Giving taxpayers a peek at the government pocketbook

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, May 26, 2010 at 11:32 AM - 3 Comments

B.C. residents have the right to know how provincial MLAs are spending their tax dollars. That, at least, is the contention of Attorney-General and government house leader Mike de Jong, who is calling for increased transparency. “Everything that is spent in these buildings, whether it is by ministries, ministers or MLAs is public money, and people expect to be able to see and judge how that money is being spent,” says de Jong. As controversy over the same issue heats up in Ottawa, the Liberals and NDP echoed de Jong’s concerns. NDP house leader Mike Farnworth says the information should be once again available online. Such disclosure would give the public insight into how millions of dollars are spent each year. In 2008-2009, MLAs spent a collective $16.1 million.

Vancouver Sun

The Tory party reborn

By Charlie Gillis - Wednesday, May 26, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 6 Comments

Steve Forrest / PANOS

At some point, this may start to sound familiar: a well-established party cruises to office in three straight elections, riding the popularity of a dominant, if sometimes ruthless, leader. Then, entitlement sets in. The party’s policies turn stale. Its senior statesmen grow irksome to the public. Power-drunk members succumb to petty corruption, and a few party operatives even set out to game the political system to personal advantage. Finally—repelled by the steady drip of scandal—voters send the rascals packing.

The post-Margaret Thatcher experience of Britain’s Conservatives can read at times like a roman à clef for Canada’s Liberals after Jean Chrétien—another sometime dynasty that, like the U.K. Tories, once saw itself as its country’s “natural governing party.” In both cases, the succession battle to replace the warlord PM left the party crippled and divided. In both cases, a brief interregnum in office under a new leader merely staved off the inevitable. In Canada, as in Britain, a formerly hapless opponent restyled itself into a credible political alternative, occupying wide tracts of the deposed party’s electoral base and pushing the perennial incumbent further into the wilderness.

Continue…

Michael Bryant: "I don't know what the future holds"

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, May 26, 2010 at 10:45 AM - 7 Comments

After a public altercation left a bicycle courier dead on the side of Toronto’s Bloor Street West, it seemed that former Ontario cabinet minister Michael Bryant’s political future was over for good. He stepped out of the limelight, and took a quieter job at a Toronto law firm. But with charges against him recently dropped, Bryant might be reconsidering. At a press conference on Tuesday, Bryant was asked if he was considering another run for public office. His response: “To be honest, I haven’t really thought about much other than getting through this experience.” But Bryant conceded: “I don’t know what the future holds.” Some say that in the political world, that kind of evasiveness is as good as a “Yes, please!” The mere fact that he called a press conference, says University of Toronto professor Nelson Wiseman, is sign enough that Bryant is “courting attention in some sort of publicly visible way.” “To me,” Wiseman added, “that’s a political act.”

CBC News

Icelandic Volcano Stops Spewing Ash… For Now At Least

By Takeoffeh.com - Wednesday, May 26, 2010 at 9:13 AM - 1 Comment

Is the Icelandic ash crisis over? Experts say it is still too early to tell, but no ash was detected from the Eyjafjallajokul volcano on Sunday in a flight over the crater by Icelandic scientists.

“The volcano appears to be dormant, the activity has been going down for the last two days and at the moment there is nothing coming out… no magma,” said Icelandic Meteorological Office forecaster Jonsson Thorsteinn in an interview with CNN.

Measurements from the test flight found that the temperature at the crater was just below 100°C, confirming that the volcano was now spouting steam instead of ash, Thorsteinn said.

Volcanology is not an exact science, however, and experts warn that the volcano could erupt again – they just don’t know when. “There is still something going on inside, some tremors, it is possible it could erupt again, but when is a question nobody can answer,” said Thorsteinn.

Even if it is only temporary, the slowdown in volcanic activity is good news for commercial airlines and millions of passengers planning to fly in the near future.

