Environmental groups claim Canada is violating NAFTA

By macleans.ca - Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 12:17 PM - 1 Comment

Two environmental groups have launched a complaint against the federal government for insufficiently cracking down on pollution from Alberta’s oilsands. Environmental Defence Canada and the U.S.-based Natural Resources Defence Council claim Ottawa’s failure to enforce provisions in the federal Fisheries Act that prohibit activity that contaminates bodies of water with harmful substances amounts to a subsidy which would violate the North American Free Trade Agreement. Matt Price, the policy director at Environmental Defence Canada, says it’s now up to the U.S. and Mexico to accept the complaint, but expects it could take years before the issue is resolved.

Montreal Gazette

No anonymity on the 'Net, N.S. judge rules

By macleans.ca - Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 12:13 PM - 12 Comments

A Nova Scotia judge has ordered Google and managers of a weekly newspaper to reveal the identities of seven people who are alleged to have defamed senior members of the Halifax fire department with remarks about racism within the organization. The long-awaited decision by Justice Heather Robertson is an important step in the legal dispute pitting Internet freedom against the right to protect one’s public reputation. The court has ordered The Coast newspaper to provide all information provided by the users when they established their accounts on its website; all other email addresses
associated with those accounts; log-file information such as IP addresses, times and dates of log-ins and the activity on the accounts. Google, meanwhile, must provide all information it has relating to the identity of a person who distributed online a letter about the fire department from a Gmail address. Since IP addresses are included in the court’s sweeping requirement, any of the commenters who used fake names to set up their accounts with the paper or Google won’t be anonymous for long.

Chronicle Herald

Maclean's Interview: neurologist Martin Samuels

By Kate Fillion - Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 12:10 PM - 5 Comments

Photographs by Jodi Hilton/Getty Images

Dr. Martin Samuels heads the Harvard Medical School Department of Neurology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, where he is also neurologist-in-chief, and has received dozens of international honours, including numerous teaching awards. On April 15, he will deliver the inaugural lecture of the Scienta Health Series in Toronto. His topic is “Successful aging: important advances in protecting your brain.”

Q: What are the big controversies in neurology regarding cognitive impairment associated with aging?
A: There are thousands. One is that nobody really knows the causes of Alzheimer’s disease. One hypothesis, invented by a colleague of mine, is that something called the amyloid precursor protein is the cause. Most people think he’s right, but a strong minority think it’s something completely different. A second controversy concerns treatment of Alzheimer’s. The FDA has approved four drugs that act indirectly, on memory systems, and some people think they should be used freely, while others question the benefit-to-cost ratio. Double-blind studies show that families can’t even tell whether the patient is taking the drugs or not, but families still want whatever is available. The question becomes whether it’s worth it, given the high cost and the side effects, like making people nauseated.

Q: Is memory loss inevitable?
A: An aspect of memory is lost, predictably, with aging: it becomes more difficult to think of the names of things and people. If you give people the Boston naming test—a standardized test of 60 objects that starts with easy words like “house” and ends with low frequency words like “protractor”—and you force them to go fast, you can predict age quite accurately. A normal 30-year-old would get over 57 correct, a normal 60-year-old would be more like 50 out of 60, and a 90-year-old, more like 40 correct. If you have Alzheimer’s disease, or a stroke that interferes with language in a pathological way, you might get only 10 right.

Q: Why does word retrieval diminish with age?
A: Neurons are dying; the brain is actually shrinking. If you took a perfectly normal 90-year-old who everybody in the family says is sharp as a tack, even if he was still the president of IBM, his brain would be lighter than it was when he was 80, and so on, all the way back to the peak weight of the brain, which is around 17 or 18 years old.

Q: Does intelligence protect against cognitive decline because you have a larger cognitive reserve?
A: It’s very hard to measure cognitive reserve. You hear stuff like “Einstein used just 38 per cent of his brain,” but there’s no evidence that’s the case. As far as we know, we are all using all of our brain, the neurons are firing and making electrical connections. What makes for fast cognition—intelligence, quick thinking—is the microscopic complexity of the network. It’s like a radio: it’s about the number of wires and the number of connections and, of course, they have to be connected correctly to work. The evidence we have is that if you start with very high cognition it doesn’t mean you’re less likely to get Alzheimer’s, but it does mean it takes more brain loss before it becomes obvious to the outside world that anything’s wrong.

