Canadian ads dominate New Yorker magazine

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, June 22, 2010 at 12:42 PM - 2 Comments

The New Yorker magazine has gone Canadian for its G8 and G20 week issue. For the first time in the magazine’s 85 years, every ad bought in the current issue, which hits newsstands Monday, has been taken out by a Canadian government, business or institution. Advertisers include the provinces of Alberta, Ontario, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, the city of Ottawa, the money management firm Gluskin Sheff, RBC, the University of Toronto’s Rotman School, and Trinity College School of Port Hope, Ont. The federal government’s six-page ad buy alone cost an estimated $873,796, and promote Canada as “a great place to do business.” The only mention of the summits appears once in small type at the bottom of an Ontario ad touting the province’s commitment to clean energy. None of the magazine’s Canadian contributors—including Malcolm Gladwell and the illustrators Bruce McCall and Barry Blitt—appear in the issue, but it will feature a six-page story about Canadian novelist Howard Engel, who awoke one morning in the summer of 2001 to find familiar things suddenly indecipherable. The New Yorker claims to have a paid circulation of 1,040,000, including 26,075 in Canada.

Globe and Mail

Six new planets

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, June 22, 2010 at 12:36 PM - 13 Comments

An international team has discovered six new planets that are remarkable in their different characteristics. The planets are called, CoRoT-8b (a small ice planet), CoRoT-10b (with an elongated orbit), CoRot-11b (a quickly rotating planet), CoRoT-12b , 13b and 14b (a trio of giants) and CoRoT-15b (a brown dwarf). They’re named after CoRot, a space telescope operated by the French space agency CNES. The telescope sits outside of our solar system and “discovers” the planets when they pass in transit. CoRoT 14b is an especially rare find: it has a size similar to Jupiter, but is 7.5 times the mass. It’s only the second of its type that’s been discovered. “Each of these planets is interesting in its own right, but what is really fascinating is how diverse they are,” says Dr. Suzanne Aigrain from Oxford University’s Department of Physics. “Planets are intrinsically complex objects, and we have much to learn about them yet.”

Science Daily

Wikileaks approaches government

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, June 22, 2010 at 12:33 PM - 3 Comments

Wikileaks has made contact with the U.S. government after an American soldier has been detained on suspicion of leaking confidential military information to the whistle blowing website. Soldier Bradley Manning has been held for three weeks without charges after a former hacker, Adrian Lamo, confided to U.S. authorities about Wikileaks’ sources. Lamo claimed that Manning had passed 260,000 U.S. diplomatic cables and two confidential videos to Wikileaks. Julian Assange, a representative of Wikileaks, said that the site would “always try and represent alleged sources,” and that it had contacted three lawyers to help defend Mr. Manning.

BBC News

Michaëlle Jean to join UN

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, June 22, 2010 at 12:26 PM - 7 Comments

Governor-General Michaëlle Jean is reportedly becoming a special envoy for UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) following her term in Canada. She says her goals are to fight poverty and boost literacy rates in Haiti, her home country. According to CTV, Prime Minister Stephen Harper “went to bat” for Ms. Jean and helped her secure the position. However, it’s common knowledge that the Tories had no intention of extending her term.

CTV News

Attempted bomber threatens U.S.

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, June 22, 2010 at 12:23 PM - 1 Comment

Faisal Shahzad, the man who parked a car full of explosives in Times Square but failed to detonate them, has pleaded guilty to terrorism charges but remains completely remorseless. “It’s a war,” said the 30-year-old suspect in an angry diatribe to the presiding federal judge. “I’m going to plead guilty a hundred times over because until the hour the U.S. pulls its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan and stops the drone strikes … we will be attacking.” When asked how he felt about the innocent people, including children, that would have died had his attack been successful, he simply said “The people select the government. We consider them all the same.” He also detailed how he learned to make bombs at a Taliban training camp in Pakistan, and how the organization assisted him with payments of several thousand dollars. The university educated former account analyst now faces life in a federal prison.

New York Daily News

What's next

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, June 22, 2010 at 12:21 PM - 38 Comments

The Prime Minister’s Office confirms the impending end of Michaelle Jean’s term as Governor General and her next mandate as a UN special envoy and namesake of her own foundation.

“As UNESCO Special Envoy to Haiti, Michaëlle Jean will draw upon her unique experience and dedication to Haiti, as well as her commitment to educational and cultural initiatives,” said the Prime Minister.  “She will be in a position to further advance the international community’s response to the urgent needs in Haiti as it recovers from January’s devastating earthquake.  The appointment is also a tribute to Canada’s leadership role in rebuilding Haiti.”