The volcano first erupted in mid-April, sending a dense cloud of ash into the atmosphere and disrupting the travel plans of millions.

No Fooling: U.S. Border Crossing Can Be A Hassle

By Takeoffeh.com - Wednesday, May 26, 2010 at 9:09 AM - 10 Comments

As the Windsor Star reports, five women from that Southern Ontario city were fingerprinted, photographed and denied entry into the U.S. while heading for a yoga course that would help them gain credentials to become instructors. U.S. border regulations require foreign visitors to obtain a student visa for vocational training, which is how the yoga course is classified.

One of the women first told border officials that she was just going shopping before admitting she was also visiting for a course. As a result, she has been barred from entering the U.S. for five years. “I want to alert Canadians that whatever necessary paperwork needs to be done, they should do so,” Michelle Lam told the Star. Lam was patted down and detained for six hours, part of that time in a cell.

U.S. border officials are particularly sensitive about the possibility of Canadians taking work away from Americans. So even people travelling to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity, for example, must bring a letter of invitation or other documentation.

Chief Ron Smith of U.S. Customs and Border Protection told the Star that while some Canadians may not know the rules, the regulations are clear and not new. “If they’re coming over for pleasure, I hope they enjoy it,” he said. “When someone comes in to volunteer, they have to be able to prove to the officer that they are a member of, or have a commitment to, a particular recognized religious or non-profit charitable organization. We have to make sure there is no U.S. salary.”

While the rules may not be new, stricter enforcement may be part of heightened anxiety about terrorist attacks. And it can go both ways – U.S. media has featured several reports of Canadian border officials turning back visitors for minor offences committed decades ago.

A helpful site for Canadians travelling to the United States is www.voyage.gc.ca.

If you want to hear what happens when you bring a little attitude to your U.S. border crossing, check out this audio recording which purports to be (and sure sounds like) a confrontation between a Canadian couple heading for outlet shopping in Niagara Falls, New York and a series of U.S. border officials.

Photo Credit: kuriputosu

It’s alive! A primer on synthetic life

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, May 26, 2010 at 8:21 AM - 55 Comments

I’ve got a neglected heap of notes for weblogging topics, but Craig Venter’s latest biotechnology stunt metaphorically swept them clear from my desk. It is not easy to comprehend by means of plain English what Venter and his research institute have achieved. The title of their paper for Science offers the best possible short summary: “Creation of a bacterial cell controlled by a chemically synthesized genome.” Reactions range from the alarmist—dear God, he’s created synthetic life!—to the dismissive—bah, it’s not synthetic life at all! (The Raelians, for their part, take the view “He’s created synthetic life, and we think it’s awesome!”)

Here’s the strictly technological significance of what Venter has done: he used computers to create a synthetic genome that never previously existed in nature, turned that information into physically existing DNA, replaced the DNA of an existing organism with the new DNA, and successfully showed that his artificial software “worked”—that it could self-reproduce and serve as the design for functioning progeny. It is the production of an all-new life form from human programming. I do not think Scots SF author Ken MacLeod goes too far when he writes “This is a moment in evolution, the origin of a new kingdom: the Synthetica, as artist Daisy Ginsberg has suggested we call it, supplementing nature’s bacteria, eukarya, and archaea.”

Creationists and Catholics are putting on a brave face, and they have a basic point that cannot be gainsaid. Venter had to follow “God’s” existing “literary rules” of genome construction, so to speak; his artificial genome had to contain essential bits of programming plagiarized from nature, some of which are not fully understood. And nobody can yet imitate “God” in building a cell from scratch: an existing bacterium had to have its own chromosomes scraped out to provide a platform for Venter to build upon. It’s a bit like observing that, yes, this sentence I’m writing right now is completely original in the usual sense, but I haven’t made up any of the words in it completely from scratch, and to be understood as a message, it must follow a certain accepted structure.

