Hello, Dali

The Vancouver Art Gallery gets surreal with The Colour of My Dreams. B6
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Murders RUSSiaN roulette spark fears and the U.S. DeBT of honour killings
upward trend
By TrisTin Hopper

ANALySiS

Thats the way the city crumbles

Montreals poor building legacy is catching up with it

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Abdul Malik Rustam had only been in Canada for two months before his wife, Shaher Bano Shahdady, rented a Toronto apartment of her own. Around midnight on July 22, police say, Mr. Rustam found his way in and strangled her. Neighbours reported hearing a childs screams for 15 minutes, and then silence. Ms. Shahdadys father discovered her body the next day. According to Toronto police, the couples two-year-old son had been left alone with Ms. Shahdadys body for more than 12 hours. Six days later, in the Vancouver suburb of Surrey, 24year-old Ravinder Bhangu was seated at her desk at Sach Di Awaaz, a Punjabi-English newspaper. Just before 11 a.m., Ms. Bhangus estranged husband, Sunny Bhangu, allegedly strode through the door with an axe and drove it into Ms. Bhangu as she was attempting to flee, screaming Save me! Save me! News photographer Narinder Nayar jumped in to intervene, but was fought off with a meat cleaver, suffering light injuries. Ms. Bhangu died on the spot, said a witness. In both cases, sources within Canadas South Asian communities fear the murders carry the distinctive marks of honour killings. In both cases, the husbands turned themselves into police and have been charged with first-degree murder. Honour killings are different from standard cases of domestic violence, in that the killings are carried out in order to cleanse a family name of perceived dishonour. The practice remains relatively rare in Canada, although experts agree there is an upward trend in Canadian instances of honourbased violence.
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G r a e m e H a m i lT o n in Montreal

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theu.s.houseofrepresentativesonMondayapprovedadealtoextendthedebtceiling.

Lawmakers end up with a sad, unambitious debt deal and only themselves to blame
K e l ly m c p a r l a n d Comment
ormally a deal that reduces debt accumulation without raising taxes, ends weeks of bitter arguing and forestalls a financial calamity would be considered a victory by any conservative-minded thinker. Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent says the debt deal cobbled together Sunday in Washington passed by the House on Monday and heading to the Senate on Tuesday is just that: a huge, unprecedented victory for the Republican Tea Party, which gave up little while forcing major concessions. And it certainly could be seen that way: the liberal, bigspending president has been humbled, the Democrats humiliated, many Democrat supporters enraged and Washington made to dance to the tune of a minority faction in a party that controls only one house in Congress. But if this is success, the Tea Party can have it.
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Giffords returns to vote on debt deal. Page A7 With spending cut, tax reform up for debate. Page FP1

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n addition to the cobbled streets and horse-drawn calches, visitors to the old city were able to witness another distinctive Montreal scene Monday: a massive concrete beam freshly toppled onto a usually busy roadway. After the 25-tonne mass fell from a tunnel running through the heart of the city Sunday morning, luckily missing passing cars, authorities worked Monday to secure a safe passage into the VilleMarie tunnel to inspect the extent of the damage. They said it was too soon to predict how long the stretch of Highway 720 would remain closed. The mangled beam spanning four eastbound lanes was visible from a distance, a reminder of the dangerous disrepair of the citys major infrastructure. The collapse came as Montrealers wrestled with closures for emergency repairs this summer of lanes on a major highway interchange and the Mercier Bridge to the South Shore. It also follows recent reports that the Champlain Bridge is not safe and needs to be replaced. The beam that fell Sunday supported a concrete grille designed to shield motorists from the sunlights glare. Saeed Mirza, professor emeritus of engineering at McGill University, said the Montreal region is paying the price for a poorly supervised construction boom in the late 1960s and 1970s. With the rush for Expo 67 and for the olympics in Montreal, we built highways and bridges as if they were going out of style, Mr. Mirza said. We built many, many of these, and unfortunately the quality control wasnt there.
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