President of Honduras ousted by military

By John Intini - Sunday, June 28, 2009 at 2:11 PM - 0 Comments

In what some are describing as the first military coup in Central America since the cold war, Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was ousted on Sunday and flown into exile in Costa Rica. Zelaya had been planning a referendum that critics say would have allowed him to rewrite the constitution and run for re-election—there is a one-term limit for presidents. The Supreme Court and Congress had declared the referendum unconstitutional. Though Zelaya has the backing of the poor and the unions, others feared he was trying to install a Hugo Chavez-like regime in Honduras.

New York Times

Billy Mays Dead, This Has Now Officially Been Most Depressing Week Ever

By Jaime Weinman - Sunday, June 28, 2009 at 1:40 PM - 6 Comments

Another celebrity is unexpectedly dead in Los Angeles (sorry: Tampa) at the age of 50. This time it’s Billy Mays, the most famous and prolific low-budget TV pitchman. This past week has been really, really depressing.

As of this writing there has been no update at Billymays.net, the famous ironic fan site that many people used to  mistake for an official Mays site.

Tim Hudak elected leader of Ontario's Progressive Conservatives

By macleans.ca - Sunday, June 28, 2009 at 12:38 AM - 17 Comments

Though it took three ballots, Tim Hudak won the leadership of Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives at the party convention in Markham on Saturday, beating Frank Klees, Randy Hillier and Christine Elliott, the wife of federal finance minister Jim Flaherty. Hudak, who has the backing of some high-profile federal Tories (John Baird, Tony Clement), will succeed John Tory, who resigned as leader in March after losing a key by-election. Though the party has moved to the political centre in recent years, many expect Hudak, a 41-year-old Niagara-area MPP, to swing the PCs firmly to the right. Hudak will get his first shot at the Premier’s office during the provincial election scheduled for 2011.

Toronto Star

Momentum and its discontents: The Harper/Ignatieff show

By Paul Wells - Saturday, June 27, 2009 at 6:20 PM - 5 Comments

From the magazine, my story about how the leaders of the two largest parties Made Parliament Work For Canadians.

'I am here'

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, June 27, 2009 at 5:05 PM - 2 Comments

Abousfian Abdelrazik’s homecoming, twittered.

More from Canadian Press, Canwest and CTV. Video of the scene here. And, from earlier this week, Maher Arar’s plea for greater oversight of our national security agency.

Canadians deserve to know why so many of this country’s citizens, all of Muslim background, have been imprisoned and tortured abroad. Human-rights organizations, activists and national-security experts have been calling for the current government to establish the credible oversight agency that was recommended by Judge O’Connor several years ago. Their calls have landed on deaf ears. How many more victims will it take before our government realizes that it needs to act?

Harper’s next big chance

By Paul Wells - Saturday, June 27, 2009 at 4:40 PM - 167 Comments

In the last week of May, Prime Minister Stephen Harper met with his top political advisers and the Conservative party campaign team. He “put all the troops on high election alert,” an adviser said last week, “and told them to get ready for the campaign.”

Nothing particular in the outside world had triggered this decision, no action by Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff or the other opposition leaders, no big news story. And it was hardly the first time Harper had ordered his party put on campaign footing without being sure a campaign was actually coming. The Conservative leader would always rather be safe than sorry. What had spurred this latest escalation in the threat level, the Harper adviser says, was the Conservatives’ own calculation of the Liberals’ best interests. Continue…

Pakistan, where the cautionary tales of future counterinsurgency texts are being written today

By Paul Wells - Saturday, June 27, 2009 at 4:21 PM - 1 Comment

“Earlier Pakistani campaigns against the Taliban do not offer an encouraging precedent. In Bajaur, a part of the tribal areas, two main economic centers, the market towns of Loe Sam and Inayat Kalay, remain in ruins nearly eight months after the army smashed them in pursuit of the Taliban and claimed victory.”

