Tiger attack in Germany

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 10:11 AM - 1 Comment

An animal trainer was attacked by three tigers at Hamburg’s Hagenbeck Zoo’s “dinner show” on Tuesday. Some 150 guests were tucking into their four-course meal when three of the five tigers in the show jumped the 28-year-old man who was putting them through their paces. They reportedly bit into his head and upper body, and he lost part of his left hand. Some other circus employees used hoses and fire extinguishers to push the big cats into a corner, and then got them back in their cage. Two doctors who happened to be in the audience tended to the badly injured man. The show’s director said it wasn’t a “malicious attack.” Police judged the incident a “workplace accident.”

Spiegel Online

Dmitry Medvedev: Russia's faux reformist

By Nancy Macdonald - Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 10:03 AM - 4 Comments

The first serious sign of a split within the Kremlin arose a week ago, when President Dmitry Medvedev fired a key aide, Mikhail Lesin. The media adviser and former minister became the most senior person to exit from the administration, fanning increasingly heated speculation that the president may be breaking away from his mentor and predecessor, prime minister and former president Vladimir Putin, with whom Lesin was closely linked.

The sacking of a Kremlin insider wouldn’t, on its own, have raised eyebrows. Lately, however, Medvedev has been going out of his way to distance himself from the harsher elements of the Putin era: its authoritarian politics, isolationist bent, and “seriously distorted” perception of human rights. He has bemoaned the “backwardness” of the governing party, United Russia, the country’s “shamefully low” competitiveness, and rampant corruption (currently, an estimated one-third of Russian gross domestic product goes to paying bribes). This fall, Medvedev, who is nearing the halfway point of his term, bundled these themes into “Forward, Russia!”, a manifesto that reads like a platform for a liberal reformer, leading to whispered musings about Mevedev the modernizer, the Obama of Russia.

It’s a convincing narrative—“until you look at the facts,” says London-based Russia-watcher Edward Lucas, author of The New Cold War. Under Medvedev, media has not become any freer, free speech has been increasingly stifled, and the number of murders and attacks on journalists and human-rights activists has actually increased. Indeed, “the discrepancy between Medvedev’s ideas of dynamicism and democratic transparency,” the Financial Times Deutschland wrote in an editorial last week, “are so far from reality as to sound grotesque.”

Continue…

Seeking a nation's forgiveness

By Chris Tenove - Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 10:02 AM - 5 Comments

When the Khmer Rouge forces were routed from Phnom Penh in January 1979, they left behind a ruined and vacant city. Following the odour of decomposing bodies, Cambodian and Vietnamese liberators discovered a high school surrounded by barbed wire fences. Inside they found 14 prisoners whose throats had been cut. Other rooms contained grisly evidence of torture: whips, lengths of chain, thousands of written confessions, photographs of beaten and terrified men and women. Scrawled across documents were orders from the prison’s commandant. On one interrogation record, he wrote, “beat until he tells everything.” Beside a list of names: “kill every last one.”

This was S-21 prison, and last week that commandant made a final appearance in court before a panel of crimson-robed judges, who will issue their verdict in early 2010. Kaing Guek Eav, known by his revolutionary name, “Duch,” is the first defendant at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), a United Nations-backed tribunal. His trial has captivated Cambodians. Broadcast live on television, it’s debated at dinner tables and on radio programs. Each day, hundreds of Cambodians travel to Phnom Penh to attend in person, many leaving their villages in the middle of the night for the long bus ride. “I want to go to the trial to see what an evil person looks like,” an elderly woman told me on the eve of her journey. “I want to see his real face.”

Since the trial began in March, Cambodians have heard chilling testimony about torture techniques and bizarre medical experiments. But they have also been profoundly challenged by Duch’s defence. Duch was not an evil man, his lawyers argue, but a flawed one. Experts have testified he is now capable of compassion and ready to be reintegrated into society. Duch himself has suggested something many Cambodians would have considered preposterous: that they forgive him. He set the tone of the trial from his first statement. “I am responsible for the crimes committed at S-21, especially the tortures and execution of the people there,” he declared on March 31. He apologized to the victims and their families, and to all survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime, before concluding, “I would like you to please leave an open window for me to seek forgiveness.” Continue…

First the HST, then pensions—Ignatieff's new game?

By John Geddes - Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 9:26 AM - 18 Comments

Patterns in politics are obviously more revealing than isolated actions. When Michael Ignatieff decided last week to throw Liberal support behind harmonizing provincial sales taxes in B.C. and Ontario with the federal GST, it was merely an interesting event. Combine that risky political move with yesterday’s proposal from Ignatieff on pension reform, however, and you’ve got the beginnings of something that deserves closer attention.
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The Mailbag: Tiger Woods, a pair of beavers, Michael Ignatieff's eyebrows

By Scott Feschuk - Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 7:25 AM - 39 Comments

Welcome to the Tuesday Mailbag on Wednesday, where we answer all the pressing questions of the day, save for the question of why I lied just now when everyone knows this column is in fact all about boob jokes and David Hasselhoff references.

