Don't panic, folks, but the pilot's dead

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 19, 2009 at 12:02 PM - 0 Comments

Passengers on a Continental Airlines flight between Brussels and Newark, N.J., were blissfully unaware that the plane’s 60-year-old pilot had collapsed and died midway through the trip. Crew members handled the
situation brilliantly, calling a Belgian doctor forward in hope of reviving the pilot, then moving the body to a “rest area” for crew members. People on the plane weren’t told what was going on; the few who were aware of the
medical emergency assumed it involved a fellow passenger. Two co-pilots then took over the controls, landing the Boeing 777 slightly ahead of schedule yesterday in foggy, rainy weather. The pilot apparently died of natural causes.

The Washington Post

The deal of a lifetime

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 19, 2009 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

Like vultures picking at a dead carcass, shoppers have been trolling auto dealerships for big bargains. One buyers tells the Washington Post he saved $9,000 on a brand new Chrysler Town and Country minivan. “I tried to
counteroffer $30,000. [The salesman] wouldn’t go for it. He said, ‘Man, I’m already losing money on it.’ ” As car makers offer these huge incentives, sales have been on the rise—still well below last year’s levels, but good
enough to surprise analysts. According to Edmunds.com, the average discount on a new car is almost $5,000. That’s bad news for dealers though, who are losing close to $1,000 on every car they sell, and looking to used car sales to try and scrape out some profit. But if you’re in the market for a new car, act soon. The deals will likely end by this fall, after car dealers have cleared out their excess inventories.

The Washington Post

Khamenei rejects allegations of vote tampering

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 19, 2009 at 11:34 AM - 0 Comments

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, has called for an end to the massive protests that have broken out in Iran following the country’s election last week. Khamenei also threatened to punish opposition leaders, saying they would be held responsible for any violence at the rallies, and urged Iranians to close ranks behind Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “There is 11 million votes difference,” the ayatollah said in response to allegations the vote was manipulated. “How one can rig 11 million votes?” Khamenei blamed the unrest on foreign countries, singling out the U.K. as the “most evil of them.” Britain has since responded to the allegations by summoning Iran’s ambassador in London to a meeting to explain the supreme leader’s comments. According to unconfirmed reports on Twitter, pro-Mousavi activits plan defy Khamenei’s orders and hold a rally in Tehran’s Enghelab Square at 4:00 P.M. on Saturday.  Mousavi, as well as fellow reformist politicians Mehdi Karoubi and Mohammad Khatami are expected to show up at the protest.

BBC News

Associated Press

Elections Canada vs. The Liberals: In and out! In and out! In and – no, looks like it's actually just "out".

By kadyomalley - Friday, June 19, 2009 at 10:58 AM - 49 Comments

Canadian Press reveals the latest Liberal funding woes:

OTTAWA–Elections Canada is scrutinizing almost $800,000 worth of expenses filed by Liberal candidates in last fall’s election campaign, The Canadian Press has learned.

The elections watchdog has asked the Liberal party to produce detailed invoices and documentation to prove that a mandatory riding services package was actually worth the $2,500 each candidate was required to pay for it .

Until Elections Canada is satisfied that the packages aren’t really a thinly-veiled donation to party headquarters, the candidates won’t receive their election expenses rebates, worth a total of about $3.5 million to the cash-hungry party. [...]

Elections Canada spokesman John Enright said the agency is on track for distributing rebates, which it hopes to have completed by the end of August. The rate of reimbursements for last fall’s election is so far comparable to that after the 2006 campaign, he said.

As for the request for full documentation about the cost of the Liberals’ riding services package, Enright said that’s “not at all unusual.” And he said all parties were warned before and during the campaign that all expense claims, including transactions between local and central campaigns, would have to be supported with documentation.

“This information is required to ensure that all expenses are fully detailed and also to properly establish the commercial value of the transactions.”

Okay, first off, three cheers for Elections Canada for doing its job, and ITQ hopes this will finally put a stake through the heart of the persistent – and, frankly, downright pernicious – claim heard in certain Conservative quarters that the federal agency is swarming with Liberals and Liberal sympathizers. I’m sure that some of the more outspoken advocates of that particular conspiracy theory will be falling all over themselves to undo some of the damage that may have been done to the agency’s reputation for fairness and impartiality, not to mention the confidence that Canadians quite rightly have in their electoral system.

