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BY: BARBARA MOSER & IRWIN BLOCK Last winter, we spent four weeks in Argentina and Chile. It was our first trip to South America. The seven-hour bus ride to San Pedro de Atacama in northern Chile from Pumamarca in northern Argentina was stunning, with desert, snow-capped mountains in the distance, [...]
BY: IRWIN BLOCK Israel is seen as a society beset by seemingly insurmountable obstacles, challenges and threats. Based on what we see and read in the media, life in the “promised land” would seem to be unlivable. But on the streets of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa, there is a [...]
Gil Benabou (from left), Molly Mouyal and Coby Steiner talk politics and sip coffee at Pain Doré on Monkland. BY: IRWIN BLOCK It was the day after the Quebec election, and for many west end residents there was a sense of relief that Pauline Marois’s Parti Québécois will be restrained [...]
BY: IRWIN BLOCK When Ron Aigen came to Montreal from the U.S. in the summer of 1976 for his first posting as a rabbi, he was in for some big surprises. For starters, the Brooklyn, N.Y.-born graduate of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, with a degree in family therapy and community [...]
BY:IRWIN BLOCK Being leader of Canada’s fifth political party is not the easiest way of getting the nation’s attention. But that has not stopped Green Party chief Elizabeth May from making her presence felt in the hurly burly of Ottawa politics, even if the NDP, Liberals, and Bloc have priority [...]
BY: IRWIN BLOCK In 1994, Pointe Claire resident Charles Curtis got the result from what was then a relatively new test for something called the PSA level in the blood. Prostate specific antigen, PSA, is the substance produced almost exclusively by certain cells within the prostate gland. When my own [...]
BY: BARBARA MOSER & IRWIN BLOCK We left Salta, Argentina, to visit three northern villages in Jujuy province just south of the Bolivian border. We were advised by an English teacher we met in Salta to spend one night each in Humahuaca, Tilcara and Purmamarca, and that’s just what we [...]
BY IRWIN BLOCK The irrepressible Vic Vogel was on the phone from his home near the Jacques Cartier Bridge, searching for words to explain what he does with Cuban music. Words failed him, so he put down the phone, went over to the piano and played a few bars of [...]
BY: BARBARA MOSER & IRWIN BLOCK We left magnificent Iguazu Falls, straddling the border of Argentina and Brazil, feeling elated: Yes, life is a trip and our world in its natural splendour can be magnificent. We boarded the bus heading for Salta—in northwestern Argentina just below the Bolivian border and [...]
BY IRWIN BLOCK Jazz fan or not, there is a tremendous range of music in free outdoor venues and paid indoor ones to satisfy most tastes at this year’s Montreal International Jazz Festival. The first of hundreds of daily shows starts Wednesday, June 27, and continue until Sunday, July 7, [...]
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