– “Taliban Losses No Sure Gains for Pakistanis,” New York Times

PCO to Information Commissioner: *blink*

By kadyomalley - Saturday, June 27, 2009 at 9:14 AM - 4 Comments

Just as ITQ predicted, it turns out that the most effective way to convince the government to comply with current access laws is to publicly announce your plans to launch a daring daylight document raid on Langevin Block.

From today’s Toronto Star:

Privy Council officials have ended months of stonewalling and handed over documents requested by the federal information watchdog.

Yesterday’s disclosure of files came only after Information Commissioner Robert Marleau threatened to have his staff enter the Privy Council offices and seize the paperwork themselves.

Privy Council staff delivered some documents yesterday, the deadline set by Marleau, and promised to deliver the rest soon.

“(Privy Council Office) has already sent several packages of the requested files,” Privy Council spokesperson Jeffrey Chapman said in an email yesterday. “We have also sent a proposed action plan to the Office of the Information Commissioner outlining when we will be able to send the working and final record sets to their office.”

There, now. That wasn’t so hard, was it, PCO? To celebrate this — dare we call it a new spirit of cooperation? — ITQ won’t grumble too much over the lost liveblogging opportunity. Well, not loudly, anyway.

L.A. Times: Second autopsy on Jackson

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 26, 2009 at 11:49 PM - 0 Comments

The L.A. Times is reporting that the Jackson family hired a private pathologist to perform a second autopsy on Michael Jackson’s body in the hopes of finding out his cause of death faster. The L.A. County coroner’s office performed the first autopsy on Friday. And while it ruled out foul play, the coroner announced that more tests were required to determine the “cause and manner of death.”

Meanwhile, Dr. Conrad Murray, who was with Jackson at his home when he stopped breathing, spoke to police for three hours on Saturday. A source close to the investigation told the L.A. Times that while the doctor — who authorities stress is not a suspect — was “cooperative,” the interview provided little in terms of evidence as to why Jackson went into cardiac arrest.

L.A. Times (autopsy)

L.A. Times (doctor)

It's Garry Shandling On DVD!

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, June 26, 2009 at 6:07 PM - 4 Comments

Wonderful news, even better that the whole show will be coming out as one complete-series set. (It’ll be expensive, but I doubt the whole series would come out if they released only one season.) It’s Garry Shandling’s Show was a variation on an older type of television and radio program, what somebody called the “I Me Mine” format — a show about somebody starring in a show. In Garry Shandling, done before a live audience, he played himself, and — like Jack Benny and Burns & Allen and the other old shows that influenced it — it was both a situation comedy and a show about situation comedy.

The approach of this show (and its template for how to bring a stand-up comedy act into the world of sitcoms) would influence Seinfeld a few years later, but without the fourth-wall-breaking. I think I prefer it to his more famous The Larry Sanders Show, though that deserves to have a complete DVD release too.

Doctor's car impounded

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 26, 2009 at 5:31 PM - 0 Comments

With some speculating that Michael Jackson may have overdosed on the painkiller Demerol, police have turned their attention to his personal doctor. Though authorities stressed he’s not under criminal investigation, Dr. Conrad Robert Murray, who was with Jackson when he stopped breathing in his home, spoke briefly with police and had his car impounded. “The car might contain medications or other evidence that could assist the coroner,” said a police spokesperson. A friend of the Jackson family, Brian Oxman, gave several interviews on Thursday and said drugs may have contributed to the former pop star’s death. The King of Pop was reportedly addicted to painkillers. A toxicology report will confirm what chemicals were in Jackson’s system, but it could take six to eight weeks for results to be ready.

New York Times

This is huge

By Paul Wells - Friday, June 26, 2009 at 4:10 PM - 3 Comments

In a move that should be profoundly chastening to the current management of the Village Voice (The what? Precisely.), the paper has loaded up its archive of significant articles on Michael Jackson. It’s a humbling reminder of a time, not long distant but gone forever, when the Voice led the American conversation on just about every significant issue, pop trend, cultural debate or lurid sideshow. Our intrepid researcher found this because I was looking for the Stanley Crouch article. But there’s Christgau, Greg Tate, Guy Trebay… well, for a long time right into the ’90s, Thursdays were really important to me because there were a few places in Montreal where I could get my hands on the Voice.