Continue…

Hey Look

By Paul Wells - Friday, June 19, 2009 at 10:40 AM - 41 Comments

New Wells column, from the current issue, in which I pay Mark Steyn’s column from last week the compliment of a close reading.

Chalk River spewing too much radiation?

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 19, 2009 at 10:13 AM - 2 Comments

The nuclear reactor at Chalk River may be out of the isotope business for the foreseeable future, but according to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, it’s still spewing out radiation at twice the level at which AECL is obliged to “control the situation.” The Ottawa Citizen reports that, although the quantity of tritium is still below the current threshold for “maximum health limits”, those limits may not be sufficient. At a meeting with AECL officials last week, commission member Alan Graham expressed concern over “loading the atmosphere … with excessive tritium” that could end up falling onto land—or into the water supply.

The Ottawa Citizen

Swine Flu attacks summer camps

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 19, 2009 at 10:12 AM - 0 Comments

Swine flu cases are dropping off with the warmer weather, yet it’s now causing outbreaks in summer camps, just like it did in schools, US officials told the New York Times. Camp administrators have been told to watch out for sick kids, who should stay home for a week or until 24 hours after symptoms are gone. Camps in Georgia, California, and North Carolina have all reported probable swine flu cases; so far, the illness has hospitalized 1,600 Americans, mostly young, and killed 44 people. It’s most persistent in the Northeast. It’s not just summer camps where flu is spreading; hospitals and clinics also aren’t doing enough to prevent it, the CDC said, noting that patients with swine flu aren’t being identified quickly enough, and that hospital staff still aren’t wearing masks often enough to protect themselves.

The New York Times

Have fun! Rat out your contractor! Win a trip to Ottawa!

By Andrew Potter - Friday, June 19, 2009 at 9:57 AM - 6 Comments

I know you’ve all been waiting for the results of the Canadian Revenue Agency’s Independent Video Producer Award, where citizens were invited to make YouTube videos based on the theme Underground Economy- Not Your Problem?

The CRA pitched its video contest as a way of giving all Canadians an opportunity to speak up about how the underground economy is a problem for them, their businesses, and their communities. Gestapo tactics? Heck no, it’s a way for the government to support new media and the arts. It’s also “fun,” according to one CRA spokeswoman.

The contest entries can be found here.  The Honourable Jean-Pierre Blackburn will announce the winner on Monday morning. The prize? Get this: An all-expenses paid trip to Ottawa.

As someone once said: We are not making this up.

The feeble 'march' of Euro-fascism

By Paul Wells - Friday, June 19, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 128 Comments

Boo! Did I scare you? Good! We like scaring you here at Maclean’s. That’s why we like these rip-roaring cover stories: we hope that you’ll pick us up and read the calmer stuff inside too. That’s what we did last week with our cover photo of generic thugs in camouflage and berets, under the cover line THE RETURN OF FASCISM.

The cover pointed to a column by our Mark Steyn. And Mark’s column—well, it’s a bit of a mess. Here’s why.

Continue…

The unanswered questions

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 8:46 PM - 16 Comments

Awhile after the Justice Minister’s unexpected announcement, Paul Dewar stood and asked if Stockwell Day or Vic Toews had, in their previous portfolios, received a request from the U.S. ambassador or the White House that Abousfian Abdelrazik be prevented from returning to Canada.

This would seem to be what prompted that question.

The Commons: And then, suddenly, an answer

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 6:27 PM - 23 Comments

The Scene. It was not otherwise a particularly remarkable day.

The Liberals persisted in asking the government to account for the current shortage of medical isotopes. The government insisted on doing no such thing. Jack Layton pouted about not receiving an invitation to the Prime Minister’s afternoon tea with Michael Ignatieff the other day. The Prime Minister jabbed his finger and waved his arms and declared the NDP an annoyance. John Baird scorned Mr. Layton with one answer and congratulated him on the birth of his granddaughter—Beatrice Dora Campbell, eight pounds and one ounce, born 12:03am Wednesday morning to Jack’s daughter Sarah—with the next.

Not even the early appearance of Irwin Cotler, the former justice minister rising immediately after Michael Ignatieff had dispensed with his three questions, seemed a cause for much concern. With the House breaking tomorrow for the summer, it appeared the Liberals were merely giving the venerable old lawyer a ceremonial opportunity to register a couple long-held grievances.

