Journal de Montréal lockout over
The two-year long Journal de Montréal lockout ended last Saturday when 64.1 per cent of journalists and support staff from the French-language tabloid voted in favour of a settlement that will see only 62 of the 227 locked-out workers return to work. The rest of the employees will receive severance packages averaging $100,000 each. An original settlement voted down last October would have seen 50 workers head back to the paper. It still remains unclear which workers will be returning, but Quebecor, which owns Le Journal de Montréal, has stated that seniority will probably be taken into account. The 62 jobs include 24 reporters, 18 photographers and other journalists, and 20 support staff. Some locked-out employees have said they will not return to Le Journal if they are offered a position.
ConU prof is GG winner
Photographer and Concordia fine arts professor Geneviève Cadieux is one of eight Canadians honoured this year with a 2011 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. She is also the sole Quebec recipient and one of the youngest to win the award. Cadieux has participated in numerous international exhibitions, including at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Her most recent work, titled La Voix lactée, is a glass mosaic currently perched on the roof of the Musée d’art contemporain and will be recreated to hang in the Saint-Lazare metro station in Paris.
Egyptian PM is McGill grad
Before introducing better digital technologies to Egyptians, becoming prime minister of the country and ultimately being sacked on Jan. 29 by an embattled Hosni Mubarak, Ahmed Nazif was a PhD student at McGill University. A Feb. 23 Montreal Gazette article credited his success as minister of communications and information technology as eventually leading to the “Facebook Revolution” which helped to ignite the Egyptian protests earlier this year. Now many high-ranking officials in the Mubarak regime, including the prime minister, have been banned from leaving Egypt and are under investigation for financial conduct and abuse of power.
Jackie Robinson honoured
Hailed as a baseball legend and civil-rights hero, Jackie Robinson was honoured yesterday when the U.S. government unveiled a plaque at his former Montreal home in the Villeray district. Robinson lived there during the summer of 1946 before successfully breaking baseball’s colour barrier as a member of the minor-league Montreal Royals for one season. From there, he went on to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers the following year in the major league. Yesterday’s event, which was organized to coincide with Black History Month, was attended by various dignitaries including American ambassador David Jacobson and Montreal mayor Gerald Tremblay. In an interview last week with the Canadian Press, Robinson’s widow Rachel indicated how she and her husband had cherished their time in Montreal, for they felt they had finally managed to escape the racist attitudes that plagued the American Deep South at the time.
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