Is the Pope taking a shot at Prince Charles?

By macleans.ca - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 11:35 AM - 3 Comments

Sometimes a gift is more than just a gift, and you wonder whether Pope Benedict XVI is taking a poke at the British monarchy with a memento he plans to give Prince Charles, on the occasion of Charles’ first papal audience since he divorced Princess Diana. Next week, after receiving the Prince and the Duchess of Cornwall, the Pope plans to present  a “luxury facsimile” of the 1530 appeal by English peers to Pope Clement VII, which asked for the annulment of Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. That would be the one the Vatican rejected—prompting Henry to break with Rome and causing the formation of the Church of England. A lot of water has gone under the bridge since then. Yet the Vatican still holds marriage to be a sacred vow that can’t be broken by temporal laws. Charles, as we know, was granted a divorce from the Princess of Wales in 1996, and remarried to divorcée Camilla Parker-Bowles after Diana died in a car crash.

The Times

Rumour: Jerry Hall’s book manuscript rejected

By macleans.ca - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 11:32 AM - 0 Comments

Eighteen months after signing a $2-million deal with HarperCollins, according to Britain’s Daily Express, former model Jerry Hall has had her manuscript rejected for being “terrifically bland.” Specifically, the mother of four of Mick Jagger’s children during their nine-year relationship was unable or unwilling to go into enough detail over life with the Rolling Stones.

Daily Express

Tax credits going to waste

By macleans.ca - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 11:30 AM - 6 Comments

A survey conducted for H&R Block last December found the vast majority of Canadians don’t claim all the tax credits they’re entitled to. Canadians living in the prairies were the most likely to file for new tax credits introduced last year, with 42 per cent of filers claiming them on their returns. By contrast, only 18 per cent of Quebecers did the same. Across Canada, only one out of four taxpayers claimed the credits on their tax returns. “How can you leave that kind of money on the table?” wondered Cleo Hamel, a senior tax analyst at H&R Block.

Victoria Times-Colonist

Are two languages better than one?

By macleans.ca - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 11:04 AM - 0 Comments

Parents debating the benefits of teaching their kids a second language should consider the findings of a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Agnes Kovacs and Jacques Mehler at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, where bilingualism is common, studied 40 “preverbal” seven month olds. Half of the babies were “crib” bilinguals, meaning two languages were spoken at home, while the other half were monolingual. Using made-up words, the researchers trained the babies to expect the appearance of a puppet on a screen. When they changed the words and location of the puppet, the bilingual babies had an easier time adapting than their monolingual counterparts, indicating that bilingualism may accelerate the development of the brain’s executive function.

The Economist

China’s sporting future

By macleans.ca - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 11:02 AM - 2 Comments

The Beijing Olympics last year were supposed to mark a turning point in the sports marketing business in China, with the introduction of big, U.S.-style sponsorships, rich television contracts and the widespread use of sports as a marketing tool. But eight months on, things haven’t panned out quite as marketers had hoped. Sure, there are some Coke commercials on TV featuring Chinese athletes, but much of the buzz has faded in the past eight months. The economic downturn has hurt, but the Chinese people have also not embraced pro sports as quickly as many had expected. Even the famous Bird’s Nest stadium now risks becoming a white elephant.  Sports as big business in China will catch on, say marketers, it just might take a few years.

Sports Business Journal

5-lb missile is “the size of a loaf of French bread”

By macleans.ca - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 11:00 AM - 1 Comment

The war on terror is about to get a deadly new weapon. U.S. scientists are testing a 5-lb missile “the size of a loaf of French bread” in the California desert, that packs enough explosives to blow up a pick-up truck. The tiny innovation will mean that currently unarmed spy drones will acquire massive firepower, and allow the larger Predators to carry even more missiles as they scour the skies over Afghanistan. But are these weapons really that impressive? James Bond had them years ago.