He asked first about Omar Khadr. Deepak Obhrai, the foreign affairs minister’s parliamentary secretary, rose with the perfunctory answer.

Mr. Cotler moved to the case of Abousfian Abdelrazik, the Canadian still bunking at our embassy in Sudan, awaiting an answer to the cruel riddle of his situation. “Mr. Speaker, Abousfian Abdelrazik is another abandoned Canadian citizen. In spite of the Federal Court’s severe rebuke, this government continues to violate Mr. Abdelrazik’s rights by refusing to bring him home,” Mr. Cotler posited. “The government has had two weeks to read a judgment that is unequivocal in its findings of fact and conclusions of law. Every day it waits is a continued violation of Mr. Abdelrazik’s rights. Does the government plan on appealing the court’s decision while delaying justice at Mr. Abdelrazik’s expense, or will it heed the court’s order and immediately return Mr. Abdelrazik home to Canada?”

It was here that something truly astonishing happened. Continue…

Matt Weiner Strikes a Blow For Longer Episodes

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 5:59 PM - 1 Comment

This has not been a great time for those of us who would like to see longer running times and fewer commercials in TV programming. (This isn’t just about the boredom of commercial breaks, which after all can increasingly be skipped; it’s about the limitations on storytelling that are imposed by the ever-shrinking running times.) The failure of Fox’s “Remote Free TV,” even after it proved that audiences are more likely to watch the commercials in short breaks, seemed to demonstrate that the networks probably won’t return to selling 10 minutes of commercial time per hour, as opposed to 20.

That’s why it was good to see Matthew Weiner, the creator of Mad Men, actually stood up for the idea that a minute of screen time is a precious and valuable thing. Mad Men has a running time of 47-8 minutes per episode, which isn’t long by historical standards but is several minutes longer than usual for a show with commercials (we’re usually talking 43-4 minutes on basic cable, 41-2 on network). It is the running time an hour-long show would have had in, say, the late ’80s. When AMC decided that it needed to sell more commercial time on the show, this wasn’t an unreasonable decision. The show still isn’t a big hit, it’s not cheap to make, and the network needs all the advertising revenue it can reasonably get. But Weiner absolutely refused to cut his episodes back to today’s standard length:

A very hands-on creator, he fought back and got AMC to instead let the show run longer than an hour with the additional commercials so that he wouldn’t have to trim dialogue and scenes from the show. Of course, AMC and cable operators will have to find a way to insure that the show’s post-11 p.m. end time doesn’t screw with our TiVos and DVRs.

To a certain extent, Weiner is being the unreasonable one here, forcing the network to inconvenience itself, its viewers and cable companies so he can have three extra minutes of time on the show. But artistically, he’s right. Mad Men is a show whose pacing is part of its style: it takes its time, lingers on certain shots, extends conversations to a length that suggests (but doesn’t actually resemble) real life, and sometimes even shows people walking in and out of a room. None of these things are possible in today’s shorter-length shows; where Mad Men will have people shaking hands and exchanging small talk as they sit down in Don’s office, a shorter show would often have to start with the first line in the scene that advances the plot.

(The curse of the short running time is that you have to cut out everything that doesn’t “advance the plot,” even though some of the best moments can come from seemingly extraneous moments. It’s why many classic shows seem less interesting in syndication than they do in their complete versions, because in cutting from 25 to 22 minutes you lose all the cool stuff that wasn’t plot-specific.)

So while Weiner’s decision may not be great for AMC, and may not even have any ramifications for other television shows, it’s nice to see someone standing up for the basic principle that a few minutes more or less really do matter. They really, really do.

An alternative view is Ron Moore’s, that “I’ve got to cut this thing down, but the real episode will be on DVD.” But as I’ve said before, the “extended-length” DVD episodes are rarely better than the aired ones. The advantage of a longer running time is not just the ability to include extra scenes, but to subtly change the way shows are written and shot. A show is either a 43-minute type of show or a 48-minute type of show; if Mad Men had to be 43 minutes in its initial airings (and still make sense), it would not magically become its original self again on an extra-length DVD.