That being said, once you’ve gone Gutenberg, there is no going back. The key passage in the Venter paper is perhaps this one [emphasis mine]:

We refer to such a cell controlled by a genome assembled from chemically synthesized pieces of DNA as a “synthetic cell”, even though the cytoplasm of the recipient cell is not synthetic. Phenotypic effects of the recipient cytoplasm are diluted with protein turnover and as cells carrying only the transplanted genome replicate. Following transplantation and replication on a plate to form a colony (>30 divisions or >10⁹-fold dilution), progeny will not contain any protein molecules that were present in the original recipient cell. This was previously demonstrated when we first described genome transplantation. The properties of the cells controlled by the assembled genome are expected to be the same as if the whole cell had been produced synthetically (the DNA software builds its own hardware).

If I had a way of putting that last parenthetical in double-bold face, I’d do it. No, we can’t yet build a cell from scratch, but if we can edit the software of an existing cell to any degree we please—although the process described in the paper is still of a crudity that bleeds forth from its every line—it really doesn’t matter. The descendants will reproduce according to our program, and will be indistinguishable from the descendants of a cell created by God, Klingons, or Santa’s elves. The software builds its own hardware. Sixty-seven years after DNA’s role as a genetic information carrier was confirmed, and 57 years after its structure was ascertained, we can now say that there exists, in the parlance of mathematics, a true constructive proof of this.

But then again, no biologist or other sane person really needed such a proof. The best lay summary of Venter’s achievement that I have found is provided by robotics professor Rodney Brooks, a man who has thought a great deal about the operational definition of life.

..the fact that [Venter's] genome works as a genome is not a surprise to molecular biologists. They have long believed that life is chemistry, and that one string of connected atoms is just as good as another having the same arrangement. They have long ago discounted the idea that there is any sort of specialness imparted to a molecule by its history of production. Molecules have no souls.

But the new cells are also not synthetic life in that the ancestor cell was an existing live cell. It was not built from pieces in the same way that the synthetic genome was built. That is another, perhaps harder technological challenge, but also one that there may be no imperative to try to achieve in the short term; hijacking existing cells may be all that we need to develop all sorts of new synthetic forms.

The press has both overplayed that what has been done is a surprise, and underplayed the interesting challenges that lie ahead, in that their biggest fears do not automatically follow from the current achievement.

Brooks is saying that there are no new theoretical implications from the Venter team’s accomplishment, as there actually were from the Venterian work that preceded the demonstration of synthetic life—namely, paring the smallest genome known to exist in nature down to an even smaller instruction set, and getting humans closer (closer than God or natural selection ever managed) to the theoretical minimum of information needed for a DNA sequence to be meaningful. Playing God? Hell, that’s for amateurs!

That DNA can practically be edited will come as a shock only to those whose anti-materialist or vitalist views depend on clinging to some particular state of human technological ignorance. There are no longer very many biologists in that category. If life can be designed and mass-produced synthetically like machines, there won’t be much ground left on which to argue that living things aren’t machines.

Biologists presented with the Venter news are instinctively contemplating the revival of familiar old forms previously discarded by natural selection, and the synthetic genome adds spice to the ethical debates over whether we would be justified in making a Neanderthal or a woolly mammoth. This is not really a big theoretical deal either. The more important, wider prospect on offer is the ability to recover biodiversity by artificial means, and the eventual end of the rule than “extinction” is the definitive end for a species. The thought of one day being able to see a dodo strut and squawk and lay eggs is romantic (in a way that warms even the stony heart of Darwinian tough-guy Richard Dawkins) and missions of that sort are now one big step closer to fruition.