"I could listen to that song all day!"

By John Geddes - Friday, June 26, 2009 at 3:27 PM - 0 Comments

Driving a twisty Ontario two-lane highway with my then nine-year-old daughter in the back seat a couple of years ago, I put on a new Motown best-of CD to pass the time. A few of those old songs went by without eliciting any comment. But after “I Want You Back,” she piped up, “Can I hear that one again?” “You like it?” “I could listen to that song all day!”

Meanwhile, back in courtroom 36 … the Larry O'Brien Show will go on!

By kadyomalley - Friday, June 26, 2009 at 3:26 PM - 2 Comments

That is, unless Team Larry’s lawyers have another plot twist in store for fans of Ottawa’s smash hit municapolitical reality show thriller:

Mayor Larry O’Brien’s criminal trial will continue, after Justice Douglas Cunningham ruled Friday afternoon that it would be against the law to offer a political opponent a job in exchange for dropping out of an election campaign.

ITQ will be back on liveblogging duty when/if the trial resumes on July 6. In the meantime, follow all the action via Hot Room Colleague McGregor’s indispensible twitterfeed.

What's been your reaction to Michael Jackson's death?

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 26, 2009 at 2:42 PM - 24 Comments

Courtesans gone wild in 'Cheri' and 'The Girlfriend Experience'

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, June 26, 2009 at 2:17 PM - 1 Comment

Michelle Pfeiffer and Rupert Friend in 'Chéri'

This weekend offers a choice between two beguiling films about professional lovers who lose their bearings in a gilded age that’s on the verge of ruin—one stars a 51-year-old Oscar-nominated screen siren, the other a 21-year-old hard-core porn star. In Chéri, Michelle Pfeiffer plays an aging courtesan who falls in love with a young man half her age amid the lavish friperie of La Belle Epoque in Paris. In The Girlfriend Experience , Sasha Grey makes her mainstream film debut as a high-priced Manhattan call girl servicing anxious businessmen in the early months of the current recession. Both characters are cool, calculating beauties who treat sex as liquid currency, and get into trouble when they break their cardinal rule of remaining emotionally uninvolved. Chéri is a baroquely scripted adaptation of two Colette novels, adapted by director Stephen Frears and playwright Christopher Hampton, the team behind Dangerous Liasons. The Girlfriend Experience features a cast of non-actors bluffing their way through improvised dialogue under the crafty direction of Steven Soderbergh essaying Jean-Luc Godard-lite. But both are slender, observational narratives, melancholic comedies of manners that view the world’s moral bankruptcy through a needlepoint scrim of taste and fashion. Between Pfeiffer and Grey, of course, there’s no question as to who is the better actress. No contest.  But by merely staying afloat as Soderbergh’s lead, while sustaining a vacant intrigue, Grey gives the more startling performance. Pfeiffer is immensely watchable, and Chéri offers all the idle pleasures of a well-decorated period confection, but The Girlfriend Experience is the better, and more interesting, film. Continue…

Studio cuts scene featuring LaToya from Brüno

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 26, 2009 at 2:10 PM - 0 Comments

The studio behind Sacha Baron Cohen’s Brüno has made a last-minute edit to the film to cut out a scene featuring Michael Jackson’s sister, LaToya. The deleted scene showed Cohen (as Brüno) looking for the pop star’s phone number on LaToya’s phone and reading out a number purportedly belonging to Jackson. Universal Studios has said the decision was made “out of respect for Jackson’s family.”

The Guardian

'They did not anticipate you'

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, June 26, 2009 at 2:06 PM - 3 Comments

Michael Ignatieff addresses a vigil for Iran in Vancouver.