Guy Lafleur gets a suspended sentence

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 5:50 PM - 0 Comments

Hockey legend Guy Lafleur will have to pay a $100 fine and give $10,000 to charity—but will not be spending any time in jail—for giving contradictory testimony during a 2007 bail hearing for his son, Mark. During the hearing, the former Montreal Canadien said that his son had not broken a curfew, which required he sleep at his parents’ house. But police produced hotel receipts proving Mark had broken the court-imposed curfew while free on bail on charges of assault and forcible confinement. Guy is appealing the verdict in his case, which wrapped up six weeks ago.

CBC News

Craziest Sentences I Read Today

By Andrew Potter - Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 5:13 PM - 16 Comments

[Before the famine,] two million acres of Ireland were given over to growing potatoes. Three million people ate nothing else. Nothing. Adult males consumed between twelve and fourteen pounds daily.

Mitchel Raphael on biker MPs

By Mitchel Raphael - Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 5:00 PM - 2 Comments

Senator Nancy Ruth’s complaint

The gay advocacy group Egale held its first-ever big gala in Toronto’s Le Meridien King Edward Hotel to mark the 40th anniversary of the decriminalization of homosexuality in Canada, an event encapsulated by Pierre Trudeau’s famous line, “there’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.” Justin Trudeau was the keynote speaker. Egale’s executive director, Helen Kennedy, says the group has never had so many MPs at an event. Political attendees included Transport Minister John Baird, Liberal MPs Scott Brison and Mario Silva, former Liberal interim leader Bill Graham, NDP MP Olivia Chow and former Liberal cabinet minister Belinda Stronach. Conservative strategist Jaime Watt, who is chairman of the Navigator communications firm, was presented with the group’s inaugural Leadership Award for LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) human rights. Stronach was impressed by the way Watt and his partner raised his daughter Heather Watt from a previous marriage. “They were such great parents,” she says. Derek Vanstone, Jim Flaherty’s chief of staff, called Watt “a trailblazer who made it easier for people to be gay and Conservative, including myself.” Vanstone notes it is thanks to Watt that Ontario, under the Conservative government of Mike Harris (Watt played a key role in getting him elected), changed every single statute that dealt with common-law couples and gave same-sex spouses the same rights. “It was the single biggest voluntary step [for gay rights] any government in Canada has ever taken,” says Vanstone. Flaherty, who was Ontario’s attorney general at the time, noted in a congratulatory letter to Watt that “Some were surprised our government took this decision . . . but conservatives fundamentally believe in equality and fairness. It does, however, sometimes take leaders such as Jaime to help us live up to our ideals.” At the after-party, Tory Senator Nancy Ruth was the first to hit the dance floor but was upset when the DJ spun electronic beats and no rock music.

Continue…

It’s back: our oldest canoe comes home

By Tom Henheffer - Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 4:40 PM - 1 Comment

The world’s oldest canoe is coming back to New Brunswick. But someone forgot to tell the Maliseet, the First Nations people who constructed it.

Built about 180 years ago on a riverbank in Fredericton, the Grandfather Akwiten canoe has had an amazing journey. It was taken to Ireland in 1825 by a British officer—possibly stolen, possibly a gift. It wound up at the National University of Ireland in 1850 and hung from a roof there until 2001. Falling apart and full of pigeons, its history was forgotten and it was almost thrown out.

Continue…

Raphael crushes Michelangelo

By John Geddes - Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 4:20 PM - 3 Comments

Walking into the first room of a big art show, the gallery-goer naturally looks around for the block of text on the wall that introduces the artist or group of artists, and sets the stage for their moment in art history. But that’s not how the National Gallery of Canada’s big summer draw, From Raphael to Carracci: The Art of Papal Rome, is organized. Each room is devoted, not to an artist, but to a different 16th-century pope. The first belongs to Julius II, who commissioned Saint Peter’s Basilica and whose patronage began the work of making Rome glorious in the Renaissance and beyond. At least, the text stencilled neatly on the wall says it’s his room. Anyone who looks at the art, though, will come away divided as to whether it’s really ruled by Michelangelo or Raphael. These rivals are gloriously represented in Julius II’s room, and experiencing the competitive tension between them at close quarters is one of the great pleasures of this engrossingly varied exhibition, which runs in Ottawa until Sept. 7.

