One of Vancouver’s best-known and most popular restaurateurs is back working part-time after suffering a very minor stroke on the right side of his brain during the last weekend of April. John Bishop, owner of Bishop’s Restaurant in Kitsilano, told the Straight in a phone interview that after returning home from work on a busy Saturday night and sitting down for dinner, his left hand went numb. He went to the emergency room, where he was given low-dose aspirin and a CT scan.

The Vancouver Police Department has been ordered by the office of the police complaint commissioner to investigate the use of tasers by TransLink police.

Residents of East Vancouver’s activist heartland may not mind seeing Jarome Iginla in their neighbourhood in 2010, but they’re not so keen on baton-wielding security personnel cracking heads to stifle anti-Olympic dissent.

School trustee Allan Wong still plans to run for reelection with the Coalition of Progressive Electors, even though he’s openly supporting city councillor Raymond Louie’s campaign to win Vision Vancouver’s nomination for mayor.

Two Non-Partisan Association councillors have mixed feelings about legislation introduced by B.C.’s Liberal government that would amend the Vancouver Charter.

This afternoon (May 7), Prime Minister Stephen Harper met with Burma’s prime minister-in-exile Sein Win. According to a Canadian Friends of Burma media release, it was the first time a Canadian prime minister has ever met with the Win, whose official position is chairman of the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma.

Vancouver didn’t get a chance to celebrate the passing of the Beijing Olympic torch in the same way that cities like London and Paris did. But on May 10, the “Tibet Freedom Torch” will be run through our city’s streets.

This morning (May 6), biologist Alexandra Morton went to court to challenge the provincial government’s constitutional right to regulate B.C.’s coastal waters. The issue is fish farms and the deadly effect they are having on wild salmon, she told the Straight.

Tom Smith, founder and chairman of Taser International Inc., is scheduled to appear in Vancouver next Monday (May 12) to present at the first Braidwood Inquiry.

B.C. health minister George Abbott announced May 5 that girls entering Grades 6 and 9 will be offered the controversial human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine Gardasil.

With hopes fading for the discovery of an HIV vaccine in the near future, the director of the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS has called on the federal government to step up HIV prevention and treatment programs.

For the fifth year in a row, British Columbia had the worst child poverty rate of any province in Canada in 2006, according to the latest Statistics Canada numbers.

Syncrude Canada Ltd. has offered a “sincere apology” following the death of hundreds of birds at the company’s Athabasca Oil Sands operation.

A plan to develop a bistro on English Bay Beach is headed for public consultations after Vancouver’s park board unanimously approved a design concept for the restaurant.

A West End tenant has written to Vancouver mayor Sam Sullivan to object to the installation of seven cellphone-transmission antennas on the roof of her building. In her April 24 letter to Sullivan, Tina Zanetti stated that she discovered that two separate permits had been issued to Mott Electric earlier this year without any notification to area residents about the “health hazards associated with electromagnetic radiation”.