Obama regrets his choice of words

By macleans.ca - Friday, July 24, 2009 at 5:15 PM - 2 Comments

At Friday’s White House briefing, President Barack Obama sought to clear up the controversy over remarks he made regarding the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. Obama said that he had not intended to malign Cambridge police when he said they “acted stupidly.” “I could have calibrated those words differently,” says Obama, who had called Sgt. James Crowley earlier in the day. During that conversation, Obama said, they talked about Crowley and Gates joining him at the White House for a beer.

New York Times

New York Times — The Caucus

'Harper produces feelings that run hot for about 30 per cent … but produce less passion with the other 70 per cent

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, July 24, 2009 at 4:59 PM - 16 Comments

Bruce Anderson completes his contemplation with similar advice for the Prime Minister.

If he presides over an all out attack on the personality of Mr. Ignatieff, he calcifies his reputation as a partisan first and to the bitter end. Alternatively, he could try to rebrand himself, an effort which started out well in the last campaign. But the problem with this idea is that it takes longer than 40 days, often doesn’t work, and exposes you to some unique risks. Our society’s fleeting attention mean personality campaigns are becoming more risky than ever, with the prospect of victory or loss turning on a single phrase, photograph, musing, or indulgence.

The best approach for Mr. Harper to break through his ceiling would also be to put some larger ideas on the table. He needs a new, better way to show centrist, female and urban voters that his agenda is truly theirs, that if they reward him with a larger mandate, he will not use it to pursue his partisanship, or to try to impose the kind of right of centre ideas that most of them don’t want. His opportunity is to define a next-generation centrist agenda for Canada.

Is it possible to both condemn and condone?

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, July 24, 2009 at 4:45 PM - 6 Comments

Canwest’s Randy Boswell looks at the government’s policy on capital punishment abroad, specifically now its response to a United Nations review panel’s recommendation that Canada reconsider its qualified support for clemency. From Canada’s response.

Canada does not accept recommendation 30. The Government of Canada continues to consider whether to seek clemency for Canadians facing the death penalty abroad as these cases arise. Canadian citizens detained abroad continue to receive consular assistance.

According to a previous Canwest report, Rob Nicholson, now the Justice Minister, was among those MPs who voted for the reintroduction of the death penalty in 1987. The vote failed by a count of 148-127.

During debate in the House last year, Nicholson’s parliamentary secretary, Rob Moore, referenced that vote as so. Continue…

America and race in the Obama age

By John Parisella - Friday, July 24, 2009 at 4:40 PM - 51 Comments

In what should have been a press conference on the status of his healthcare reform package, Barack Obama strayed from his usual habit of staying on message and waded in on the controversy surrounding renowned Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and his arrest by the Cambridge, Massachusetts, police outside his own home last week. No one was surprised that the question came up in the hour-long media conference and the president evidently had a point of view. Obama’s statement that the police acted “stupidly” in handcuffing the professor, a 57 year old man with a cane, has done much more than anything else to give the story legs.

One week after Gates’s arrest, the facts related to the incident remain incomplete and ambiguous. The arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley, was originally portrayed as an overzealous policeman falling prey to racial profiling. But photos relating to the incident show the presence of an African-American policeman and quite possibly an Hispanic officer as well. And we have since found out that Crowley teaches a class at the police academy in how to avoid racial profiling. Crowley argues that the arrest was prompted by disorderly conduct and the fact the call was related to a possible burglary in progress. However, it is still not clear why Gates was handcuffed once it was established he was indeed at his home.

Continue…

Who said it?

By macleans.ca - Friday, July 24, 2009 at 4:24 PM - 0 Comments

Click to take the Quiz

Enjoy a 22-page Newsmakers Special in the latest issue of Maclean’s, on newsstands now.

Your next minister of finance

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, July 24, 2009 at 3:53 PM - 5 Comments

Celebrity contractor and owner of many sleeveless shirts, Mike Holmes, makes pitch for government tax credit and upstanding guys like him. To reinforce Holmes’ point, newspaper editors put headline “Go with the pro” above photo of Prime Minister famously struggling with a nail gun.