Queries for future mailbags can be submitted in the comments below, sent to me via KITT or dispatched using electronic – or “magic” – mail at scott.feschuk@macleans.rogers.com. Next week’s mailbag will give priority to questions dealing with your most personal and intimate problems, including relationship queries and urgent medical advice. So staunch that bleeding and start typing.

Remember – there are no stupid questions, unless Helen Thomas somehow gets involved.

•

Dear Scott:

What would you do right now if you were Tiger Woods? – Dan222

Dan –

Right now? I’d duck. In fact, I’d probably spend most of my time around the house ducking. But when I’m not ducking – which wouldn’t be that often – here are some of the things I might do – duck! – if I were Tiger Woods:

1. Start doing porn. Sounds insane, right? But think about it. He’d get to have all the sex he wants, plus at this point porn stars are actually more highly regarded and respected than Tiger by society at large. Two birds, meet one stone. (That could also be the title of his first movie.)

2. Pay a guy to get rid of this whole so-called “Internet.” Shut ’er right down. Bury it in a landfill somewhere in Jersey. Damn thing is nothing but trouble.

3. Construct an alternate reality in which Continue…

Touching the face of God vs. punching him in the nose

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 6:26 AM - 6 Comments

I continue to be awestruck at Sir Richard Branson’s gift for hype. On Monday he rolled out Virgin Galactic’s “SpaceShipTwo”, dutifully described by Wired magazine as “the first commercial spacecraft” and “the first commercial spaceship”. This must be galling for the folks at the spaceflight research firm SpaceX. In July of this year, to little fanfare, they successfully put a Malaysian satellite into low earth orbit using a privately designed and built unmanned rocket, the Falcon 1. This is definitely commerce, and RazakSat is definitely up there in space, bleeping away in Malay. Surely everything else is Bransonian semantics?

SpaceShipTwo, despite the name, is an airplane–a very sophisticated and impressive airplane, designed to make brief suborbital hops after being carried aloft by another airplane. Branson’s hundreds of more-money-than-they-know-what-to-do-with customers are buying the aviation experience of a lifetime, one that nobody returns from unmoved. But it will be an aviation experience. “Space” is defined in custom, international law, and Virgin marketing literature as “high enough that airplanes mostly don’t work anymore”. To get there as an airplane passenger, by virtue of a few seconds of rocket boost tacked onto a conventional flight, seems a little like a technical cheat—the equivalent of trying to join the Mile High Club by oneself in the john.

Branson likes to crack wise about the old-fashionedness and inelegance of efforts to commercialize space by means of brute, old-fashioned multi-stage rocketry. In fact, the seventh American in “space” was a civilian badass named Joe Walker, who got there more or less by the method Branson is using. Like Walker, Branson’s passengers will experience “weightlessness” only for a few seconds at the top of their journey, for exactly the same physical reason that a bungee jumper experiences it at the apex of his rebound. Virgin Galactic continues to suggest that its research program will one day progress beyond flirtations with the Kármán line to earth orbit, where the real commercial, defence, and scientific applications are. But those plans are vague, and, perhaps tellingly, SpaceShipThree is no longer scheduled to be an orbital craft.

Meanwhile, SpaceX may be just days—hours, even—from testing its Falcon 9 launch platform, which is capable of carrying a manned capsule all the way into orbit and supporting International Space Station resupply missions. They’ve got their “spacecraft” built already, and will be testing its orbital capacities in the new year. Branson has a stirring line of blarney that obviously appeals to adventurers weaned on the sonorous, mercifully equation-free poetry of Carl Sagan. But we hardcore nerds know where the action really is.

'The government is obliged'

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 1:23 AM - 33 Comments

Parliamentary law clerk Robert Walsh tells Ujjal Dosanjh that Parliamentary committees are essentially entitled to whatever they seek.

While uncensored papers may present some concerns about national security for the government, “at the end of the day, the government is obliged to supply to the committee whatever information it requests in the performance of its mandate from the House [of Commons],” parliamentary law expert Robert Walsh says in a letter to defence critic Dosanjih.

Walsh’s letter is available here. This would seem to correspond with a recent majority opinion of the Public Accounts Committee.

The Next Soap Opera To Die Is…

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, December 8, 2009 at 7:15 PM - 7 Comments

…As the World Turns.

It’s actually kind of a horror-movie plot about soap operas: the shows are being taken out one by one by mysterious outside forces. Which show will be the next to go?