Q: Is there any good news about our brains and aging?
A: Oh yes. Given the same basic intelligence, old people know way more than young people. They’ve forgotten more because they’ve lived so much longer, but what’s left is probably an order of magnitude greater than what a young person has, even though young people know things that some old people don’t, like how to text on a cellphone. It’s important to realize that forgetting is fine, in fact it’s critical for normal brain function. There are very good rememberers, idiot savants, who can tell you whether the 20th of April 1908 was a Wednesday, but they can’t do anything creative or that requires new thoughts because every circuit is completely jammed with useless old data.

Q: What can we do to protect our brains as we age?
A: There are no magical pills, vitamins or tricks which prevent aging. Aging cannot be prevented. But what one can do is make the environment for the nervous system as amenable as possible, so that as it ages, it can still function at a pretty high level, and cognition can be maintained well into late life, provided there isn’t a disease. More than anything else, there are things to avoid: smoking cigarettes, which is bad for the brain’s blood vessels, and getting morbidly obese and getting Type 2 diabetes, which is bad for your blood vessels, heart and your kidneys—when those don’t work, the brain doesn’t work well either. Very high levels of bad cholesterol: not good. Very low good cholesterol: also probably not good. A lot of alcohol—not one or two drinks a day, but a lot—is probably bad. And there’s the potential that there are toxins in a lot of herbs and spices that are sold as anti-aging cures. You don’t know what’s in them or how they’re made, because they’re not regulated by the FDA or the corresponding agency in other countries. A lot of these anti-aging teas, for instance, actually have neurotoxins in them.

Q: That’s it?
A: There are a few tricks, too. Tricks don’t prevent disease, and if you get a brain tumour or Alzheimer’s, tricks don’t work, but a good one is to sleep. Sleep is a very important part of memory consolidation—many of us believe that’s its function—and if you don’t sleep well, you put an extra stress on your aging nervous system.

Q: How much is enough?
A: I don’t think it matters exactly how much. One of the key things about sleeping is not to obsess about it, just do the right things. Don’t take stimulants—caffeine, diet pills, or things that contain caffeine, like chocolate— or exercise within a few hours of bedtime. You want an hour of downtime if possible before going to bed, and it’s good to dim the lights; it has a direct effect on the pineal gland, which secretes melatonin, a pro-sleeping hormone.

Q: As you get older, isn’t it harder to sleep?
A: Many reasons people don’t sleep well have nothing to do with aging. Drinking is the biggest problem, I would say. People think a drink will help them fall asleep, and it does, but as the alcohol level in the blood falls, they wake up two or three hours after going to bed. You shouldn’t drink significantly—a small glass doesn’t bother some people—within a couple of hours of going to bed. It’s very disruptive to sleep.

Q: We keep hearing about sudoku, ballroom dancing—don’t any of those things help our brains?
A: Well, ballroom dancing isn’t bad, it combines exercise and socialization. Physical exercise is associated with a lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease, and to the extent that Alzheimer’s is an analogy for normal aging—which isn’t necessarily true—that’s a reasonable thing to do. People should exercise about 20 minutes, if they can, at least five times a week. It’s the one thing that really works but we don’t know why.

Q: What about those brain games on the computer—just marketing scams?
A: “Scam” is a little strong, but they’re marketing efforts, no question about it. The basis is a famous study of nuns who did crossword puzzles and had a low incidence of Alzheimer’s disease. The problem with the study, and subsequent studies, is that there’s a pre-selection bias: if you’re a person who does crossword puzzles and you’re still doing them when you’re 90, you probably have a genetic background of high cognitive skills, so even if you get Alzheimer’s disease, it’s going to take longer before anybody notices. There’s no evidence that doing the New York Times crossword puzzle prevents Alzheimer’s.

Q: What do you personally do to protect your brain?
A: Nothing.

Q: Not even exercise?
A: Well, my wife and I run every morning, 1.5 to 2 miles—no more because I don’t want to wreck my knees—but that’s for general well-being. It’s more a psychological thing.

Q: You don’t take vitamins or supplements?
A: No. Dietary supplements are just a waste of money.

Q: What about this claim that omega-3 maintains the flexibility of the cell wall of the neuron?
A: What you can show about a cell wall in a lab doesn’t necessarily have any effect on the physiological system in vivo. There’s no benefit for omega-3 with regard to maintaining cognition or treating Alzheimer’s.

Q: What about a special diet?
A: I don’t believe in that at all. I personally enjoy everything and encourage my patients to do the same. Eating is one of the great pleasures of life. I’ve seen way, way more problems in people who’ve gone on diets or decided to take megavitamins than in people who have a normal diet.