The Governor General will continue her educational and cultural initiatives in Canada through the Michaëlle Jean Foundation, which will use art and creativity to encourage and promote citizen engagement, particularly youth from underprivileged, rural and northern communities across Canada.  The Foundation will support community groups in addressing social challenges, will use intergenerational dialogue and other creative methods as tools to support the development of youth as agents for positive change and will bring together community groups to foster civic participation.

New software cuts CT radiation in half

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, June 22, 2010 at 12:18 PM - 3 Comments

Recent studies have suggested that computed tomography, or CT scans, might increase a person’s risk of developing cancer over their lifetime, Reuters reports. But a new software program that enhances image quality cuts the radiation dose of a colon scan in half, while still producing clear images. This will allow doctors to “use far less radiation than even a typical abdominal CT scan without compromising image quality,” said Dr. Daniel Johnson of the Mayo Clinic in Arizona, the study’s lead author. While CT scans of the colon (also known as virtual colonoscopy) can replace a more invasive test in which a camera is inserted into the rectum to look for cancer, concerns about radiation have caused many doctors to avoid them. This method could minimize that concern. General Electric provided the software for the study, according to Reuters.

Reuters

Widow of wrestler Owen Hart suing WWE

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, June 22, 2010 at 12:14 PM - 1 Comment

The widow of Owen Hart, a World Wrestling Entertainment performer who died in a 1999 stunt, says she’s suing the WWE and its leaders, including Republican U.S. Senate candidate Linda McMahon. Martha Hart said McMahon, who stepped down as WWE chief executive to run for Senate, and her husband, Vince, the current chairman, have continued to use Owen Hart’s image to promote the business despite agreeing to stop after his death. Hart planned to file her lawsuit Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Hartford. Owen Hart died at the WWE Over The Edge pay-per-view on May 23, 1999 when he fell 78 feet due to an equipment malfunction. His family sued the WWE and several other defendants in the death. Martha Hart agreed to an $18 million settlement with the WWE in 2000. In her new lawsuit, she alleges the WWE and the McMahons violated a contract that restricts the use of Owen Hart’s name, likeness and wrestling footage. In a statement, she said, “In the 11 years since Owen’s tragic and avoidable death, I have worked tirelessly to disassociate Owen’s name and likeness from anything related to WWE in order to protect our children from any reminder of the circumstances surrounding their father’s death, and to avoid any misplaced perception that I endorse WWE.”

AP

Wrestling Inc.

Subway restaurant leaves almost 100 ill

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, June 22, 2010 at 12:09 PM - 0 Comments

The Illinois Dept. of Health is investigating 97 cases of Salmonella Hvittingfoss infection in 28 counties among people who ate at Subway sandwich restaurants in the state, Reuters reports. The Salmonella poisoning happened between May 11 and June 5, according to a state spokeswoman, and sent 26 people to hospital, but caused no deaths. The source of infection by this rare Salmonella strain has not yet been identified, but the restaurant chain voluntarily withdrew some items like onions, green peppers, tomatoes and lettuce in early June as a precaution. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 76 million people in the U.S. get sick each year from eating tainted food, and 5,000 people die. Subway didn’t return Reuters’ calls for comment.

Reuters

Losing bees would hurt UK economy

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, June 22, 2010 at 12:06 PM - 3 Comments

In a bid to save declining bee populations, the Insect Pollinators Initiative will look at what could be causing the decline, and represents a £10m investment in nine different projects, the BBC reports. In fact, if bees and all pollinators disappeared completely, the UK economy could lose up to £440 million per year, or about 13 per cent of its income from farming. The initiative is a collaboration between UK scientists from universities and government agencies, funded by public and charity organizations. Some will look at what affects the health of pollinators like wasps, bees, and moths, which help feed people by pollinating crops, while others will look at specific species and diseases. Since the 1970s, there’s been a 75 per cent decline in butterfly species in the UK, and three of 25 bumblebee species have gone extinct.

BBC News

Nebraska town passes law to banish illegal immigrants

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, June 22, 2010 at 12:04 PM - 3 Comments

Residents of a small meat-packing town in eastern Nebraska voted Monday to banish illegal immigrants from jobs and rental homes, setting off a costly and closely watched legal challenge. Unofficial results from the Associated Press released Monday showed that 57 per cent of voters in Fremont, a town of about 25,000, approved a referendum that bars landlords from renting to illegal immigrants, requires renters to provide information to the police and to obtain city occupancy licenses, and oblige city businesses to use a federal database to check for illegal immigrants. A similar law was almost passed two years ago in Fremont, but was ultimately voted down by the city’s longtime mayor. Leading up to Monday’s vote, opponents of the new law argued the City of Fremont simply cannot afford the new law without significant cuts to the city’s services or a tax increase. Officials from A.C.L.U Nebraska have pledged to file a lawsuit against what they call a law that racially profiles some residents. But advocates for the new law say federal authorities have failed to enforce their own immigration guidelines, leaving places like Fremont—which has a growing Hispanic population—to take matters into their own hands. According to some estimates, Fremont’s Hispanic population, which was virtually non-existent two decades ago, has grown to about 2,000 people. Estimates of how many illegal immigrants live in Fremont varies widely.