And of course, by “mysterious outside forces” I mean “the demise of the business model that created soap operas in the first place.” Plus the usual problems: changing demographics, the fact that soap operas can no longer make back the cost of maintaining a large cast, and the rise of cable, which has displaced the daytime soap as the place to go for racy/controversial storylines they won’t do in prime time.

Newsmakers '09: Stealing the show

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, December 8, 2009 at 6:43 PM - 2 Comments

Since political columnists are always right, Stephen Harper has only a few weeks left to resign from politics in disgrace before the New Year. Better hurry!

Or perhaps you don’t recall the spate of commentary at the beginning of the year to the effect that Harper, having survived the Great Weird Coalition Crisis of Late 2008 only by strong-arming Governor General Michaëlle Jean into proroguing Parliament, was so badly wounded he would soon be forced to skulk away onto the retired-politico rubber-chicken circuit. One presumes the authors of those predictions, who perch at certain Toronto newspapers, will not hasten to remind us as Harper heads into 2010 in uncontested control of his party, with the Liberals struggling to get off the ropes and tantalizing hints of Conservative growth in Quebec and in a few carefully selected ethnic communities.

Quit? Harper has a better shot than ever at the parliamentary majority that has eluded him until now. So how’d that happen?
Back in January the predictions of a hasty Harper retirement didn’t seem particularly outlandish. Harper was indeed disoriented. The 2008 election gave him a strengthened minority and left Liberal Stéphane Dion’s leadership mortally compromised. Somehow Harper managed to provoke an opposition united front that threatened to congeal into a coalition government. He survived that threat only to do what he has always done when he is bitter: lash out, this time against Brian Mulroney, whose Conservative party membership status became the focus of a brief, bizarre controversy sparked by Harper’s PMO spokesdrones.

What saved him, Harper tells his entourage now, was the economic recession and the climate of uncertainty it provoked. Canadians were worried, and to the amazement of Liberals still congratulating themselves for beating the budget deficit more than a decade ago, much of Canadians’ confidence on matters of economic management has transferred to the Conservatives. Michael Ignatieff, the new Liberal leader, announced he would force Harper to report periodically on the status of the multi-billion-dollar coast-to-coast cash dump known as the “fiscal stimulus”; Harper, barely able to believe his luck, cheerfully obliged. At times the Conservative “information” campaign has been lurid to the point of being ethically questionable, with Conservative MPs handing out jumbo cheques, some bearing the Conservative party logo, to municipal dignitaries.

The Conservatives are amused by any ethical debates their behaviour has sparked. They are satisfied with the results. From June to September, according to a senior Conservative source, public awareness that the Conservatives have “an action plan” for dealing with the global economic crisis vaulted from 20 to 49 per cent. One voter in two is an unusually high level of public awareness for anything any government does. And the Conservatives have only the Liberals to thank for making them launch the public awareness program.

“What’s worth remembering is that most of our progress this year has been through self-inflicted Liberal damage,” the senior Conservative said. “There haven’t been a lot of Stephen Harper evil-genius traps, except maybe the gun registry”—a parliamentary vote on a Conservative private member’s bill to eliminate the registry for rifles and shotguns, which split the Liberals and the New Democratic Party caucus—“and that was more about splitting the NDP than boxing the Liberals in.”

Perhaps the best news came in mid-autumn, when the Conservatives picked up a seat in Rivière-du-Loup, a Bloc stronghold in eastern Quebec, confounding the impression that Harper’s modest breakthrough in Quebec in 2006 might be the high-water mark of his success there.

What we have learned about Harper in the past year should be dispiriting to the Liberals. Each time an election has seemed likely, support for the Conservatives has risen. Economic uncertainty helps the incumbents, not their rivals. And there are many more corners of the country where the Liberals are uncompetitive than where the Conservatives are. By autumn, Harper was making guest appearances on Ottawa concert stages and Bollywood dance shows. He looks set to keep surprising Canadians for a while yet.

Newsmakers '09: Road warrior

By Chris Sorens - Tuesday, December 8, 2009 at 6:40 PM - 2 Comments

To the relief of just about everyone around him, auto parts czar Frank Stronach appears prepared to finally forgo his dream of becoming a full-fledged manufacturer of cars and trucks.

The wily Austrian-born businessman’s latest effort to get into the higher-profile vehicle-manufacturing game careened off the road in November when General Motors, no longer at death’s door, decided to hang on to its European Opel division instead of selling a majority stake to Stronach’s Magna International and a Russian partner.

