Canadian soldier who killed a comrade to be sentenced

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 11:08 AM - 0 Comments

A 24-year-old Nova Scotia soldier who shot and killed his tent mate in Afghanistan two years ago is expected to be sentenced on Tuesday. In July, Cpl. Matthew Wilcox was convicted on charges of negligent performance of duty and criminal negligence causing the death of fellow soldier Cpl. Kevin Megeney. During his trial in Sydney, Wilcox testified that he heard a gun being drawn behind him and fired in self-defense, only to realize afterward that he had shot his colleague. The prosecution, on the other hand, says the death resulted from a game gone awry. According to retired colonel Michael Drapeau, who operates a legal practice in Ottawa, a prison term for Wilcox is unlikely. “He could face dismissal or just dismissal with disgrace,” he says. George Megeney, Kevin Megeney’s uncle, is pushing for a four year sentenced—the minimum a civilian would face if convicted of the same crime.

CBC News

Sarah Palin done writing ’dem words

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 11:06 AM - 21 Comments

Sarah Palin’s much-anticipated memoir—Going Rogue: An American Life—was supposed to be done next spring. But since resigning from her post as Alaska governor, the failed vice-presidential candidate has been typing so fast the release date was bumped up to next month. Her publisher, Jonathan Burham, is understandably thrilled. “Governor Palin has been unbelievably conscientious and hands-on at every stage, investing herself deeply and passionately in this project,” he says. “It’s her words, her life, and it’s all there in full and fascinating detail.” The first press run will be a whopping 1.5 million copies. No word yet on whether John McCain has already placed his order.

CBS News

A new brew

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 11:04 AM - 5 Comments

Starbucks, the coffee giant best known for its $4 lattes, is going down market… way down market. This week, it started offering the lowliest form of java—instant coffee. The company sees a huge opportunity in the cheap drink, and a chance to reverse falling revenues. The instant coffee market is worth US$21 billion worldwide. Starbucks will sell its instant drink under the name Via. It will come in three packs for US$2.95 and 12 packs for US$9.95. The price point should appeal to consumers who’ve been switching to cheaper types of coffee drinks the recession. But the challenge will be whether instant coffee will appeal at all to the average Starbuck’s customer. The company says that Via exceeded expectations in test runs in the U.S. and London.

Associated Press

Diablo Cody now in sync

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 10:56 AM - 0 Comments

I just learned that, because of an upload glitch, the audio fell out of sync in my video interview with screenwriter Diablo Cody. I’ve now fixed it, and feel deserves a second chance. So here it is again, in its corrected form. I talked to the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Juno at TIFF for the premiere of Jennifer’s Body. She’s wonderfully candid as she talks about teenage sex, Megan Fox, Amanda Seyfried, Steven Spielberg, writer’s block, roller coasters and tattoos, among other things.

Girl dies hours after receiving HPV vaccine

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 10:52 AM - 2 Comments

A 14-year-old UK girl died shortly after being given a cervical cancer vaccine on Monday. Though health officials are still waiting for post-mortem tests that will confirm the exact cause of Natalie Morton’s death, some parents are already reconsidering plans to vaccinate their daughters. Dr. David Elliman, a community pediatrics consultant at Great Ormond Street Hospital, says they may be jumping to conclusions. “At this stage we don’t know what was the tragic cause of this child’s death, so whether or not it’s linked [to the vaccine] we cannot say.” Elliman contends that “a severe allergic reaction or most likely a coincidence” could have killed Morton instead of an unsafe dose of the vaccine. Still, the vaccine batch used on the girl has been placed into quarantine. And Britain’s vaccine program—which vaccinates teenage girls at schools across the country—has been put on hold in Morton’s area of Coventry. So far, there have been 4,657 suspected negative reactions to Cervarix, the vaccine used on Morton, from more than 1.4 million doses.

BBC

Fluoride: great public health victory or toxic waste?

By Katie Engelhart and Cathy Gulli - Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 10:45 AM - 44 Comments

When it comes to fluoride in his community’s water, the mayor of Lambton Shores, Ont., Gord Minielly, has one thing to say: “Better out than in.” But he’s not the only one calling the shots. On the other side of the debate is Mike Bradley, mayor of nearby Sarnia, who is pro-fluoridation. The two communities share a water supply—which is fluoridated. And that’s where things get messy. “It’s been an issue every year since it was put in in the ’60s,” Bradley says.

