Top reads this week

Month: June 2018

Havana home run: Cuba loves its baseball

by David Winch, Montreal Gazette March 13, 2015 HAVANA – It is late February, sweltering hot, and the Cuban baseball season is in full swing. We are racing in a shiny 1955 Dodge taxi to the stadium, where hometown team Industriales will face cross-island rivals Pinar del Rio this evening, in game 2 of a…

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Telecommuting: city jobs move to country locales

The scenic Townships region near the U.S. border is drawing more city professionals from Montreal, who find small-town life accessible in an online world by David Winch, Montreal Gazette January 8, 2017 KNOWLTON — Susan Pepler wanted to try a new neighbourhood. A downtown Montreal denizen, the Concordia grad and Dawson-certified designer was happy and…

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Belle Du Seigneur Geneva

Love and war in Geneva

Ariane, married to the bored and detached fonctionnaire Adrien, is trapped in a life of banal social-climbing in Geneva, with its vivid social taboos. She soon becomes triangularly linked to Adrien’s superior, the very haut fonctionnaire Solal.

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Vietnam Dien Bien Phu

Dien Bien Phu and after: the U.S. inherits an intractable conflict

You thought the Vietnam war was lost by 1974? Turn your clocks back two decades Almost 70 years after the French defeat — and, all credit due, the Vietminh victory — at Dien Bien Phu in northwest Vietnam,1 lessons continue to be drawn from a military confrontation that saw the defeat of a well-equipped Western…

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Prisoners of age

Prisoners of age: old folks in jail

LIFE SENTENCE Older inmates are packing U.S. prisons and colouring them with shades of gray Foreword from the book Prisoners of Age (2000): http://www.prisonersofage.com/home   Photos by Ron Levine Text by David Winch   “My prison is becoming a old folks home” — Warden of 3,000-prisoner Angola state penitentiary in Louisiana I was young and…

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Bangkok is calling, but UN staff don’t hear it

From the archives: 2010 The city is bursting with activity. Its downtown pulses like a mini-Tokyo. The country is growing prosperous, and gleaming towers rise at every turn. Yes, it’s not hard to boost Bangkok and Thailand. And yet, who wants to work there? by David Winch, UN Special magazine, March 2010 photos: Pierre-Michel Virot…

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