“The Iranian regime did not anticipate you,” he told the last of a series of 10 nightly vigils at the Vancouver Art Gallery aimed at raising awareness of the violence in Iran and calling for a return to a fair and democratic electoral process in that country.

“They thought they could suppress democratic rights and bully, beat and intimidate the people of Iran and the world would not care, the world would not watch,” Ignatieff told the cheering crowd. “They did not anticipate you. I’m proud of Canadians who understand that when others cannot stand up we must stand up for them, and when they cannot speak we have to speak for them.”

What about the children?

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 26, 2009 at 1:38 PM - 0 Comments

Stacy Brown, co-author of Michael Jackson Behind the Mask, and an old family friend, says that Michael Jackson “always said he wants Grace, the nanny, to have them if something happened to him.” Grace Rwaramba, 42, has been involved with the Jackson family for two decades first working as an office assistant and in later years serving as nanny and Jackson’s personal assistant. In 2006, there were marriage rumors floating between Rwaramba and Jackson. The two eldest children, Prince Michael Jr. 12, and Paris Katherine, 11, were born to Debbie Rowe, a nurse in Jackson’s dermatological office. Rowe has not yet claimed the children. The third child, Prince Michael II, was born to an unknown mother.

The Obama Effect on Canada

By John Parisella - Friday, June 26, 2009 at 1:37 PM - 11 Comments

With national holiday season upon us on both sides of the border, it is a good time to pause and consider whether Barack Obama has had a positive effect on Canada. Last week, Maclean’s Washington correspondent Luiza Ch.Savage wrote a very thoughtful article arguing “Barack Obama is bad for Canada.” The piece was far more balanced than the title suggests, but it raised some legitimate points about Obama’s economic ambitions with respect to free trade, global warming, and energy. She could have added border security for good measure. At first glance, and based on its national interests, Canada has grounds for worry. Yet polls suggest Canadians like Obama more than they do Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Could the Obama effect and his popularity be making us blind to potential threats to our country’s economy and overall interests?

Continue…

Week in Pictures: June 19th – June 25th, 2009

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 26, 2009 at 1:02 PM - 0 Comments

NDP sizzle

By Mitchel Raphael - Friday, June 26, 2009 at 12:58 PM - 14 Comments

The NDP party held its year-end BBQ in the courtyard of East Block. Here is leader Jack Layton.

Edmonton NDP MP Linda Duncan.

Continue…

TMZ: Family worried that Jackson’s final dose of Demerol was ‘too much’

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 26, 2009 at 12:47 PM - 0 Comments

Police in Los Angeles are reportedly trying to find a doctor who is said to have injected Michael Jackson with Demerol, a painkiller similar to Morphine, before the pop star died of cardiac arrest. According to TMZ, a Jackson family member said the pop star received a daily shot of Demerol and family members were worried the final dose may have been “too much.” Reports suggest Jackson had developed an increasing dependence on painkillers in the lead-up to his comeback tour. The Jackson family’s lawyer, Brian Oxman, told reporters he had been “very critical of the use of pain medications” in the past. Oxman traced Jackson’s use of painkillers back to injuries suffered several years ago, most notably the ill-fated Pepsi commercial shoot during which Jackson’s hair caught fire. Jackson used them “to treat actual pains he’s had,” Oxman said, “but the use of these medications I felt had become life threatening.”

TMZ

The Sun

Cheap tricks

By Bruce Parkinson, Takeoffeh.com - Friday, June 26, 2009 at 12:29 PM - 1 Comment

A common misconception among travellers is that buying “direct from the manufacturer” is cheaper. It’s not always true when it comes to hard goods, and it’s definitely not always the case in the travel business.

Shoppers should recognize – and often don’t – that for the vast majority of travel product sold in Canada, it is the supplier that sets the pricing, not travel agents, and in most cases you’ll find they offer identical rates. Agents don’t mark up prices and consumers get the benefit of agent expertise. Continue…