Fluoride debates are old hat here. Sarnia was involved in Canada’s first-ever water fluoridation experiment. In 1945, the city paired with Brantford, Ont., to study the effects of adding fluoride to drinking water. Sarnia was the non-fluoridated control city for 11 years. When Brantford’s tooth decay rates dropped, Sarnia began fluoridating too. Today, Bradley says it’s time to “put it to the public”—to settle the issue with a referendum on water fluoridation, which would coincide with municipal elections in 2010. He’s not the only civic leader making that call. Continue…

Gay man launches Charter challenge against blood-donor screening

By Philippe Gohier - Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 10:38 AM - 10 Comments

Since the Krever inquiry, there has been general agreement that the personal questions asked by Canadian Blood Services are a reasonable limitation on our Charter rights. The idea is to limit the health risk posed to blood recipients. But Kyle Freeman, a Thornhill, Ont. man, has called this assumption into question by suing the agency on the grounds that its questionnaire is unjustified and discriminatory. The suit arose after Freeman lied on the part of his questionnaire that asks whether he’d had sex with even a single man since 1977 (he had). He later emailed the agency to tell them as much, and now maintains he’d recently tested negative for blood-born diseases like HIV. “I felt the benefit of giving blood would outweigh the political position of Blood Services,” he said.

Ottawa Citizen

Throw the Liberals from the train

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 10:22 AM - 11 Comments

Transport Minister John Baird told CTV’s Question Period on Sunday that the prime minister would travel to Saint John to update Canadians on the progress of his government’s stimulus program because he wants to talk to “real people right across the country.” On Monday, local Liberals found out that meant everyone but them. According to reports, opposition politicians, including Moncton MP Brian Murphy and New Brunswick Liberal MLAs Abel LeBlanc and Stuart Jamieson, the latter of whom was designated by the provincial Liberal government as its official representative at the event, weren’t allowed into the Irving-owned machine yard to hear the PM speak. “It certainly doesn’t bode well for good relations when you get treated like that,” Jamieson told the Telegraph Journal. But Conservative MP Rodney Weston, who won the Saint John riding against Liberal incumbent Paul Zed last October in one of the closest races in the country, insists that it was simply a question of security. “If people wanted to attend, they had to be on a list.”

Telegraph-Journal
Times Transcript

Probiotics: Healthy, or just hype?

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 10:15 AM - 2 Comments

Probiotics are live bacteria that help restore the balance of microorganisms in the intestine, boosting the immune system to fight germs. But are probiotic products really worth the expense? Yes and no, the New York Times reports. There are thousands of different probiotics, yet only some have proven effective; what’s more, no standard labelling requirement exists, so the word “probiotic” on a product doesn’t mean much. Different species of bacteria provide different results. “It’s a huge problem for the consumer to try to make heads or tails of whether the products that are out there really work,” Dr. Shira Doron, an assistant professor of medicine at Tufts, told the newspaper. Lactobacillus, for example, can be found in many products. But “Lactobacillus is just the bacterium,” said Gregor Reid, director of the Canadian Research and Development Center for Probiotics. “To say a product contains Lactobacillus is like saying you’re bringing George Clooney to a party. It may be the actor, or it may be an 85-year-old guy from Atlanta who just happens to be named George Clooney. With probiotics, there are strain-to-strain differences.” This month, Dannon, one of the biggest sellers of probiotic yogurts, settled a class-action lawsuit over Activia and DanActive yogurt products, which are meant to help regulate digestion and stimulate the immune system. As part of the $35 million settlement, Dannon will add the scientific names of its probiotic strains to packages. The company stands by its product claims.

New York Times

Jumped v. pushed

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 10:08 AM - 13 Comments

Gordon Landon says he was politely asked to go away.

The York regional councillor says he complied with a request from the Conservative party to step aside, adding he is not used to people telling him what to say and think … As a regional councillor from Markham, Landon, 61, is used to being independent and speaking his mind, “so it’s hard for me to bow to a lot of structure and having everything approved by Ottawa,” he said.

… Meanwhile, Landon said he stands by what he said about the lack of funding for the medical devices centre but wishes he had said it differently. ”I didn’t follow Conservative policy in terms of getting permission to go on that TV show and I made a comment on that show that was an embarrassment to some members of the Conservative party.”

Elsewhere, the Parliamentary Budget Officer says he’s being politely rebuffed in his attempts to scrutinize government stimulus spending.

Attention, fellow obsessive committee watchers: Don't panic.

By kadyomalley - Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 9:47 AM - 27 Comments

Despite its current appearance, the main committee website has not, in fact, been hijacked by a fringe group of malicious political geek hackers looking to unleash parliamentary chaos by cancelling scheduled meetings with wild abandon. (Although come to think of it, that would actually be pretty cool.)

Continue…

The long tail, curtailed?