King Eddy's new suitors

By Paul Wells - Friday, July 24, 2009 at 3:12 PM - 8 Comments

They packed the Grand Theatre last night in Calgary for the public unveiling of the five proposals on the short list for the Cantos Music Foundation’s King Edward Hotel renaissance project. (Background is available in my earlier blog post here.) Finally the scale and the entirely salutary eccentricity of Cantos’s ambition is clear: they want to build a National Music Centre worthy of the name — in, over and around the skeleton of a tattered old blues dive in the heart of one of the country’s sketchiest neighbourhoods. But transformation is at the heart of this project. The East Village redevelopment will be one of the country’s most ambitious urban-design projects over the next few years. The Cantos National Music Centre is a keystone for the East Village project. And now Cantos has lured a handful of the world’s most audacious architects into a public battle for the right to kick off that transformation.

We have spectacular video of the five short-list proposals after the jump. The goal, in Cantos’s words, is to “honour the iconic King Eddy Hotel while creating over 80,000 square feet of spectacular space that will house an education research centre, museum, world-renowned collection of instruments and memorabilia, recording studios, a radio station, a seven-days-a-week live music venue and a suite of innovative and creative programs for people of all ages.” I really encourage you to watch these videos and see how much care and imagination is already going into this project.

Continue…

On third thought

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, July 24, 2009 at 3:03 PM - 5 Comments

Tony Clement, July 18. Sudbury is better off now than it was two and a half years ago when Vale Inco Ltd. bought the former Inco Ltd., says Canada’s Industry minister. If the Brazilian-owned Companhia Vale do Rio Doce hadn’t bought it, Inco would “not exist, it would have been closed down, it would have been liquidated if there wasn’t a buyer,” said Tony Clement in a telephone interview late Friday afternoon. ”There was going to be no buyer, there were going to be no jobs, there weren’t going to be any capital investments, there was going to be no employer,” said Clement. ”That was the Valley of Death that Sudbury faced.”

Tony Clement, July 22. Amid a sea of anger, federal Industry Minister Tony Clement stood his ground Tuesday over comments he made about the sale of Inco in Sudbury back in 2006 … ”I think it’s an accurate comment and I’m not sure what all the hubbub is about quite frankly,” Clement said in Calgary.

Tony Clement, July 24. Industry Minister Tony Clement says he made “a pretty bone-headed remark” to The Sudbury Star last week when he said Sudbury was facing becoming the “Valley of Death” if Vale Inco had not purchased Inco … ”Like every other human being, sometimes you say things” that weren’t what you meant to say, said the minister.

Week in Pictures: July 15th – July 22th, 2009

By macleans.ca - Friday, July 24, 2009 at 2:50 PM - 0 Comments

A family breaks its silence

By macleans.ca - Friday, July 24, 2009 at 2:49 PM - 1 Comment

The family of Australian photojournalist Nigel Brennan, who along with Red Deer, Alta. freelance writer Amanda Lindhout has been held hostage in war-torn Somalia since last August, has begun speaking out about the failure of the Australian and Canadian governments to secure his release. “We are just desperate to get some answers from our government,” a family spokeswoman told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. “What do they think is a reasonable time for an Australian citizen to be held captive?” The Lindhout family, meanwhile, remains silent—for good reason, say Australian government officials. “Our advice has always been not to go public, not to go to the media,” Australian foreign minister Stephen Smith told a reporter. Kevin Rudd, Australia’s prime minister, described the situation as “an exceptionally complex matter, and I think if you were fully apprised, confidentially, of the details of the case… you’d be fully seized of how difficult and complex a matter this is, given the part of the world in which he is located.”

Calgary Herald

Hey look: We found John Manley

By Paul Wells - Friday, July 24, 2009 at 2:10 PM - 10 Comments

From the latest print edition, my column, featuring the next head of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives. He looks oddly familiar. He says interesting things.