Q: What kinds of problems?
A: There are all sorts of neurological complications of different vitamins. I had a man recently who decided he was going to take zinc, which is advertised in health food stores as being good for your memory and your libido. What he didn’t know is that zinc induces a protein in the gut which causes a loss of copper. He became very weak in the legs, numb and unable to walk, basically, and people thought he had a spinal cord tumour or some other horrible thing. But all it was was a profound copper deficiency.

Q: Why, if they don’t work, do the media keep telling us about vitamins and other things “proven” to enhance cognitive functioning?
A: Over the years, journalists have interviewed me about one thing or another, and they always want to put in their article what somebody or other can do about a problem. It’s the obsession of advanced societies: having too much confidence in technology, to the point where people believe everything can be prevented if you just do the right things. Well, there isn’t always something to do.

Q: When you were in med school, was anti-aging even a focus in neurology?
A: I finished medical school in ’71, and there was no talk about neuroprotection or anything of the kind. It’s become a focus because of the public’s interest in it, primarily. Successful aging is an aspect of neurological medicine that I would say is analogous to cosmetic dermatology: it’s nice to have, but it isn’t really the important thing. Neurology is a medical field, and what we’re really worried about are the diseases that can disable or kill you: brain tumours, strokes, epilepsy. Normal aging is not a disease, even though people who are 90 walk slower and their memory is not what it once was, and neither are their joints, or their faces. Successful aging is [a concept] that has come along in societies where people have a lot of resources and leisure time. In Africa, where people are falling down on the street and dying of brain infections caused by parasites, they don’t worry about successful cognitive aging. It’s a luxury.

Ignatieff thinks again on health user fees

By macleans.ca - Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 11:53 AM - 56 Comments

Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff has been quick lately to show he’s on-side with moves by Quebec’s provincial Liberal government. When Premier Jean Charest moved to force fully veiled Muslim women to remove their niqabs to get some provincial services, Ignatieff quickly voiced his approval. Similarly, he was fast to say he thought a Quebec plan to study imposing a $25 per medical visit charge, to be implemented through the income tax system, didn’t violate the Canada Health Act. But after a grassroots revolt in his party, Ignatieff now says, wait a minute, the Quebec idea would break the federal law against user fees.

Canadian Press

The church, the mosque and traditional belief in Africa

By macleans.ca - Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 11:42 AM - 0 Comments

A major new survey of African belief—25,000 people interviewed by the Pew Forum in 19 sub-Saharan countries—shows that most people are committed Muslims or Christians. And that many visit traditional healers like Dr. Msilo in his cramped hut at the end of an alleyway in the coastal Tanzanian town of Bagamoyo. To locals, he is known as a witch doctor, and his treatments involve casting out evil spirits, as well as administering traditional potions. People are keen to seek out his services, regardless of their religious affiliation. “God provides medicine for all people—Muslims, Christians and pagans,” he says. The survey also showed that in most countries, Christians and Muslims live peacefully side by side. Fewer than one third of respondents felt religious conflict was a problem in their country—though 58% said it was in Rwanda and Nigeria, where there have recently been clashes between rival communities around Jos.

BBC News

Nearing midday in Guergis

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 11:22 AM - 45 Comments

The Star adds a Belizean tax haven to the allegations. Ms. Guergis’ lawyer issues a statement denying the allegations with vigour. And CTV is apparently reporting that the private investigator first offered to tell the Liberals.

Mailbag: Hookers, Busty Hookers and Also Hookers

By Scott Feschuk - Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 11:08 AM - 20 Comments

Welcome to the Mailbag, where I’m disappointed in all of you: not even one single question about Larry King’s pending seventh divorce and allegations that he may have been doing it with his wife’s younger sister? What is wrong with you people?

King, seen here playing the lead in the nursing home production of Happy Days: Still Sitting On It After All These Years, reportedly got into a real barnburner of an argument with his future ex, leading both to file for divorce. That’s fun to imagine but let’s be honest: after six divorces. could Larry really still have his heart in a good, old-fashioned domestic blowup? Would such a thing even get his attention?

Shawn: You son of a bitch – are you sleeping with my sister?!

Larry: Huh?

Shawn: How could you, Larry? HOW COULD YOU??!

Larry [fiddles with his suspenders]: Nic Cage – what’s he like to work with?

Shawn: What are you talking— I’m leaving you, Larry. You’re a sick, sick man and I’m going to take you for every goddamn penny!

Larry: Your calls for Ross Perot, right after this.

On to the mailbag. The following queries were actually submitted by actual readers. And remember: there are no stupid questions, unless you’re Rahim Jaffer and you’re asking whether I can give you a lift downtown.

