Quote of the week:

"There are at least a dozen players, sometimes 14 or 15, on each team consuming different drugs, from marijuana to amphetamines to ephedrine." - Hockey agent Enrico Ciccone, on drug abuse in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League, in Tuesday's La Presse

Heavy metal theatre

Alcan employees can expect some theatre outside their Sherbrooke W. office during the noon hour on Tuesday, Dec. 16, but they may not like what they see. The performers will be targetting Alcan because of the aluminium giant's stake in a controversial mining project in eastern India, and urging the company to withdraw from it. The project's opponents fear environmental degradation and land seizures at the expense of impoverished local tribal people.

The protest date is no coincidence: on that day three years ago, three protesting villagers were shot and killed by police in the Kashipur district of the state of Orissa. A judicial enquiry released recently said the police used excessive force but, as quoted in the Calcutta Telegraph, the shootings were "appropriate" and industrial development should not be hindered by "so-called environmental protection."

The Montreal event will, for the first time, be held in conjunction with a larger one in Kashipur. "The theatre will reflect the typical, traditional work of the tribal people, with a small group of villagers surrounded by jugglers and drummers in aluminium costumes," says Abhimanyu Sud, coordinator of Alcan't , the organizing group in India. "It represents Alcan's juggling with the future of the people, and every time a juggler drops an aluminium can or a drummer misses a beat, a villager will fall. This will be repeated until three villagers have fallen."

The group will also read aloud statements collected from locals in India who are speaking out against the project. » Patrick Lejtenyi

Church picketer acquitted

It's been a long fight for Robin Edgar, and in the end he won without even knowing it. The photographer has been scrapping with the Unitarian Church in Westmount over his relentless picketing of their Sunday services, which stems from his 1992 religious experience that revealed that a solar eclipse was a divine symbol of God's eye, and his repeated attempts to propagate this idea in "Interfaith Creation Day" in church. The elders at the Unitarian Church - which is renowned for its liberalism and inclusiveness - didn't see things that way. One called him "psychotic," dismissing his beliefs as cult-like. Edgar began picketing outside the church in 1998 and on Dec. 5, 2000, he was arrested under Section 176.3 of the Criminal Code, which prohibits disturbing a religious ceremony. He decided to fight the case in court, saying the law was "so broad and wide open to abuse that it's possibly unconstitutional."

His last day in court was in April, with a resumption set for last Thursday, Dec. 4. When he showed up to court, he found he didn't have a trial date because he'd been acquitted of all charges.

"I'm disappointed I can't present a full defence, not only in terms of the specifics of my case, but of the law in general," he says. "I think the prosecutor just wanted me out of his hair." He believes he wasn't notified because he moved in early May.

He says he plans to "really crank up" his picketing activities after Christmas. »Patrick Lejtenyi

Bobbing to Jakarta

Some might find it sad to be a teen marooned in Laval, but that's not what led Maxime Destin to toss a Coke bottle with a note into the St. Lawrence in July 1994.

"Eight of us had a class project and when we finished we decided to do something special," he says. "So we tossed these bottles into the water. For about a week we speculated on where they went but then we forgot about it."

Just prior to his 25th birthday last Nov. 12, Destin's phone rang with news from his inadvertent penpal. A 23 year old named Deborah from Jakarta, Indonesia, had come across his note while taking one of her many seaside strolls. "We've since exchanged photos on the Internet - she's very charming," says Destin.

According to one expert, the route a floating bottle takes to get to Indonesia is "impossible to know. If it had taken 10 days or a month we could have done a model based on wind and currents, but this bottle could have taken the Gulf Stream to Europe and then slipped out down to Africa, or it could have hit land for a while and then washed out in a storm, or even gone via the Pacific," says Bernard Labreque, tidal officer for the federal Canadian Hydrographic Service. Destin, who plans to visit his new friend next year, had rare luck with his aqua delivery but his day job is devoted much more conventional mail, designing mail boxes for Canada Post. » Kristian Gravenor

REAR-VIEW MIRROR

16 YEARS AGO THIS WEEK
Dec. 11, 1987-Jan. 7, 1988

On the cover: A jukebox, representing the Mirror's Montreal Music Annual 1987. Featured are several lengthy essays on the local scene's growth and versatility, the decline of jazz clubs as the Jazz Fest grows, the local black music industry, Jenny Ross's overview of the underground, and concert and album reviews. Lists include Best Show (Chris Isaak, Club Soda), Most Disappointing Show (Pink Floyd, Forum) Most Impressive Montreal Artist (Marjo, Three O'Clock Train, The Nils) and Names People Can Live Without (The Box, Front Runner, Dead Brain Cells).

• The city is not enforcing its much touted anti-porn legislation. The law calls for porn to be at least 1.5 metres above the ground, with mags and videos placed behind a screen or in opaque wrappers. "There are discussions going on right now over who will enforce it," says a city press attaché.

• Two period epics set in China, Spielberg's Empire of the Sun and Bertolucci's The Last Emperor, are reviewed: Empire is lambasted, Emperor sneered at.

Angel >> Protecting the Gully The 2.5-kilometre deep, 65-kilometre long and 15-kilometre wide underwater canyon southeast of Halifax - described as the nursery of the North Atlantic and home to bottlenose and blue whales - was given federally protected status this week. The designation, which effectively prohibits fishing and oil and gas exploration, was a decade in the making, as environmentalists, fishermen, petroleum bigwigs and the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans debated the Gully's future. This is the second of up to a dozen more marine preservation areas - the first is off the B.C. coast - that the feds promised to create last year.
Insect >> The World Summit on the Information Society This gabfest, taking place this week in Geneva and gathering delegates from 192 countries to talk about the Internet's future, is not making anyone happy. Radio and TV broadcasters are angry because vital issues concerning them won't be addressed, and are holding a parallel summit. Civil society organizations are upset because human rights don't seem to be a big concern to anyone involved. And media-freedom organizations, including Reporters Without Borders, are mad because they've been banned from attending while countries with strict media controls are welcomed - an odd and ominous contradiction when discussing the future of information dissemination.