Los Angeles Times

Nevada eases smoking restrictions

By macleans.ca - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 10:55 AM - 2 Comments

Just as other jurisdictions move to clamp down on cigarette smoking in public places, Nevada’s doing the opposite—its state senate voted 16 to 5 on Friday to ease some restrictions on smoking, the first U.S. state to do so. The new bill takes aim at the Nevada Clean Indoor Air Act, which took effect in 2007 and bans smoking in any indoor space where minors may be present and food is served. The new bill, which will now be considered by the Assembly, would let taverns that sell food to allow smoking if people under age 21 can’t enter. According to the Nevada Tavern Owners Association, gambling revenue from video poker slot machines has tumbled since the smoking ban came into effect; smokers now frequent local casinos, where some smoking is permitted. “Our members’ gaming revenues are off 20 to 30 per cent since the ban, and that’s before the recession,” association president Geno Hill told the New York Times.

The New York Times

… Same as the old (Liberal) boss

By Andrew Potter - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 10:53 AM - 8 Comments

Despite their new leader’s big talk about the Liberal caucus ceasing to sit on its hands while the Tories steamroll parliament, Ignatieff’s people aren’t exactly fulfilling their constitutionally-defined role of officially opposing the government of the day. As Glen McGregor reports today, this government-in-waiting seems to be still waiting for something to object to:

OTTAWA — Despite leader Michael Ignatieff’s vow that his party would no longer sit on its hands during votes in Parliament, Liberal MPs have missed three times as many votes in the House of Commons as Conservative members so far this year.

The average Liberal MP did not participate in about 12 per cent of the recorded votes on bills and motions in the House of Commons since the parliamentary session began in January, compared to Tory MPs, who on average skipped four per cent, a Citizen analysis shows.

The Liberals posted the worst record for voting of the four parties in the House, standing to be counted fewer times on average than even Bloc Québécois MPs.

And when Liberal MPs did show up, they voted the same way as the Conservatives 79 per cent of the time.

Grits get poor marks for attendance

By macleans.ca - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 10:11 AM - 4 Comments

If showing up is half the battle, Liberal MPs have a big handicap. In the House of Commons this year, Grits have missed three times as many votes as their Conservative counterparts. Despite leader Michael Ignatieff’s pledge to put an end to his party’s poor voting track record, Liberal MPs missed 12 per cent of recorded votes on average, while Tories missed an average of four per cent. And when Liberals did vote, they sided with Conservatives 79 per cent of the time.

Ottawa Citizen

It Was the Best Ebay Auction Ever, And They Would Have Shipped To Canada

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 9:24 AM - 3 Comments

After the recent talk of Texas secession, someone had the smart idea of putting the state up for auction on Ebay. (“Shipping to Canada? Yes!”)

The great state of Texas is for sale.  All proceeds will go towards paying off the national debt of the United States of America.  Must sell before she secedes!   You’ll receive the whole state including all sports teams.  Historic sites include the Alamo, Lyndon Johnson’s boyhood home, Bishop’s Palace, and so many more.  Think of the income opportunities.  The state is also plentiful in both hunting and fishing sites. As an added benefit you can make all your friends real, Texas Rangers.  How about that!

Ebay has taken this listing down, but the bidding had already gone up to $99 million US (which at the moment isn’t that different from $99 million Canadian) before it was pulled. Here’s a link to the Google Cache of the auction listing.

To move the conversation back to home ground, I’m not sure which Canadian province is the likeliest candidate to be sold on Ebay; I suppose Alberta would fetch the highest price, though you can’t rule out PEI as an underdog: with relatively low shipping costs and high nostalgia factor, it could spark a bidding war among collectors of Anne of Green Gables memorabilia. The only province that wouldn’t sell well on Ebay is British Columbia, not because there’s anything wrong with the province but because if the Americans bought it, they wouldn’t be able to save money by filming there.

CanJet hijacker in custody

By macleans.ca - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 8:42 AM - 1 Comment

The gunman, who hijacked a CanJet plane in Montego Bay on Sunday night, has released all 174 passengers and eight crew members scheduled to be on Flight 918, which was headed back to Halifax after a stop in Santa Clara, Cuba. Although there were reports of a shot being fired on the tarmac, nobody was injured. The hijacker, described by one Jamaican government official as a “mentally challenged youngster,” is now in custody.