New York Times

‘This is just wrong’

By Jason Unrau - Tuesday, June 22, 2010 at 12:00 PM - 7 Comments

VINCE FEDOROFF/WHITEHORSE STAR/CP

On Dec. 2, 2008, Raymond Silverfox lay dying in the RCMP’s Whitehorse drunk tank. Despite his vomiting more than 23 times, medical attention was not deemed a priority for the 43-year-old, who was kept in custody rather than moved to a hospital. Instead, as closed-circuit camera footage shown at a coroner’s inquest held in April revealed, he was, in the final 13 hours of his life, ridiculed by officers and guards and told to lie in his own filth. Paramedics were eventually called, but by then, he’d succumbed to acute pneumonia.

Silverfox is the fourth Aboriginal person to die in Yukon RCMP custody in 10 years. Robert Stone died in May at a Whitehorse detox centre after a night of being bounced between paramedics, hospital and police. And the equipment that recorded Silverfox’s last hours was installed after December 1999, when John Tibbet Jr. hanged himself in a Whitehorse RCMP cell. Still, by mid-2000, two more Aboriginal men had perished in Yukon police custody.

Continue…

Stephen Harper to apologize for Air India tragedy

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, June 22, 2010 at 11:45 AM - 9 Comments

Prime Minister Stephen Harper will publicly apologize to those who lost loved ones in the 1985 Air India bombing as part of a “very significant announcement” on Wednesday. Harper is expected to apologize for the series of federal failings during an evening memorial service at Humber Bay Park in Toronto marking the 25th anniversary of the tragedy. Harper’s apology will come just one week after a scathing 4,000-page report in which retired Supreme Court justice John Major chronicled officials’ incompetence when handling the tragedy. In 1985, federal agents botched an investigation into a Canadian cell of Sikh extremists who placed bombs on board two passenger jets that later exploded and killed 331 people. Major didn’t recommend an apology, but remarked that successive federal governments had failed to do so. Previous annual memorial gatherings have drawn smaller crowds, but the 25th anniversary of Canada’s worst terrorist attack is expected to draw hundreds of people to memorial services being held in Toronto, Ottawa and Vancouver.

Globe and Mail

If you can't beat 'em, serve 'em

By Sonya Bell - Tuesday, June 22, 2010 at 11:40 AM - 2 Comments

This wouldn’t be a house party that needed beer goggles. That much was obvious to the Budweiser executives plotting Bud House, a reality television series set in South Africa during the FIFA World Cup tournament. The house would be home to 32 attractive soccer enthusiasts, one from each competing nation. It would have a palm-tree-lined patio, two swimming pools, four bars and the biggest flat-screen television in South Africa.

But something—or someone—was missing from the concept, says Andrew Sneyd, Budweiser’s global advertising director. What would keep the 32 diehard supporters from rioting over a handball or offside call? The cry for help went out on Craigslist one month before the June 11 kick-off: “Casting: big normal-looking funny Canadian men.” A Canuck would be responsible for keeping the peace, in a role we can all say cheers to—the house bartender.

Peacekeeping is a role Canadians take very seriously, of course. And a Canadian’s impartiality in this matter would be assured by the fact that Canada didn’t qualify for the World Cup (and hasn’t since 1986). A casting agency found Danilo, a 39-year-old veteran Toronto bartender, in Los Angeles, pursuing an acting career. On his way to Bud House, near Cape Town, Danilo had to give up two things—his lifelong support for the Italian team, and his last name. Budweiser won’t let it be used as part of the security for the cast.

“It’s the easiest gig I’ve ever had,” Danilo says from behind the bar. Budweiser is the only drink on the menu. The only question is: can or bottle? “I did show them something,” he says, opening the bar fridge and removing a glass. “Frosted glasses. Very Canadian. Everyone loved it.”

In Bud House, the contestants are always decked out in their team’s colours, no matter which match is on. There are egos, and three tickets to the final game, at stake. Two tickets will go to the contestants from the countries that play in the July 11 final. The third will go to the person who wins the most points during the show’s daily challenges, which include ostrich riding, quad biking and shark diving. (All of which can be seen at budhouse.com.)

