Yes, Mr. Sarkozy, that's the kind of man I think you are

By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 10:59 AM - 2 Comments

Last September, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, was asked if he would release an Iranian agent convicted of murdering a former Iranian prime minister on French soil in exchange for the freedom of a French student held by Iran.

No, he said. That’s blackmail. The French President then summoned some television-friendly indignation. Do you really believe I’m a man who would swap a murderer for a French student, whose only crime was speaking the Iranian language?  he asked.

Now we have the answer.

Here’s the tape:

"I'm sorry to tell you there is no money"

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 10:28 AM - 2 Comments

Upon arriving at his new office, British Chief Secretary to the Treasury Liberal Democrat David Laws was expecting constructive advice from his predecessor. What he got, observes the Daily Mail, was more like a “final two-fingered salute.” In a handwritten note, his forerunner in the position, Labour minister Liam Byrne left him with these parting words: “Dear Chief Secretary, I’m afraid to tell you there is no money. Kind regards and good luck!” Though Byrne maintains the note was meant as “a joke from Chief Secretary to another,” Laws is reportedly furious, pointing to the national debt, which has been revealed to be nearly $3 trillion, as evidence that Labour has left the country’s finances in an “utterly ruinous state.” There is, of course, some truth behind every joke.

Daily Mail

Outsiders don’t get us and hockey

By John Geddes - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 10:20 AM - 12 Comments

Jeff Vinnick/NHLI/Getty Images

As if anybody needs them during playoff season, here are a few reminders of how inescapable hockey is in Canada. On our $5 bill, in a spot where another country might offer an old Latin motto, there’s a bilingual quotation from Roch Carrier’s short story “The Hockey Sweater.” When Michael Ignatieff wrote an essay about Canada’s two solitudes, back before he entered politics, his epiphany about the language divide occurred—where else?–in a Trois-Rivières, Que., hockey arena. Not to be outdone, Prime Minister Stephen Harper burnishes his image by letting it be known that he toils during spare moments over some sort of history of the game.

All these examples concern writing about hockey, rather than lacing ’em up and actually playing. The national obsession has, in recent decades, inspired an outpouring of prose that Jason Blake aims to make sense of in his new, groundbreaking book Canadian Hockey Literature. Despite the rather generic title, this is no dry critical survey. Blake is an engaging guide, not just to obvious highlights—like Mordecai Richler weaving hockey into some of his best scenes—but also to examples a reader might easily skate right past—like Alice Munro naming streets for original-six NHL teams in her superb story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.”

Continue…

Rocking the Globe

By Nicholas Köhler - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 10 Comments

Kevin Van Paassen / Globe and Mail

Despite an edict by Globe and Mail editor-in-chief John Stackhouse, designed to limit gawking, that newsroom staff “only come in to the building if you must be on-site,” several senior managers, including Stackhouse himself, brought their kids in on Saturday to watch as the Globe’s guest editors—Bono and Sir Bob Geldof, pop stars from, respectively, U2 and the Boomtown Rats—stitched together the Monday edition.

In a move one might have never imagined for Canada’s grey paper of record, the celebrity duo took control, producing an edition devoted to Africa and labelled “The African Century.” Suddenly, here was Zooropa, black and white and read all over, rather than the dreary Mop and Pail. “I think people were excited to get their picture taken with them,” says an editor. The carnival atmosphere afforded many at the Globe a first glimpse of co-worker offspring in a newsroom not known for conviviality. “Preteens, kind of thing,” says a staffer. “People who probably didn’t know who Bono was. Do you really need to do that? Like—you’re kind of here to work.” Says a reporter: “It just felt like another generation’s rock star. And the editors who are old—like, who are in their 40s—they got really excited about it. This was really their show.”

Continue…

Five hanged in Tehran

By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 9:46 AM - 4 Comments

I was out of the office when this atrocity took place. I’d be remiss, however, not to bring it to your attention even a week late. The five activists were murdered at Evin Prison, where Canadian Zahra Kazemi spent her last days alive. Four were Kurds. A widespread strike in protest of the executions shut down many of the Kurdish towns and cities in northwest Iran.