•••

Dear Scott:

Hate to dwell on this story, but any tips on how Rahim can “Stay Classy” at this point? More importantly, any advice on how he might hang on to his wife? – MaggiesFarmboy

MaggiesFarmboy –

Why are people apologizing for Continue…

'We take all allegations seriously'

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 2 Comments

Gen. Walter Natynczyk’s statement on yesterday’s testimony at the special committee on Afghanistan.

Recent public comments have made grave accusations against the men and women of the Canadian Forces. As Chief of the Defence Staff, I can assure all Canadians that we take all allegations seriously and will investigate new allegations appropriately.

The Canadian Forces have always been and remain committed to ensuring that detainees are handled and transferred in accordance with our obligations under international law. Whenever there have been specific allegations of ill treatment, the Canadian Forces have not hesitated to act.

The Canadian Forces hold themselves to the highest level of professional conduct and have conducted themselves with bravery and compassion. We are committed to ensuring detainees are handled and transferred in accordance with our obligations under international law.

Continue…

Improv exercises help Ph.D. students learn to be ‘less cerebral’

By Alexandra Shimo - Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 4 Comments

Photograph by Cole Garside

It’s difficult to know exactly what Lisa Byers, 36, does wrong in her job interviews. Perhaps she’s just not what potential employers were looking for, but it could also be that sometimes she forgets to breathe or she speeds through her answers when she’s nervous. “I’ve not gotten a lot of jobs, so I must have been doing something not so well.”

That’s why, on a recent drizzly evening in Hamilton, Byers, a Ph.D. student in sociology at McMaster University, finds herself pretending to be an elephant. She’s also swearing like a trooper, and vibrating her arms like a pneumatic drill. The exercises were designed to help people like Byers learn how to be “less cerebral” under pressure.

The brainchild of Allison Sekuler, dean of graduate studies at McMaster University and a professor in the department of psychology, neuroscience and behaviour, the improvisation program paired about 45 students (graduate and post-doc) with actors working out of Hamilton’s Theatre Aquarius. The course is one of a series of programs the university introduced this year to prepare students for life outside the ivory towers. Peter Self, assistant dean for graduate student life and research training, helped organize the improvisation workshop. “People often say, ‘Well, now you’ve got to enter the real world,’ ” he explains. “And how do you do that? We’re attempting to help them with that transition.” Continue…

Why did I major in anthropology?

By Julia McKinnell - Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 10:50 AM - 1 Comment

Photo Illustration by Lauren Cattermole

My degree was a waste of time. How did I wind up back at my parents’ house? My mom’s on my case. I need a job. For the newly graduated, life coach Kenneth Jedding offers advice in his new book, Higher Education: On Life, Landing a Job, and Everything Else They Didn’t Teach You in College.

Moving back into your parents’ house isn’t as pathetic as you might think, he writes. “It gives you the chance to explore career possibilities with less financial pressure. If you can work it to your advantage it will go down in your history as a smart move.”

That’s if you can survive your parents driving you crazy. “If you’re feeling like you can’t do anything right, from putting the orange juice back in the right place to wearing the right shoes to sending out your resumé to enough of the right people—then the criticism is probably excessive.” Still, “keep the peace as much as you can,” he urges. “You’ll need to find someone else to vent to.” Even better, “put on your running shoes, go out and run a few miles, yell at the top of your lungs if necessary, and then with all that pent-up anger out of your system, keep thinking about what you’re going to do career-wise.”

Continue…

Video games before bed have little impact on teen sleep

By macleans.ca - Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 10:37 AM - 0 Comments

Teens who played a relatively violent video game before bed took only slightly longer to fall asleep than those who watched a relaxing nature documentary, according to a preliminary study reported in the BBC. In the study, researchers from Australia recruited 13 males aged 14 to 18 with no existing sleep problems. One night, they played Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare for 50 minutes while in bed. On a second night a week later, they spent an equal amount of time watching March of the Penguins. Three fell asleep to the movie while none fell asleep during the video game. Most who played the game were asleep within 7.5 minutes, only four minutes longer than during the documentary.

