through my 2,800-word preamble in the form of this week’s history of Canada’s Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act, it’s time to focus on the subject I actually set out to cover: Canada’s National DNA Data Bank (NDDB). As I explained back in 2017, whenRead More

I was thinking back to the 1950s when television arrived in Cape Breton and how many of us made our way up to Charlotte Street to stand looking into the window of a store that displayed a small set, itself displaying what we came to know as a test pattern.Read More

Editor’s Note: This is Part III in a series of articles on rail safety even if it doesn’t seem like it. Here are Part I and Part II.   On 1 May 2015, Canada and the United States announced “a harmonized set of tank-car regulations” that aimed, as the FinancialRead More

The train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio had me pulling on so many different threads this week, there’s no way I can weave them all back into a coherent whole, so I’m going to divide the resulting article into two parts to give me more time to track down someRead More