Canada vulnerable to cyber-attacks: CSIS

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 9:45 AM - 1 Comment

CBC News has obtained a heavily censored briefing note under an access to information request showing that Canada’s spy agency has warned that cyber-attacks on government, university and industry computers has been growing “substantially,” the news agency reports. Canada’s energy, financial and telecommunications systems all are increasingly vulnerable, according to the June 2009 memo from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, or CSIS. “In addition to being virtually unattributable, these remotely operated attacks offer a productive, secure and low-risk means to conduct espionage,” the CSIS briefing says. The federal government’s March throne speech pledged a cyber security strategy, but Canada still has no official plan for responding to coordinated cyber-attacks. Public Safety Canada did not respond to CBC’s interview requests.

CBC News

Suicide bomber kills 18 in Kabul

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

A massive suicide car bomb today hit a NATO convoy in the Afghan capital, Kabul, killing at least 18 people and injuring 50 more. Six of the dead are NATO soldiers—five Americans and a Canadian, whose name has not yet been released. An Afghan civilian who witnessed the attack said many of the victims are women and children. This is the third large-scale attack in the Afghan capital this year.

BBC News

National Post

A soldier’s choice

By Michael Friscolanti - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 69 Comments

Sean Kilpatrick / The Canadian Press

A military courtroom is not much different than the civilian version, except for a few distinct touches. When the judge shows up, everyone salutes. When a jury is chosen, the panel has five members, not 12. And when a witness is summoned to testify, he doesn’t walk to his seat. He marches.

In the courtroom where Capt. Robert Semrau is standing trial for murder, the witness box itself is also unique. Unlike on TV, where people answer questions in a chair directly beside the judge, the witness stand here is located just a few steps in front of the defence table. Intentional or not, the effect is dramatic: as each witness talks about Capt. Semrau, nobody is closer than Capt. Semrau.

Continue…

The infomercial era

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, May 17, 2010 at 10:25 PM - 57 Comments

The Prime Minister’s Office is tonight combatting allegations made by unnamed leaders of tomorrow that questions posed during a forum on Parliament Hill today—hosted by Senator Mike Duffy—were prescreened. If any questions were skipped, it’s perhaps only so there’d be sufficient time for Mr. Duffy to get in queries such as the following.

Finally, Prime Minister, we’re looking forward to the G8, G20, Toronto and Muskoka. I can’t help but sort of cast my mind back to those snowy days—well, not much snow some days—of the Olympics in British Columbia and what a tremendous show that was and what a great show of national unity and the pride of Canadians from coast to coast to coast.  So it’s not quite as sexy as Olympic sport, but in a way, in a way it’s even more important, this conference, these two conferences that are coming up because it really is all about the future.

Not to mention follow ups such as what Mr. Duffy offered after Mr. Harper had navigated that provocation.

A little hard to get that same kind of enthusiasm over the final wording of the communique but I’m sure you’re working hard on that.

Call no man happy until he is dead

By Andrew Potter - Monday, May 17, 2010 at 7:18 PM - 11 Comments

I’ve been thinking about luck recently, especially that species of chance that philosophers call “moral luck”. This is the idea that praise or blame, success or failure, are due to circumstances over which the agent does not have complete control. In the most influential essay on the subject, Thomas Nagel identified three main types of moral luck: resultant, circumstantial, and constitutive (there’s a fourth, but it just causes problems so I’ll ignore it). Resultant luck is the one we’re most familiar with — I run a red light and nothing happens, you run one and take out a family of four. Circumstantial luck refers to the way our moral outcomes are shaped by the broader events and situations in which we find ourselves embedded — that’s what I’ve been getting at with my little pieces on Sidney Crosby recently.

But yesterday I found myself thinking about what Nagel called “constitutive luck”, the variations in moral character that each of us seems to have in virtue of our genes, upbringing, culture, education, or other circumstances that we didn’t choose. We were at the Canoe Landing park in downtown Toronto, the work-in-progress urban space designed by Douglas Coupland that includes a sculpture of a big red canoe and sculpture park of even bigger fish bobbers. It’s all pretty cool, but the most arresting part of the park is the running trail called the Miracle Mile, inspired by Terry Fox. The trail is marked by typically Couplandesque pieces of installation art — pictures of Terry’s running shorts, his sock, and an unbelievably beatific picture of Terry himself.

It’s hard not to read Coupland’s writeups and not be terribly moved, especially the part where he suggests that if Terry had got his cancer today, he would probably be cured. That’s the power of research, the very research Terry set out to raise money for.