In a recent stroll through his show, David Franklin, the gallery’s chief curator, declared Raphael the hands-down winner. Franklin lingered over a Michelangelo drawing in red chalk—a famous study for the Sistine Chapel of an improbably brawny female—and declared it a singularly beautiful dead end. “The flex and torsion are just extraordinary; I’m not sure they had the bodybuilding apparatus in 1510 to get that musculature,” he says, then adds: “This is sort of a cul-de-sac in art history, because nobody can really learn from this, in the sense that nobody can match it.” Where Michelangelo’s drawing is impossible, Raphael’s portrait of Bindo Altoviti, casting a melting gaze from across the room, is imploring. “The elegance of it,” Franklin says, “is a stylistic moment that Raphael is bringing to Rome.”

Continue…

The leading character is our border

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 4:00 PM - 3 Comments

Deep within Jim Lynch’s entrancing new novel Border Songs, a former professor at the University of British Columbia is upset by the way his words have been twisted in a (fictional) Maclean’s cover story about the Canada-U.S. border. That doesn’t only make for an interesting interview via crackling cellphone—“Could you repeat that again, Mr. Lynch?”—it speaks to the level of Canadian detail in a very American, and very up-to-the-minute, novel. Paranoia, resentment and frustration on both sides of the 49th parallel? Border Songs reflects them. Dope smugglers and illegal aliens by the truckload? A smugglers’ tunnel and a frontier-crashing figure with attributes of the 9/11 perpetrators and Ahmed Ressam (the would-be Los Angeles airport bomber caught crossing the line with explosives in 1999)? It’s all there. Border Songs reads just like the news, except that it is far better written and has a main character—a gigantic, severely dyslexic, possibly autistic, U.S. Border Patrol agent—who is more compelling and believable than either Janet Napolitano or Peter Van Loan.

Lynch, 47, is one of the rare Americans as interested as Canadians in the border, mostly because he grew up near it, in the western Washington state terrain that is the setting for his novel. He’s always been amazed that his countrymen, whose mental map of their homeland features a Mexican basement teeming with every kind of threat, real or imagined, generally draw a blank when it comes to their Canadian attic. “For me, I always had the sense when crossing the border that I was going to a place that looked the same, but was strangely different—magical even. I don’t know why the Canadian border, which is so fascinating, hasn’t been the source of more literature—not thrillers, just about the quirky, funny things that happen along it.”

Continue…

'Fordlandia' by Greg Grandin

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 3:40 PM - 0 Comments

Those who talk of American cultural imperialism in the contemporary world should consider Fordlandia, the subject of the book of the same name by historian Greg Grandin (H.B. Fenn). It tells the story of Henry Ford’s 1927 purchase—for the purpose of growing rubber for tires—of a piece of Brazilian jungle twice the size of Delaware. He nonetheless tried to run it like it was Michigan, complete with Prohibition, golf courses, ice-cream shops, bandstands and time clocks. The settlement, which was finally turned over to the Brazilian government in 1945, naturally refused to become a floating fragment of Midwestern Puritanism, and flourished for a while as a wild tropical boomtown not at all congenial to its creator-god. The story, in a gifted writer’s hands, is an epic cultural clash, now almost entirely forgotten.

On the surface the fight was complex enough: triumphant Protestant-work-ethic capitalists vs what they saw as lazy, undependable, Native Catholics. The car magnate could only impose his time-clock view of the world for so long in the lush confines of one of the world’s most complex eco-systems, but the memory of his efforts is by no means bitter among the remaining inhabitants. The Ford Corp. gave out prizes for the best home gardens, and houses there still have them. It also built a hospital and—consistent with Henry Ford’s bedrock belief that a well-rewarded workforce created markets for products, paid high wages. No wonder that one Fordlandia resident told a reporter in 1993, a half century later, that “it would be nice if the company would come back.” Today, for paltry pay, Brazilians in nearby Manaus put together products like Sony TVs and Harley-Davidson motorcycles whose components were made elsewhere: instead of America being reproduced in the Amazon, America has outsourced there. In Grandin’s conclusion, this is not progress.

The deeper battle, though, was—in effect—Ford against his own achievements. The man whose factory system broke the industrial process down to its smallest, most reproducable elements, whose mass production led to mass consumption, also broke the small-town American culture and economy he spent the rest of his life trying to recapture. Capitalism and social conservatism  often travel together even though they are fundamentally and inevitably at odds—as a destroyer of traditional social order, industrial capitalism has never been equaled. Ford’s real arrogance, Grandin writes, was not “that he thought he could tame the Amazon but that he believed that the forces of capitalism, once released, could still be contained.”