Walter Cronkite in conversation with Gertrude Stein

By macleans.ca - Friday, July 24, 2009 at 2:10 PM - 0 Comments

In the wake of his death, Walter Cronkite’s old student newspaper at the University of Texas in Austin, the Daily Texan, unearths a 1935 profile that an 18-year-old cub Cronkite bashed out after an interview with avant-garde American novelist Gertrude Stein. “Dressed in a mannish blouse, a tweed skirt, a peculiar but attractive vest affair, and comfortable looking shoes, Miss Stein appeared much more of the woman than do the pictures that currently circulate,” Cronkite writes. The piece, in its crispness and attention to detail, is as much a portrait of a budding reporter as it is of Stein, the aphoristic genius who’d beguiled the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso and—with her that evening as always—Alice B. Toklas, she of the cannabis brownies. “Miss Alice B. Toklas, Miss Stein’s traveling companion whose title is not ‘secretary,’ according to the author, was present,” writes the young Cronkite with a deft touch that belies his years. “Miss Stein attributed the depression to the psychology of the people. ‘The depression is more moral than actual,’ she observed. ‘No longer the people think they are depressed, the depression is over.’” And what, Cronkite asks, of the rumours of war from Europe? “Before I left, those who know in France didn’t believe that there would be a war,’ she answered. “But then war is just like anything else. When people get tired of peace they will have war and when they get tired of war they will have peace. Don’t you, when you have been good for a long time, want to be bad?”

The Daily Texan

What's eating Stephen Harper?

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, July 24, 2009 at 1:33 PM - 77 Comments

Gerald Caplan considers Sarah Palin, Mike Harris and Richard Nixon in an attempt to understand Stephen Harper and that outburst in Italy.

Why is Harper such a troubled man? Why are those who disagree with him enemies, not opponents? No one has a clue what’s eating him deep down. He’s not a small-town nobody as Mike Harris had been. He wasn’t an outsider in his own universe the way Richard Nixon was. He seems to have had a happy, typically middle-class upbringing. In fact, he grew up one of the luckiest human beings on earth, with privileges that only a fraction of humankind has ever enjoyed, and has remained lucky and privileged ever since. Yet he’s such an angry man.

Stephen Harper seems incapable of suppressing resentments that are unfathomable to the rest of us but that lead him to the most outrageous and self-destructive partisanship. His dismissal of socialists and separatists is just conservative boiler-plate. But his loathing of liberals/Liberals surpasses all understanding. No doubt he is a very smart man about some things. But for such a smart man he sure does some troubling things.

The last, dysfunctional days of the Bush era

By macleans.ca - Friday, July 24, 2009 at 1:25 PM - 3 Comments

Dick Cheney’s last days in the White House were devoted to one final task: convincing George W. Bush to pardon Cheney’s former chief of staff, Scooter Libby. Libby was convicted of obstructing an investigation into the leaking of a CIA agent’s name and Bush had already commuted his jail sentence, but the vice-president wanted a full pardon before the administration left office. “”We don’t want to leave anyone on the battlefield,” he reportedly argued. Cheney was apparently dogged, if unsuccessful, in his pursuit. “”The Vice President knew there was a line out there that he was getting very close to but couldn’t cross,” says a former senior official. “The President knew that he needed to help make sure that Cheney didn’t cross that line either.”

TIME

New way to mend heart

By macleans.ca - Friday, July 24, 2009 at 1:11 PM - 0 Comments

Experts have long believed the adult heart is incapable of repairing itself, since heart muscle cells stop dividing once they’re fully formed. Now, a U.S. team says they’ve found a way to coax cells to divide again, which could provide a way to regenerate healthy tissue. In a study performed on rats and mice, Boston-based researchers tested different molecules to spur cell division in heart cells. A growth factor called neuregulin1 (NRG1) was shown to speed up the process significantly: when injected into adult mice who’d suffered a heart attach, it promoted heart muscle repair and improved overall function of the organ. This could be used to treat heart attack patients, people with heart failure, and children with congenital heart defects, the BBC reports, as well as offering an alternative to stem cell therapy, which is still untested and has the risk of side effects. The next step will be testing the technique in pigs.