But it also raises the question of whether, if Terry were alive today, he’d still be the closest thing we have to a secular Canadian saint. Not to take anything away from Terry in slightest — he accomplished more in his short life than I ever will. But would he have retained the selflessness, the purity of heart for which we remember him? Was he even like that then?   This article from today’s Citizen, about Steve Fonyo, is weirdly synchronistic reminder that how things turn out — indeed, how we turn out — is not always entirely up to us. Fonyo hasn’t had the best life, and he hasn’t made the best decisions. But I can’t say for sure that, given his background, given his circumstances, given who he is,  I would have done any better. Can you? At the very least, it strikes me that taking away his beach would be a very, very low thing indeed.

Photos from Bangkok

By macleans.ca - Monday, May 17, 2010 at 5:29 PM - 3 Comments

Something we have lately taken to taking seriously

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, May 17, 2010 at 4:26 PM - 13 Comments

The Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs is presently concerned with a study of “issues related to prorogation” and, as part of those hearings, called Brian Topp, coalition biographer and former NDP campaign director, to testify. His opening statement, reprinted below, is almost certainly the most interesting treatise on Parliamentary democracy you’ll read this afternoon. Continue…

Guergis info came from different sources

By macleans.ca - Monday, May 17, 2010 at 4:18 PM - 20 Comments

Since private investigator Derrick Snowdy testified that he didn’t give the Conservatives any information that would have justified removing Helena Guergis, former minister of state for the status of women, from its caucus, the party is now saying that it received its tips from a number of sources. This is leading to speculation that the government itself has damning information about now-independent MP. Whether that information reveals anything worse then Guergis’ association with Nazim Gillani, a Toronto businessman currently facing fraud charges, or the fact that she allowed her husband, Rahim Jaffer, to use her BlackBerry and office for potentially illegal lobbying activities, remains unknown. “It’s certainly a possibility that the government was and still is sitting on information related to Guergis,” said NDP MP Pat Martin. “If I were a more jaded type, I would even speculate that Snowdy orchestrated this whole tempest in a teapot on behalf of the Conservative government to get rid of a problematic minister.”

The Hill Times

Terrorism watch in North Africa

By Michael Petrou - Monday, May 17, 2010 at 4:09 PM - 0 Comments

The long-running dispute between Morocco and the Polisario Front over sovereignty of Western Sahara is usually ignored by the rest of the world. The territory is mostly desert flatlands and has a population of maybe half a million people. The conflict has little chance of spreading. The Polisario Front, for its part, appears to be almost a relic of the Cold War, heralding socialism and national liberation rather than Islam. Continue…

Comedy Is Back! Except the Good Ones Aren't

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, May 17, 2010 at 3:39 PM - 4 Comments

Another thing about the current round of TV announcements is that the shows that aren’t Friends ripoffs have some very bad-sounding premises. I don’t want to do a whole post about that because it’s not fair to judge a show based on the premise… and yet, normally, a show that has a bad premise will in fact turn out to be a flop. (This is probably just because most shows flop, so any show with something working against it — like a terrible premise — just has one extra data point added to the already-existing likelihood that it will fail.) Fox has perhaps the most unpromising-sounding batch of premises so far — no, I’m not talking about Shawn Ryan’s Ride-Along — including Raising Hope, a show from the creator of My Name Is Earl about a single dad whose baby’s mother is on death row. Also, Mitch Hurwitz’s Raising Wilde, starring Will Arnett as a rich asshat trying to buy the affection of a beautiful bleeding-heart liberal, sounds like Community without all the other fun characters commenting on how boring this kind of sexual-tension plot can be. However, the most-mocked premise so far appears to be NBC’s Outsourced, a comedy based on the premise that Americas will really enjoy watching a show about jobs being shipped overseas. Maybe this can be the promo:

Anyway, the key fact about Outsourced is that it’s taking the spot that would normally have gone to Parks & Recreation, forcing that show to be delayed until mid-season. NBC was considering opening up another night of comedy; when they chose to make Thursday their only comedy night (including Love Bites, a new hour-long show that’s a hybrid of comedy and anthology — basically, The Love Boat on land), that left them with the choice between keeping the 8 to 10 period more or less as it was, or bumping an already-renewed show to make room for a new one. They chose the latter, and the show they decided to bump was Parks. The show has already — presumably in anticipation of Amy Poehler’s pregnancy — shot some episodes for its third season, so it will go on a short production hiatus and then resume production for mid-season. How long the new season turns out to be depends on how soon Outsourced gets canceled.

