Unpublished Newswire

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the colonies that would later become Canada were awash in a sea of rum. Millions of litres of that sugar-based liquor were imported every year to supply its comparatively small population of colonists and Indigenous people, while thousands of additional litres flowed from colonial distilleries. Why rum, and why so much of it? The simple answer is that it was cheap and plentiful in eighteenth-century North America. Thought to be good for the health, at least when imbibed in moderation, readily available liquor was generally seen as a good...

Samantha Hemmings stood in the operating room entrance, watching her sister Sophia on the table. “Help me, please,” she recalls her sister saying. “I can’t breathe.” In the spring of 2009, Sophia went into cardiac arrest while undergoing a caesarean section. She suffered an anoxic brain injury: for crucial minutes, her brain was deprived of oxygen. Her baby boy lived. But today, Sophia cannot speak, cannot walk, cannot turn herself in bed. Her mother is her primary caregiver and has been trying to teach her to communicate by pointing to pictures. Samantha, one year Sophia’s...