The "cozy" mysteries of summer

By Patricia Treble - Friday, April 30, 2010 at 6:47 PM - 0 Comments

While mysteries like Henning Mankell’s Wallander series have received critical acclaim, the traditional “cozy” still sells like hotcakes. Just witness the popularity of Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, which is based in Botswana, or this summer’s line-up on PBS’s Masterpiece Mystery! In cozies, the detective—often a woman and/or an amateur—solves crimes that defy befuddled small-town authorities. Violence is kept to a minimum and important clues are often accidentally overheard or stumbled on by pure coincidence. Agatha Christie might be dead, but the genre she perfected in the form of Miss Marple lives on.

Today, Alexander McCall Smith, a professor emeritus at the University of Edinburgh, is the reigning champ of the cozy. He pumps out a handful of books each year, each more delightful than the last. McCall Smith has four series on the go, though some, like the Isabel Dalhousie novels, are really character essays rather than mysteries in the usual sense of involving bodies and crimes. And in each book, especially his best-selling No. 1 series, the crime is less important than the people who inhabit the pages and their reactions to each other and to the crime.

This is perfectly exemplified in an exchange in the latest book of the series, The Double Comfort Safari Club. Mma Grace Makutsi, the assistant in the Gaborone-based detective Agency tells her boss: “Sometimes wickedness prevails.” She is referring to an old foe, Violet Sephotho, notorious for using her looks to ensnare men. However, Makutsi’s belief is anathema to detective Mma Precious Ramotswe. As McCall Smith writes: “In her short career as a private detective, Mma Ramotswe had encountered relatively few instances of evil, but she had seen some, and in each case she had seen the wings of wickedness clipped. Violet Sephotho had now stepped over a boundary that separated mere nastiness from real wickedness. She could not be allowed to prevail.” And, with the two women on the case, there is no doubt in readers’ minds that Violet Sephotho will get her comeuppance.

That simple reasoning that “might does not make right” is at the heart of a cozy’s appeal. Like a Harlequin romance and its inevitable happy ending, cozy readers know that in their world evil will be vanquished. A different variation of the cozy starts on Sunday, May 2 on PBS when Masterpiece Mystery! begins airing the final three episodes of Foyle’s War.

Set during the Second World War in the ancient British town of Hastings on the English Channel, the series features the most reluctant of detectives, Chief Supt. Christopher Foyle, who must solve crimes that can appear insignificant compared to the cataclysmic events occurring all around him. In these episodes, the war in Europe is over and Foyle is on the cusp of his much desired, much delayed retirement. Though these episodes deal with rather more grand issues than usual, Foyle’s War as a whole is the ultimate cozy.

Starring Michael Kitchen, who’s a delight as the enigmatic Christopher Foyle, the series is really about his quiet, determined refusal to accept the “party line”—that crime in wartime isn’t worthy of the most diligent police work. Of course Hastings plays host to the most amazing crimes, all of which would remain unsolved if not for Foyle, his former driver “Sam” Stewart and his deputy Paul Milner.

And after Foyle’s War ends there are eight episodes by the queen bee of cozies, Agatha Christie, including five Miss Marples and three new Hercule Poirots. For devoted readers of the clever sleuths, it’s enough to send them scurrying for the ideal tipple, perhaps an herbal tea or a Pimm’s, with which to enjoy watching the bonanza.

Sports in the Rearview Mirror

By Andrew Potter - Friday, April 30, 2010 at 5:41 PM - 4 Comments

One of the most difficult cognitive biases to resist is the tendency to see a deterministic pattern, or narrative, in what is largely a series of probablistic and chancy events. And so the same impulse that gave us animistic religion gives us sports journalism: Today’s case in point is Steve Simmons’ column in the Sun, arguing that the narrative of this year in hockey is the emergence of Sidney Crosby as a mature, successful Leader of Men, while his rival Ovechkin  “the older of the two, appears less mature than Crosby, less grounded, more individualistic.”