CBC

Don't forget her when she's gone …

By kadyomalley - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 8:22 AM - 34 Comments

Her heeeeart would breeaaaak/Sheeeeee has looooved you for so loooonnnng/It’s all she can taaaaake …

Okay, that was just mean. Anyone who now has that particularly antibiotic resistent strain of 80s CanCon earworm lodged in their skull can feel free to bitterly resent her for the rest of the day.

Anyway, as noted near the end of Friday’s marathon all-day dispatch from Camp Oliphant, ITQ is headed off the grid for a few days — “on assignment”, as they say. She’ll do her best to pop in every now and then, but feel free to use this as an open thread in the meantime.

Obama's face: a weapon of limited utility

By Paul Wells - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 7:49 AM - 12 Comments

Andrew Sullivan, 2007:

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close.

And how’s that going? Some of the answer comes from the Washington Post, this morning:

“When we achieve our goals in one place, we need to struggle for it in other areas,” Taliban spokesman Muslim Khan told Pakistani news services by telephone last week. “Sharia does not permit us to lay down our arms if the government continues anti-Muslim policies.” The goal, he said, is to “enforce the rule of Allah on the land of Allah.”

In the northwestern town of Mardan, insurgents attacked girls schools, forced CD shops to close, ordered barbers not to shave beards and bombed the office of a nonprofit aid agency, killing a female worker. Taliban commanders accused the agency of “propagating obscenity.” Taliban fighters occupied the Buner district for several days, closed a religious shrine and burned DVDs in the streets. They then toured the region in a convoy of trucks, even entering a secured army area while displaying heavy weapons. “The inescapable reality is that another domino has toppled and the Taliban are a step closer to Islamabad,” the Pakistan-based News International newspaper warned last week…

On a not-unrelated note, there’s Jackson Diehl’s column in the same paper, A World of Trouble for Obama.

'That's too clever for me, Evan'

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 2:41 AM - 8 Comments

Evan Solomon talks to Michael Ignatieff for CBC Sunday. (A transcript of the full interview is available at that link.)

At the end of the clip, Evan states that Stephen Harper wrote a similar book about himself at some point. That would seem to be a mistake. Though you’re welcome to read Paul’s book. Or this curiously listed coming attraction.

Jack Layton did pen his own survey of the land in 2004. And while Barack Obama did write Dreams from My Father, it was published in 1995. Audacity of Hope followed 11 years later.

Rae on Ignatieff (III)

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 2:03 AM - 2 Comments

After a two-and-a-half minute opening question, Rae discusses Iraq, Israel and Michael Ignatieff.

Harper on Chavez and why Obama makes friends easily

By macleans.ca - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 1:11 AM - 15 Comments

At the Summit of the Americas in Port of Spain this weekend—during which U.S. President Barack Obama declared a “new beginning” with Cuba—Prime Minister Stephen Harper said the President’s “clear desire to listen—not necessarily to agree but to listen—has won him a lot of friends.” Harper, who was worried going in that the discussion would get bogged down, as it has in the past, by conflicting ideologies, said Obama sparked a “new era of dialogue” among the 34 leaders. And despite their political differences, Harper described Hugo Chavez, the other major star of the show, as “affable” and “gregarious.” The PM also said everyone was “grateful” the Venezuelan leader was in a “particularly good mood” this weekend.

New York Times

How to beat an insurgency by killing fewer people (II)

By Michael Petrou - Sunday, April 19, 2009 at 11:57 PM - 5 Comments

My colleague Andrew Potter blogged a few weeks ago about Thomas Ricks’ new book, The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008. The book tells the story behind America’s strategic shift in Iraq – from one where the primary goal is defeating the enemy, to the current strategy which holds that the primary objective is winning over the population.