Parks has probably been, overall, the best of NBC’s four comedies this season; Community has had great individual episodes, and I haven’t been as disappointed with The Office as some (but then, that’s the only show in that group that I have loved without reservation, so I can forgive it a lot), but Parks not only made the expected second-season improvement, it ruthlessly weeded out all the faults of its first season, learned to do things that no other current show was doing — the mix of small-town comedy with political and media satire recalls Newhart, but no recent U.S. show — and maximized the strengths of most of its performers and characters. Greg Daniels is good at making his shows a lot better really quickly; his shows have a wonderful combination of artistry and efficiency, like he’s figured out the secret of producing great, personal television art in a businesslike way.

But Parks has one thing working against its attempt to find a larger audience that appreciates what it’s become, and that’s the Office-style format, a holdover from NBC’s original order for an Office spinoff. Now, the mock-documentary format can’t be called a bad choice in itself, because as it happens it’s the single-camera format that is most popular with a larger audience. (The two biggest single-camera, no-laugh-track successes in the U.S. are The Office and Modern Family. There’s just something about that mock-documentary format that creates the necessary substitute for the communal viewing experience — and it’s the only TV comedy format that truly never seems to need a laugh track.) But because the show airs on the same night as The Office, on the same network as The Office, has a somewhat similar collection of character types plus one woman who used to be on The Office, it is still thought of as that show’s weak sister, for all that it’s been better than Sis this year.

Sometimes I feel like Parks would be better off if it had done without the talking heads, which are rarely (for me anyway) the funniest part of the show and mostly succeed in falsely branding it as an Office clone. But that’s spilt milk now. For now, it will probably be better off if NBC can find a way to put it on another night from The Office, to build its own audience and identity. But that will require it to wait around — perhaps for one or two more shortened seasons — until the network actually has enough comedies to start another night. And if they do manage to create another night of comedy, Outsourced probably won’t be the foundation of it.

EXCLUSIVE: The man who trained the Times Square bomber

By Adnan R. Khan - Monday, May 17, 2010 at 3:05 PM - 10 Comments

Getty Images

One week following the attempted bombing of New York’s Times Square, a Maclean’s investigation has learned that the man allegedly behind the latest plot to attack the U.S. had been searching for a militant group in Pakistan to back him for years. Faisal Shahzad, the 30-year-old Connecticut resident, was captured by U.S. authorities while on a flight about to depart for Dubai, after leaving a crude but powerful bomb in an SUV in the heart of Manhattan’s iconic tourist district. But he had visited Pakistan in mid-June 2006 to receive training at a camp belonging to the Lashkar-e-Taiba in Kashmir, according to one of its senior commanders.

The LeT, a banned militant outfit set up in the late 1980s with the help of Pakistan’s largest spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, was blamed for a vicious attack on Mumbai in November 2008 in which more than 160 Indians were killed and scores more injured. According to the commander at the LeT’s main base of operations in Dulai, a village 25 km south of Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, Shahzad was brought to the LeT camp by another member of the organization. “He was an eager recruit,” he recalls. “Very intelligent but also very intense, and driven to make his mark for the sake of Islam.”

Continue…

First Arab-American Miss USA?

By macleans.ca - Monday, May 17, 2010 at 2:59 PM - 20 Comments

Rima “Miss Michigan” Fakih won the 2010 Miss USA pageant last night. The 24-year-old Arab American was born in Lebanon, and raised in New York after her family emigrated to the United States when she was a young girl; she moved to Dearborn, Mich., in 2003. During the question segment of pageant, Fakih, who is Muslim but attended a Catholic high school and also celebrates Christian holidays, said that she believes birth control should be covered by health insurance. Fakih says she knew she’d won even before her name was called by the look Donald Trump, who co-owns the pageant, gave her: “That’s the same look that he gives them when he says, ‘You’re hired,’ ” on The Apprentice, his reality TV show. After winning the title, Fakih tripped and nearly fell on the train of her long white gown while taking her victory strut. When asked how she felt, Fakih replied, “Ask me after I’ve had a pizza.”

