As the first capital of Canada, Sir John A. Macdonald’s hometown, and a once-major port city at the juncture of the St. Lawrence River and Lake Ontario, Kingston boasts some of this country’s richest history. However, one of Kingston’s important historic elements is often overlooked in favour of more cheerful, tourist-friendly destinations—Canada’s first penitentiary.
A little more than four hours north of Kingston by plane, Canada’s youngest territory stretches across 20 per cent of the country’s land mass, encompassing some of the most bleak and beautiful landscape in the world.

Hockey night in Kingston

October 4, 2005
The game’s development further complicates the issue. Hockey evolved from several different forms of stick-and-ball games—such as the Irish hurley, the Scottish shinty (the source of the word “shinny”), the Dutch ice-golf game known as kolf, the aboriginal lacrosse game, and the English bandy, wickets and rickets—so the sport’s lineage is not easily traced.

A mission of mercy on death row

September 30, 2005
A prison guard at Louisiana’s Angola State Prison told Sister Helen Prejean to turn away for the last few moments. But on that night in 1984, she didn’t listen. The guard placed a metal cap on Patrick Sonnier’s shaved head, and put a mask over Sonnier’s face. The cap was connected to the electric generator that would kill the convicted murderer, and his face was covered so witnesses couldn’t see what happens to a human face when a lethal dose of electricity runs though its body.

Marching down memory lane

September 27, 2005
Members of the classes of 1935, 1940, 1945 and 1950 gathered there with the Tricolour Guard—alumni who were not celebrating an official year party—for a relaxed and classy bash to mark their 70th, 65th, 60th and 55th reunions respectively.
At last year’s Kingston Fall Fair, a father was taking in the sights with his son when the child spotted a poultry egg nestled in a rabbit’s cage. Confused, the boy asked his father if rabbits lay eggs, and the unsuspecting city slicker replied that yes, of course they do.

your.name@queensu.ca?

September 16, 2005
Last February, ITS launched a pilot project for the University’s faculty and staff entitled your.name@queensu.ca, allowing participants to replace their Net ID e-mail addresses with addresses stating their first and last names only. The software project creates the new address by recognizing a user’s first and last name from the University’s master directory for all staff and faculty.
London, England. A city with more than its fair share of history, beauty, and intrigue—and on July 7, the site of a tragic terrorist attack. In May, my family and I planned an August visit to the capital of the once-mighty British empire. Friends of ours live there—two pairs of Dutch émigrés—and my well-travelled mother had never seen the city, weirdly enough, so it was the perfect choice.
AL-HUMAYMA, JORDAN—It’s 6 a.m. and the sun is just beginning to illuminate Old al-Humayma, a small town in the Hisma Desert of southern Jordan inhabited from the first century BCE until the 1960s. The sand, which seems bright gold in the daytime sun, is actually a mixture of reds, yellows, whites and even blacks at sunrise. A lone olive tree stands in the distance surrounded by teal tea plants that seem to grow happily from the sand all the way up to the craggy mountain horizon.
On a cold Tuesday night in early May, the Ban Righ Centre was one of the only buildings on campus that was warm and full of people. It was a night for celebration: mature women students were coming together to honour each other for their achievements over a year’s worth of hard work, struggle and success.
Last week, a mysterious message appeared in the mailboxes of each house on Aberdeen Street and a select few houses on nearby Earl, William and Johnson streets. The message included the slogan “Living the Stereotype.”
The next time you set foot on Queen’s campus, try this: count the number of seconds it takes before you spy someone sporting Queen’s clothing.

Politics among the garden plots

September 21, 2004
To most people of our generation, the word “Nicaragua” conjures up an idea of a distant country somewhere in the Third World—one of my university-educated friends asked me where it was in Africa.
We’ve all either seen the show or had to endure friends’ polemics on who deserves to win. Love it or hate it, Canadian Idol has become a pop culture phenomenon.
Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire, the son of a Canadian Forces soldier, was born in 1946 in Denekamp, Holland and raised in Montreal. In 1964, he enrolled as a cadet at the Collège militaire royale de St-Jean. He served in a variety of Canadian Forces posts before being deployed as Forces Commander of the UN mission to Rwanda in 1993. There, the following year, he witnessed the slaughter of 800,000 Rwandans, without sufficient resources to prevent it.
On Saturday, more than 400 Queen’s students, staff and community members filled Grant Hall to hear retired Lt.-Gen. Roméo Dallaire speak on war and peace in the post-9/11 world.

First year: feast or famine?

September 10, 2004
Think back to the Saturday evening of your Frosh Week. You’re standing in your double room, wearing a smelly yellow t-shirt and a grimy pair of coveralls, watching your new roommate’s belongings begin to ebb closer to your floor space. You haven’t slept for more than five hours all week or showered in the past 48, and your 400-person bio lecture—for which you don’t have a textbook yet—is at 8:30 Monday morning. And it’s dinnertime. What are you going to eat?
Easing into her chair in her office on Parliament Hill, the Honourable Sharon Carstairs expresses her vision for palliative care in Canada. “I hope that, one day, every single Canadian who requires palliative support will have it,” she said. The seasoned senator from Manitoba, and former Leader of the Government in the Senate, dedicated herself to fighting for palliative care issues across the country.
As editor of Harper’s magazine and the winner of a National Magazine Award for his “Notebook” essays, Lewis Lapham has been credited with bringing out an exhilarating point of view in an age of conformity. He has written for more than 20 North American newspapers and magazines, and is a frequent lecturer and talk show guest. His most recent book, Gag Rule: On the Stifling of Dissent and the Suppression of Democracy, was published by Penguin Press this month.
Noted biomedical engineer Morris “Mickey” Milner earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. As a faculty member there, he initiated a biomedical engineering research program and first visited Canada in 1967 on a sabbatical leave at the National Research Council. Since then, he has held numerous academic posts in South Africa, the United States and Canada.
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