Good morning, and welcome to the weekend.
Grab your cup of coffee or tea, and sit down with a selection of this week’s great reads from The Globe. In this issue, Lindsay Jones and Colin Freeze shine a spotlight on a Nova Scotia law to regulate bouncers at nightclubs that could have saved the life of 31-year-old Ryan Sawyer, who stepped out for a night on the town last Christmas and never came home.
When Jones and Freeze first came across this story, they were shocked. “A bar bouncer regulation bill in Nova Scotia has been in a purgatory for 13 years,” Freeze said. Once they began researching the story, there were more frustrations. Who should be held accountable for the failure to proclaim this law? They reached out to cabinet ministers and the premier from 13 years ago, trying to get a substantive answer. “The resounding response was simply I don’t know, or in some cases not a response at all, which doesn’t seem good enough,” Jones said.
Mark Mackinnon reports on why the expected summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un could mean bad news for the West. And Susan Krashinsky Robertson dives into the first trial of former fashion executive Peter Nygard, who will be answering to 11 charges involving sexual assault and forcible confinement.
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Death of Nova Scotia bar patron puts bouncer rules under a spotlight
Staff of the Halifax Alehouse work in front of the bar in Halifax in the early hours of July 7, 2023.Darren Calabrese/The Globe and Mail
In Nova Scotia, the security guards – bouncers – employed to keep order in bars can be anybody off the street, unlike in most other provinces in the country. A provincial act that might have changed this was drawn up in 2010 but, for obscure reasons, was never proclaimed into law. But the Sawyer family didn’t know this when they headed to downtown Halifax on the night of Dec. 23, 2022. Nor did they realize that the late-night bar they went to seemed to have a problem lately with heavy-handed bouncers. By the end of the night, all of their lives would be changed forever.
Expected summit between Putin and Kim Jong-un is ‘bad news for absolutely everybody else’
A huge screen shows a news reporting with a file image of Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Seoul, Sept. 8, 2023.Lee Jin-man/The Associated Press
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and Russian President Vladimir Putin are expected to meet in the days ahead, just as both are ramping up their confrontations with the West. Putin’s army is on its back foot in Ukraine, 18-plus months after he ordered the full-scale invasion of Russia’s neighbour. Kim has the artillery shells, anti-tank weapons and Scud missiles that Mr. Putin needs. If an agreement is reached, Mark Mackinnon reports it could result in more escalations.
Former fashion executive Peter Nygard set to face his first trial in Toronto next week
Canadian fashion mogul Peter Nygard is shown in this courtroom sketch in Toronto on Jan. 19, 2022.Alexandra Newbould/The Canadian Press
The first trial of Peter Nygard, the onetime Canadian fashion executive whose retail empire has crumbled amid a series of sexual-assault charges spanning decades, is set to begin next week in Toronto. Susan Krashinsky Robertson reports on the Toronto trial, the first of four jurisdictions where 82-year-old Nygard is slated to face eight counts of sexual assault and three counts of forcible confinement in Toronto, allegedly involving eight people at various times between 1987 and 2005.
Opinion: We must end the unwitnessed safe supply of opioids
A man prepares heroin to be injected at the Insite safe injection clinic in Vancouver, B.C., May 11, 2011.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
Mark Mallet is a doctor and a parent of teenagers who has been working as a hospitalist in Victoria for the past decade. Having watched the opioid crisis from the front lines, he says what’s happening is that an unwitnessed and prescribed safe supply of opioids in British Columbia that users can take home and use where and when they want is causing immeasurable harm.
Clockwise from left: Bryan Johnson has spent millions on therapies in an effort to reverse his biological clock; Peter Thiel says he will have his body cryogenically frozen when he dies; Jeff Bezos has invested in a startup that flushes out aged cells.Illustration by Photo Illustration by The Globe
Billionaires and weirdos have popularized longevity; and now you can do it, too. While not always flashy, modern medicine and peer-reviewed science have extended the average Canadian lifespan by roughly 30 years since the early 1900s, mainly by decreasing infant mortality rates. However, the average lifespan in Canada has plateaued at around 81 years old since the 2010s, and the next leap could come from the field of regenerative medicine: new treatments to heal tissues and restore bodily function lost to aging or damage. Alex Cyr reports on an anti-aging industry that has ballooned to a worldwide value of US$63-billion.
Canadian novelist Mona Awad believes art is a mirror
Author Mona Awad poses for a photograph, in Stratford, Ont., Aug. 26, 2023.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
Emily M. Keeler profiles Montreal-born, Brown University-educated Mona Awad in anticipation of her coming fourth novel, Rouge. The book centres on protagonist Mirabelle, who is contending with the fresh grief of her mother’s sudden death as she falls through the looking glass and into a vaguely French beauty cult tucked into the cliffs overhanging the sea in La Jolla, Calif. Awad discusses the protagonist’s alienation as it takes the form of grief and of a certain kind of abandonment, in a world in which the mirror is a dangerous place where myths and stories become more real than whatever is on her typical side of the glass.
These world champions are kings of shoe business
Top farriers battle it out at Spruce Meadows Masters Tournament this week at the Blacksmith World Championships.Supplied
At 16, Russell Floyd watched a farrier shoe a horse and was intrigued. Two decades later, Floyd shoes about 600 horses for approximately 250 clients. He works out of Prince George and at times gathers his tools and flies in a small plane to customers in remote mountain communities. Marty Klinkenberg reports on the coming World Horseshoeing Championship in Calgary, where 67 blacksmiths from 11 countries will vie for a prize pool of $136,000.