BBC News

The case against having kids

By Anne Kingston - Friday, July 24, 2009 at 12:20 PM - 654 Comments

Elaine Lui was 29 years old and had been married for a year when she and her husband, Jacek Szenowicz, decided that they didn’t want children. “Before that, we didn’t give it a lot of thought,” says the Vancouver-based eTalk reporter who writes the popular celebrity gossip blog LaineyGossip.com. “It was just an assumption, ‘You get married, you have kids.’ ” Front-line exposure to a close relative’s three young children and the work they required provided a wake-up call, Lui says. “That killed it for us. We just looked at each other and said, ‘We don’t want them.’ ”

In the ensuing six years, the couple has been barraged with reasons why they should change their minds, from “Your life will have no value if you don’t” to “You’ll be so lonely when you get old” to Lui’s favourite: “Don’t you want to know what your children would look like?” “Any baby we’d have would be of mixed race,” she says. “So everyone says, ‘Oh, it would be so gorgeous!’ ” She laughs. “And I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s really going to make me want to change my whole life.’ ” It’s a life the couple enjoys: they work together on her website (he handles the business side), golf together, engage in community volunteer work, and dote on their dog, Marcus. Continue…

Who's left to run New Jersey?

By macleans.ca - Friday, July 24, 2009 at 11:52 AM - 0 Comments

A massive sweep targeting an alleged kidney-trafficking and money laundering operation has netted the FBI a host of New Jersey politicians and officials, along with five New York-area rabbis. In all, federal investigators arrested 44 people, including three northern New Jersey mayors, two members of the New Jersey Legislature, the chief rabbi for the tight-knit Syrian Jewish community in the United States, and the chief rabbis of synagogues in Brooklyn and Deal, N.J. Also arrested was Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum, known as the “the kidney salesman” for his alleged predilection for convincing Israelis to sell him a kidney for $10,000, which he would then re-sell in the U.S. for $160,000. According to court documents, the raids are the outgrowth of an investigation into a money laundering operation in which people dealing in illegal goods would funnel their money through registered charities linked to the synagogues. Meanwhile, the public officials are charged with taking bribes.

Washington Post

19-year-old Canadian woman deported from Britain

By macleans.ca - Friday, July 24, 2009 at 11:36 AM - 2 Comments

A 19-year-old Canadian woman has been deported from Britain, where her husband lives, and forbidden from returning until she turns 21 because of immigration laws that were designed to protect South Asian women from forced marriages. Rochelle Wallis met her husband, Adam, two years ago when he was in Canada. She came to visit him in Britain in March, and the couple decided to wed. But sorting out the legalities took longer than expected after authorities lost their passport photos, and they weren’t officially married until a few weeks after Rochelle’s visa had expired. The UK Border Agency describes the couple’s forced separation as an “inconvenience.”

The Telegraph

Running against Karzai

By macleans.ca - Friday, July 24, 2009 at 11:35 AM - 0 Comments

President Hamid Karzai is often characterized as about as good a man to lead Afghanistan as can be expected. Burdened by old loyalties and a power network riddled by corruption, he knows what Western countries want to hear. He just seems unable to deliver it. Now, there is a viable alternative in the country’ election race: Abdullah Abdullah, an eye surgeon and former diplomat with a long history of freedom fighting in Afghanistan. Campaigning
on a package of reforms that would include reorganizing of government at the provincial level and breaking the national government’s reliance on support from warlords, Abdullah has offered hope that Afghanistan can move to a new chapter in its history, focused on unity rather than factionalism. It might be hopelessly idealistic. But it is a vision that Karzai—with little to show for his five years in power—can no longer offer with a straight face.

The New York Times

Swine flu and the hajj

By macleans.ca - Friday, July 24, 2009 at 11:34 AM - 0 Comments

Arab health ministers banned children, the elderly and those with chronic illnesses from attending the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia this year over fears the mass gathering could speed the spread of swine flu. In a meeting in Cairo that ended late Wednesday, the ministers, however, stopped short of calling for the cancellation of this year’s hajj—a duty for all able-bodied Muslims in their lifetime. The ritual attracts about three million people every year to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. The ban, which applies to adults over the age of 65 and children under 12, could affect a large number of people because many Muslims save up their whole lives to make the trip and others go to cleanse their souls before dying. The ministers hope that excluding those most vulnerable to swine flu will reduce the possibility of contagion during the hajj, which takes place in late November following peak flu season.

