| Vancouver's latest homicide a targeted shooting: police
Vancouver's fourth homicide this year — a 19-year-old man killed Saturday night in the city's south side — was likely a targeted shooting, say police. Vancouver Police Const. Tim Fanning said city's fourth homicide of 2008 is likely a 'targeted shooting.'(CBC) Const. Tim Fanning of Vancouver police said a passerby saw the victim — identified as Pritpal Singh Virk of Richmond, B.C. — lying on the street around 11 p.m. local time. The man was rushed to hospital, but died a short time later of gunshot wounds. "This is targeted because of the style of the attack,'' said Fanning. "We will be looking into whether this shooting is connected to any other shootings in the Lower Mainland over the last several months.'' Fanning said it appears Virk was visiting friends at a nearby house and was shot after he stepped outside.
Players want more noonball
Noon basketball is enjoying a revitalization at the Whitney Recreation Center in St. Cloud. The recreational basketball games are co-ed opportunities for people to play basketball games during their lunch hours. Although noonball — as members call it — has been offered by the city for decades, organizers said they had seen a sharp decrease in players attending the three-times-a-week activity. "Over the past year or so, the numbers have dropped off to literally zero," said Todd Cariveau, a regular noonball player who has spearheaded the effort to bring the activity back to life. The cost and some players' overly competitive nature led to the decline, said Cariveau and John Anderson, recreation supervisor for the city's Recreation Department.
What a contrast
It's slowly dawning on the liberals that it's not going to be enough to ignore Ronald Reagan. Like it or not, they're going to have to take him on, head-first, and try to convince the American people, or at least the historians of his era, that he was a fundamentally bad guy. I don't envy them the job. Reagan was an immensely popular president. Not long after his retirement I told him, in a private conversation, that I thought his historical popularity would follow the trajectory of most of his predecessors' -- declining somewhat at first, then rising again till he assumed at last his proper place in the presidential pantheon. I was wrong. Right from the start, after he left the White House, commentators on both the right and the left have recognized him as one of the major presidents of the 20th century, who shaped the country's policies and future in important ways.
Campaigning in hard times
Even though the economy teetered on recession, GDP growth didn't go negative until the third quarter - too late to alter the intoxicated zeitgeist of the '90s. As a result, during that campaign we heard a lot about other things, like a "lockbox" for Social Security (Gore) and "compassionate conservatism" (Bush), but almost nil about the wavering economy that the new President was about to inherit - and voters didn't seem to mind. But studying the calendar only goes so far. That's because there's a lag between economic reality and public perception of economic reality that's tricky to gauge - and it can be lethal to candidates, as President George H.W. Bush learned in 1992. The economy was steaming along at a healthy 4%-plus clip in the third and fourth quarters, but voters ejected him anyway, locked in a mindset from six months earlier when the economy was struggling to emerge from recession.
Campaign scrambles to explain errant 'e'
1:30 P.M. A news release is e-mailed from a campaign spokeswoman. The colorful graphic letterhead features a picture of the candidate and the words, "Pat McCrory Governer" 2 P.M. Victoria Smith, McCrory's campaign manager, says in an interview, "There's no way this was misspelled ... somebody must have sent that out and hacked into that masthead." 2:30 P.M. The misspelling is fixed in the electronic news release, a graphic that can be updated even as it sits in reporters' computers. Smith said that no one from the campaign made any changes to the graphic and that the hacker who first sabotaged "governor" must have corrected the error. Smith said someone has been hacking McCrory's mayoral Web site for six months. 3 P.M. Colleen Brannan, a spokeswoman helping the campaign with Tuesday's announcement in Jamestown, tells a reporter that "governor" had been misspelled by a graphic designer working with the campaign.
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