But the really exciting and scary idea here is the customizability of life, and as Brooks says, we don’t know what limits, other than the obvious physical ones, scientists might ultimately run up against. Let’s note, though, that so-called “genetic modification” in agriculture has already accomplished a lot, even with one hand tied behind its back by trade rules and consumer fears. (What we refer to as “genetic modification” is really just genetic modification 2.0. The hybridization and artificial selection that humans were busily engaged in for several millennia beforehand was 1.0; the stuff we’re talking about in this article is, if you like, version 3.0.) Journalist Quinn Norton offers some wild thoughts about bacteria that “pee out biofuels or Prozac, eat Gulf of Mexico oil, or glow in the presence of melamine, cancer, or anger”. These dreams may transcend what is ultimately feasible. Or they may hint only at a thousandth of a thousandth of the possibilities.

The Commons: There but for the grace of God go us

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 25, 2010 at 7:45 PM - 160 Comments

Stephen Harper stood this afternoon before a room of past and present cabinet ministers, current and former members of parliament, power-brokers, diplomats, hangers-on and swells—the size of the crowd woefully overwhelming Parliament’s air conditioning system on a truly sweltering day in the capital—and toasted the career of Jean Chrétien, the man who once seemed to epitomize everything Mr. Harper campaigned to change, everything that was wrong with this place, everything that brought Mr. Harper to office four and a half years ago.

Mr. Harper spoke of a “great Parliamentarian” and a “great leader” and his “long and successful service to Canada.” “For this passion and dedication, Jean Chrétien deserves our admiration and our thanks,” Mr. Harper said. “And he deserves to look back on his record of service to our country with pride and satisfaction.”

And then Mr. Harper said this. “Partisan differences are a healthy and necessary part of our political culture and process. But on an occasion such as this, we remember that they are transcended by a deep, enduring consensus, a shared understanding that our freedom rests also on the limitations imposed on those partisan differences by our constitutional traditions and the rule of law.”

Perhaps it was just the heat, but these words seemed heavy. Continue…

The prime minister in portrait

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 25, 2010 at 7:23 PM - 3 Comments

A picture of Jean Chretien’s official portrait is here.

Below are the remarks delivered by Stephen Harper on the occasion this afternoon. Continue…

'Trivia is what attract the attention'

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 25, 2010 at 3:38 PM - 28 Comments

With his official portrait about to be hung, Jean Chretien is philosophical.

They work hard, these guys,” the self-described “little guy from Shawinigan” said in an interview shortly before the portrait ceremony. ”And you know, they are an honest crowd and everybody pictures them as a bunch of crooks. It’s very unfair.”

Public cynicism has mounted recently amid outrage over controversies like the Guergis-Jaffer affair and MPs’ refusal to allow the auditor general to scrutinize their expenses. Chretien blamed “gotcha” journalism for the cynicism. ”Trivia is what attract the attention. The debate is very rarely now on policies, it’s always on all sorts of gotcha politics because the media need gotcha politics. They need blood.”

But he conceded politicians share the blame for bringing themselves into disrepute. ”Members too, they’re stupid because they play the game. You know, they attack each other for nothing.”

All who are here, please say "present"

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 25, 2010 at 3:29 PM - 21 Comments

As MP attendance is apparently of some concern, I am perhaps obligated to report that Helena Guergis, the independent MP for Simcoe-Grey, was in the House of Commons today for Question Period, taking her seat in the far right corner of the room. It was, if memory properly serves, her first appearance since resigning her cabinet post in early April.

The Saddam sex tape that never was

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 25, 2010 at 3:13 PM - 4 Comments

As the U.S. planned its 2003 invasion of Iraq, a special group within the CIA cooked up a few “information warfare” projects intended to discredit Saddam Hussein in the eyes of the Iraqi people. Two former CIA officials tell the Washington Post the Iraq Operations Group thought of flooding Iraq with a fake sex tape showing Hussein caught in flagrante with a teenage boy. “It would look like it was taken by a hidden camera,” said one of the former officials. “Very grainy, like it was a secret videotaping of a sex session.” A second idea involved getting an actor portraying Hussein to deliver a special news bulletin on Iraqi television announcing he was stepping down to allow his much-reviled son, Uday, to take over. Both projects apparently elicited strong opposition from James Pavitt, then head of the agency’s Operations Division, and neither ever left the ground. Besides, “Saddam playing with boys would have no resonance in the Middle East—nobody cares,” said a third anonymous former CIA official.