In support of this, Simmons notes some obvious facts: Crosby won the Cup last year and Olympic Gold this year, while Ovechkin’s Russians crashed and burned. Crosby is still alive in the playoffs, Ovechkin’s Capitals are gone for the second year in a row. And while both Crosby and Ovechkin had great first round series’, only Crosby “seems to have grasped that intangible called victory while Ovechkin understands the spectacular far more than the simple.”

What is really interesting here is the dual projection, of Crosby’s supposedly superior moral qualities, onto a highly probalistic series of events, to reach a highly deterministic conclusion. As my friend Wayne Norman wrote me in an email earlier today when we were discussing this, “Crosby could have lost that Cup and those Olympics if things had bounced just slightly differently. And yet, it is very hard to resist these narratives where Crosby’s superior moral qualities have made his success (and Ovey’s failures) inevitable.”

Winners and losers, good and evil, these tropes are as irresistable in sports as they are in life. But success in both is as much a matter of lucky choices and chance bounces as it is about talent, hard work, and good behaviour. Perhaps the reason we like these narratives so much is that the alternative explanation is too uncomfortable to face.

UPDATE: Ok, so let me amplify the point a bit. Take the more or less explicit moral opposition that floats throughout Simmons’ column:  ”But there is that fine line between individual performance and making your team better.”

Unpack this a bit, and you have the following set of oppositions: The Canadian player is sober, focused, team-oriented, while the Russian is enthusiastic, emotional, and individualistic. Flip these on their head, and you have the precise moral qualities that have been held up as the epitome of Canadian hockey since the 1972 series. How often have we heard over the the past 40 years, that the Russians were corporate, focused, team-oriented, and collective, while Canadians always played with heart, individualism, and energy — viz., the values of western capitalism writ hockey?

And  now, along comes a Russian player who, in his raw exuberance,  embodies everything we have always celebrated as essentially Canadian about hockey, while our own champion, Crosby, is the perfect exemplar of the stereotypical “Soviet” style of play. And what do we do? We invert the moral valence of the old oppositions, so now Crosby is the great Canadian team player, while Ovechckin is the aimless individualist.

It’s completely ridiculous parochialism of the worst sort.

Rush: a fan’s notes

By Colby Cosh - Friday, April 30, 2010 at 5:18 PM - 14 Comments

It’s disorienting for a Rush fan—someone who was patronizing and defending them when it wasn’t just not cool, but the opposite of cool—to watch the bien-pensants struggle to cram them into the canon in the year 2010. Especially since it’s been twenty years since their finest work, and arguably more like thirty. Continue…

Here's an idea

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, April 30, 2010 at 4:50 PM - 20 Comments

Sujit Choudhry, the esteemed University of Toronto professor of constitutional law, sends along the following. It likely would not wholly satisfy those who are intent on asserting the supremacy of Parliament, but there is plenty here worth considering, perhaps as something that might be part of a broader solution. SIRC is the Security Intelligence Review Committee, which you can read about here.

Anyway, without further ado, Mr. Choudhry’s idea. Continue…

Documentary tourism

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, April 30, 2010 at 4:11 PM - 0 Comments

Ponijao, a Namibian child in 'Babies'

There’s a popular genre of documentary that’s part travelogue, part anthropology lesson. It visits far-flung corners of the world to explore cultural variations on a theme in, fulfilling two of the most basic documentary mandates: transporting us to an exotic location, and drawing universal truths from global diversity. Babies and Dish: Women, Waitressing and the Art of Service— both showing this week at Toronto’s Hot Doc extravaganza—are two such films. They’re very different. Babies, directed by French filmmaker Thomas Balmès, simply lets the camera dote on four babies from four wildly dissimilar cultures without comment or analysis, although a covert message lurks beneath the cuteness. Dish, directed by Toronto filmmaker Maya Gallus, makes its viewpoint explicit in exploring the sexual politics of female servitude in restaurants of all classes around the world.