Stronach’s disappointment at the unexpected turn of events was etched on his craggy face, but the official line from the company was one of understanding (GM is Magna’s biggest customer) and a pledge to get back to basics. Suffice to say, Magna’s investors couldn’t have been happier. Shares of the Aurora, Ont.-based company soared 25 per cent by the end of the week of the announcement. Analysts, too, seemed thrilled the deal fell apart. For one thing, building cars and trucks has just as often been a road to ruin as it has to riches. Just ask Ford, GM and Chrysler, the latter of which Stronach also tried unsuccessfully to buy before the wheels fell off the entire North American industry.

The Opel deal also threatened to take Magna’s eye off the ball just as opportunities to acquire troubled auto parts companies are mounting. And then there was the not insignificant issue of alienating Magna’s current car-making customers, several of whom didn’t fancy the idea of buying their vehicle parts from a direct competitor.

But while sticking to auto parts might be the most sensible (and profitable) course of action, Stronach has rarely paid much attention, if any, to what other people think of his ideas. Take his troubled foray into the horse-racing business, for example. A fan of thoroughbred horses and racing, Stronach spent huge sums of money through Magna Entertainment to scoop up racetracks across the continent in the hopes of creating an entertainment colossus, often to the chagrin of Magna International shareholders. Creaking with debt, the now spun-off company is attempting to restructure under bankruptcy protection, although Stronach has apparently not given up on the concept.

Stronach has also been criticized for taking hefty pay packages, considering he is the company’s chairman, not its CEO. Although his compensation plummeted to a paltry (by Stronach’s standards) $10.7 million excluding stock options last year, as part of a temporary effort to reflect the industry downturn, he had previously pulled in closer to $40 million or $50 million—a level that is bound to return once the industry is again firing on all cylinders.

Why should we believe his car-building fantasies will be put down more easily?

Newsmakers '09: Power couples

By Charlie Gillis - Tuesday, December 8, 2009 at 6:40 PM - 1 Comment

“Raw power” was the phrase Dick Button invoked repeatedly this fall as he co-judged Battle of the Blades, CBC’s hit reality show pairing female figure skaters with retired NHL players, and the words took some getting used to. Yes, Craig Simpson, Claude Lemieux, Stéphane Richer and others oozed testosterone as they cut into the ice, effortlessly hoisting their partners through the seven-week contest. But since when was rawness a virtue in figure skating?

Say all you want about TV ratings. Or the softer side of hockey players. Battle’s real accomplishment was to show the benefits of playing up virility on the male side of an ice-dancing duo. For too long, the sport has been held hostage to a faux-arts aesthetic, in which sequin-encrusted men act more like ladies-in-waiting than impassioned lovers. Battle of the Blades, refreshingly, treated viewers to more exposed biceps than rhinestones, and the unabashed masculinity helped expand the audience. “We wanted the men to look like men,” says executive producer John Brunton, “and the women to look sexy.”

During the penultimate episode, Shae-Lynn Bourne lay like a broken angel over Claude Lemieux’s head, creating a vision both poignant and seductive. We all knew Jamie Salé could delight, but who knew she could be raunchy? And the players furnished revelation after revelation. Turns out Tie Domi is a creditable skater when he’s not chucking haymakers. Ron Duguay—whose rock hair was legendary during his time on Broadway playing for the Rangers—is now Canada’s official answer to Mick Jagger. And who could forget Lemieux skating to the sound of his own voice singing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah? “That was my first take,” he later smiled. “I come from a very musical family.”

By the Nov. 16 finale, the show could boast a checklist of entertainment coups. Not only did it get men watching figure skating (more than 40 per cent of Battle’s 1.7 million or so weekly viewers were males), it got the rest of the world interested in something Canadian. The New York Times wrote a glowing story about the program, while Insight Productions, the company that delivered the show into the CBC’s grateful hands, has been fielding queries from as far away as Sweden and Russia from networks interested in replicating the format. Here in Canada, planning for a second season has already begun.

More important to Canadians, the program brought together worlds that have remained separate while living side by side in arenas across the country. Bourne, for one, admits she more or less ignored hockey while growing up in Chatham, Ont., and had scarcely heard of Lemieux when told the former agitator would be her partner. “It’s not that figure skating and hockey have been enemies,” she says. “They just haven’t always worked together.” Bourne points to Russia, where she has witnessed hockey skaters and figure skaters working together to improve. “How great would it be if our skating coaches and hockey coaches teamed up in Canada?” she asks. “Both sports would be better, and the athletes on both sides would benefit. We should be on the same team.”

Newsmakers '09: The blingsheviks

By Nancy Macdonald - Tuesday, December 8, 2009 at 6:40 PM - 0 Comments

They are Russia’s versions of the Carnegies and Rockefellers, the robber barons, rogues and plutocrats, the blingsheviks who dazzled and disgusted the world with their brassy displays of post-Soviet wealth: US$275,000-a-bottle champagne, diamond-encrusted cellphones, fleets of superyachts—“yachtskis,” to the British tabs. Suddenly, those days seem a distant memory. Since the economic crisis began, Russia’s once-invincible oligarchs have taken one of the most dramatic falls of businessmen anywhere. The Russian edition of Forbes says the combined fortunes of the country’s richest 100 people have fallen to US$142 billion, from US$520 billion one year earlier. The number of billionaires dropped from 110 to 32. And many have been forced into a pitiful game of musical chairs, begging for emergency loans from the Kremlin’s diminishing pot.