Student sues Carleton for broken nose

By Michael Friscolanti - Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 3:40 PM - 3 Comments

A former Carleton University student who was “viciously and brutally assaulted” inside a campus dorm is suing the school for failing to protect his safety. In a case that could force every university to ramp up security, David Skidmore claims Carleton is just as responsible for his broken nose and lingering bouts of depression as the two students who allegedly attacked him. “It was a terrifying experience,” says his lawyer, Kevin Wolf. “Things like that should never happen on a university campus.”

What happened on Sept. 12, 2003, was no doubt traumatic. A first-year student at the time, Skidmore says he was punched, kicked and knocked unconscious after coming to the aid of a female neighbour who was “being harrassed” by two other students. But his lawsuit—which demands $750,000 from his assailants and the school—begs the obvious question: what more could Carleton have done to prevent such random fisticuffs?

Continue…

How Canada left itself vulnerable to U.S. protectionism: We're "governed by provincial satrapies"

By John Geddes - Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 3:21 PM - 13 Comments

International anxiety is mounting over the so-called “Buy American” provisions allowed in projects funded by Washington’s $800-billion (U.S.) stimulus spending package. Canadian premiers and even some U.S. state governors are upset over the prospect of Canadian firms being blocked from bidding for lucrative U.S. public works contracts. The World Bank president has waded in. A “Buy Chinese” policy emerging in Beijing raises fears about 1930s-style cascading global protectionism.

Trade Minister Stockwell Day is trying to pull Canada’s provincial premiers together for a united push to cut a last-minute deal to secure access for Canadian companies. Few Canadians realize, however, that provincial governments have for many years opposed any reciprocal deal with the Washington that would prevent them from excluding not only U.S. firms, but also companies from elsewhere in Canada, from bidding on provincial or municipal contracts.

Nobody knows this history better than Gordon Ritchie. As ambassador for trade negotiations, Ritchie was a key player in the making of the 1989 Canada-U.S. free trade deal. As chairman of Hill & Knowlton’s public affairs practice in Canada since 1999, he remains a sought-after expert on trade and economic issues. Ritchie spoke to Maclean’s about how Canada left itself vulnerable. Continue…

‘Putrid’ OAS attacked for Cuba invite

By Patricia Treble - Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 3:20 PM - 0 Comments

Bashing the Organization of American States was in vogue last week when the hemispheric group lifted its 47-year suspension of Cuba. And the criticism came from divergent interests. “The OAS is a putrid embarrassment,” said fiercely anti-Castro U.S. congressmen (and brothers) Mario and Lincoln Diaz-Balart, while the Cuban government called the OAS a “pestilent corpse.”

Why such rancour? Since Jan. 31, 1962, Cuba’s seat at the OAS has been empty as punishment for its Communist ideology. Now, to the anger of U.S. hard-liners, the island nation—the only non-democratic country in the hemisphere—is free to reapply for membership. But its human rights and democratic standards must be “in accordance with the practices, purposes and principles of the OAS”—a stricture that does not sit well with Havana.

Continue…

Hand over the tapes and nobody gets hurt: Liveblogging the Public Accounts Committee

By kadyomalley - Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 3:15 PM - 3 Comments

Hey, remember those mysterious audio tapes that Public Accounts has has such a very hard time prying out of the overprotective clutches of Public Works officials? This afternoon, committee members will have a chance to buttonhole the bureaucrats behind the decision to block the request, which could make for a lively meeting — so be sure to check back at 3:30 p.m. for full liveblogging coverage.

(For past ITQ coverage of this issue, click here.)

Continue…

Obama — the early years

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 3:03 PM - 1 Comment

The M+B gallery is presenting Barack Obama: The Freshman—a series of black and white photographs of the President in his first year at college. The dozens of pictures were taken by Lisa Jack, then a photography student at Occidental College. This marks the first time they have ever been printed and displayed. Obama has said his time at “Oxy” was confusing and full of soul searching, as he struggled to choose a direction in life. Jack says that although the 1980 photo-shoot started awkwardly, the pictures ended up showing a confident and charismatic student.

M+B