Babies

I saw the much ballyhooed Babies at the opening night gala of Hot Docs last night, and there’s no doubt this is a crowd-pleaser par excellence. It’s telling that it comes from France, the country that gave us March of the Penguins, Winged Migration and Microcosmos, because Babies is basically a gorgeous wildlife documentary about very young, very cute  humans in their natural habitat. The babies are adorable, the photography is seductive, and the film, which opens commercially May, should do well. The filmmaker, who finds his unwitting subjects in Namibia, Mongolia, Tokyo and San Francisco,  tracks them from birth to their first steps. Stringing together pearl-like moments of real-time wonder, the film taps into the most primitive form of family voyeurism—staring at babies as they try to invent themselves, and master their bodily functions, one embryonic thought at a time. Baby Porn! The narrative logic is pretty straightforward as the filmmaker intercuts scenes of breast-feeding, crying, peeing, crawling, falling, babbling, playing, standing, stumbling, etc. And teasing cats. There are a lot of animals in the movie. In Africa we learn that although a calf may accidentally kick a baby, cattle tend to walk around them. The filmmaker doesn’t need narration to assert his bias. He makes it pretty clear that he thinks the most toxic environment for an infant is not the African mud hut where the kid is surrounded by flies and sticks a dirt-covered bone into his mouth. It’s in San Francisco, where the baby leads a coddled, antiseptic existence of plastic-sheathed strollers and New Age infant yoga classes.

When I came out of the premiere, I bumped into a Canadian film producer who was appalled by Babies, which he dismissed as a vapid exercise in cutespoitation. He was also amazed by how much money it must have cost. But no matter what you think of the filmmaking, or the agenda behind it, the result is something we’ve never seen before: a feature-length spectacle devoted to babies. There’s a reason people are mesmerized by them in real life. And for the same reason, Babies will be a hit when it opens commercially next week.

Jane at Toronto's George St. Diner in 'Dish'

Dish: Women, Waitressing & the Art of Service

Maya Gallus kicks off her stylish, well-crafted documentary with a marathon tracking shot that follows a waitress with a formidable stack of platters on a multi-storey trek through a large and lavish Paris restaurant. The opening sets the pace for a fluid hand-held camerawork that keeps things cooking along and becomes a conceit unto itself—just keeping up with a waitress is no mean feat. Gallus travels far and wide to dish the dirty little secrets of the restaurant biz from the female point of view, and they’re are not all that surprising. In confessing the black art of extracting tips, Waitresses explain how a judicious smile or a hand on the shoulder will inspire generosity from a male client. In a diner or truck stop, a waitress can play a gestural role as a kind of surrogate wife or girlfriend for a regular client. Those fantasies remain largely unacknowledged. But in some eateries they become more explicit—from weird “maid cafes” in in Tokyo where men are served by fawning servers in French maid uniforms to a seedy Quebec joint where the women slinging the burgers go topless. The film examines the class structure of the service industry, showing that at the summit of fine dining, in the gourmet restaurants of France, male waiters rule and waitresses are considered an aberration. Gallus, however, does find a French waitress who holds her own in an army of men—she’s the one hauling that mountain of platters in the opening shot.

For capsule review of  BDJ’s favorites at the festival go to: What’s Hot at Hot Docs

General Andrew Leslie's new job

By John Geddes - Friday, April 30, 2010 at 4:01 PM - 7 Comments

For several weeks rumours have swirled surrounding Lieutenant-General Andrew Leslie’s next move.

It’s been widely reported that the UN asked that Leslie take over leadership of the peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Others speculated that he might leave the Canadian Forces to accept a diplomatic appointment. There was even a brief, weird moment when his name as mentioned in wider discussions about who might be the next Governor General.

Instead, Defence Minister Peter MacKay announced today that Leslie will take on a new role as “Chief of Transformation,” starting June 22. What the heck is a Chief of Transformation, you ask. Continue…

Oil everywhere

By macleans.ca - Friday, April 30, 2010 at 3:51 PM - 6 Comments

Millions of litres of thick, black oil are quickly spreading through the Gulf of Mexico, following a drilling rig explosion off the coast of Louisiana last week. On Thursday night, oil began to seep through Louisiana’s coastal wetlands. On Saturday, the spill is expected to hit the shores of Mississippi, before slamming into the beaches of Alabama and Florida on Monday. “I am frightened,” said David Kennedy of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “This is a very, very big thing. And the efforts that are going to be required to do anything about it, especially if it continues on, are just mind-boggling.” To make matters worse, high waves and rain storms have prevented the U.S Coast Guard from beginning to skim oil from the water’s surface. About 800,000 liters of crude oil are leaking out the sub-sea well each day. Officials say it could take 90 days to stop the leak.

