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First came the assurances.

In one stump speech after another during the 28-day Saskatchewan election campaign, Premier Roy Romanow returned to the same refrain. "Don't judge me against perfection," he urged voters. "Judge me against the alternatives.

Hurricanes are a personal thing for Joanne O'Connell. Her house, barely 200 m from an estuary on the coast of North Carolina, bears the scars of past storms.

In the basketball arena in Kupang, West Timor, the young boy was all kitted out in his L.A. Lakers jersey and shorts. A refugee, he looked about 12 years old, one of the thousands of victims of two weeks of violence in East Timor.

Watch what I do, not what I say. That, in effect, is how BCE Inc. chief executive Jean Monty explained the latest and boldest step in his campaign to reinvent the Montreal-based telecommunications giant as the dominant provider of Canadian content on the Internet.

At first, the effects are almost imperceptible: a man or woman cannot find keys or forgets the name of a loved one. As Alzheimer's disease continues to destroy nerve cells in the brain, the incidents become more frequent - and more troubling.

John Jacobsen has been through a lot of boom and bust cycles over the past 30 years, but he's never seen anything quite like this. As vice-president in charge of operations for Calgary contractor Precision Drilling Corp.

One Saturday morning last November, Peggy Code collapsed outside a suburban Calgary mall. Helped to a nearby bench, the 64-year-old nurse realized she was drooling and that the entire left side of her body was insensate.

By any standard it was a meaty budget. On taxes, Finance Minister Paul Martin's first fiscal plan for the new century laid the table for five years of gradual cuts to corporate and personal rates.

No one expected Napoleon to retreat from the steppes of Russia, or Conrad Black to dispossess himself of the newspapers he has spent most of a lifetime acquiring.

Jim Cuddy hears the music. I see the grotty stairwell. Standing in the open doorway amid the stacks of cardboard boxes and equipment cases, he slaps his palms together and cocks his head for the echo that stretches thin above us.

It was 8:45 a.m. on sept. 18, 1992, when the rail car transporting the replacement workers hit the trip wire, setting off an explosion so powerful that it drove bits of their flesh and bone deep into the hard rock ceiling.

It was appropriate that as he embarked on the biggest political gamble of his life, Paul Martin chose to talk about wavering at the edge of the Rubicon.

It should have been a simple question for a man accustomed to the black art of political gamesmanship. What can the other contenders for Jean CHRÉTIEN's throne do to give former finance minister Paul MARTIN a run for his millions? But this seasoned LIBERAL PARTY strategist seemed stumped.

The glare of a lightbulb dangling from the ceiling of his decrepit basement room casts a harsh light on the young illegal's life. A beetle scurries from under a mattress on the floor beneath a grimy window.

It takes a political animal to know one.

In his novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel García Márquez unwinds the final hours of a man fatally marked by circumstances and bad timing, whose death is preordained and who is utterly powerless to skew his fate, thus living with a sense of eerie, fatalistic determination.