The man most responsible for this shift is David Petraeus, who commanded the 101^st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq and later led its occupation of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. Here he sought to engage and protect the local population, rather than seeking out and destroying every last insurgent. The city was a rare success during the early days of America’s occupation of Iraq, but was swallowed up by the insurgency when Petraeus and the 101^st left. Petraeus now heads U.S. Central Command and directs U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, where the United States is shifting its focus, and where Canadian soldiers have been fighting the Taliban for the last seven years.

Last June, Petraeus sent his commanders in Iraq a memo in which he outlines the tactics and philosophies he expects them to employ in a hearts-and-minds counter-insurgency campaign. This memo is included in the appendix of The Gamble, and I’ve recorded much of it below.

General Walter Natynczyk, Canada’s chief of the defence staff, shares Petraeus’s belief that beating an insurgency requires winning over the local population. He said as much in a recent speech. Still, I’d like to know how many of the tactics and strategies discussed by Petraeus are employed by Canadians in Afghanistan. Does the Canadian military have patrol bases and outposts in Kandahar city? How much time (especially overnight) do Canadian troops spend there versus back at the main base? Are Canadian soldiers living among the Afghans, or as, Petraeus would describe it, are they commuting to work? How many patrols are conducted on foot, versus from inside vehicles? How much, if any, of Kandahar city and province do the Canadian soldiers or their Afghan allies decisively control? Are they holding territory, or does their authority vanish when their patrol rolls away? Is the Canadian military working to peel away “reconcilable” insurgents from “irreconcilables”? In other words, are Canadian soldiers talking to the Taliban? How smooth are transitions from an outgoing group of soldiers to those who are just arriving? Are relationships that are built between locals and one deployment of Canadian troops carried over to the new arrivals?

Continue…

That ticking time bomb…

By Paul Wells - Sunday, April 19, 2009 at 10:57 PM - 7 Comments

…ticked a lot, apparently.

MUSIC: New(-ish) conductor, Old World

By Paul Wells - Sunday, April 19, 2009 at 9:46 PM - 4 Comments

The Boston Symphony cancels its European tour, which was planned for autumn and would have taken them to Paris and Vienna. (I heard the band in Paris in September 2007, and they made a mighty noise.) This economy sucks for arts organizations, which depend on philanthropy from people who lately aren’t feeling philanthropic, and on the disposable income of people who lately have less.

Perhaps the Montreal Symphony Orchestra would have cancelled their tour too, if the crunch had come earlier, but it didn’t and they’re in Europe right now. The website for their tour is loads of fun, with photos, blogs, an interactive map (tonight Madrid, Vienna — where they take this stuff seriously — on Tuesday), and other goodies. Three years into his tenure, music director Kent Nagano thinks he has a band worth showing off; their recording of Mahler, the third since he came on board, will come out this week, barely three months after it was recorded in concert.

And starring James Moore in "Life Isn't Fair"

By Paul Wells - Sunday, April 19, 2009 at 9:25 PM - 17 Comments

The heritage minister gives $40 million to Montreal’s (extraordinarily ambitious) Quartier des Spectacles arts-and-festivals project, one of the largest urban overhauls anywhere in Canada in recent years. That’s more than twice the Quebec dollar share of the arts touring cuts that caused so much unpleasantness last autumn. And it gets about one-hundredth the coverage.

Meanwhile Michael Ignatieff appears on Tout le monde en parle, gets one pop-culture quiz question (now dubbed “la Question James Moore,” because the minister missed three of the six questions he had to answer). Iggy nails his question: “Who founded the Cirque du Soleil?”

Applying the human rights standards of The Fugitive

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, April 18, 2009 at 5:30 PM - 14 Comments

Leonard Stern looks on the bright side of torture.

As for the Red Cross report, it’s scary to see the ease with which a modern, democratic government can ignore the taboo against torture, not to mention principles of due process.

That’s the intellectual reaction. Then there’s the emotional satisfaction of reading about CIA officers doing it the Chicago Way and taking monsters like Khaled Shaik Mohammed to the “verge of death and back again,” as Mohammed put it.