CBC News

Conservatives and the men in blue

By Mitchel Raphael - Friday, April 30, 2010 at 3:47 PM - 18 Comments

The Conservatives’ Law Enforcement Officers Caucus held a special reception for the Canadian Police Association while they were in town. Below is caucus chair Shelly Glover.

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Senator Nancy Ruth with the boys in blue.

Continue…

Baird gets a plate

By Mitchel Raphael - Friday, April 30, 2010 at 3:21 PM - 0 Comments

Transport Minister John Baird met students from Italy and was presented with a plate. He in turn gave them Canadian gift bags, which included flags and maple syrup lollipops.

Continue…

Sitting Down For Jay

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, April 30, 2010 at 3:10 PM - 3 Comments

This Politico article on Jay Leno, as he prepares to headline yet another White House Correspondents’ Dinner, doesn’t mention much about the recent Troubles — for that, you’ll have to watch Conan O’Brien’s interview on 60 Minutes this Sunday. (It seems like they are fated to do things at the same time: in this case, Leno hosts the dinner the day before O’Brien pops up on CBS). It does manage to give a fairly decent portrait of the type of comedy Leno does and the philosophy he represents. The idea is not simply for the comic to portray himself as middle-of-the-road politically; many comedians, including Jon Stewart, try to portray themselves as the centrist voice of reason. The point is to find jokes and targets that are acceptable to the widest range of viewers, the equivalent of banana-peel jokes and other comedy tropes that have nearly-universal appeal. It means maintaining strict balance when it comes to political targets, so that no one will get the feeling that you’re attacking their side more than another’s: Leno’s Tonight Show is often considered one of the most absolutely balanced when it comes to jokes about liberals or conservatives, and he’s very proud of that fact.

And perhaps above all, it means basing the humour on what the broad mass of people know, or think they know. A lot of comedians assume that if you make an obscure reference or express an unusual point of view, those who get it will love it, and those who don’t get it will not necessarily mind. In the internet age, more TV writers and producers argue that viewers can use Google to fill in the gaps. (David Simon has argued something like that about Treme, that it doesn’t need to go in for a lot of exposition: as long as it gives the audience enough information about the setting, they can look up the rest.) But Leno is adamant that this doesn’t apply to mass-market comedy: “The trick is not to know more than anybody else,” he told Politico. “The trick is to know exactly what everybody else knows,” adding that he tries not to mention any political figure “past secretary of state.”

I’m not personally fond of this type of comedy, but I will say that I think it’s based on an accurate assumption and is often attacked from the point of view of inaccurate assumptions. The inaccurate assumption is that the fragmentation of the audience has become so great that there’s no longer any point in being middlebrow, going for the biggest audience possible. Some middle-of-the-road television show proves this wrong virtually every night. And while these shows’ audiences are old, they’re not that old. As Leno likes to point out, he’s always done well with young viewers. Even now, he’s doing no worse than Conan O’Brien did (if no better) in the “key demographic,” while obviously doing better in other demographics where people also have money to buy products. I think there’s another wrong (or at least incomplete) assumption you find here, that young people are all information-soaked sophisticates.

My problem with Leno isn’t so much the kind of comedy he does, but that it’s not a good example of the type. The article compares him to Bob Hope, and the comparison is accurate, right down to the tendency to split the difference between jokes about “both sides” (see the two famous movie clips below). But it’s like the difference between Bob Hope in the ’40s and Bob Hope in the ’80s: you can do mass-market, inoffensive one-liners and make them good, or you can make them bad. People who criticize Leno for being middlebrow are, in a weird way, letting him off the hook, because the middlebrowness (middlebrowism?) is not the problem.

