Jerusalem's golden Dome of the Rock glows white in the aftermath of a rare snowstorm in the Middle East. Drifts and slippery streets were also reported in Beirut and Damascus. (David Silverman/Getty Images)

Winter's wrath: havoc and tragedy

SEVEN MOST VIEWED

• Sat. Caucus concerns
• Sun. Alberta bus crash
• Mon. Goudge inquiry
• Tue. Emergency landing
• Wed. Nuclear warning
• Thur. Sask. infant deaths
• Fri. Toronto bystander shot

A week of horrible weather plagued Canada and the world. In China, snowstorms whirled through the centre of the country, leaving hundreds of thousands homeless. For many, it was the first snow they'd ever seen. Snowball fights broke out on the streets of Jerusalem, where the golden Dome of the Rock gleamed white in the morning sun. Other Middle Eastern cities reported drifts, slippery streets and amazed inhabitants. In Canada, the mercury plunged on the Prairies to below minus-50 in some places, not counting the wind chill. Ontario's temperatures weren't so bad, but high winds and whiteout conditions slammed into the south of the province on Friday. Ice pellets and freezing rain added insult to injury. The storm wreaked havoc from Windsor, Ont., to Montreal before heading east. Long-suffering Maritimers braced themselves for yet another frigid, snowy blast. People in P.E.I. had already spent much of the week waiting for power to come back on after blizzards knocked down hydro lines last Monday.

The icy cold had calamitous consequences for Kaydance and Santana Pauchay of the Yellow Quill First Nation in Saskatchewan. The infant girls were found dead outside their family home, dressed only in the lightest of clothing. With temperatures at -52, death from hypothermia came quickly for the sisters. Their father, Christopher Pauchay, is being interviewed as part of a criminal investigation by the RCMP. Newspapers reported that he'd been drinking heavily the night before the girls' bodies were found in the snow. Shock and horror swept through the Yellow Quill community, according to Chief Robert Whitehead, who told journalists that attempts by the band council to ban alcohol on the reserve were under way at the time of the sisters' deaths.

In Prince George, B.C., there was a breakthrough — literally — in a 27-kilometre ice jam that had clogged the Nechako River for weeks and forced people from their homes along the banks. Nature provided the first break for the city's long-suffering resident, and then local officials augmented the natural shifting of the ice with a stream of warm water from a nearby pulp mill. No one expects the steamy streams of new water to melt all of the stacked up floes along the Nechako, but the man in charge of the project, city development services director Bob Radloff, is hoping to keep a channel open at the lower end of the ice jam. Meanwhile, dozens of people are unable to go back to their homes because of the danger of flooding and rampaging ice.

• Winter weather FAQs
• How to stay warm

Obama and McCain surging

And then there were four — serious contenders for the U.S. presidency, that is. Faced with declining poll numbers, and, more importantly, empty campaign coffers, Rudy Giuliani and John Edwards pulled out of their parties' primary races. Former New York mayor Giuliani was the Republican front-runner at this time last year. His decision to ignore the first wave of small state primaries and concentrate on Florida and his native New York couldn't have been more disastrous. Giuliani finished a distant third to Arizona Senator John McCain in last Tuesday's Florida primary and promptly withdrew from the field. The man they call "America's mayor" promptly endorsed McCain, as did the "governator," California's Arnold Schwarzenegger. Edwards, an ex-senator, was rather more circumspect when he dropped out of the Democratic race Wednesday, telling voters he'd do volunteer work and continue to argue that poverty still affected far too many Americans. But no endorsements, not yet.

Obama did pick up some crucial support in the past week. Members of the Kennedy clan of Boston appeared at the Illinois senator's side on Thursday and formally endorsed his candidacy for president. Senator Ted Kennedy was there, and JFK's daughter Carolyn, too. Both offered fulsome praise for Obama, stopping just short of declaring him an honorary Kennedy. Carolyn even wrote in The New York Times that the appeal of the Illinois senator reminded her of the hope and pride that echoed through liberal America when her father took office in 1961. Then, the Kennedy White House was known by the Arthurian moniker Camelot, prompting at least one U.S. headline writer to coin a term that may just catch on: "Obamalot".

Whatever the media buzz around Obama, he still trails Hillary Clinton in many of the big states holding primaries on Feb. 5, "Super Tuesday." As a New York senator, she's well ahead of him in her home state and also leads in California, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Pollsters and pundits — still a little shamefaced after getting it spectacularly wrong in New Hampshire last month — are hedging their bets. Most think Clinton may emerge from Tuesday's test having won more states than Obama, but neither may get enough support to guarantee their nomination as the Democratic party's presidential candidate. That means a state-by-state fight over the coming weeks. As Obama adviser David Axelrod tells political operatives and news junkies, "Cancel your tickets for spring training."

