April

*Municipal politician, Gazette columnist and notorious barfly Nick Auf der Maur dies at age 55 after a long battle with throat cancer.

*Mitchell Johnson, 13, and his cousin Andrew Golden, 11, gun down their schoolmates in their Jonesboro, Arkansas schoolyard. They kill four girls and a female teacher and wound 10 others. Johnson had vowed to kill all the girls who had broken up with him.

*Bloc MP Stéphan Tremblay, 24, steals a chair from Commons, stuffs it into a van and drives back to his Lac-St-Jean riding. The meaning of the abduction of the $900 heavy oak and green velvet chair: to protest the powerlessness of Parliament.

*Two Girls and a Guy opens in cinemas. The latest film starring Robert Downey Jr. plays heavily on the audience's offscreen knowledge of the actor's drug problem. Downey Jr. is in prison for heroin abuse when the film is released.

*Dow Corning Corp., the largest maker of silicone breast implants, agrees to pay up to $50 million to 10,000 Quebec and Ontario women in settlement of a class action lawsuit.

*The Paula Jones case is thrown out of court, her sexual harassment case against Bill Clinton being deemed unworthy of being placed before a jury.

*The Supreme Court of Canada supports Delwin Vriend's claim that Alberta's Individual's Rights Protection Act violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms by failing to protect against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The decision sets off a furor in Alberta, where critics claim the federal forces are again interfering with legal matters which should remain up to individual provinces.

*George Michael is arrested by an undercover cop after exposing himself in a Beverly Hills park bathroom. The singer admits in interviews that he hasn't dated a woman in over a decade and says he's relieved to finally be out of the closet. Later in the year he releases a music video in which he dresses up as an LAPD cop.

*On Good Friday, after 22 months of negotiations, Northern Ireland's historic peace pact is finalized, a deal that makes concessions to both Protestants and Catholics.

*An Ontario Court rules that Friends of the Lubicon were within their rights in organizing a consumer boycott of Daishowa Inc. products. Daishowa had been logging land claimed by the Lubicon.

*Nasty Cambodian dictator Pol Pot dies at age 73, reportedly from a heart attack. With his Khmer Rouge, he orchestrated one of the most brutal revolutions of the 20th century, turning Cambodia into a slaughterhouse in the 1970s.

*Québécoise Julie Marquette and Sarah Mireille Baillargeon are kicked out of Chiapas and returned to Montreal. They had been in the southern Mexican state to observe civil rights conditions.

*CIBC and Toronto-Dominion Bank announce their proposed $47-billion merger.

*Viagra is approved for sale in the U.S. Subsequently, every other newscast, magazine article and newspaper headline is about treating male impotence.

*Jean Charest takes over from Daniel Johnson as leader of Quebec Liberals.

* A bumper month for local music releases. Those hard-rockin' hair farmers Atomic Folk deliver Winterland (the launch featured fake snow on stage at the climax), Shades of Culture let us in on their Mindstate and the Local Rabbits dropped their second album Basic Concept. Meanwhile, the American Devices' Nineties Demos, a cassette of all five or so songs they did in the last decade.

* Alas, the Paper Route cancel their subscription. Bummer. What do we do with the skinny leather ties we bought?

* Fishbone return to Montreal and to their crazy hyper skafunkity-punkity insanity after a decade of sluggish metallizing.