An exchange of letters

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, April 30, 2010 at 2:57 PM - 7 Comments

Two weeks ago, Gen. Walter Natynczyk wrote to the Afghanistan committee in response to the testimony of Malgarai Ahmadshah. In that letter, he stated that “Canadian Forces do not transfer individuals for the purposes of gathering information.” This caught the interest of the NDP’s Paul Dewar and Jack Harris, who wrote Natynczyk seeking an explanation as to how this could be squared with an October 2007 transfer report.

Their letter has received a response from Rear-Admiral R.A. Davidson and Messrs Dewar and Harris wrote back with a missive yesterday, the text of which is below. Continue…

Hey look: Complex negotiations fail to stir controversy!

By Paul Wells - Friday, April 30, 2010 at 2:38 PM - 6 Comments

From the print edition, my latest column provides yet another update on trade negotiations between Canada and the E.U. This sort of column is why I chuckle when people say, “You’re just in it to sell magazines.”

Well, that was fast.

By Colby Cosh - Friday, April 30, 2010 at 2:23 PM - 43 Comments

I think those who expected the government to answer the Speaker’s ruling on the detainee documents with a Nixonian jihad must now start recalibrating. Can I appeal to fellow chattering-class types to start getting used to the way apparent reversals for the Conservatives turn very, very quickly into opportunities to divide and confuse the Opposition?

The ministry—whether you happen to think the Speaker chastised it with whips this week or felt it to be more of a scorpion-y kinda thing—doesn’t have to come up with a disclosure solution that satisfies every single parliamentarian on the Hill. To obtain majority support, the government only has to come up with something that the Liberals, en bloc, can agree to. The Conservatives’ bargaining chip is this: they can approach Michael Ignatieff and say “OK, we can get together on this and help you look like a responsible statesman; or, you can insist on the right of Gilles Duceppe and Libby Davies to be personally involved in the most intricate details of our military affairs, and we can go to the country and have an election on that basis.” Anyone who denies that this is a very strong poker hand hasn’t read the cards correctly. (I guess I understand the potential confusion: it might be easy to confuse the rights of Parliament with the personal political entitlement of Ms. Davies if you happen to think that she would, in fact, make a first-rate defence minister.)

Ignatieff is inevitably going to be criticized for “weakness” when the eventual modus vivendi, one likely to be comfortable for the Conservatives and marginally tolerable for the Liberals, is arrived at. When it comes to disputes over parliamentary procedure, I’m afraid Mr. Ignatieff is no more or less weak than his party’s standing in the House of Commons.

While we wait

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, April 30, 2010 at 2:23 PM - 1 Comment

A former diplomat told the Afghanistan committee this week that the first officials heard of specific allegations of torture was when the Globe and Mail reported as much in April 2007.

A military official told the Military Police Complaints Commission that documents related to the handling of detainees are being stored in a shipping container in Afghanistan and may take years to locate.

And, amid new testimony gathered by the Canadian Press, the Canadian Forces is investigating whether soldiers killed an unarmed teenager—an incident raised two weeks ago during testimony at the Afghanistan committee.

Khadr refuses to go to court

By macleans.ca - Friday, April 30, 2010 at 1:36 PM - 11 Comments

Omar Khadr, the Canadian held in Guantanamo Bay on murder and terrorism charges for a crime he allegedly committed while he was only 15, is refusing to attend court hearings because of what he says are unnecessary and humiliating searches and transportation procedures. He initially refused to attend his pre-trial hearing on Thursday because of a requirement to wear sensory-depriving goggles and earmuffs while in transport, and on Friday he was absent from the court room because he wouldn’t allow guards to search his waistband. The Military Judge, Col Patrick Parrish, says Khadr is rejecting a “reasonable security measure,” and that the trial will proceed without him. Col. Parrish has also refused to give Khadr medical treatment, saying he didn’t want to “second guess” the care provided by Guantanamo’s guards, and has also refused defence requests that a doctor be allowed to testify about the seriousness of Khadr’s health problems, which are caused by shrapnel shards in both of his eyes. The doctor says Khadr’s condition requires urgent treatment, and the military says a prison physician is attending to the prisoner, but that there is no ophthalmologist on base.