Toronto Star

The government-in-waiting

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, May 17, 2010 at 2:42 PM - 51 Comments

Another thing the Brits seem to take more seriously is their shadow cabinet. Indeed, this bit from Bruce Anderson might be the first serious thing ever written about the Ignatieff team.

It seems to me there’s a fair bit of talent in the Liberal caucus, and given the importance of economic issues, Mr. McCallum is the most baffling choice Mr.Ignatieff continues to make. The economy is likely to remain at the top of the public agenda for some time, but the team of Ignatieff-McCallum seems unable or unwilling to muster an argument or a point of differentiation about it. The conclusion one might draw is that they either don’t know how they would improve upon Harper economic policy, or can’t articulate the difference they would make if elected.

What else could there possibly be?

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, May 17, 2010 at 2:34 PM - 28 Comments

Shelly Glover teases the possibility of still more exciting developments to come in the story of Helena Guergis.

“I can assure you that there is far more to come out,” Shelly Glover, parliamentary secretary for official languages told CTV’s Question Period Sunday. “This isn’t finished.”

So far we’ve got allegations of cocaine, prostitutes, compromising photos, improper lobbying and use of a government Blackberry, not to mention an alleged con man, a dog photographer, a former member of the Toronto Argonauts, Robert De Niro’s son and a private investigator. Place your bets on what’s next.

No national standards for drinking water: report

By macleans.ca - Monday, May 17, 2010 at 2:29 PM - 2 Comments

A new report scheduled for release Monday says that there are no national standards that effectively ensure drinking water is safe for all Canadians. The report, called Seeking Water Justice: Strengthening legal protection for Canada’s drinking water, was written by a group of academic, health and environmental experts. “Canadians do not have equal access to safe drinking water—a basic source of survival,” said an executive summary of the report. “We have voluntary national guidelines and provinces establish their own standards, which may or may not meet those guidelines … This leaves significant populations, such as First Nations and rural communities, vulnerable to water-borne diseases, boil water advisories and associated health effects.” Nancy Goucher, a water-policy expert with the Forum for Leadership on Water, says that 116 First Nation communities had boil orders in recent Health Canada stats, and that 90 percent had those advisories in place for one year, while half had them in place for more than three years. “The thought of not having that guarantee of safe drinking water, I think, would just reduce your entire quality of life,” she says.

National Post

NATO needs reform: panel

By macleans.ca - Monday, May 17, 2010 at 2:22 PM - 0 Comments

A panel of experts led by former U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright have set out the future strategy of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. They say NATO must remain able to act beyond its borders, and must improve its ability to drum up public support by placing more emphasis on its achievements. The recommendations come while NATO is engaged in Afghanistan, its largest and deadliest mission, which is straining relationships between its members and calling into question the shape and scope of its future missions. Albright said those future missions will increasingly stem from threats—including terrorism, cyber crime and piracy—by “non-state actors.” The report also reconfirmed the organization’s commitment to the mission in Afghanistan, and recommended that its member states work to better their relationships with Russia.

BBC News

Latest photos from Cannes

By macleans.ca - Monday, May 17, 2010 at 2:09 PM - 0 Comments

MORE PHOTOS
Aaaand action!— Pictures from the opening of the 2010 Cannes Film Festival

This is why we can't have nice things

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, May 17, 2010 at 1:55 PM - 15 Comments

Taylor Owen considers all the reasons a British-style coalition is not so easily replicated.

Possibly the main lesson of the British coalition is procedural. Brits have once again shown Canadians that they take parliamentary democracy seriously. There was no talk of coalitions with socialists and separatists, Gordon Brown stepped aside with dignity, Mr. Cameron and Mr. Clegg authored an incredibly thorough agreement that has a legitimate chance of lasting, and the media overall treated the historic events with substance rather than gamesmanship. In short, they were adults.

What we're not talking about

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, May 17, 2010 at 11:47 AM - 154 Comments

The realities of abortion in Tanzania are brutal. Canadian aid groups are confused and concerned. And a Liberal MP says a vote on abortion is inevitable.

The Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada apparently figures there are 124 “pro-choice” MPs and 120 “anti-abortion” MPs in the current Parliament, with 64 votes unaccounted for (a “pro-life” rally on Parliament Hill last week drew approximately 20 MPs). Though given the divergent views on the topic—as noted by Chris Selley—those titles might be overly simplified.