He ain't heavy, he's my mayor

In a province with higher rates of obesity, asthma, diabetes and heavy drinking than the rest of Canada, Summerside's Mayor Basil Stewart is on a quest to lose weight – and help other Prince Edward Islanders take their health to heart. Jane Taber reports.

Dear Ford Nation: What's your damage?

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In an open letter to supporters of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, Marcus Gee asks why they expected anything other than stubbornness and buffoonery – and what Torontonians will do now that they have to live with it.

The visible woman

With women baring skin again in the warm spring, Ian Brown goes girl-watching to meditate on the male gaze, the guilt and the politics behind staring at attractive women in public.

At Viterra, an opportunity lost

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In selling out to Swiss commodities trader Glencore, grain handler Viterra Inc. illustrates how Canadians value take-the-money-and-run strategies to building strong industries at home, Eric Reguly argues.

At BioWare, opportunity knocks

The Edmonton headquarters of BioWare, the Canadian video-game company behind Mass Effect 3, isn't much to look at – but it conceals a gaming brain trust and a "great Canadian success story" that is quietly propelling the industry's growth.

Josh Wingrove pays them a visit.

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Obamacare's terrible twos

Barack Obama's health-care law has reached a tumultuous second birthday, and Republicans are still working hard to turn the American public against it. Unless it passes a life-or-death test in the U.S. Supreme Court, the law won't live to see a third year, Konrad Yakabuski writes.

Prose around the globe

Writers-in-residence are coming out of the liberal-arts-college closet, setting up shop in Parisian shop windows, Antarctic research stations and British prisons – and whatever other oddball locale will have them, John Barber discovers.

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The brand of violence

Spanish police arrested 22 Romanians on Saturday in an alleged prostitution "clan" that held women captive and branded them with bar-code tattoos on their wrists.

Location, location, location

Borrowing a page from the 100-mile diet's playbook, the Architecture Foundation of B.C. is looking at projects that use only locally manufactured or recycled material to build homes in Vancouver and there's $10,000 in prize money at stake for innovative designs. Mark Hume reports.

Scrum of the earth

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Langford, B.C., home of the Canadian Rugby Centre of Excellence, wants to make Canada a global rugby powerhouse and engineer a "culture shift" in the Canadian sport by letting future stars train, live and play in one place. David Ebner reports.