Bruce Wark

With Americans craving political change, it’s been useful to see the US response to Fidel Castro’s resignation last week; the biggest change the northern hemisphere has seen in a while. Barack Obama said he would take a different approach than the trade embargo the States has maintained against Cuba since 1961, and meet Fidel’s successor […]

“You know, there’s never a nice way of losing your job,” said Marc-Noel Ouellette, a vice president at Transcontinental Media, “but in the end, I think we did the best we could in the circumstances.” Ouellette was talking over a crackling cellphone connection from Montreal about last week’s sudden and brutal closure of the Halifax […]

Gen. Suharto, he dead. A penny for the Old Guy. And yes, a penny too for the Canadian leaders who aided and abetted the Indonesian dictator’s massacres and torture. A penny for Clark, Trudeau, Mulroney and Chretien. They refused to condemn Suharto’s police state, preferring instead to sell him Canadian military equipment and to subsidize […]

So why am I not surprised that Halifax’s biggest bar is doubling the number of spy cams and giving police full access to its surveillance pix? Well, I’d say it’s another sign of the times. Downtown Halifax is already bristling with spy cams, many operated by private firms and others—such as those at Pizza Corner, […]

Ah 2007, ’twas the year when two right-wing blowhards got their comeuppance. First, after a four-month trial in Chicago, former media tycoon Conrad Black was convicted in July of stealing millions from shareholders, sentenced to six-and-a-half years in the clink by Judge Amy St. Eve in December and ordered to report to jail without passing […]

Christmas, a time to celebrate peace and to thank our beneficent military for supporting Canadian universities. Last year, I wrote about how Dalhousie’s Centre for Foreign Policy Studies was one of 11 similar academic outfits generously supported by DND, the Department of National Defence. Now, I’ll point to the King’s Journalism School, where budgets are […]

Dianne Swinemar leans across the desk in her Spartan office at Feed Nova Scotia. She’s just been asked how she’d assess the food bank’s success in meeting its goal of eliminating chronic hunger and alleviating poverty. “Oh, we’ve failed,” she answers with a bitter laugh, adding that she was hired as executive director in 1991 […]

“I know something about crime,” said judge Joseph Kennedy in a low, gravelly voice. “I have seen the situation change in Halifax in the last 10 to 20 years.” Kennedy was addressing the Mayor’s Roundtable on Violence last week at City Hall. There was dead silence in the council chamber as he spoke of “mindless, […]

In his bestselling book, “War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning,” the veteran American war correspondent Chris Hedges writes about “the cold and brutal efficiency of industrial warfare.” After describing the “impersonal slaughter” of fleeing Iraqi soldiers in the first Gulf War, Hedges writes it’s no wonder the world’s richest countries “live in such […]

“When I wrote this book, I knew the contents would cause great pain for many Canadians of English descent,” reads the first sentence in Daniel Paul’s We Were Not The Savages. “It must be discomforting to come to grips with the fact,” Paul continues, “that many of your ancestors were not always the kind, gentle […]

It’s hard to believe the United States is sliding rapidly toward military dictatorship. But the latest list of under-reported news stories from Project Censored makes it clear that president Bush now has all the legal powers he needs to impose a police state. He can order mass arrests and imprison anyone indefinitely without charge or […]

Censorship is rearing its ugly head these days in Halifax schools. Picture this: A high school teacher trying to give a science lesson on cloning wants to use animated, interactive websites to illustrate it. But half a dozen of them are blocked when students try to call them up on their classroom computers. It gets […]