BBC

Mitchel Raphael on MPs scarf skills and the G8 star who wanted to walk everywhere

By Mitchel Raphael - Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

Hillary Clinton’s personal makeup shield
For the G8 foreign ministers’ conference, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stayed in the Karsh suite of the Fairmont Château Laurier, where famous Ottawa photographer Yousuf Karsh lived for 18 years with his wife, Estrellita Karsh. Famous Karsh photos in the apartment include ones of Pablo Picasso and George Bernard Shaw. The suite also has what Mrs. Karsh describes as “the sexy shower”—it’s lined with marble and has three tiers of water jets. CTV’s Tom Clark went to the Château to interview Clinton for his show Power Play. Before the interview, Clinton pulled out her makeup kit for a touch-up. Seamlessly her security detail moved in front of the cameras. When the freshening up was done they moved back into position. One G8 attendee, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, was very low maintenance, according to staff at the British High Commission who said his only demand was that he be able to walk everywhere. “He has lots of energy,” noted the staffer. While Miliband (who has been touted as a future leader of Britain’s Labour Party) was in the foyer of the House being interviewed by the CBC, a rare hush descended. People seemed star-struck by the politician—well, except for Industry Minister Tony Clement, who walked down the stairs loudly snapping his fingers, even doing it behind Miliband as he was being interviewed. “I am a snap-happy kind of guy,” he later joked when he realized what was going on.

MPs flaunt accessory chic
All parties were united in wearing blue to show their support for NDP Leader Jack Layton and his battle with prostate cancer. The men were given ties and the women scarves by Prostate Cancer Canada. Liberal MPs Martha Hall Findlay and Justin Trudeau traded. Trudeau made the scarf an ascot and wore it as the mandatory-tie-for-men in the House of Commons. “A tie is a tie is a tie,” he said. “I did the research.” Trudeau noted the ascot was also a way to remember his father Pierre Trudeau with “a bit of flamboyance.” The former PM died from prostate cancer and other medical complications. Other MPs also tried adding some panache to their blue made-in-Canada, 100 per cent Italian-silk accessories. NDP MP Megan Leslie tied hers around her neck, evoking airline stewardess chic, while Public Works Minister Rona Ambrose wrapped her scarf around her waist. All the parties paid tribute to Layton in their member’s statements before question period, an unusual departure. Normally, the statement made right before QP is by a Conservative trying to drag Michael Ignatieff through the mud. But this time Conservative MP Jim Abbott spoke about prostate cancer and said he told Layton he looked good in a blue tie. The NDP leader replied that his father (a Tory in Brian Mulroney’s cabinet) would have been proud. Prostate Cancer Canada president and CEO Steve Jones said the event was a milestone for his organization and that they could not have hoped for better awareness for the condition, one that he says one in six men will be diagnosed with in their lifetime. At a reception after QP, Layton, who has been on a health diet, joked he has never eaten more broccoli in his life. “No cheese,” his MP wife Olivia Chow reminded him. Chow herself was spotted grabbing greasy spring rolls. “I am eating them on Jack’s behalf,” she joked.

Why those reporters are  yelling at Michael Ignatieff
One CBC reporter has noted that Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff chooses to take the loudest questions during scrums, which is annoying, they say, for those journalists who tend not to yell. NDP Leader Jack Layton, the reporter added, is much better at spreading the wealth—or being smart and picking the people he prefers to answer.

Three-person IVF could fight disease

By macleans.ca - Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 10:30 AM - 2 Comments

Scientists at Newcastle University in the UK have made embryos with DNA from a man and two women, a technique that could help mothers with rare genetic disorders have healthy kids, they say. Published in the journal Nature, their research’s goal is to prevent damaged DNA in mitochondria, which powers the cell, from being passed on by the mother, the BBC reports. While IVF clinics aren’t currently allowed to carry out the procedure, about one in 200 kids is born each year with mutations in mitochondrial DNA; in most cases, it results in only mild disease that sometimes does not have symptoms. But about one in 6,500 kids is born with mitochondrial disease, which can cause sometimes fatal conditions, like muscular weakness, blindness and heart failure. The Newcastle team made a total of 80 embryos, cultured for up to eight days in the lab, and is planning further studies.

BBC

Hail the return of the prodigal bro

By Scott Feschuk - Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 3 Comments

Photograph by Harry How/AP

Are you troubled? Have you hit rock bottom? Do not fear, mortal—for assistance is on its way.

Tiger Woods is coming to help you.

Forget about how he performs at the Masters or the year’s other golf majors. What matters is that a 40-day stint in rehab has completely cured Tiger of his horrible illness. He no longer suffers from the dreaded Having Sex With Pretty Ladies disease. In fact, he’s so cured that he is now ready to tackle your problems.

Speaking at his first press conference since, well, you know—and referring to reporters by their nicknames and, in the case of one lucky scribe, as “my bro”—Woods strived to demonstrate that he is a changed man. He said things like, “It’s not about the championships—it’s about how you live your life.” (This would have been a laugh line to the Tiger Woods of a year ago, just as it will likely be to the Tiger Woods of a year from now.) And he spoke in the coded, wounded parlance of the rehabbed.