The Globe and Mail

Car sales continue to increase

By macleans.ca - Friday, April 30, 2010 at 12:52 PM - 1 Comment

There’s more good news for the auto sector as Scotia Economics releases its latest Global Auto Report showing a 25 per cent year-over-year gain for sales in March. It’s the sixth consecutive double-digit increase for the industry, which the bank says is largely due to year-over-year gains of more than 40 per cent in developing nations. Meanwhile, the volume of car sales in North America is increasing at the fastest rate in ten years, and consumers are increasingly buying more expensive vehicles.

CBC News

“Cuddle hormone” makes men more sensitive

By macleans.ca - Friday, April 30, 2010 at 12:38 PM - 1 Comment

According to a new study of 48 volunteers, a nasal spray containing oxytocin, the “cuddle hormone,” can make men more in tune with others’ feelings. A team of German and British researchers found the spray made men just as empathetic as women, and boosted the ability to learn from positive feedback, which could help with behaviour therapy in conditions like schizophrenia. A naturally produced hormone, oxytocin is known to trigger labour pains and promote bonding between mother and baby. It also plays a role in social relations, sex and trust. In the study, half the men got a nose spray of oxytocin and half got a placebo. They then looked at photographs of images like a crying child, a girl hugging her cat, and a grieving man, and asked about their feelings. Those who got the spray had higher levels of empathy, usually seen in women. In another experiment, volunteers were asked to do an observation test and got an approving face if they got it right, and an unhappy face if wrong. Those who got the spray responded better to facial feedback.

BBC News

Pub crawling at 95

By macleans.ca - Friday, April 30, 2010 at 12:34 PM - 1 Comment

Is Montreal a great town, or what? Where else do the city police come round to a nursing home for women and escort the ladies on a semi-annual pub crawl? Okay, “crawl” might be an exaggeration: when you’re pushing 96, one stop feels like bar-hopping. Still, eight gals from Fulford House rode the paddy wagon on Tuesday down to Hurley’s, the fabled watering hole where Mordecai Richler was known to take a sip. A crowd gathered as the tipsy girls emerged onto Crescent Street in the middle of the afternoon, six of them pushing walkers. One guy applauded and pumped his fist. Look for the waiting list to get into Fulford House to grow as news of the outing
circulates.

Montreal Gazette

This Is the Spring of George

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, April 30, 2010 at 12:03 PM - 1 Comment

The latest viral entry in the fake-trailer sweepstakes is George. It promotes the Oscar-baiting story of a simple man who is just about to find happiness when his fiancée tragically dies. But he recovers by raising a small boy, learning to get in touch with his emotions, and dishing out wise advice while inspirational music plays on the soundtrack.

[vodpod id=Video.3521169&w=640&h=385&fv=%26rel%3D0%26border%3D0%26]

It seems like Seinfeld lends itself particularly well to the viral video treatment — remember the video that re-cut scenes from many episodes into a “lost episode” about Kramer’s racist outburst at the Laugh Factory? Maybe it’s because the show tried so hard to avoid emotional moments or “very special” treatment of serious issues: it’s almost irresistible to try and re-arrange scenes into exactly the sort of thing that Seinfeld and David would never have approved of.

Cleaning up the world's worst oil spills

By Rachel Mendleson - Friday, April 30, 2010 at 12:00 PM - 21 Comments

In the days since a BP oil rig exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico, vast amounts of oil have been pouring into the water. The damage is worse than originally thought: the U.S. Coast Guard has revised its earlier estimate, indicating that some 5,000 barrels of oil are spilling into the water off the coast of Louisiana each day. As the slick moves toward the fragile coastline ecosystems, the race to contain it is underway. On Thursday, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano declared the spill “of national significance,” pledging to devote “every available asset” to stopping it.

