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Ship shape
The federal government has awarded contracts worth $28 billion for the building of 28 vessels — naval warships and civilian (Coast Guard) ships both — that will modernize the country’s aging sea-faring fleet. Halifax- based Irving Shipbuilding Inc. will build the warships. Vancouver Shipyards Co. Ltd. will build the Coast Guard ships. The new vessels […]
Norway’s oil explorers move to the High North
The strong Norwegian interest in global energy affairs stems from the fact that Norway is a major energy nation. With just five million people, our country is the world’s second-largest natural gas exporter, the fifth-largest petroleum exporter (oil and gas together) and sixth in the world in terms of hydropower production. We provide Europe with […]
Playing defence: hockey as a fundraiser
A hockey tradition, now three years old, started as a way for military attachés to get together with their colleagues from National Defence in a lighthearted, casual way. In the beginning, the team of military attachés posted to Ottawa from all over the world was a rag-tag bunch with ill-fitting gear but they had spirit […]
Life after the International Criminal Court
Canadian lawyer and diplomat Philippe Kirsch was the first president of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and served as a judge on the court from 2003 to 2009. Prior to that, he worked for Foreign Affairs for 30 years. He served as assistant deputy minister for legal, consular and passport affairs, as deputy permanent rep- resentative […]
My Zulu love letter says: ‘Embrace the exuberance of South Africa’
My South Africa is the white man in his ML500 stopping to tow to a nearby petrol station the broken-down car of a young black mother and child stuck in traffic. It is the successful accountant who works for a global conglomerate and returns to Langa, the township he grew up in, to run Saturday […]
The walls of the world: keeping in, keeping out
Wendy Brown’s Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Zone Books/MIT Press, US$25.95 cloth) is concerned with the role that walls — the Berlin Wall, for example, or the Israeli wall that winds through the West Bank — play in modern political discourse and economic thinking. She begins by quoting Paul Hirst, the late British political theorist. […]
‘Robert Mugabe is revered as a hero’
By Florence Chideya Your unfair criticism of President Robert Mugabe as a worst dictator is based on disrespect for democratic choices made by Zimbabweans and Africans, and ignorance of the political situation on the ground. President Mugabe enjoys a majority of total support from Zimbabweans as the 2008 elections show, and this victory is the […]
In defence of Paul Kagame
In response to an article that appeared in your summer edition, permit me to indicate where Rwanda stands today and where we are heading under the leadership of President Paul Kagame. While your readers know the agony Rwanda and its people went through during the 1994 genocide, and how it shattered our political and […]
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