Continue…

Most seductive predator since Bond

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 9:40 AM - 4 Comments

Photograph by Knut Koivisto

Stieg Larsson wrote the way he smoked, compulsively and for pleasure. The Swedish journalist, a socialist who devoted his career to exposing neo-Nazis, wrote fiction on the side. Little did he know that his Millennium Trilogy of crime novels—all published after his death in 2004 from a massive heart attack—would launch a blockbuster franchise, selling over 20 million copies. Or that he would supply Hollywood with a new female superhero prototype: a punk cyber-sleuth who could become the most seductive predator to make the leap from page to screen since James Bond.

Not unlike 007, Lisbeth Salander—the heroine of Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and its two sequels—is a lone wolf with a sociopathic streak and an appetite for cigarettes and loveless sex. But as a victim/predator with a mysterious past, she’s far more intriguing. Scarred by horrific abuse, tattooed and pierced, she’s a bisexual outlaw in black leather—a computer hacker armed with a MacBook Pro, a photographic memory, and lizard-like reflexes wired to a scary killer instinct. Rape her, and she’ll rape you back, 10 times worse. Salander is a walking feminist revenge fantasy. And she’s coming to a theatre near you, over and over again.

Larsson’s three novels have all been turned into Swedish-language films. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, directed by Denmark’s Niels Arden Oplev, opens here next week after tearing up the European box office under Larsson’s original title, Men Who Hate Women. It has already grossed US$100 million. And with her ferocious performance as Salander—“the woman who hates men who hate women”—Sweden’s Noomi Rapace raises the bar for kick-ass female avengers.

Continue…

Bittersweet justice for Singh

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 9:37 AM - 48 Comments

Simon Singh MBE, the celebrated science writer and documentarian, has officially won his libel tilt with the British Chiropractic Association. In April 2008 Singh wrote a column for the Guardian about the persistence of pre-scientific ideas in the British chiropractic trade. What most people now think of as merely an expert form of massage began with the claim that spinal maladjustments were the source of virtually all disease in humans, and some chiropractors still believe they can cure a lot more than back and joint pain. Singh wrote:

You might think that modern chiropractors restrict themselves to treating back problems, but in fact they still possess some quite wacky ideas. The fundamentalists argue that they can cure anything. And even the more moderate chiropractors have ideas above their station. The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments.

I can confidently label these treatments as bogus because I have co-authored a book about alternative medicine with the world’s first professor of complementary medicine, Edzard Ernst. He learned chiropractic techniques himself and used them as a doctor. This is when he began to see the need for some critical evaluation. Among other projects, he examined the evidence from 70 trials exploring the benefits of chiropractic therapy in conditions unrelated to the back. He found no evidence to suggest that chiropractors could treat any such conditions.

(Singh’s column went on to discuss the controversy surrounding the 1998 death of Saskatchewan chiropractic patient Laurie Jean Mathiason.)

English libel law is so tough on defendants that the world’s rich and offended will torture jurisdictional logic to the point of incoherence if it means their complaint can be heard in an English courtroom. But the BCA had it easy; Singh was trapped right there on the island with them. They took him to court. And only him; they chose not to name the Guardian in their claim at all.

English libel requires the judge to issue pre-trial rulings on the meanings of offending passages. Singh, whose piece had appeared in the Comment section of the Guardian, argued before Sir David Eady that his use of the word “bogus” meant only that there is no good evidence for the effectiveness of the impugned treatments. But the judge not only closed off the fair comment defence; he ruled, without giving much indication that he was paying close attention to the arguments or the relevant text, that the term denoted conscious and deliberate dishonesty. This shifted a frightful burden of proof onto Singh, requiring him to show not only that British chiropractors were offering useless and unverifiable treatments, but that they did so with the certain and specific knowledge that they were useless and unverifiable.

It became clear almost immediately that the BCA had overplayed its hand. Eady’s ruling rightly raised a worldwide clamour against the depraved state of the law and the health of free inquiry in the land of Newton and Darwin. (This has helped put libel reform on the agendas of all major parties in the current UK election.) It is, after all, almost not enough to say that science “depends” on the freedom to make tough evidentiary criticisms; considered socially, science is practically equivalent to the possibility of making them. Meanwhile, the beam of a million-watt searchlight had been attracted to the claims and conduct of the British chiropractic business. In a canonical demonstration of the Streisand Effect, the country’s statutory regulator of chiropractic, which holds the activity and advertising of practitioners to an explicitly scientific standard, was obliged to launch literally hundreds of investigations into strip-mall spine-crackers.