Washington Post

What would Sheila Fraser find if she were to audit federal politicians' expenses?

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 25, 2010 at 2:41 PM - 27 Comments

HIMYM and the Treacherous Trap of the Aborted Arc

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, May 25, 2010 at 1:21 PM - 1 Comment

This was not a great season of How I Met Your Mother, even granted that it’s one of those shows where every new season is always going to be unfavourably compared to one season in particular. (The show has always been entertaining, but no season has been as strong as the second.) It wasn’t terrible, it just felt like the show was spinning its wheels a lot, producing few standout episodes, and culminating in a finale that seemed tossed-off and seemed almost like a shrug. That last part doesn’t bother me — most shows don’t need big season finales — except that the show had done four self-consciously big season finales in a row, so the casual nature of this episode once again felt like the writers not quite getting it right. It’s like they had the big life-changing elements, Robin learning to value love over career (big mistake, Robin; all men in this universe are douches and not one is worth sacrificing your career over — update: okay, Marshall’s not a douche, he’s a doormat) and Lily and Marshall deciding to have a child, but they couldn’t make them feel like more than just another TV episode. And part of the strength of the show, traditionally, is how it takes familiar story elements and infuses them with an epic feel.

This is nothing the show can’t recover from, since its strengths are still real enough, the cast is still strong, and even as recently as a week ago, turned out a very strong though not great episode (“The Wedding Bride”). I think I agree with those who suspect the show has been suffering from a small-scale case of Creator Abandonment Syndrome, the thing that happens to a show when the creators are working on something else and spreading themselves thin. In this case, creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas spent part of the year working with two of their other writers on a new pilot that didn’t sell (“Livin’ On a Prayer”), and that might account for the show’s uncertain tone and feeling of been-there, done-that in the selection of stories. I’m sure it’s not like they’ve never been in the room, just that the other writers would have to do more. And when that situation comes up, the show often finds itself retreading old ground, as if the writers are asking themselves what the bosses would have done here, instead of coming up with new solutions.

There’s also another syndrome this season has suffered from, which reminds me of the sixth season of Frasier — an ominous comparison, since that’s the season when that show’s quality dipped irreversably. Both HIMYM season 5 and Frasier season 6 began with what I believe the TV Tropes people call an “Aborted Arc,” a story arc that is set up, followed through, but dropped early because it just isn’t working. The fifth season of Frasier ended with him losing his job at the radio station; the fourth season of HIMYM ended by setting up the possibility that Barney and Robin could be a couple. The subsequent seasons went through with these ideas; in fact, not only was Frasier unemployed, leading to lots of “Frasier is unemployed” stories (as well as, in the clip below, meta-references to the show’s new spot in the slot vacated by Seinfeld), but Niles, trapped in a messy divorce case, became poor and had to give up his swanky lifestyle.

(Oh, and a plurality of Frasier season 6 episodes were directed by Pamela Fryman, who is the director of HIMYM. Not that there’s a connection there; neither show’s problems were the director’s fault.)

And then the shows abandoned these arcs very abruptly — Frasier got his job back in the course of one episode, Niles blackmailed Maris into granting him a quick and inexpensive divorce, and Barney and Robin broke up suddenly — and tried to go back to the way things were before. But I mean exactly the way things were before: Frasier’s the pompous radio shrink, Niles is the upper-class dweeb with a crush on Daphne, Barney is the disturbed sexual athlete.