The biggest loan of all, US$4.5 billion, went to Oleg Deripaska, once Russia’s richest man, whose personal fortune has shrunk by US$20 billion since the meltdown. His empire, which stretches from metals to mining to finance to cars, accounts for fully two per cent of the Russian GDP. To pay off crushing debts, he is peddling stakes in just about everything he owns (including Canadian car-parts manufacturer Magna), and restructuring US$7.5 billion of debt for UC Rusal, the world’s biggest aluminum producer and his crown jewel. Continue…

Newsmakers '09: They're back . . .

By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, December 8, 2009 at 6:40 PM - 1 Comment

The problem may be that the Afghan Taliban were never really defeated. They just picked up and moved. Ahmed Rashid, arguably the world’s foremost authority on the Taliban, describes the exodus of Taliban fighters from Afghanistan to Pakistan in the fall of 2001: “They arrived in droves, by bus, taxi, and tractor, on camels and horses, and on foot,” he writes in Descent Into Chaos. “For many, it was not an escape but a return home—back to the refugee camps in Balochistan, where they had been brought up [during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan] and where their families still lived.”

Rashid said officials with Pakistan’s largest spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, stood with customs officials at the border crossing and waved the fighters in. They’d nurtured the Taliban for years. “For Pakistan they still represented the future of Afghanistan and had to be hidden away until their time came.”

The United States didn’t bother Pakistan about the returning fighters—despite requests to do so by the new Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, and his then foreign minister, Abdullah Abdullah. Karzai sent Abdullah to Washington in January 2002 to ask the Americans to get Pakistan to stop allowing the Taliban to regroup. He was rebuffed. The U.S. was interested in the al-Qaeda terrorists who brought down the twin towers, not the Taliban who sheltered them. As Abdullah put it: “The CIA wanted Arabs, not Afghans.”

And so the Taliban survived, licked their wounds, raised funds, drew recruits, and plotted a comeback. They began moving weapons into Afghanistan in late 2002, and launched a guerrilla campaign just as America was focusing all its military and intelligence resources on Iraq. The invasion of Iraq was a “disaster” for Afghanistan, Rashid said in an interview with Maclean’s. It sucked up money and personnel that might have gone toward rebuilding Afghanistan. NATO stepped in to provide security, but with far too few troops. The Taliban fed on the resulting instability and won support from Afghans who concluded the foreign armies in their country simply weren’t serious. By the spring of 2006, when Canadian troops deployed to Kandahar, a full-scale insurgency was raging.

Counter-insurgencies are won or lost in the hearts and minds of the local population. And the international forces in Afghanistan were losing hearts and minds because of an overreliance on air strikes, which resulted in the collateral damage of dead civilians; because they backed Karzai, whose government is increasingly seen as corrupt; because they couldn’t provide jobs; and because they couldn’t provide security. The Taliban’s comeback gathered strength.

“It’s not because the public was anxious to have the Taliban return,” says Marvin Weinbaum, a scholar at the Middle East Institute. “It’s a direct function of the failure of the Kabul government and the international forces to protect the local population.”

NATO’s International Security Assistance Force is now led by U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who has refocused international efforts on protecting civilians, rather than killing insurgents. He’s also asked U.S. President Barack Obama to deploy another 40,000 American troops to the country.

It’s the right strategy, says Weinbaum, but it may be too late. “If this had all been done earlier on, I don’t think there’s any question we would be looking at a very different situation.”
Can things be turned around? “With difficulty,” he says. “Nobody’s very optimistic. We’ve dug ourselves such a hole.”

The Commons: Support for the troops if necessary, but necessarily support for the troops

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, December 8, 2009 at 6:21 PM - 16 Comments

The Scene. Michael Ignatieff stood to report that some 23 former ambassadors had put fingers to keyboard to express their support for Richard Colvin and John Baird took the opportunity to rise and expound on the fine work of our troops.

Rising for his second question, Mr. Ignatieff offered the obvious follow. “Field notes by Canadian soldiers make it clear that a detainee was beaten in Afghan custody after being transferred by Canadian troops, way back in June 2006. Our soldiers saw it firsthand. They took photographs. They did the right thing. They rescued the man. They reported it up the chain of command. However, the government did nothing,” he ventured. “What kind of Canadian government refuses to act on firsthand accounts by its own troops, credible accounts, of detainee abuse in Afghan jails?”

