PRESS DIGEST - Canada - Oct 15

Oct 15 (Reuters) - The following are top stories from selected Canadian newspapers. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy.

THE GLOBE AND MAIL:

- Thousands of Canadian breast cancer patients who take tamoxifen for years in the hope of fending off a recurrence may be doing it for naught: Because of their genetic makeup, the drug is doing little or nothing to help them.

- Almost from the start of its big 2006 push into southern Afghanistan, Canada's senior military and government officials were warned of "serious, imminent and alarming" problems with handing over captured prisoners to that country's notorious jails.

- Teams of gunmen attacked three security sites Thursday in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore while a suicide bomber hit a northwestern town, killing a total of 37 people. The strikes were part of an escalating wave of terror aimed at scuttling a planned offensive into the militant heartland on the Afghan border.

BUSINESS:

- JPMorgan Chase & Co's (JPM.N) fat investment banking profit masks a dark underside of the U.S. recovery - the housing market is still a mess and homeowners are defaulting at an alarming rate.

Heralding what's in store for other major banks, JPMorgan reported almost $3.6-billion in profit in the third quarter -- a stunning 580 percent surge from the same quarter last year -- cementing the perception that banks are emerging strong and healthy from the recession.

- On the first day of hearings in the Ontario Superior Court Wednesday to discuss the financial restructuring, lawyers for Goldman Sachs Inc (GS.N) warned that they would take legal action against CanWest Global Communications Corp CGS.TO if it tried to change the terms of the Alliance Atlantis deal.

NATIONAL POST:

- A suicide bomber ploughed his explosive-laden car into a police station in northwest Pakistan early on Thursday, killing eight people, police said.

FINANCIAL POST:

- Stellar earnings from two key market bellwethers and upbeat U.S. retail sales moved Canadian stocks higher on Wednesday, while south of the border, the Dow Jones industrial average closed north of 10,000 for the first time in a year.

- When the Canadian dollar raced to parity, in the fall of 2007, the Canadian government came under constant attack from business leaders to provincial premiers to do something to stem the loonie's leap to equal footing with its U.S. peer.

There's less of that now -- partly because the strongest among Canadian-based manufacturers survived the dollar's ascent and learned to live with a stronger loonie by completely overhauling the way they do business.

- Vancouver-based miner Pan American Silver Corp (PAA.TO) unveiled a friendly $626-million stock-and-warrants deal to buy Aquiline Resources Inc AQI.TO. Adding the monster Navidad deposit will potentially increase Pan American's production to more than 40 million ounces of silver a year.