Montreal
Rally shooting: A fatal shooting shocked Canada this week on the night that the province of Quebec chose its first female premier, from the separatist Parti Québécois. Pauline Marois was delivering her victory speech at a theater when a gunman opened fire just outside, killing one man and wounding another. As police apprehended him, the 62-year-old shooter, wearing a blue bathrobe and a balaclava, shouted in French, “The Anglos are waking up!” and then said in English, “There’s going to be f---ing payback. It’s enough. Wanna make trouble.” Police said the man appeared to have acted alone. Marois supports independence for Quebec, where more than 80 percent of residents speak French as their primary language. But since her party did not win an outright majority in the provincial legislature, it is unlikely she can push for a new referendum on Quebec’s sovereignty.
St.-Louis-de-Blandford, Quebec
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Syrup heist: Thieves made off with more than a quarter of the 10 million pounds of maple syrup Quebec producers keep in strategic reserve. The loss was discovered last week when an inventory check of a rural warehouse found that thousands of barrels had been emptied. “Obviously those people stole the maple syrup to sell it somewhere,” said industry spokeswoman Anne-Marie Granger Godbout. “It will be hard for the honest processors to compete with stolen syrup.” The strategic reserve, valued at $30 million, was created so that Quebec, which produces about three quarters of the world’s maple syrup, can meet global demand even after periodic poor harvests.
Mexico City
Cops shoot U.S. agents: Plainclothes Mexican police shot up a U.S. Embassy car last week, wounding the two unarmed Americans inside. Mexican government officials said the incident was an accident and that the 12 police officers involved have been detained and may be charged with abuse of authority. But Mexican newspapers said mistaken identity was unlikely. According to locals from the small town north of Mexico City where the attack occurred, the two Americans were CIA agents who traveled that road frequently in a car clearly marked with diplomatic plates. Locals also said the federal police in the area were in the pay of the drug cartels.
Medellín, Colombia
‘Cocaine Godmother’ killed: Griselda Blanco, 69, the Colombian druglord who pioneered the use of assassins on motorcycles, was gunned down in Medellín this week by an assassin on a motorcycle. Known as the “Cocaine Godmother,” Blanco named one of her sons Michael Corleone after the Godfather character and lost three husbands to drug violence. She served nearly 20 years in Florida prisons for trafficking and for ordering hits that killed three people, including a toddler, and was deported to Colombia in 2004. “It’s surprising to all of us that she had not been killed sooner,” ex–homicide detective Nelson Andreu told The Miami Herald, “because she made a lot of enemies.”
Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
Maternity leave for a man: A gay banker has become the first Brazilian man to be given the same amount of paid leave for a new child as mothers get. When Lucimar da Silva and his partner adopted a child, their employers gave them just five days off each, the usual paternity leave in Brazil. Da Silva successfully sued to get four months’ leave, the mandatory minimum maternity leave, arguing that the law intended that one parent should stay with the child that long. “However unusual it may seem to grant maternity leave to a male person,” the social security agency said in its ruling, “this is possible when the father takes care of the newborn.” Brazil’s high court ruled just last year that same-sex couples have all the rights of straight couples.