Associated Press

Shanghai departs from infamous one-child policy

By macleans.ca - Friday, July 24, 2009 at 11:33 AM - 0 Comments

What happens when an exploding population is prohibited from having more than one child? Sooner or later, there will be a lot of old people, and too few young people to care for them. That’s the situation in Shanghai, where for the first time in decades officials are actively encouraging eligible couples to have two children in a bid to offset the impending resource-drain of the city’s aging population. Despite China’s infamous one-child policy, urban couples who are both only children and rural couples whose first child is a girl are allowed to have two kids.

Reuters

UPDATED: First, they came for that Galloway fellow …

By kadyomalley - Friday, July 24, 2009 at 11:22 AM - 108 Comments

.. and now this:

KEENE, NH (July 24, 2009) – Jason Talley and Pete Eyre of the Motorhome Diaries were denied entry into Canada while attempting to cross the border yesterday. Border officials cited an incident that occurred in Mississippi (in May 2009) where the crew was arrested and detained without cause.

The Motorhome Diaries is the story of two friends – Jason and Pete – who took to the road in the spring of 2009 to search for freedom in the Americas, chronicling their adventures as they travel throughout the continent. Both are united by one goal – the desire to increase individual freedom and decrease the influence of government in their lives.

The original itinerary included visits to Montreal, Windsor, and Toronto to meet with liberty-minded Canadians and share their message of peace and freedom.

During the crew’s attempted border entry, border agents and the K-9 patrol searched their recreational vehicle. They were filming as they neared the checkpoint, but border agents deleted the video and informed them that if they continued to film, record, or take pictures they would be arrested. Various items were confiscated from the vehicle, including computers and literature.

Border agents justified the seizure by claiming they were looking for “pornography or heinous propaganda.” When asked for a definition of “heinous propaganda” or the applicable statute, the crew was told it was available online. However, agents could not produce the statue. [...]

Well, technically, I guess in this case, “they” — the Canada Border Service Agency, in this case — didn’t exactly come for the Motorhome Diarists, since they’re the ones who showed up at the border. But other than that — well, that, and the absence of any outburst of self-backpattery by certain citizenship and immigration ministers for having saved Canadians from the scourge of dangerous speech —  this has an eerily Gallowayesque feel to it and seems — from what ITQ can see, at least — similarly senseless.

Continue…

Montreal couple is accused of murdering three daughters

By macleans.ca - Friday, July 24, 2009 at 10:27 AM - 0 Comments

Mohammad Shafia, 56, his wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 39, and their eldest son, Hamed Shafia, 18, all face first-degree murder charges after the bodies of three of the couple’s daughters and Shafia’s first wife, were discovered in a car submerged in the Rideau Canal. Police allege that the couple began planning the murders as far back as May 1, weeks before the family traveled to Niagara Falls, Ont. The deaths occurred on the family’s return trip to Montreal. An anonymous person claiming to be a relative of the family wrote a letter to the Montreal Gazette, claiming that Shafia was “disgraced” by his daughters’ behavior and that he wanted his first wife to return to Afghanistan, where he is originally from. The family car was discovered in the Rideau Canal on June 30, the same day Shafia reported his car missing, along with his three daughters and his first wife, who he then described as his cousin. All three suspects were arrested in Montreal on Wednesday; they face four counts each of first-degree murder and four counts of conspiracy to commit murder. As of Friday, Kingston police refused to reveal how the four victims died.

Ottawa Citizen

Via Rail on strike

By macleans.ca - Friday, July 24, 2009 at 10:26 AM - 1 Comment

Via Rail’s engineers and yardmasters are on strike, creating a near-complete shutdown of national passenger rail service in Canada. Talks between the union and Via broke down early Friday morning, quashing any hopes of an agreement being reached before the noon deadline. The strike is expected to have a ripple affect across business, tourism and travel industries, as the 11,000 passengers Via would normally carry everyday seek alternate arrangements. The company is not offering any form of replacement transportation, but will give a refund for unused tickets.

CBC