Blogger and tech journalist Jeff Jedras has a good analysis of the moral panic that swept through the Parliamentary Press Gallery last Friday (and previously touched on here). The leading lights of Canadian journalism had had the news cycle snatched from their grasp not once but twice the day before, and not by the customary culprits in the PMO but by a pair of tweeters, one obscure (the PEI man who kicked off the wildly popular #tellviceverything meme) the other anonymous (@vikileaks30). After floundering unhappily for 24 hours in the turbulent wake of these citizen journalists, the gallery regrouped Friday for an...

20 February, 2012

Gary Gallivan will present the history of Cape Breton Island through postcards: A native of Whitney Pier, Gallivan is a life-long collector of postcards. His illustrated talk before the Old Sydney Society will highlight four postcard periods, including "The Golden Era" (1900 to 1914), which featured cards of a high technical quality depicting industrial, disaster, and sports scenes, as well as visits by dignitaries and patriotic events. Gallivan's collection includes rare cards featuring the Broughton mine and Dominion Number 2 colliery, the Gisborne Bridge on the Mira River, a fishing camp at Jersey Cove, Robert Perry’s visit to Sydney, the 1913 fire in North Sydney,...

20 February, 2012

Vancouver photographer Hana Pesut takes pictures of couples, then gets them to switch outfits and pose again. H/T: Kottke via Kristy.        ...

20 February, 2012

Earlier today I criticized several Nova Scotia media outlets — The Chronicle-Herald, The CBC, AllNovaScotia.com — for ignoring The Coast's breathtaking scoop about Mayor Peter Kelly's mishandled duties as executor of a friend's estate. The omission makes them look small. That's nothing compared to the Parliamentary Press Gallery's competition to out @vikileaks30, the anonymous tweeter who exposed details of Public Safety Minister Vic Toews' messy divorce. It's increasingly clear that many of the same reporters who are now hellbent to expose @vikileaks30 knew Toews had fathered a child after cheating on his wife for years, but helped him keep that secret. They will...

17 February, 2012

  CBC Radio's Joan Weeks follows up suggestions arsonists have intimidated residents and civic officials in northern Cape Breton into silence, while insurance companies are declining to cover homes in the area against fire damage. True on both counts, she reports. Previous instalments here and here. [audio:http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/podcasts/cbnsinfomorn_20120217_79179.mp3|titles=A_Burning_Issue]...

17 February, 2012

[See update/correction below] The Coast, a Halifax weekly paper, has produced a devastating account of Halifax Mayor Peter Kelly's mishandling of the estate of  a family friend who had named him as executor and sole trustee of her modest fortune. In a prodigious piece of reporting, News Editor Tim Bousquet lays out the complex story in relentless detail, layering  fact upon devastating fact through 5,000 words, illustrated with cancelled cheques and sketchy legal and financial filings. It's too complicated to summarize here, but please read it yourself, especially if you are a resident or voter in HRM. Bousquet's work sometimes suffers from his habit...

17 February, 2012

The Cape Breton Post has a thoughtful followup to my post about Victoria Standard publisher Jim Morrow's refusal to name the members of a police advisory council in Victoria County for fear they might face retribution in the district north of Cape Smokey. Morrow portrayed the area as rife with retributive justice and public fear, and asserted that new houses cannot be insured there because of widespread arson. The Post noted that accounts of the social fabric in Northern Cape Breton often conflict: Delilah Delores Dixon and Peter Sheldon MacKinnon, who were recently ordered out of their Bay St. Lawrence Road home...

16 February, 2012

At a news conference marking the 10th anniversary of Portugal's bold experiment in drug policy — the decriminalization of all drugs — Joao Goulao, President of the Institute of Drugs and Drugs Addiction, said, “There is no doubt that the phenomenon of addiction is in decline in Portugal." The number of addicts who repeatedly use hard and intravenous drugs has fallen by half since the early 1990s, when the figure was estimated at around 100,000 people. Goulao, a medical doctor, stressed that treatment decriminalization was not solely responsible for the drop, but that treatment programs and risk reduction policies also played a role. As E.D. Cain...

15 February, 2012

Earlier today, I posted a photograph of uncertain provenance showing Nova Scotia as seen from the International Space Station at night, and wondered out loud where it had come from. The estimable Bethany Horne of Halifax Open File pointed us to this Reddit post, and thence to this collection of NASA astronaut videography, where we tracked down the amazing sequence from which our image — a screenshot, as it turns out — was clipped. Check out this gorgeous time-lapse video from the space station's January 29 pass up the East Coast of North America, starting at the southern edge of the Gulf of...

14 February, 2012
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