I’d be suspicious of anyone who reads the report and experiences only one response but not the other.

Here again, posted this time for Stern’s emotional satisfaction, is the sworn affidavit of Omar Khadr. And here, again, is the Washington Post report detailing how useless—and, in fact, counter-productive—the emotionally satisfying treatment of Abu Zubaydah proved to be.

Nation in progress

By Michael Ignatieff - Saturday, April 18, 2009 at 3:20 PM - 9 Comments

Michael Ignatieff, 61, leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, is also an eminent writer. His family memoir, The Russian Album, won the Governor General’s non-fiction award in 1987, and his 1993 novel Scar Tissue was shortlisted for the Booker prize. In 2000, Ignatieff and his wife, Zsuzsanna, retraced the journey his great-grandfather George Monro Grant undertook with Sandford Fleming in 1872. Grant and Fleming were mapping out the railway line that would link Canada from ocean to ocean. Ignatieff’s aim was to see the country through his ancestor’s optimistic eyes and trace how four generations of his prominent family—including his uncle George Parkin Grant, author of Lament for a Nation (1965)—had grappled with the idea of Canada. Grant’s despairing view of Canada’s fate, that the nation was destined to dissolve into the American orbit, has made his book an icon of Canadian nationalism. His nephew’s view of our future, as set out in True Patriot Love (Penguin), is far more confident.

The Canada of the Grants was a small-town nation of modest brick houses with white verandas, Protestant and Catholic churches on wide, leafy streets and the railway station within walking distance. George Parkin Grant’s Lament for a Nation was a cry of grief and rage at its passing. But that Canada is still there. Just go to Richmond, Que., or London, Ont., or Halifax, N.S. There are beautiful streets in each of these towns where this Canada still remains. But there is a palpable sense that time is passing this Canada by.

Continue…

The Canadian question

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, April 18, 2009 at 2:21 PM - 27 Comments

Michael Ignatieff talks to the Sun.

“I didn’t write the book as a defensive response to anticipated attack. I started this thing long before I was even in politics — and I would have finished it whatever happened — but there’s no doubt that it has the consequence of being a response to that.

“I’ve never seen a contradiction between loving your country and being outside it … sometimes you actually have to get out of your country to see it for what it is.”

The Star, meanwhile, spends a few days with Ignatieff in Southwestern Ontario and reports back.

The nation as dessert

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, April 18, 2009 at 1:51 AM - 23 Comments

Michael Valpy writes nearly 4,400 words for the Saturday Globe on Michael Ignatieff and True Patriot Love.

His idea of some of the mythologies that run deep in Canadians’ lives seems a little musty — the North, the land, the constitutional mantra of POGG: peace, order and good government. He writes at one point that because Canadians are three peoples living in a single state without sharing the same sense of country — English-Canadian, French-Canadian and aboriginal — they cannot create a single, uniting national myth, as Americans have done.

What, I ask him, does that say about our shibboleths of pluralism, of a culture of rights, of a more communal approach to life than the Lockean individualism of Americans? On the last issue, he tells me, this nephew of George Grant: “You can’t run this country without government, without a federal government that has an inciting, promoting, stimulating role in pulling the country together.

“And the job description of a prime minister, the job description of a federal government, is just one job — hold the country together, make it stronger. That’s all it does, and Canadians have a deep understanding of that. They don’t like big government. But they do think we can’t have a country unless we have a federal government that does some of this stuff. And this is, I think, the fatal ideological flaw of Harper’s conservatism because it fits a country that is finished, but it doesn’t fit a country that is not yet done. … Part of what I like about our country is the sense that we’re unfinished business. We’re not there. The dish is not done, and that creates a project for us, which to imagine it finished, imagining the building done, the pie cooked.”

You can listen to the entire interview here. Excerpts of Valpy’s conversation with Ignatieff have also been turned into a six-minute video. Oh, and there’s a book excerpt too.