Editorial

Let’s say that the twin towers of climate change are global warming and global dimming. By now, everyone’s heard of global warming, twin tower number one. Experts have been warning for decades that unless we kick our addiction to burning fossil fuels that emit greenhouse gases, rising temperatures will generate more intense hurricanes, tornadoes, ice […]

The Coast Valentine’s Day issue lets us celebrate love and sex. But it also gives us a chance to honour power and money. After all, power is the great aphrodisiac and money is the universal lubricant. If love and sex are kissing cousins, money and power are their fraternal twins. Me, cynical? No way. All […]

Four years ago, Stephen Harper angrily accused the federal government of hitting “the snooze button” instead of protecting Canadians from a “suspected terrorist” named Maher Arar. Stockwell Day called Arar “dangerous.” Both were speaking shortly after the Americans deported Arar to Syria. At the time, Harper and Day were opposition members of the Canadian Alliance. […]

In the fall of 2001, just after 9/11, the Daily News ran ads promoting Halifax police and the RCMP. The ads, co-sponsored by a big coffee chain, peddled trading cards with photos of police officers on them. Kids who collected all 24 cards could win “cool prizes.” Under the headline “To serve, protect and collect,” […]

If a sailor falls overboard, should a journalist standing on deck throw down her notebook and try to save him? Or should she calmly record the dramatic scene as he drowns? The answer’s a no-brainer. The reporter should try to rescue the unfortunate sailor. So why aren’t I dropping my pencil and throwing a safety […]

“One cannot hope to bribe or twist/Thank god! The mainstream journalist,” runs an adaptation of Hillaire Belloc’s famous satirical verse. “But seeing what news hounds will do/Unbribed, there is no reason to!” Those lines sprang to mind last week as I perused Christie Blatchford’s teary rant in the Globe about spending her most meaningful Christmas […]

Ten years ago, the Maritime Film Classification Board made the news when it banned Anjelica Houston’s Bastard Out of Carolina, an adaptation of the acclaimed novel about child abuse, from local screens. That decision was soon overturned by bureaucrats further up the chain of command—Nova Scotia’s government runs the censor board on behalf of the […]

David Suzuki, flying bicyclists, crystal meth, Bettie Page, Ellen Page, a music-loving dolphin, a popcorn-eating hamster, embattled school board member Doug Sparks, Trailer Park Boys creator Mike Clattenburg, Feist. Each was the subject of a Coast cover in 2006. Together they give a picture of the cover as being eclectic, wide-ranging, unpredictable, interesting and dynamic. […]

The 9/11 hijackers created a real-life Towering Inferno in midtown Manhattan. But televised images of smoke and fire don’t mean much on their own. All movies, even real-life disaster flicks, need soundtracks to help viewers make sense of them. And for some reason, the hijackers left the sound track to George W. Bush and his […]

Mayor Peter Kelly was in Melbourne for the Commonwealth Games last March, part of a large fact-finding team from Halifax. Yet, important as the Games will be to the city if our bid for the 2014 edition is successful, Kelly also had urgent business to attend to back home. He cut his Australia trip short […]

One sunny morning in September 1999, a wall of industrial fog suddenly rolled across a section of expressway near Windsor, Ontario, known as “carnage alley.” Within seconds, 87 cars and trucks began plowing into each other, creating a fiery pile-up of twisted steel. Crash survivors heard the screams of people trapped in burning cars. Seven […]

Dartmouth’s former heritage museum is a monument to urban decay. The squat municipal building has served in several proud civic roles—it’s been a library and a police office, besides the museum—but now stands boarded up at the eastern end of Wyse Road. Compounding the city’s neglect is the graffiti. A couple elaborate throw-ups and countless […]