• U.S. votes: Issues and analysis

A risky restart

She lost her job but not her conviction that the federal government is putting the country at risk of a nuclear accident by restarting the Chalk River atomic reactor to make medical isotopes. Former nuclear safety agency chief Linda Keen testified Tuesday before a House of Commons committee that she has no regrets about blocking the reactor's restart last year, whatever the impact on isotope supplies in Canada and around the world. Keen was fired by the government in mid-January after Parliament voted unanimously to override her refusal to allow the Chalk River facility to start up again without what she says are needed safety upgrades. The reactor was restarted Dec 16. Keen told MPs that the risk of a nuclear accident was one in 1,000. One in a million is an acceptable level of risk internationally.

Health Minister Tony Clement said cancer patients in Canada and other countries were going without crucial therapies while Keen split hairs over safety issues. His cabinet colleague, Gary Lunn, whose natural resources portfolio includes responsibility for Atomic Energy of Canada, warned that "people would have died" if the shutdown had continued and dismissed opposition calls for an inquiry. Angry Liberal MPs said they'd be keeping an eye on the nuclear safety issue and wouldn't let up in their calls for a public investigation of the affair.

• Medical isotopes explained

Afghanistan 'failing'

Canada could leave Afghanistan next year if NATO countries don't pony up more soldiers. That wasn't Jack Layton or Stéphane Dion talking, it was Stephen Harper on the phone to George W. Bush on Wednesday. Harper told the U.S. president that Ottawa broadly supported the recommendations of the Manley commission: that Canada should stay militarily involved in southern Afghanistan but only with more help from the Atlantic alliance. The prime minster talked a lot about the Afghan mission in the past week, making his first appearance of the year in question period and defending his government's record on Afghan detainees. But it was his talk with Bush that might have had the most impact on the situation in Afghanistan. Soon after the telephone call to the White House, NATO's Canadian-born spokesman James Appathurai told journalists in Brussels that alliance countries would meet Canada's concerns. It also emerged that Washington was putting new pressure on Germany and France to send combat troops to the battlefields of southern Afghanistan.

What can't have helped Harper's case to stay the course in Kandahar were more warnings that Afghanistan was again at risk of becoming a failed state. In the United States, two reports prepared by high-level panels called on Washington to provide more money and more leadership in Afghanistan. The former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Thomas Pickering, headed one of the studies. He told CBC Radio's As It Happens that his Afghan study group found little progress on a range of key areas: military operations, economic development, reconstruction and anti-narcotics efforts. None, he said, were going well. The charity Oxfam added its two cents' worth, warning in an open letter to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown that Afghanistan faced a "humanitarian disaster" if more wasn't done to get basic food and services to rural parts of the country.

In Helmand province, a mosque bombing suspected to be the work of Taliban militants claimed a high level victim, the deputy governor of the province. Perhaps the only encouraging words of the entire week came from one of Afghanistan's bravest women, currently on tour in Canada. Sima Samar of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission told CBC Newsworld that a hasty Canadian pullout from Kandahar would be even more disastrous for her country. "The job in Afghanistan is not done," she said. "Please don't leave us in the middle of the problem."

• Canada in Afghanistan

Dramatic apology

Disgraced former pathologist Charles Smith, on the stand at the Goudge inquiry in Toronto, apologized to several of the people he helped send to jail for crimes they didn't commit. (Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press)

It's hard to overstate just how much raw emotion has been on display in a specially built hearing room in downtown Toronto. That's where the Goudge inquiry into the work of disgraced pathologist Charles Smith has been hearing testimony from the man himself. Speaking in muffled, often tear-laden tones, Smith has been talking about case after case where his work put innocent people in prison, charged with abusing or killing children. Under pressure from lawyer James Lockyer, who represents nine people wrongfully accused or convicted of crimes against kids, Smith offered apologies to people who can only be described as his victims. Lockyer told him that his words "rang hollow" because he wouldn't look people in the eye when he mumbled that he was sorry.

Then on Thursday, a man who spent 12 years in jail after being falsely convicted of sodomizing and strangling his own niece stood up and confronted Smith. The two men locked eyes in a room as still as a grave. Finally, Smith offered a barely audible apology to William Mullins-Johnson. Later, Mullins-Johnson told reporters that it had been a "surreal" experience for him, but he was glad that Smith had apologized. "He finally realized his actions and how much power he actually had to ruin somebody's life," Mullins-Johnson said.