There were various catcalls from the Conservative side. Laurie Hawn, seated in the front row beside Peter MacKay, loudly objected.

Mr. Baird was ready with a response. “Mr. Speaker, let us be very clear. Let us talk about the facts,” he boldly declared. “The then-Vice Chief of the Defence Staff, General Walter Natynczyk, a decorated war hero, someone who has served our country in uniform for decades, stated very clearly more than two and a half years ago that the Afghan in question was not detained, was not captured by Canadian Forces, and he repeated that statement yesterday. I say to the Leader of the Opposition, why can he not trust General Walter Natynczyk?”

On this highly contentious file, the government’s explanation for itself is now entirely semantic. Continue…

Newsmakers '09: Mr. Turnaround, Tim Geithner

By Jason Kirby - Tuesday, December 8, 2009 at 6:16 PM - 0 Comments

The most terrifying seat on a roller coaster is always the one right at the front, and no one has had a more stomach-churning perch from which to view the plunges, twists and turns of the financial crisis than U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. Now, with the wild ride levelling out and stability returning to the economy, the man whom hard-liners on both the left and right were calling a “disaster” a few months ago is being credited with helping put the U.S. back on track. When Warren Buffett declared the financial panic over this month, he said that Geithner, with Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, deserves “high marks” for how he handled the crisis.

Of all the predictions about the fate of the global economy made during the darkest hours of the financial crisis—“There will be blood,” the historian Niall Ferguson pronounced—few thought that 250 days later we’d be where we are today. America’s economy is growing again, unemployment is slowing and consumer confidence has rebounded from lows not seen in half a century. Through a barrage of stimulus spending and tough measures that forced troubled banks and automakers to restructure, Geithner ultimately succeeded in giving America some of its confidence back. Continue…

Nothing to see here, just some Mounties lying

By Andrew Potter - Tuesday, December 8, 2009 at 5:21 PM - 13 Comments

Paul Kennedy, chair of the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP, has released his report on the death of Robert Dziekanski. And, quelle surprise, he’s found that a) the Mounties behaved unprofessionally, and then b) lied  about it. Well, Kennedy puts it only slightly more diplomatically:

I do not accept the version of events as presented by the four responding RCMP members. The statements provided by the members are sparse in terms of detail of the events and the thought processes of the members as events unfolded. When tracked against the witness video, the recollections of the members fall short of a credible statement of the events as they actually unfolded. The fact that the members met together prior to providing statements causes me to further question their versions of events.

I.e. they lied.

And why wouldn’t they? The RCMP lies about everything. They lied about APEC. They lied about  the name a six-year-old gave to a puppy in a contest. And they lied over and over again to Paul Kennedy.

Gary Mason sees changes afoot. Can’t come soon enough.

Jim Prentice sums up Canada's climate change postion

By John Geddes - Tuesday, December 8, 2009 at 4:43 PM - 62 Comments

Here in Ottawa this afternoon, in the Museum of Nature’s mammals gallery, Environment Minister Jim Prentice announced a $5-million study into the feasibility of creating a marine conservation area in Lancaster Sound, the eastern gateway to the Northwest Passage.

I called some Arctic wildlife researchers to ask what the sound is like. They described icy waters and rocky islands astoundingly rich in sea life—bowhead whales and walrus, nesting black-legged kittiwakes and (my new favourite) thick-billed murres that dive so deep, up to 200 metres, in search of fish that sea-bird experts haven’t figured out how they do it.

Given that this is the opening week of the Copenhagen climate change conference, and that global warming is the overarching environmental concern in the Arctic, I took the opportunity to ask Prentice about the linkage. Doesn’t Canada’s stewardship of Far North territory like Lancaster Sound stand embarrassingly at odds with our laggardly position in negotiations toward an international climate change treaty?

Continue…

Newsmaker of the Year '09: Angela Merkel

By Anne Kingston - Tuesday, December 8, 2009 at 3:20 PM - 0 Comments

She has quietly blazed trails for the past four years as Germany’s first female chancellor and as the first to hail from the former Communist East. She’s the “most powerful woman in the world” according to Forbes and, in her slow, plodding way, has emerged as the de facto leader of the European Union.

Outside of Germany, however, there’s been scant interest in Angela Merkel, the earnest, apple-cheeked 55-year-old leader of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU)—but for when she brushed off former president Bush’s frat-boy neck rub at the 2006 G8 Summit or showed off impressive decolletage in Norway in 2008: “Merkel’s Weapons of Mass Distraction!” crowed the British tabloid Daily Mail.