The harm that British chiropractic has done to itself is incalculable; meanwhile, it has had to give up hope of impoverishing Singh, who had Eady’s ruling overturned by the England and Wales Court of Appeal on April 1. In asking a public controversy concerning a question of evidence to be a matter for a libel suit, wrote the Lord Chief Justice, the BCA was inviting the court to serve as “an Orwellian ministry of truth”. The court, he added, must decline to do so. (He did not neglect to throw in a pinch of old John Milton and his Areopagitica.)

One ought not to admonish the BCA for abandoning its libel action; it was self-evidently the right thing to do. But what does it say about British libel law that the Association did so almost immediately once the fair comment defence was made available to Singh—a commentator by profession, one whose standing to assess and challenge scientific evidence could hardly be higher? Just one month ago, Singh announced that he would be ceasing his newspaper column for good. One hopes he will reconsider, but it is still uncertain that he will recover his own defence costs, and the time and effort he has expended will never be recouped.

Try putting yourself in her shoes

By Elio Iannacci - Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 9:30 AM - 7 Comments

Photo Illustation by Bradley Reinhardt

If David Byrne gets his way, Imelda Marcos will be the next Evita Peron. Or at least an off-Broadway version of the political icon. Byrne and music producer Norman Cook (a.k.a. Fatboy Slim) have released a two-disc concept album called Here Lies Love. The collection—also available in an edition featuring a booklet and a DVD with six music videos—centres on the scandalous life and times of the wife of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Depending on how you look at it, the timing couldn’t be better, or worse. Now 80 years old, Marcos, who returned to her homeland in 1991 after her exile in 1986, is seeking a parliament seat in Ilocos Norte in the northern Philippines.

The album will surprise fans of Byrne’s solo efforts or his work with the Talking Heads. Sounding like an amphetamine-spiked disco opera, it features 20 female singers (Byrne sings on a few tracks too) and reflects Marcos’s lavish Studio 54-soaked tastes (think bass-heavy torch songs amplified by vocalists such as Cyndi Lauper, Tori Amos, Natalie Merchant, Martha Wainwright and the B-52s’ Kate Pierson). Byrne divides Imelda’s biography into 22 tracks. The first CD explores Marcos’s poverty-stricken youth and fictionalizes her transformation from beauty queen to political wife. The second focuses on the pair’s Dynasty-like spiral into excess and corruption. (One track, Order 1081, is about the tragic repercussions of Ferdinand’s decree of martial law in 1972.)

It was Marcos’s love of the nightlife that motivated Byrne to pen the libretto. “I read about Imelda’s fondness of disco seven years ago and it immediately made me conceptualize her life on stage,” Byrne says over the phone from his office in New York City. “Those ’70s and ’80s dance hits expressed this romantic, larger-than-life, transcendent feeling of joy and opulence. She related to all that.” In fact, Marcos was so smitten by the boogie that she had custom-built discotheques—with mirror balls and dance floors—constructed in a few of her homes (reportedly using tax dollars). Continue…

Right out of the mouths of snakes

By Alex Shimo - Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 9:30 AM - 2 Comments

Getty; iStock; Photo Illustration by Adam Cholewa

The venom of the temple viper, or Tropidolaemus wagleri, causes a mouse to stop breathing, its muscles paralyzed. It dies within minutes, and it is this phenomenon, or at least the paralytic quality, that made scientists realize its potential as a skin cream.

The Canadian cosmetics company Euoko, which launched the snake venom cream Y-30 Intense Lift Concentrate, claims it works in a similar way to Botox, which paralyzes the muscles that cause facial wrinkles. Unlike Botox, which is injected, Y-30 comes in cream form. Its serpentine qualities are part of what makes it so attractive, explains Alessandra Bordon, a Vancouverite in her mid-30s. She applies the cream nightly, just before she goes to bed. “When I heard they were using snake venom, I was like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. Now I’ve got to try this.’ ”

Those who share Bordon’s sentiments might first want to consider the price. Costing $525, it works out to $17.50 per millilitre. But that doesn’t seem to have deterred the excitement over the cream. Described on fashion blogs and in the media as “Botox in a bottle,” a “miracle drug” or “better than Botox,” the cream produces serious results, says Daniella Durov, a sales representative at the Toronto upscale retailer Andrews, which carries the cream. “Our clients all come back and they love it. They can’t be without it, not even for a week.”