PHOTO GALLERY
“A massive and potentially unprecedented environmental disaster” — Photos from the spreading oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico

In the meantime, BP is trying to contain it any way it can: in addition to using skimmers to remove the thickest substance, 76,000 tons of dispersant to break up the oil, and setting up miles of barriers to protect the coast, the company is experimenting with controlled burns—a last-ditch effort that carries environmental consequences. (Though burning oil changes its consistency, making less likely to coat marine life, according to the U.S. Coast Guard’s Rear Adm. Mary E. Landry, it creates a “black plume” of smoke.) Despite past experience with oil spills, there’s no tried-and-true way to contain them. Here’s a look at how the world’s top five marine oil spills were (or weren’t) contained:

5. ABT Summer: On May 28, 1991, there was an explosion aboard the ABT Summer, an oil tanker en route from Iran to Rotterdam. The ship, which was carrying 260,000 tons of oil, caught fire. After three days, it sank 1,300 km off the coast of Angola.* Because it was so far off-shore, there was no rush to clean up the damage; it was assumed that high seas would break up the large slick.

4. Nowruz Oil Field: On February 10, 1983, in the midst of the Iran-Iraq war, an oil tanker slammed into a platform at the Nowruz Oil Field in the Persian Gulf. The conflict delayed efforts to cap the ensuing spill, and an estimated 1,500 barrels drained into the water each day. In March, Iraqi planes attacked the platform, setting the oil slick ablaze. By the time the well was finally capped in September—an Iranian operation that killed 11 people—it had released some 260,000 tons of oil into the sea. The clean-up effort largely centered around the use of skimmers and pumps by Norpol, a Norwegian company.

3. Atlantic Empress/Aegean Captain: On July 19, 1979, two oil tankers, the Atlantic Empress and the Aegean Captain collided off the coast of Trinidad and Tobago during a tropical storm. The ships, which contained nearly 500,000 tons of crude oil between them, burst into flames on impact. Crews successfully extinguished the fire aboard the Aegean and it was towed to shore, but the blaze continued to rage on the Atlantic. After more than two weeks of firefighting efforts, an explosion sunk the ship, which had by then been dragged further out to sea. Dispersants were used to treat the spilled oil, curbing pollutants. In the end, an estimated 280,000 tons poured into the Caribbean—the record for a ship-source spill.

2. Ixtoc I: On June 3, 1979, Pemex, Mexico’s government-owned oil company, was drilling a 3.2 km deep oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, when the Ixtoc I exploded. The blow out, which occurred when the drill ran into high pressure, soon caught fire and caused the platform to collapse. A team of experts arrived quickly at the site, about 970 km south of Texas, but because of poor visibility and seafloor debris, it took divers until the following March to cap the well. In the meantime, between 10,000 and 30,000 barrels of oil poured into the water each day, totaling an estimated 454,000 tons. To slow the flow, mud (and later, steel balls) were dropped into the well. According to Pemex, half the oil burned when it reached the surface, and a third evaporated. Norwegian experts contained the spill using skimming equipment and booms.

1. Gulf War: In the first days of the Gulf War, Iraqi military forces opened the valves at the Sea Island oil terminal in Kuwait, releasing vast amounts of crude oil into the Persian Gulf. The spill, which began on January 21, consisted of up to eight million barrels (between 1,360,000 and 1,500,000 tons), making it the largest in history. Because of the war, clean-up was delayed, but an international effort did eventually get underway. Using smart bombs, Coalition forces were able to seal the open pipelines at the Al Ahmadi facility, and American and Dutch workers built ponds in the desert to store the oil they pumped from the water. Booms and skimmers were used to keep the oil away from the desalination plants, which provided drinking water to residents in the area. In the end, the spill was not as catastrophic as initially feared: roughly half the oil evaporated, two to three million barrels washed ashore and a million barrels were recovered.

(*Corrected from an earlier version, which erroneously stated that the ABT Summer sank 130,000 km off the coast of Angola.)