But something happens when a show tries to restore the status quo after breaking off an arc very suddenly. It may turn out that the jokes that worked before aren’t as funny as they used to be. This is because once you go back to the status quo, it feels like a throwback to the way the character “used” to be, and therefore the audience senses that these ideas are not as fresh as they once were. It’s not that you can never bring a character back to the way he or she was originally conceived. But a show that’s passed 100 episodes already is in danger of seeming like it’s rehashing old stuff. So what happens when you play down “Barney is a horndog who cannot be true to one woman” jokes for a third of a season, and then go back to them? You’ve got an aging show that is quite visibly and recognizably going back to a type of joke that it had already established as an old joke, part of what they used to do. Even if the writers intended all along to go back to cartoon Barney or radio-shrink Frasier, it’s not the same, because the audience has been conditioned to view the jokes as a bit old-hat. It’s the same reason why a show rarely uses its catchphrases once they’ve become established in the world’s vocabulary (Barney almost never says “suit up!” unless it’s a self-parody moment). A show is in trouble if the audience sees a joke as a callback to the glory days, rather than something fresh and organic to the character and the series.

Which means… what? I don’t know; I prefer Cartoon Barney to Relationship Barney, in the abstract, and was initially kind of glad to see him back. But I can’t deny that most of Barney’s scenes this year have a sort of nostalgic feeling, as in “remember when that guy was really funny?” It’s like trying to make the Fonz a cool rebel again after he became a wise schoolteacher: even if you preferred the character the old way (and who didn’t?), it wouldn’t be as good, it would just be a rehash.

(Well, at least Barney/Robin will always be less damaging than Fonzie/Ashley. So HIMYM has that going for it.)

I think that’s part of the reason why HIMYM has felt like it’s marking time this season; it’s been trying to go back to older joke sources that the audience recognizes as belonging to the best years of the show. And there’s a possible snowball effect, in that once we realize the Barney jokes are a bit old then the other stuff — Ted-looking-for-love stories and all the rest — seems a little old too. It could be that the only way for it to get back a feeling of freshness would be to find some new ground to cover, by which I don’t really mean trying to grow the characters (as we saw with Barney, that can actually hurt the show if it doesn’t work) as in finding new stuff for them to do. Ted as a teacher, implausible as it was, at least provided a new setting and new story possibilities, but it seems to have been nearly abandoned; didn’t you think the finale would come closer to indicating at least how he knew The Mother was in that class? But that was at least sort of new. Other sort-of-new stuff may be needed to cope with the problem that we know just about all the stories they can tell about  five young people looking for love in New York.

Violence erupts in Kingston, Jamaica

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 25, 2010 at 1:08 PM - 1 Comment

Parts of Kingston, Jamaica are under a state of emergency as troops and police forces attempt to close in on Christopher “Dudus” Coke, a drug lord wanted by the United States. Security forces are attempting to regain control of an area known as Coke’s stronghold and on Tuesday began searching the Tivoli Gardens district. Holding up Jamaica’s end of a bilateral treaty—which compels Jamaica to respond to the U.S. request to apprehend Coke—search teams have been going from house to house in search of the notorious drug lord, who is wanted on drugs and gun-running charges. Jamaican High Commissioner in London, Anthony Smith Johnson, told the BBC the violence is limited to one square mile of Kingston. “It’s a small area, and they do have it surrounded, and the rest of the city is going on about its business,” he said.

BBC News

Michael Bryant is home free

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 25, 2010 at 12:50 PM - 100 Comments

Prosecutors withdrew all charges against Michael Bryant Tuesday morning. The former Ontario attorney general had been set to go on trial for criminal negligence and dangerous operation of a motor vehicle for his role in a collision that killed Toronto bike courier Darcy Allan Sheppard last August. But Crown prosecutors now say there was no reasonable prospect of conviction. After an altercation one evening on Bloor Street West, Sheppard—who was on his bicycle—leaned into Bryant’s car, gripping it near the steering wheel. As Bryant sped away in fear, Shepphard was thrown against a tree and mailbox, and later died as a result of his injuries. Sheppard’s blood alcohol concentration was more than twice the legal limit at the time of the accident and evidence suggests he had a history of violent outbursts on his bike. If Bryant had been convicted, he could have received a maximum sentence of life in jail.

