X-FILE EXPO: “Madame Metshu,” centre, an “Amerindian medium-visionary,” discusses a client’s future at the 46th annual ESP Psychic Expo, held at Place Bonaventure over the weekend. All manner of paranormal activities were on hand, including palmistry, tarot card and astrology readings. PHOTO BY RACHEL GRANOFSKY

Quote of the week

“The big nuisance in the PQ is certainly the egos of certain players and particularly those who have a personal agenda.” —Former PQ leader André Boisclair, who will leave politics on Nov. 15, in an interview with the Journal on Sunday. Boisclair singled out Bernard Landry for divisive and unproductive behaviour.

Torture beyond Arar

The harrowing tale of Maher Arar may be well known, but a number of other individuals, including Abdullah Almalki, claim to have endured similar ordeals and are demanding an open investigation into what happened to them.

Almalki will be in Montreal this Sunday, Oct. 21, as the Coalition Justice for Adil Charkaoui and local civil rights advocates hold a strategy session called “The Other Arars: When the ‘Exception’ is the Rule,” at CÉDA (2515 Délisle). Last Friday, Almalki and two of the “Other Arars,” Ahmad El-Maati and Muayyed Nureddin, issued a call to PM Stephen Harper to open up the Iacobucci inquiry, the secret, internal investigation into their cases. “The Arar Commission found that there was clear evidence that Canada was passing on questions to [Almalki’s] torturers,” says Mary Foster of the Coalition.

Former security certificate detainee Charkaoui, who continues to live under severe restrictions, will also be present for a panel discussion beginning at 5 p.m. that will include Almalki, lawyer Yavar Hameed, and Dominique Peschard of La Ligue des droits et libertés. A free supper will be served at 7 p.m., followed by the strategizing at 8 p.m. For more info, e-mail justiceforadil@riseup.net.

by CHRISTOPHER HAZOU

Night of the homeless

We’ve all wondered what it’s like to be homeless; hopping freight trains with harmonica-playin’ hobos named Boxcar, roasting rats over garbage can fires, never having to go to work. But homelessness isn’t all fun and games—starving, freezing your ass off while smiling at people on the street who walk past you, looking at you like you’re a piece of shit, hoping that they’ll toss you a coin because you’re a “nice” homeless person, not one of those bitter, depressing ones.

If you care about this serious problem, on Friday Oct. 19, you are invited to the 18th annual “Nuit des sans-abri” (starting at 6 p.m. right outside 5947 Monk), a unique opportunity to get a little taste of the homeless experience. The event, organized by l’Auberge Communautaire du sud-ouest, is jam-packed with activities like sleeping outside in the cold, eating soup and listening to the testimonies of real-life homeless people, as well as performances by Cirque du Soleil and the music of Ima.

“We want the kids in the streets to know they have not been forgotten,” says Andé Archambault, general director of l’Auberge. “Nobody is pointing fingers, it’s time to find solutions.”

For more info, visit www.nuitdessansabri.ca.

by Steve Zylbergold

Watching the wall

Just in case the weekly Mirror Letters section hasn’t spelled out every single intricacy of the Israel-Palestine conflict quite enough for you and you’re hungry for new information on the subject, Mohammed Alatar’s highly acclaimed documentary, The Iron Wall, will be screening for one night only at the Cinéma du Parc on Thursday, Oct 18, at 9 p.m. Focusing on Israel’s highly controversial construction of a massive wall/security barrier designed to separate the two peoples, Alatar’s film has been championed by everyone from Jimmy Carter to Le Monde Diplomatique, which hailed it as “the best film there is on Israeli colonization in the occupied territories.”

According to Palestinian and Jewish Unity (PAJU) spokesperson Daniel Saykaly, who along with PAJU co-presidents Bruce Katz and Rezeq Faraj will be conducting a Q&A session following Thursday’s screening, “The wall doesn’t follow the frontier between Israel and the West Bank. Instead, it annexes large chunks of Palestinian land and carves up the West Bank, causing enormous suffering while making any future Palestinian state impossible.”

Admission is $10, $7 for students and seniors. For more info, check out www.pajumontreal.org or www.theironwall.ps.

by Chris Barry

Peak oil revisited

Last summer, the Mirror spoke to Roger Bezdek, a former U.S. government energy advisor who co-authored a hair-raising report on the peak oil theory. “The world has never faced a problem like oil peaking,” he said.

Over the past few years, a growing number of energy specialists have warned that the world’s reserves are running out of cheap, easily extractable oil. Alternative fuels such as bio-diesels would not match five per cent of the current total demand. Of course, some dismiss the predictions, but even by the rosiest accounts, any new oil field discoveries or technological developments would hardly compensate for the depleted fields, let alone meet soaring demand.

Bezdek authored the report with Robert Hirsch, another former government advisor, and Robert Wendling. Based on their definitive analysis, world oil supplies should peak over the next 20 years. Several cities in the U.S. have already adopted or are considering plans to cut oil dependency.

Thanks to Concordia’s department of geography, Daniel Lerch, author of Post Carbon Cities, a guidebook for local government on fuel policies, will discuss such initiatives on Monday, Oct. 22, at Concordia’s Hall Building (1455 de Maisonneuve W., Rm. 1267), 7 p.m., free. All are welcome.

by Samer Elatrash

Rear-view mirror

13 YEARS AGO - OCT. 20–27, 1994

On the cover :A tomato speared by a large knife, signifying the challenges to the Canadian organic farming movement. Bureaucracy and a powerful conventional farming lobby are blamed for the movement’s woes.
• Courtney Love calls the RantLine™! “(hoarse female voice with an American accent) I think it’s really cool that you have free speech in Canada, wow, neat…. And, wow, I think it’s cool that people think I’m a bitch, ’COZ I AM! HAHAHA!”
• Despite being banned in Saskatchewan (for two days), Exit to Eden, based on Anne Rice’s S&M-heavy novel, “is a truly bad film,” bringing to mind “Cagney and Lacey investigating a somewhat kinkier Love Boat marooned on Fantasy Island.”
• Responding to a letter complaining about the lack of Mirrors on McGill’s campus, an editor’s note states that the McGill Daily, Tribune and Reporter colluded to remove the paper “in order to reduce on-campus waste,” although “some consider it a ruse to protect the university papers’ advertising markets…. Whoever said universities aren’t the real world?”

Angel >> High-speed rail travel With Canada’s two biggest cities a four-to-six-hour train ride from each other (not counting delays or cancellations), far-sighted passengers have been grumbling for years now about the need for a high-speed rail link between the two. It makes sense. A good chunk of Via’s 4.1 million passengers last year travelled between Montreal and Toronto, and getting them to their destination faster and easier would benefit everyone. An outside report prepared for Via, and obtained by the Canadian Press, says it’s time to quit studying the idea and get down to brass tacks. It wouldn’t come cheap, though, but with the feds’ new-found love of rail travel, now is as good a time as any to start seriously considering it.

Insect >> Canada’s filthy water An alarming new StatsCan report says almost one-quarter of southern Canada’s waterways are so polluted that they can’t meet the minimum standards for supporting marine life. The same goes for 14 per cent of waterways in northern Canada. Guess who’s to blame? “Manufacturing and service industries, institutions and households,” according to the report, dumped “at least 115,000 tonnes of pollutants” into Canada’s coastal and fresh water supplies in 2005. Phosphorous in particular is fingered as a major pollutant. The report also said levels of ground-level ozone, a major contributor to smog, are also on the rise, especially in southern Quebec and southern Ontario.