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So now, it’s no business of the state

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 217 Comments

Photograph by Rebecca Cook/Reuters

Quebec’s move to nix the niqab continues to tie Canada’s commentariat in knots. The funniest column to date was by Haroon Siddiqui, “editorial page editor emeritus” of the Toronto Star. Mr. Siddiqui was not impressed by the arguments mounted against the head-to-toe body bag—for example, the notion that it is a “symbol of oppression”:

“Let’s assume that it is,” he wrote. “Whose business is it to end the practice—that of the state?”

That’s pretty cute coming from a guy who, during this magazine’s long battle with Canada’s “human rights” commissions, argued at length that it was most certainly the business of the state to end the practice of Maclean’s carrying Islamophobic Steyn columns. If the state can regulate what you write and say and think and even (as in the lesbian heckler case at the British Columbia Tribunal) what you quip, it can most certainly regulate what you wear. In Canada, it would be quicker to list what isn’t the business of the state. “The state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation,” said Pierre Trudeau, unless, of course, you’re tucked up with a nice mug of cocoa reading an Islamophobic edition of Maclean’s. It was a classic bit of Trudeaupian legerdemain: if you’re allowed to roger anything that moves, or doesn’t, according to taste, you won’t notice all the other parts of your life the state has a place in. In Canada, it’s the state’s business when you get your hip operation, not yours: if the state has jurisdiction over your hip, why shouldn’t it also have jurisdiction over which garments the hip can be sheathed in? In Canada, a resident alien is not permitted to own a bookstore, on grounds of cultural protection. If “cultural protection” can prohibit a homosexual from San Francisco opening up a gay bookstore in Vancouver, why can’t it also extend to a Muslim woman’s dress?

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Bestsellers

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Top-selling fiction and non-fiction titles (week of April 12th, 2010)

Fiction

Non-fiction

LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)

Rights and Democracy: Meet the new boss

By Paul Wells - Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 7:50 AM - 81 Comments

A few notes before the Foreign Affairs committee meets today to hear from Gérard Latulippe, the new president of Rights and Democracy appointed by the Braun/Gauthier faction of the board and rubber-stamped by the hapless salaryman who sits in the office normally reserved for foreign ministers, Lawrence Cannon.

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Tonight in Guergis

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 12:39 AM - 49 Comments

CTV gets the private investigator’s side of the story.

Helena Guergis, the former minister of state for the status of women, was expelled from caucus and is being investigated by RCMP over allegations of partying with cocaine and prostitutes, CTV News has learned. Private investigator Derek Snowdy says Guergis lost her Tory post after he informed a Conservative Party lawyer of those allegations, CTV’s Robert Fife reported Wednesday night.

Snowdy had been conducting a 19-month probe into the affairs of Nazim Gillani and his business partner, former CFL player Mike Mihelic, when he learned of purported illicit behaviour by Guergis and her husband, former Tory MP Rahim Jaffer … Gilliani boasted that he had cellphone photos of Guergis and Jaffer “partying” with cocaine and high-priced hookers, Snowdy said … It has not been confirmed that Gillani said those comments or that he had the cellphone photos, but it was those allegations that caused Harper to act.

The government operations committee has called Mr. Jaffer and Ms. Guergis to testify during hearings into federal funding for renewable energy. Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty cites “missteps” in Mr. Jaffer’s case. Ontario Provincial Police chief Julian Fantino commends the work of his officers on that case.

Professor promoted by Iranian government 'study centre' has his say: "I am absolutely against the Iranian fascist dictatorship regime."

By Michael Petrou - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 at 10:02 PM - 3 Comments

Mahdi Tourage is among three scholars and a director promoted by an Iranian government-linked institution in Toronto that portrays itself as non-partisan study centre. The “Center for Iranian Studies” on Sheppard Ave. W. was founded by Iran’s former cultural attaché in Ottawa and is still funded by the embassy here. On its website, it links to departments at the University of Toronto, McGill, and Concordia – although it has no affiliation with any of them. Of the four individuals it promotes, three – Richard Foltz, Soheil Parsa, and now Mahdi Tourage –  have confirmed that they have nothing to do with the centre. It’s a safe bet that the fourth doesn’t either.

Here, in part, is Mahdi Tourage’s email to me:

I have no idea who these guys are and have never heard of them before. Continue…

Mailbag questions. You heard me.

By Scott Feschuk - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 at 7:44 PM - 41 Comments

Apologies for my blogly silence. Turns out starting a suicidal cult is a real time suck.

Permit me to make it up to you with a mailbag and this nice refreshing glass of Kool-Aid.

Any questions?