Her re-election to another four-year-term in September barely registered in North America, which tends to think of Europe’s most populous country and largest economy in terms of BMW, not CDU. Far more ink is spilled on beleaguered male EU leaders: Britain’s Gordon Brown, whose Labour Party is slowly committing hara-kiri; French President Nicolas Sarkozy, with his decorous wife and ADD flitting from issue to issue; and Italy’s scandal-prone PM, Silvio Berlusconi.

The effective Merkel, who spends her leisure time hiking in the Alps and attending the Bayreuth opera festival, is glaringly dull in contrast. Her husband, chemistry professor Joachim Sauer, is so publicity-shy he’s known in Germany as the “Phantom of the Opera.” Slate dubbed her the “anti-Obama,” citing her “zero charisma, zero glamour, beige pantsuits, and a spouse who rarely appears in public.” Continue…

Newsmaker of the Year '09: The Celebs-in-Chief

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Tuesday, December 8, 2009 at 3:19 PM - 1 Comment

No one said it would be easy. True, the commander-in-chief began the year as the celebrity-in-chief. Barack Obama, accompanied by his wife, Michelle, kicked things off in Washington with a record-breaking inauguration that drew almost two million ecstatic supporters to the U.S. capital and a series of star-studded inaugural balls ushering in a new era in America. The first African-American President had won by the largest popular-vote margin in 20 years; his approval rating sat at 70 per cent. But within months the honeymoon had ended and today his approval is slipping below 50 per cent—reflecting a deeply divided nation and a polarized electorate struggling with mounting job losses and public debt, and doubts as to whether the new guy can deliver.

It didn’t help that Obama took office in the midst of a worldwide economic crisis. He arrived with armfuls of promises: to overhaul health care, to pass climate-change legislation, to wind down the war in Iraq, to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and to halve the federal deficit, just for starters. Most of that agenda remains bogged down by Republican opposition and feuds within Democratic ranks—mainly about the growing role of the federal government in American life and debts left to future generations. The new administration has brought in new regulations on everything from credit-card loans and executive pay to tailpipe emissions. The government is financing nine out of 10 new mortgages, and government spending accounts for a greater share of the U.S. economy than at any time since the Second World War. Continue…

Newsmaker of the Year '09: Lost boy, forever

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, December 8, 2009 at 3:19 PM - 0 Comments

Even more startling than the news of his death was its impact. Not since Diana has a celebrity’s sudden passing sent such a profound and lasting shock wave around the world. Michael Jackson’s career had been in the doldrums for over a decade, his reputation shattered by allegations of child molestation, his face ravaged by cosmetic surgery, his body wired on painkillers, his finances in shreds. Although his fans had remained fiercely loyal, snapping up tickets for a sold-out comeback tour that would never take place, for much of the world the King of Pop had become a sad freak—a literally pale shadow of the man-child who once moonwalked into our hearts. But after Jackson’s death on June 25, 2009, a miraculous resurrection began to take place.

As the media became consumed with conjuring his memory, parsing his significance and exploring the riddle of his death, it soon became clear that this celebrity death was shaping up to be an event on a par with the loss of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. In death, the moral scales were instantly tipped. Jackson’s iconic stature would trump his human frailties. The man once accused of being a pedophile and a predator was now cast as victim, possibly a victim of murder by lethal injection, perhaps even the target of a conspiracy. The disturbing pathology of Jackson’s personality—the enigma of the lost boy trapped in a man’s body—only enriched the myth. As a showbiz prodigy forever trying to reclaim the Neverland of his stolen childhood, he acquired tragic nobility. Like Elvis, Marilyn and Diana, here was another martyr to celebrity. Jackson had always dressed as if auditioning for divinity. And in the months that followed, pieces of him would be auctioned off like religious relics, from his diamond-encrusted socks to the white glove he wore in the 1983 Motown TV special—which is considered the “holy grail” of MJ memorabilia.

As a black man who seemed bent on erasing his race and blurring his gender, Jackson’s shape-shifting was mocked when he was alive. In death it only magnified his cultural importance. Just as Elvis Presley and Mick Jagger had plundered the moves and music of black R & B to create their burlesque empires of rock ’n’ roll, Jackson merged black music with white pop, but from the other side. He seemed intent on transforming himself into an alien creature, as if the only ethnicity that really mattered to him was extraterrestrial. With Thriller, the monster video that broke racial barriers and virtually invented MTV, he tried on a ghoulish identity that would follow him to the grave.

Jackson always fancied himself a movie star, or rather a movie character. And he received some posthumous poetic justice with the release of This Is It, the movie stitched together from rehearsal footage of the concert that never was. The film, which has grossed more than US$200 million, puts a lie to all the media speculation that his heart wasn’t in the tour, or that he no longer had the chops to pull it off. His ethereal falsetto was still intact, and his quicksilver dance moves still dazzled, as if he had no choice: the music flowed through his body like an electric current, animating every move with semaphore precision.

