Quote of the week:

"We know the underworld better than anyone. Without our help, the police wouldn't be able to fight organized crime." - Former drug dealer Jim Boivin, a police informer since the early '90s, angry that the cops haven't kept key promises, in Monday's La Presse

Taxman threatens charities

Every day, the Chez mes amis restaurant in NDG provides 120 cheap meals to diners and another 40 to needy homes. But Tracy Dorion's seven-year-old restaurant could close its doors, thanks to complicated new provincial tax rules.

"We are in a lot of trouble," says founder Dorion, "and it has to do with Bill 150 and the reallocation of taxes. We've always been exempt but for some reason things have changed around this year and the result is we received a tax bill in the amount of over $8,000."

The restaurant is a registered charity for which donors can receive tax receipts, but it is not associated with the powerful Centraide fund, which can often help charities out in such binds. Bill 150, passed in 2000, forced municipalities to rearrange tax rates, leading to tax problems at such non-profit groups as the province's Legion Halls, and more recently led bailiffs to seize the contents of a food bank in Villeray.

"When they seized that food bank, I called to see if there was something we could do. I was made aware to be careful because we're going to get it too," says Dorion. "I can't imagine how many charities are going to be closing down over this."

Bureaucrats have advised Dorion to reapply for charitable status, an effort that will require a nine-month wait and won't exempt her from her current bill. Chez mes amis welcomes support at 482-2210. » Kristian Gravenor

Out in the classroom

This Friday, April 11, Gris-Montréal (Groupes de recherche et d'interventions sociales gaies et lesbiennes) will hold a press conference to announce Démystifier l'homosexualité, ça commence à l'école, a guide for elementary and high school staff to deal with homophobia. The guide, available to teachers through Gris, will also be part of an educational package put together by the Montreal Regional Health and Social Services Board..

Since the early '90s, Gris has been sending gay and lesbian speakers into schools to conduct question and answer periods with classes. Their mandate has always remained open: normalizing homosexuality by having friendly, funny gay folk talk to kids and make being gay a more accessible reality to them.

Written by sociologist Irène Demczuk, the guide outlines how school staff can pre-emptively counter homophobia by introducing gay-friendly elements into the curriculum. "It suggests how, for instance, a teacher could include a story about two mothers, or what questions or situations can be raised to open up attitudes in students and encourage discussion," says Robert Pilon, head of communications for Gris. For now Gris only deals with the French school board and has not translated the guide to English, though it hopes to eventually. Pilon says they've been so overwhelmed with the task at hand that they didn't want to do a half-baked job or steal any fire from Project 10, a similar English-language school discussion project. For further info you can go to the Gris-Montréal Web site at www.gris.qc.ca or call 590-0016. » Alexandra Spunt

Hechtman declared dead, wins award!

Regular readers will know that Mirror freelancer and former Taliban prisoner Ken Hechtman is alive and well, but it took the United Nations well over a year to figure that out. In fact, they were so sure of his demise that they recognized him with a posthumous honourable mention for a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) award.

According to UNESCO, a second Honourable Mention 2002 Madanjeet Singh Prize for the Promotion of Tolerance and Non-Violence award was "attributed to nine journalists killed in Afghanistan in the exercise of their profession." Hechtman's name, to his surprise, was included on the list. While Hechtman was arrested and detained by the Taliban in November 2001 as a suspected spy, he was eventually released unharmed.

"I was just doing some surfing and entered my name in Google to see what would come up," says a spry and lively - if bemused - Hechtman. "And that's one of the things that did. It came out in October 2002."

He has since e-mailed UNESCO, which never contacted the Mirror to inform the paper of the award, to let them know that he is not, in fact, dead. UNESCO's reply was apologetic, but did note that the "extremely positive side of this affair is that you are still with us!"

"It makes you wonder how accurate the rest of the stuff they put out is," Hechtman says. » Patrick Lejtenyi

Rear view

12 YEARS AGO THIS WEEK

Cover: The Pet Shop Boys' Neil Tennant reveals his appreciation for Guns N' Roses. Rock is "repetitive, lazy, nostalgic and retreading. [But the Gunners] have a modern sound. They don't sound like the Velvet Underground, the way everyone else wants to."

• German filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff (The Tin Drum) discusses literature-to-film adaptation as a preview to the Goethe Institute's retrospective of his work.

• A report by Ville-Marie Social Services blames systemic racism for the high number of institutionalized black anglo teens. "The white-run institutions, [Montreal blacks anglos] said, were permeating the culture of an entire generation of blacks… the system is in fact creating criminals."

• Daniel Richler's novel Kicking Tomorrow receives a scathing review: "Richler makes the '70s appear as a period of self-possession, bad sex [and] bad dialogue… At best, Kicking Tomorrow reads like bad porn, descending into paranoia with rare glimpses of honesty amongst the images of psycho/sexual torture and fantasy," writes the late poet/musician Ian Stephens.

Angel >> Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) While most American papers and networks continue their cheerleading over the U.S. blitz up Iraq and into Baghdad, FAIR, a New York City-based media watchdog organization, has been taking a closer look at the story behind the spin. It isn't pretty. Most recently, FAIR has taken the U.S. media to task for ignoring reports of civilian casualties in Iraq, not verifying American claims and being obsessed with military hardware and battlefield tactics. It also accuses mainstream networks of too readily swallowing the Pentagon's sanitized version of events. For more information on media shortcomings in Iraq, visit www.fair.org.
Insect >> Great apes in peril A new study on the state of the great apes in central Africa warns that our closest animal relatives could be on the brink of extinction within a decade. Deforestation, logging, the bush meat trade and the Ebola virus have devastated the gorilla and common chimp population in Gabon and the Republic of Congo, with the population density having dropped by 56 per cent over the last 20 years. The Ebola virus is especially catastrophic, the study reveals: one group of 143 gorillas was reduced to only seven within a matter of months.