CBC News

'The tyranny of the opposition'

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 25, 2010 at 12:39 PM - 78 Comments

Below is the prepared text of government House leader Jay Hill’s statement in the Commons this morning, in which he laments for the state of Parliament’s committee system and explains why ministerial staffers will no longer be taking part. Those who delight in irony might wish to read Don Martin’s 2007 column on the government’s handbook for committee manipulation before reading the following. Continue…

G8, G20 security costs go through the roof

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 25, 2010 at 12:38 PM - 11 Comments

Ottawa is expected to table new cost estimates for next month’s G8 and G20 summits that include a nearly five-fold spending increase on security forces. Preliminary figures released last March pegged security costs to come in at $179 million for the two summits, but revised estimates now suggest spending on security could climb to $833 million—an increase of $654 million or 465 per cent. The G8 summit will take place in Huntsville, Ont., from June 25-26, while G20 meetings are scheduled for June 26-27 in Toronto.

CTV News

Fake cheese that'll make vegans swoon

By Julia McKinnell - Tuesday, May 25, 2010 at 12:35 PM - 35 Comments

Photograph by Liz Sullivan

Oprah tried it. Ellen talked it up. Alex Jamieson, wife of Super Size Me’s Morgan Spurlock, calls it “crack for vegans.” Daiya (pronounced day-a) is a new non-dairy cheese alternative that’s causing such a sensation that one vegan blogger in L.A. described it as “the sort of stuff that’s going to start a revolution.” For vegans who don’t eat dairy but grew up loving grilled cheese and gooey mozzarella on pizza, cheese is often the thing they crave most on their dairy-forbidden diets. “The cheese flavour is dead-on, and even more remarkably, Daiya melts like real cheese. No joke. It melts and stretches and actually makes you want to eat it,” writes the L.A. blogger at toliveandeatinla.com.

“It’s revolutionary in that now people can have pizza and mac and cheese,” writes Kishari Sing on her blog The Food Allergy Queen. When Sing taste-tested Daiya, she declared it “delicious,” then listed its ingredients: no dairy, no soy, no eggs, no nuts, no gluten, no casein, no wheat, no barley, none of the usual allergy suspects. Tapioca and water are the top ingredients. Everything else is plant-based. The company claims Daiya contains 33 per cent less fat than regular cheddar cheese. “It’s probably the best vegan cheese substitute out there,” Sing told Maclean’s. “Mostly because the previous versions have all been so hideous!”

Continue…

New ways to prevent HIV explored

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 25, 2010 at 12:08 PM - 0 Comments

Researchers are looking into new ways that could protect women, and maybe men, from HIV infections, including tablets, insertable rings and dissolving films. Using such an approach, called a microbicide, could help overcome some risks of drug resistance that can come with taking pills that prevent infection. A flexible ring used in the vagina can continually deliver two AIDS drugs for up to a month, researchers reported, although it hasn’t been tested in people yet. Meanwhile, a vaginal tablet worked in a similar way, using a polymer that attaches to the moist vaginal lining. In another approach, a film that’s smaller and thinner than a stick of gum is used. Microbicides using HIV drugs are expected to represent a large new market for companies that make them.

Reuters

Farmers’ markets are SO stressful

By Noah Richler - Tuesday, May 25, 2010 at 12:03 PM - 0 Comments

It is the merry month of May and already, in Ontario, farmers are impatient to bring those first green shoots—three weeks early, this year, in what has been an uncannily heady and extended spring—to market. Previously this was a time of rejoicing for me. I work at home, in Toronto’s Cabbagetown. I have a farmers’ market a block behind me on Tuesday afternoons and another a short cycle away, on Saturday mornings. Asparagus, fiddleheads, ramps; you’d think I’d be delighted. But no, this is not the case.