By Andrew Potter - Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 9:39 AM - 5 Comments

Chris Anderson’s Long Tail thesis, it appears, is bunk. The basic problem is that the “big head of novelty” is growing so fast that there’s no serious market in long-dormant long tail items:

If we do a search on those sites and narrow it down to the last 24 hours; we get a enormous amount of new URLs:

- 45,800 for the New York Times (out of 12m total URLs)

• 37,400 for The Guardian (out of 20m)
• 21,900 for Le Monde (out of 1.05m)
• 69,300 for Aftonbladet.se — #1 site in Sweden — (out of 1.2m)

Of course, this includes all types of URLs, from new articles to the smallest items added (comments, blogs entries, graphs, automatically generated stuff…) But it has been estimated that just one week of the New York Times is equivalent to the amount of information an 18th Century human being would absorb during his/her entire life.

link

Ruining Quebec from Toronto

By Andrew Potter - Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 9:19 AM - 21 Comments

The Globe and Mail’s package today on Ignatieff, Coderre, and the “Toronto Team” is great. The bios of Davey, Apps, Fairbrother, and Rossi are gems. How mean is this?:

Alf Apps, 52, Liberal party president

A Toronto lawyer and businessman, Alf Apps has had his hand in Liberal causes – and internal spats – since the days of John Turner. He helped to recruit Paul Martin into politics, and was an early champion of Michael Ignatieff, becoming national party president after Mr. Ignatieff assumed the leadership. Mr. Apps is considered partly responsible for the imbroglio over the riding of Outremont.

Peace yes, truce no

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 1:23 AM - 3 Comments

The commander-in-chief comments on the Olympics and the war in Afghanistan.

Shortly after signing on as official patron of the Olympic Truce for the 2010 Winter Games, Governor-General Michaëlle Jean rejected a suggestion Monday that a truce be imposed on Canadian military action in Afghanistan for the 17 days of the Olympics. ”I think we must build peace in Afghanistan, and that’s what our soldiers are trying so hard to achieve,” Ms. Jean told reporters…

Canadian troops are “working so hard” to help build a civil society in the worn-torn, mountainous country, Ms. Jean added before being whisked away by her team of handlers.

In her earlier remarks to the truce forum, the Governor-General recalled joining Canadian soldiers in an emotional chorus of John Lennon’s anti-war anthem, Give Peace a Chance. ”[There were] hundreds of voices echoing through the dark Kandahar night … and it was powerful, because I knew the soldiers were risking their lives every day … to support the aspirations of the population to live in a secure place, to live in peace,” Ms. Jean said.

The Governor General’s position seems to be in keeping with that of the Vancouver Olympic organizing committee and, for that matter, the International Olympic Committee’s own description of the modern Olympic truce.

Well that was totally unexpected

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 12:21 AM - 29 Comments

Gordon Landon is apparently no longer the Conservative candidate for Markham-Unionville.

Scenes From My Low Expectations

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, September 28, 2009 at 11:43 PM - 1 Comment

Maybe it’s because I had low expectations or because it was an island in a sea of Seth MacFarlane, but I actually enjoyed the Simpsons season premiere quite a lot. I didn’t know until afterward that it was written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (you know how it is, sometimes you turn away in the precise moment when they’re showing the writing credit), but I did feel like there was something a little different about the “voice” of this episode from most recent episodes. That’s not to say that they brought anything terribly original to the table, and certainly not to presume to guess how much of their work actually remained in the final version, but the episode was short on horrendous puns and self-referentiality, had a story that made sense, and even a few “screw the audience” jokes that felt like they could have come out of season 6 (the scene that seems to be building to a studio buying Comic Book Guy’s creation, only to reveal that another studio already bought it weeks ago).

That’s damning with faint praise, but The Simpsons is never going to produce episodes as great as its best seasons in the ’90s; what we can hope now is that it will produce scripts that don’t fall apart halfway through. The show has enough going for it that if it has a decent script, it can produce an entertaining episode. Again, I think that part of the rapturous critical reaction to the Simpsons movie — a reaction that now seems overblown — was simply relief at encountering an entire Simpsons script without any B-quality material. The puns and other corny devices that had plagued the show were mostly absent in the movie; it didn’t compare (even the quality of animation, believe it or not) with the best TV episodes,  but it felt like it was subject to quality control. The show has cut back a bit on the cheap jokes since then, but most episodes still leave me with the feeling that a terrible joke could come at any moment and, worse, that if there is a terrible joke, there won’t be a good one along in a few seconds to make up for it. So while I will not claim that this new episode was great, it did make me relax and feel like I was in for a string of competently-crafted jokes. That seems like a lot nowadays.

Games outside the House

By Mitchel Raphael - Monday, September 28, 2009 at 10:10 PM - 9 Comments

NDP MP Peter Stoffer takes a chess break on the Hill.

The Commons: Economic porn

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, September 28, 2009 at 8:37 PM - 38 Comments

The Scene. You’ll forgive the Prime Minister if he’s a bit shy, if he’s just not that interested in the traditional trappings of leading your very own G8 nation.