Agreement and disagreement

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, April 30, 2010 at 11:16 AM - 31 Comments

The opposition parties aren’t agreed as to whether Justice Frank Iacobucci, or seemingly any independent advisor or arbiter, should have a role in Parliament’s review of detainee documents. Meanwhile, Gen. Walter Natynczyk, the chief of the defence staff and a man the Defence Minister seems to trust, is asked if he’s worried about detainee documents being reviewed.

CBC News asked Natynczyk on Thursday, “Do you have any fears of people poring over those documents?”

Natynczyk responded: “Not at all, not at all.”

King of divorce

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Friday, April 30, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 8 Comments

RGA/ ZOJ

Tonight’s topic: men who love too much.

Forget David Letterman fishing off the company pier, the low-bräu tastes of Sandra Bullock’s tattooed husband, or Tiger Woods’s all-thumbs mastery of text messaging. America’s senior swordsman is without question a stooped and suspendered 76-year-old from Brooklyn: Lawrence Harvey Zeigler, a.k.a. Larry King.

Fifty-three years into a broadcasting career that has taken him from a tiny AM radio station in Miami to living rooms around the globe, courtesy of a nightly platform on CNN, the host of Larry King Live is said to be closing in on his 50,000th interview. But these days it is a different set of numbers that has captured the public imagination—his eight marriages to seven different women, and strong indications that he might soon be in the market for another bride.

Continue…

This Week: Good news/ Bad news

By macleans.ca - Friday, April 30, 2010 at 9:30 AM - 0 Comments

Eric Gaillard/Reuters

Face of the week
A Thai protester chants anti-government slogans while wielding a photo of King Bhumibol Adulyadej

A week in the life of Randy Quaid
Talk about legal trouble. On Friday, the actor filed a lawsuit alleging his former lawyer, Lloyd Braun, improperly used his access to Quaid to obtain photos and information, which he then posted on an Internet gossip site he owns. On Monday, Quaid and his wife, Evi, were arrested for failure to appear in court on charges stemming from an unpaid $10,000 tab at a California guest ranch. They were placed in pink handcuffs—a colour apparently intended to shame suspects.

Continue…

An undeniable win for Parliament

By John Geddes - Friday, April 30, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 117 Comments

Blair Gable/Reuters

Peter Milliken’s low-key way of speaking doesn’t automatically command attention. His stature, short and thickset, doesn’t make him an imposing physical presence when he rises to address MPs. But the Speaker of the House of Commons, who has done the job for longer than anyone in Canadian history, didn’t have any trouble holding the often raucous chamber’s rapt attention on the afternoon of April 27, when he read his landmark ruling in the clash between the House and the government’s executive branch, the Prime Minister and cabinet. The question: must the Conservative government turn over to an opposition-dominated House all the uncensored documents MPs demand to see as they probe the Afghan detainees controversy? Milliken was unequivocal—yes, it must.

But he granted Prime Minister Stephen Harper two weeks to hammer out a deal with the opposition parties on how to keep legitimate secrets from being made public when those documents are finally delivered. “Finding common ground will be difficult,” Milliken said, showing a mastery of understatement. (As if to signal just how difficult, he paused midway through reading his findings to wipe the sweat from his white-haired brow with the sleeve of his traditional black robe.) The problem is the corrosively partisan mood in the House these days, especially over anything to do with the war in Afghanistan. The government routinely accuses the opposition parties of lacking proper regard for Canadian troops in the field. And the Liberals, in particular, have taken to referring at every opportunity to what they’ve labelled the Conservatives’ “culture of deceit.”

So it’s against this backdrop of intensifying acrimony that all parties now have until May 11 to try to reach the accommodation that Milliken insists upon. The obvious way forward is for the Conservatives to turn over whatever uncensored documents MPs demand, after negotiating for the House committee on Afghanistan, which is investigating the detainee issue, to set in place procedures to make sure secrets stay secret. Milliken gently, but firmly, closed the door on the argument from the government that boils down to suspicion that MPs on the committee can’t be trusted not to leak. “There have been assertions that colleagues in the House are not sufficiently trustworthy to be given confidential information, even with appropriate safeguards in place,” he said. “I find such comments troubling.” Continue…