Opinion

It's snowing! The time has arrived for present anxiety and frantic cleaning of houses before company comes. It's also the time that I personally start to think about making the gifts for my family that I should have made three months ago.

I usually sit down to write these columns on Friday night but this last Friday, I just couldn't bring myself to do it. The news out of Paris - well over 120 people dead and twice that many wounded - was just too surreal.

An attack on all of humanity, U.S. President Barack Obama called it. French president Francois Hollande declared it an act of war. So the chorus of outrage went. What happened in Paris Friday is a tragedy and there must be a response.

I'm very disappointed with the news media in Canada. I have written in to the The Citizen before about the unfairness of the fuel prices. The editor Neil Godbout suggested that I had erred that government taxes were part of the problem.

The mother of a young woman who committed suicide hours after she aged out of the child-protection system last year still doesn't have much information from public officials on how her case was handled.

Kamloops residents let their mayor and city council know how they feel about a proposed downtown performing arts centre last Saturday, voting 54 per cent against borrowing $49 million to help build the $90-million facility.

Re: Teacher Trudeau a great choice (Will Lewis, October 27 Citizen). Thanks so much for submitting such an insightful letter. It is indeed refreshing to have a prime minister who defines himself as a teacher.

This year, the oft-quoted poem In Flanders Fields turned 100, the Allied victory over the Axis turned 70, and those born at the beginning of this century turned 15.

By this time next year, Chrystia Freeland may be a household name in Prince George and throughout B.C.

Rock snot has been in the news. It is a simple organism. Its proper name is Didymosphenia germinata but many researchers in the field refer to it as didymo. It is a species of algae and specifically, it is a diatom.