In principle, I love farmers’ markets. I love fresh produce—don’t eat strawberries out of their short season, etc.—and in the summer months, I need no persuading about the common sense of a 100-mile diet. My romance with my wife, Sarah, started with summer trips to Niagara for the best of the peaches (it’s where she’s from), and August in Ontario reminds me unfailingly of driving through Quebec’s Eastern Townships with my late dad, whose idea of shopping for groceries was to bring 10 lb. of tomatoes or a couple of dozen corncobs home.

Continue…

9/11 led to increase in male miscarriages: report

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 25, 2010 at 12:01 PM - 8 Comments

It seems that the stress caused by the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York contributed to an increase of miscarriages in male fetuses, according to a new review from the University of California, Irvine, which supports what experts call the theory of “communal bereavement,” or the acute mental distress that follows a major national event. The study, in BMC Public Health, found that 12 per cent more male babies were lost in Sept. 2001 after the 20th week of pregnancy, than in what would be called a “normal” September,” and fewer boys were born in all states three to four months after the attack. Stressful times reportedly reduce male birth rate across many species, said lead researcher Dr. Tim Bruckner.

BBC News

Sex sells, and I ain't buying

By Martin Patriquin - Tuesday, May 25, 2010 at 11:46 AM - 18 Comments

The Quebec government have always taken a wholeheartedly literal approach to warning its people of the dangers of speed, sex and booze. The above advert is part of its newest campaign to warn Randy Young Things of the perils of chlamydia–which, according to smart people, is on the rise in Quebec as it is everywhere else in North America.

I’ve never been convinced of the effectiveness of these types of ads. After all, it wasn’t a typically over-the-top sensibility campaign (like this one) that caused a decrease in the number of road deaths in Quebec recently. It was increased police surveillance and, in the last year, the introduction of photo radar. The lesson, in Quebec as elsewhere, is not to hit people in the eyes, but their wallets.

I find these types of ads more interesting sociologically. Can you see these types of ads on billboards in, say, Calgary or St. John, or anywhere else beyond these borders? (Ok, mebbe Toronto…) I think I know the answer, but I’m asking anyway.

Is the Bloc good for Canada?

By John Geddes - Tuesday, May 25, 2010 at 11:20 AM - 42 Comments

Photgraph by Roger Lemoyne

Gilles Duceppe is an odd sort of fixture on the federal political scene. The Bloc Québécois leader remains a separatist, of course, and thus capable of arousing outrage, as he did when he recently praised sovereigntists as “resisters,” borrowing a term usually reserved for those who opposed the Nazis in the Second World War. Yet he is also an unthreatening part of the furniture in Ottawa, and so too, after two decades, is his party. Although Conservatives and Liberals might not advertise the fact to voters outside Quebec, both parties have, when it suited them, worked closely with the Bloc on policy and politics. “It’s funny,” Duceppe told Maclean’s, “when we’re supporting the Tories, the Liberals are telling the Tories, ‘You’re sleeping with the separatists!’ And when we’re supporting the Liberals, the Tories are telling the Liberals, ‘You’re sleeping with the separatists!’ One day I told them, ‘You all want to be in bed with us but no one wants to marry us.’ ”

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Degrees of tension

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Tuesday, May 25, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 6 Comments

Photofraph by S‡ndor Fizli

Ask Heather Reisman whether she feels more like a lightning rod or a pinata, and the response is a rather curt “neither.” Then again, the CEO of Indigo Books & Music also maintains she isn’t angry about protests by a handful of Mount Allison University staff, and like-minded individuals across the country, against the honorary degree she was awarded earlier this week. Irked, however, with occasional gusts to severely pissed, is exactly how she sounds. “This very same group of people have been protesting against me and against Indigo for three years,” she says. “There is an absolutely deliberate attempt to misinform; to twist facts.”

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