Quote of the week:

The leadership will come and is coming from the local level. Inevitably, our country will join the community of nations.” —Seattle mayor Greg Nickels, who has presided over the city’s drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, in Montreal for a mayors’ conference.

Detention revisited

During their time as student activists at Concordia, Yves Engler and Samer Elatrash became well acquainted with local police and security officials. Now, having moved on from Concordia, both Engler and Elatrash are continuing their long-standing association with law enforcement.

Late last month, Elatrash, who’s travelling on a four-month Canadian International Development Agency journalism internship, was detained several times by police while covering the second round of parliamentary elections in Egypt. He was swept up in a government crackdown on journalists in late November while reporting on clashes between police and supporters of the banned opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood.

“I was detained for ‘my protection,’ according to a weasel of an officer who largely ignored me while he severely beat a demonstrator,” e-mails Elatrash from Egypt.

Not to be outdone, Engler was arrested last week for disrupting a Liberal party campaign event. Apparently, party organizers didn’t cotton to Engler’s chant of “Paul Martin lies, Haitians die,” so they had him turfed by the police, who treated him to a weekend in jail after Crown prosecutors refused to grant his release. » Christopher Hazou

Baby Jesus stolen!

A painted life-size nativity sculpture in Jacques Cartier Square was attacked by dark-hearted villains last Friday. They tread through the holy hay to the holy crib and detached baby Jesus’s fingers, leaving only the middle finger intact. The next night, an ungodly soul placed a Stop sign in the Virgin Mary’s arms, and on Sunday night, Jesus had disappeared altogether and several other figures lost vital limbs.

A cop from Station 21, who didn’t offer his name, denied that it was the ominous foreshadowing of imminent world takeover by the Devil’s Army. The officer says the attacks have occurred for at least the last four years and blames “people who are drunk leaving bars at 3 a.m. and don’t have all their judgment.”

But he was vague on whether cameras in the area might have been pointed at the impious attackers. Francine Goulet of the Societé de développement du Vieux-Montréal had heard of the craven blasphemy but couldn’t make sense of the heinous deed. “We have problems but it’s more or less the same as other areas of Montreal.” » Kristian Gravenor

Latin lack of justice

Montreal-based Latin American groups are hosting their first meeting to discuss the lack of justice in their countries, where ex-dictators have not been held responsible for crimes committed under their respective military rules.

“Impunity is a phenomenon that all Latin American countries have experienced during their transition to democracy,” says Ximena Campos, a Chilean whose brother disappeared during the Pinochet dictatorship, and one of the speakers at the panel.

She will be joined by members of human rights groups from Guatemala, Colombia and Venezuela.

Organizers hope the meeting will create a strong network to build towards a larger event next year.

The panel is part of the activities to celebrate International Human Rights Day on Dec. 10, which marks the anniversary of the UN adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

The panel, titled “Human Rights and Impunity in Latin America,” is in Spanish and is open to the public.

It takes place Thursday, Dec. 8, at 6:30 p.m. in UQÀM’s Pavillon Thérèse Casgrain (455 René-Lévesque E.), Room NM 530. » Irene Caselli

Women and micro money

Money talks. And if making it and having it buys political, health or educational clout, so be it—FEM International, a locally-based group that empowers women in developing countries through entrepreneurship lessons, wants to put bucks in women’s hands.

With programs in India, Thailand and Colombia, FEM International helps women create their own micro-enterprises to help them achieve economic empowerment and escape the cycle of poverty. “We want to introduce the concept of self-sufficiency through entrepreneurship,” says founder Lis Suarez-Visbal. “We sell their products here through fair trade markets, and a portion of what’s sold goes to a fund that offers micro-credit to women starting their own businesses.” Most of the women they help, she says, are younger.

On Thursday, Dec. 8, FEM International will be holding a fundraising soirée at Bistro In Vivo (4731 Ste-Catherine E., $15, 7 p.m.) to let people know they have a kickin’ new Web site (www.feminternational.org) and to help fund their international volunteer program. On the agenda are a Colombian folk-ballet performance, salsa lessons and general partying. » Patrick Lejtenyi

REAR-VIEW MIRROR

14 YEARS AGO THIS WEEK
Dec. 5–Dec. 12, 1991

On the cover: An assortment of junk food, as Shawn Apel looks at the ethics of supermarket shopping. Issues range from corporations that own the food supply and their questionable business tactics to the nutritional value of the food we buy. “The changes in the food system are due to the large corporations (in producing and retailing), and not consumer desire,” says Beth Hunter of QPIRG-Concordia’s Global Cooperation Network.

• “One quickly understands how Big Shave earned its reputation when the daily male ritual turns into a frightening bloodletting that’s accompanied by Bunny Berigan’s big band hit, ‘I Can’t Get Started,’” reads the review of one of three pieces in Three by Scorsese, at a Cinéma de Paris retrospective.

• “As nasty as you wanna be, you just can’t dislike the Barenaked Ladies,” writes Richard Bird.

• In the Female Persuasions column, self-described “artist, womanist, feminist and lesbian of colour” Marisa Swangha writes that, “White women act in solidarity amongst themselves, while continually fractionalizing and tokenizing us.”

Angel >> The Leiboviches Simcha Leibovich, the elderly, crotchety proprietor of Simcha’s Fruit Market on the corner of St-Laurent and Napoleon, died earlier this week of kidney failure. Perched atop wooden Coca-Cola crates on either side of the door, Simcha and his wife Fanny, who died in February 2004, were well known by Main denizens for closely monitoring the comings and goings of their clients, and for their disdain of basic retail etiquette, like being polite to your customers. But the passing of the Jewish Romanian immigrants, who’d been at that location since 1947, signals the end of an era and the approaching end of a chapter in Montreal history that added a lot of spice to the city.
Insect >> Junk food A recent poll by Radio-Canada showed that eight out of 10 respondents would be willing to pay a bit more money to make sure children were not eating garbage at school. Nearly two-thirds of the 1,006 respondents said the government should ban junk food in schools outright. As concerns about trans fats and child obesity grow like a red-state waistline, the number of high schools serving their students unhealthy foods is increasing. But substituting good food for crap food shouldn’t be expensive; in fact, Britain, several American states and Canadian provinces—but not Quebec—have already started removing junk and replacing them with healthier, more nutritious food and cheaper alternatives.