So it was last week, with the best and worst of the international community gathering in New York, that Stephen Harper could stomach but one highfalutin dinner before jetting back home for a Tim Hortons run. And so it was today, with the business of Parliament resuming beneath the stained glass and chandeliers of the House of Commons, that Mr. Harper jetted off to furthest New Brunswick, where, as luck would have it, a lectern had been set up in front of an idle locomotive and a representative sample of Canadian blue collars.

There the Prime Minister found a crowd eager to hear him explain how well he was handling this economic unpleasantness and applaud his assurances thereof. Now, sure, here you may argue that the Prime Minister needn’t go to New Brunswick to find individuals willing to applaud his pronouncements on cue. Indeed, you might point out, the Canadian public pays something in the order of $157,000 to each of 142 individuals whose job it is to stand every so often in the House of Commons and do exactly that.

But then you would be ignoring the fact that those 142 individuals do not constitute even a majority of members of that august chamber. And the rest constitute an unruly collection of scoundrels and skeptics, many on the record as not entirely believing in the Prime Minister’s propensity for fulsomeness.

“The government reports to the people of Canada,” the Prime Minister’s press secretary observed over the weekend. And let it never again be said that the individuals who constitute this place in any way represent such Canadians. Continue…

Algebra

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, September 28, 2009 at 6:20 PM - 38 Comments

Speaking to reporters after QP, the Transport Minister tries to explain what his government is saying when it says 90%.

Hon. John Baird: I’ll give you an example. We don’t – you know, for example, the equity of the Home Renovation Tax Credit.  Has the money been paid out?  No, but people right across the country are keeping their receipts for tax time.  So while no money has gone out, Canadians have got the green light to go and spend money on infrastructure.  We pay our invoices within 30 days.  On the tax measures, which when we talk about 90 percent done we’re not talking about exclusively infrastructure.  We’re talking about the tax measures.  We’re talking about the credit facilities that the Minister has put in.  We’re not exclusively talking about even the infrastructure stimulus with the provinces and municipalities.  We’re talking about the knowledge infrastructure.  I made an announcement in Kingston with respect to the Lasalle Causeway.  The project’s starting this week.  Obviously is all the money spent on the first day?  No, you spend it as you go along, day by day.  Things are really going like a snowball around the country and they’re happening.

Question: What’s the word when you say hit the rubber?  What does it mean?

Hon. John Baird: When monies begin to be spent.

Question: Money that came out – so you’re saying that 90 percent of the money came out —

Hon. John Baird: No.  If you – I’d encourage you to read the report because the 90 percent number is for the Economic Action Plan, not exclusively stimulus. Continue…

Greeners on the Hill

By Mitchel Raphael - Monday, September 28, 2009 at 5:28 PM - 15 Comments

Green activists brought bikes on Parliament Hill to protest and demand more action on the environment.

Continue…

If Jack Layton were a strategist…

By Paul Wells - Monday, September 28, 2009 at 4:47 PM - 99 Comments

…he’d vote in support of the Liberals’ non-confidence motion this week.

The Liberals are in perfect disarray. Layton will never have a better shot at harvesting a chunk of the Liberal vote.

But of course, he’s not thinking about that stuff, is he? He’s just so worried about the Canadian workers who need their EI.

Brevity is … wit: Liberal confidence motion REVEALED!

By kadyomalley - Monday, September 28, 2009 at 4:26 PM - 71 Comments

Hey, look, everybody! The Liberals have released the text of Thursday’s confidence motion! And — it’s exactly what we expected:

That this House has lost confidence in the government.

I’m not sure if there’s really anything more to say about that — except that, given recent (and, for that matter, not-so-recent) events, it was probably wise not to get too cute with the wordplay.

The Coderre Affair vs. The Stimulus Update

By kadyomalley - Monday, September 28, 2009 at 3:47 PM - 24 Comments

2:55:32 PM
Welcome back to the liveblog, where, after a brief QP-induced hiatus, ITQ has left her perch in the Hot Room for the crush of the Foyer, where reaction to the update, she still holds out hope, is about to pour forth. It’s a frenzy of activity here already; reporters circling the waiting mics like so many psychic vultures. There will be blood! We can smell it! Wait, no, that’s just the Coderre contingent.

3:00:54 PM
Hey, here’s Jack Layton!

Continue…

"I think more Quebecers are interested in what the Liberal Party of Canada represents now"

By Paul Wells - Monday, September 28, 2009 at 3:46 PM - 10 Comments

Jean-Marc Fournier, former Quebec provincial cabinet minister, explains (in French, to La Presse) why he was so excited to work for Michael Ignatieff.