The inquiry was called to probe Smith's work after a team of forensic experts found problems with the pathologist's conclusions of foul play in 20 cases involving death or injury to young children, 13 of which resulted in criminal convictions. Smith conducted more than 1,000 autopsies during his 24 years with the pediatric forensic pathology unit at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children. The inquiry continues, but Smith's testimony is over.

• Dr. Charles Smith.

Not Rwanda ... not yet

Violence intensified in Kenya even as UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon dropped in to press for peace. (Bernat Armangue/Associated Press)

Not even a glimmer of hope emerged from the pall of bloodshed, devastation and gloom over Kenya — where violence after a disputed election last year is exposing deep ethnic fault lines along the Great Rift Valley. The death toll is nearing 1,000, and it may not be long before humanitarian agencies tell us that a million people have been displaced. It all began when incumbent President Mwai Kibaki claimed victory over rival Raila Odinga in December's elections, a result that few if any independent monitors would verify. Followers of both men took to the streets, but soon the violence became more ethnically based. What was once one of Africa's most politically and economically stable countries descended into chaos.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon turned up in Nairobi on Friday, hard on the heels of his predecessor, Kofi Annan, who is leading his own mediation efforts. Moon called for peace and warned of humanitarian disaster if people didn't stop fighting. Like Annan and other mediators from South Africa, Britain and Ghana, he met the main players and made all the right noises. But many Kenyans and outside experts now fear that it's gone beyond a conflict between two political parties and their various ethnically aligned coalitions. Most observers rejected simple comparisons with the Rwandan genocide, pointing out that Kenya has more than 40 cultural groups as opposed to Rwanda's big two, Hutus and Tutsis. It's much more complex, the experts say, but that doesn't mean that current tensions aren't dire and likely to be long-running. Kenya's agony isn't even close to ending.

• Kenya 's agony.

Eh? No passport?

That sound? A collective sigh of relief from the cross-border shopping community — buyers and sellers — as U.S. officials kept the world's longest undefended border free of passport requirements for another year-and-a-half. Actually, the law requiring U.S.-bound Canadians and returning Americans to have proof of citizenship, preferably a passport, did come into effect on Jan. 31. But tenacious lobbying by Canada and some fifth column work in Washington by a group of senators from border states paid off. The new rules won't be strictly enforced for another 18 months. Phew. Leading the charge inside the Washington Beltway against mandatory passports, Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy no doubt had an earful from barkeeps, storeowners and ski resort operators along the border with Quebec. "This [cross-border commerce] is something worth billions of dollars, and we'd be losing that and be no safer at all," was the senator's typically gruff rejoinder to the Homeland Security Department mandarins and their passport plan.

Mind you, simple economics might just solve the Americans' fears about a porous border, or at least reduce the flow of Canadians heading south in search of a bargain. Autumn's mighty loonie has been weakening ever so slightly against the U.S. greenback as wintry economic trends hit both countries. What's theirs is ours in this case. Fears that softening growth south of the border could turn into a full-blown recession are hitting the U.S.-dependent Canadian economy where it hurts, in the forestry, automotive and resources sectors.

Canada's never-ending search for meaning vis-à-vis its southern neighbour took a body blow over the past week with news that "Canadian" can be an offensive racial slur in the United States. A federal prosecutor in Houston had to apologize for comments in an e-mail that referred to blacks on a jury as "Canadians" — i.e. soft on crime and prone to unmanly virtues like compassion and understanding. A cascade of stories of similar slurs, expanding the notion far beyond race, soon emerged in the blogosphere. It makes one nostalgic for the days when Americans showed up at the border with skis on the roof rack in July, but nary a racial stereotype in sight.

• Is 'Canadian' a racist slur ?

Talking points

• Pot smokers in California can now get their stash from a vending machine — that's if they have state-government-issued medical marijuana user ID cards. Washington anti-drug agents are already threatening to pull the plug on the scheme.
• A Canadian publisher withdrew copies of a controversial new book that alleges a former Conservative MP from Calgary was a Russian spy in the 1990s. Alex Kindy's friends say the allegations are ridiculous, but U.S. author Pete Earley is sticking to his story.
• Things just got worse for Britney Spears, who was committed to hospital in Los Angeles for the second time in recent weeks for psychiatric evaluations after what might have been a suicide attempt.
• You're not getting older, you're getting busier. A new poll found that 82 per cent of Canadians would rather work than retire.

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