South Africa shows the complexities of IOC’s vaccine offer

Industry minister to meet Rogers CEO after outage

TORONTO - Canada's industry minister will convene a meeting with the leader of Rogers Communications in the wake of a massive outage that paralyzed the company's network and hampered several crucial services, his office announced on Sunday, even as some customers continued to report service disruptions.

A statement released from the office of François-Philippe Champagne said he plans to meet with Tony Staffieri and other telecom leaders to discuss the importance of improving "the reliability of networks across Canada."

The statement said Champagne found last week's widespread service disruption — which lasted at least 15 hours and knocked out access to numerous law enforcement, health care and banking services — "unacceptable," adding he has expressed that view directly to Staffieri.

"These services are vitally important for Canadians in their day to day life and we expect our telecom industry to meet the highest standards that Canadians rightly deserve," the statement read.

Nobel laureate Toni Morrison dead at 88

NEW YORK - Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, a pioneer and reigning giant of modern literature whose imaginative power in "Beloved," ''Song of Solomon" and other works transformed American letters by dramatizing the pursuit of freedom within the boundaries of race, has died at age 88.

Publisher Alfred A. Knopf announced that Morrison died Monday night at Montefiore Medical Center in New York. Morrison's family issued a statement through Knopf saying she died after a brief illness.

"Toni Morrison passed away peacefully last night surrounded by family and friends," the family announced. "The consummate writer who treasured the written word, whether her own, her students or others, she read voraciously and was most at home when writing."

Few authors rose in such rapid, spectacular style. She was nearly 40 when her first novel, "The Bluest Eye," was published. By her early 60s, after just six novels, she had become the first black woman to receive the Nobel literature prize, praised in 1993 by the Swedish academy for her "visionary force" and for her delving into "language itself, a language she wants to liberate" from categories of black and white. In 2012, Barack Obama awarded her a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The long and winding road

As theatre goes, it sent a strong message.

Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew, standing in front of microphones and television cameras, holding up his Indigenous status card and saying that he didn’t feel Canada should have “a race-based form of identification in this country, but that is a reality,” adding that it was time to abolish the Indian Act.

“I think it’s time to abolish the Indian Act, get rid of the Indian Act, move past the Indian Act, and it needs to be done with First Nations people and First Nations governments, of course. I think it’s long overdue that we have a relationship with Indigenous Peoples in Canada that reflects who we are as Canadians today,” he said.

The Indian Act — the name alone suggests how out-dated and out of place the law has become. Originally dating from 1876, the law was put in place to “amend and consolidate the laws respecting Indians” and gave the Minister of the Interior the responsibility to “control and management of the reserves, lands, moneys and property of Indians in Canada.”

Court ruling concludes Canadian Wheat Board saga

It remains to be seen whether the recent court ruling in a lawsuit filed after Canadian Wheat Board’s dissolution in 2012 puts the whole debate to rest, as some no doubt hope.

But either way, the dust has settled on the post-CWB world. The sun still rises and a new generation of farmers on the land only knows by name an institution that for generations influenced every aspect of Prairie grain farming.

The first Rural Revival column I wrote for this newspaper more than 30 years ago was about a thousand farmers from Western Canada demonstrating in support of the Wheat Board. It was in the aftermath of the Western Grain Marketing Panel report, one of several efforts that eventually included a plebiscite to help the federal government decide what to do about a vocal minority of farmers who wanted marketing “freedom.”

The polls at the time suggested about two-thirds of farmers were comfortable enough with the single-desk system for food wheat and barley to keep it around. It served as a counterbalance to canola, which they sold on the open market. They essentially had a dual market.

Rural hospital shutdowns continue into fall

Summer shutdowns at some rural Manitoba hospitals have quietly extended into fall, and the uncertainty about reopening is frustrating residents.

Actor-director Cooper takes new approach to familiar tale

TORONTO — In his self-directed version of A Star Is Born, Bradley Cooper plays a rock star named Jackson Maine.

Note the name: it marks the character as a member of a cinematic lineage that descends all the way to 1937.

That year, the first A Star Is Born was made, with Frederick March in the role of alcoholic actor Norman Maine. The name stayed in 1954, when James Mason took over the role of an actor who first nurtures the career of Judy Garland’s up-and-coming star Vicki Lester before his drunken shenanigans threaten to derail it. By 1976, Kris Kristofferson played the role of musician John Norman Howard, a rock singer with a musical stake in the ascent of Barbra Streisand’s Esther Hoffman.

Cooper, 43, remembered the Maine name, but also brought his own vision as a first-time feature filmmaker to the new version, which opens Thursday, Oct. 4, opposite Lady Gaga after the originally designated director, Clint Eastwood, dropped out. While actors might not want to see different interpretations of a role, Cooper embraced the opportunity to see all the past iterations.