Had he lived to perform the tour, no doubt there would have been a concert movie, but it would have shown a slicker performer. The rehearsal footage reveals a softer, more circumspect Michael Jackson. Though the film is more hagiography than documentary, it offers a glimmer of vulnerability, and of the creative soul behind the Oz-like armour of the persona. Jackson comes across as an adult, quietly focused and firmly in command. The movie lends credence to what Elizabeth Taylor once told Oprah Winfrey, that Jackson was “highly intelligent, shrewd, intuitive.” There’s a lovely scene in which Jackson is trying to hold himself back. “Don’t make me sing out,” he pleads. “I gotta save my voice.” It’s a moment freighted with sad irony in a movie that redeems a monstrous icon by reminding us that he was only an artist.

Newsmaker of the Year '09: Patient zero

By Cathy Gulli - Tuesday, December 8, 2009 at 3:10 PM - 5 Comments

It started with Edgar “Patient Zero” Hernandez, the five-year-old boy in rural Mexico who caught the first confirmed case of H1N1 last March. He came home from school with a fever and headache. After a few days, and lots of consolatory ice cream, Hernandez recovered. But for thousands of others worldwide, H1N1 has been lethal, including here in Canada, where casualties have included: 13-year-old Evan Frustaglio, the hockey player who died in his father’s arms after a bath; 10-year-old Vanetia Warner, who loved figure skating and Miley Cyrus; 38-year-old Keith Fagnou, a popular chemistry prof with a growing family. “Burying your own kid is the most horrific thing for any human being,” said Paul Frustaglio, Evan’s dad. “There is no plan, no instinct, nothing to guide you.”

In a matter of months, H1N1 has become the defining public health event of the decade, arguably causing more confusion, fear and heartache than anything the world has seen since the 1918 Spanish flu. With one crucial difference. Where our ancestors could only wish for a medical intervention to spare 50 million people from death, most countries today are, fortunately, armed with a preventative weapon: the pandemic flu shot. “The vaccine,” says Gregory Hartl of the World Health Organization, “is the single most important tool we have against influenza.”

Having the tool and knowing how to best use it are separate matters, though. As big an achievement as the H1N1 vaccine is, the big dilemma this pandemic has been whether or not to actually get the shot. And, if so, when and how. Preparedness—or lack thereof—has been a running theme. Continue…

The Globe and Blatchford

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, December 8, 2009 at 3:00 PM - 176 Comments

In 20 years in journalism I have never seen anything resembling the systematic and sustained repudiation to which Christie Blatchford, the Globe and Mail‘s marquee columnist, is being subjected by her own newspaper. There is room in any good paper for disagreements among colleagues, and frankly there should, for a long time now, have been room for more of that at the Globe. But this goes further. This is breathtakingly methodical. And I believe it was needed. Continue…

“The science isn't settled”

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, December 8, 2009 at 2:37 PM - 7 Comments

Danielle Smith, leader of Alberta’s Wildrose Alliance Party and, for some, the great hope of Alberta small-c conservatives, has been keeping a rather low profile of late, ever since her communications guru, Stephen Carter, mocked Premier Ed Stelmach’s speaking cadence (in a Tweet, Carter suggested Stelmach has a hayseed accent; he later resigned). Now Smith is back and, in a speech to the Canadian Club of Calgary, made no bones about her climate change skepticism. “The science isn’t settled,” she said, according to the Calgary Herald’s Renata D’Aliesio. “I’m worried about us embarking on costly schemes to try to reduce our overall emissions rather than doing the obvious things that will come easier,” she said of UN climate change talks now ongoing in Copenhagen. Her political opponents have wasted no time in branding her a “climate change denier,” a tough category to find oneself in if you’re trying to look “moderate,” as Smith arguably must. Then again, perhaps she’s on to something—maybe Albertans are ready to embrace the contrarian view.

Calgary Herald

Exercise now predicts future wealth

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, December 8, 2009 at 2:35 PM - 1 Comment

Researchers at the University of Southern California and the University of Gothenburg in Sweden have found that male adolescents who had strong cardio fitness scored better in IQ tests—and wound up with higher education and income later in life. The scientists studied 1.2 million Swedish young men who were born between 1950 and 1976, and participated in mandatory military service at 18. They found that the more aerobic fitness the males had, the better their cognitive functioning—including verbal, mechanical, and logic skills. What’s more, the the boys who were most fit at 18 were most likely to go to post-secondary school. The researchers’ conclusion: Aerobic exercise improves mental ability because of the circulatory system’s effect on brain plasticity. (They did not study how muscle strength impacts intelligence.) They believe this study, which is published in the Dec. 8 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, makes the case for more physical education programs in school.

University of Southern California