Danilo’s primary responsibility is to help everyone get along. This means laying down the law when countries are misbehaving. “The bartender sees everything,” he says. On the first night, he spotted Lolade from Nigeria quietly change the channel when the Italian team was introduced. Ilaria, the Italian contestant, was confused—and then outraged. That kind of prank could get ugly in a game situation, Danilo says. This resulted in a new house rule—the remotes are taken away from the participants at game time. And when North Korea’s Daniel antagonized Greece’s Maria over her team’s 2-0 loss to South Korea, Danilo consoled her. That North Korean guy is a pill, he says­—he may have to cut him off at some point.

When peace has been negotiated, the Canadian bartender is relieved from duty by his Russian or Irish counterpart. Away from the world stage, the perks of the job emerge. While the other guests sleep in dorm-style rooms, Danilo has his own private room. Inside, he turns on the TV, throws open the shutters that separate the bathroom and living room, and watches the action of a soccer game from the bathtub, drinking a Bud. Not that he would brag about his digs to the other countries. “That’s not nice,” he says.

E-reader sellers slash prices

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, June 22, 2010 at 11:39 AM - 0 Comments

Barnes & Noble, America’s biggest bookstore, dropped the price of it’s Nook 3G e-reader by nearly 25% yesterday to $202. It also added a $151 version that can only download when it’s near a Wi-Fi connection. Neither is yet available in Canada. Market-leader Amazon.com reacted by dropping the price of its 3G Kindle to $192 just hours later in both the U.S. and Canada. Indigo’s Kobo e-book reader was already aggressively priced in May at $149, analysts told CBC.

CBC News

Finding the function in dysfunction

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, June 22, 2010 at 11:38 AM - 34 Comments

The Prime Minister granted an interview to Reuters yesterday and, aside from questions about the upcoming G8 and G20 summits, was asked about the Parliamentary sitting just passed. Here is the transcript of that answer.

Well, first of all, I actually, notwithstanding, you know, notwithstanding my own frustrations with some of the dysfunction in the minority Parliament, I think in the end we actually got some, some pretty good, some pretty good results, particularly in the closing days.

As you know, we got the budget implementation bill through. As, as was observed critically and I think inaccurately, the criticism was inaccurate in some circles. The budget bill was wide-ranging legislation that had a lot, not just of important budgetary measures, but important measures for the Canadian economy. So, I think the passage of the budget bill, in and of itself, made the parliamentary sessions productive. And I know we’ve been criticized by how much was in that budget bill. But, putting a lot in that budget bill effectively ensured, passing it ensured a productive parliamentary session. There were other important things done. The passage of refugee reform legislation, this has been a crying need for, I’d say, at least 15 years. The bill we passed there, I mean, Minister Kenney deserves a lot of credit, got all-party support in the end, for what are some very significant reforms that will help us manage those pressures going forward. As you know, we’ve increasingly been having difficulties managing the dysfunction of the refugee system with the impact that visas have on our, on our international relationships. And so, this is a very important set of reforms. We passed, we passed the, some pardon legislation, the important legislation, or at least part of the reforms to the system of pardons, which have been so abused in this country. And there were several other pieces of legislation. So, actually I think in the end, notwithstanding what was largely, I would not disagree with you, you know, largely a dysfunctional session where, quite frankly, it seemed to me Parliament spent a lot of its time debating things that are not top-of-mind for the Canadian people. In the end, I think we actually got the key pieces of legislation passed. And of course, we also put, the other thing that has to be mentioned is we put a lot on Parliament. We introduced 56 pieces of legislation so far this session. So, it has been, Parliament has had a lot put before it that is moving forward.

Asked explicitly about the fall, he dismissed the possibility of an election.

Antidepressant may have contributed to teen’s suicide

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, June 22, 2010 at 11:31 AM - 29 Comments

The lawyers for parents of an Oakville, Ont. teen who hanged herself when she was 18 years old told a coroner’s inquest yesterday that they blame antidepressants. Health Canada first issued warnings about the increased risk of suicide in teenagers who take the drugs in 2003. Carlin had been prescribed the drug Paxil for depression and anxiety 14 months before her death.

Canoe

Gay men are good at recognizing faces

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, June 22, 2010 at 11:22 AM - 1 Comment

Gay men can recall familiar faces faster and more accurately than their heterosexual counterparts because, like women, they use both sides of their brains, according to a new study by York University researchers. The study, published in the journal, Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain and Cognition, examined the influence of gender, sexual orientation and whether we’re right-or-left-handed on our ability to recognize faces. It found that when memorizing and discriminating between faces, homosexual men show patterns of bilaterality—the usage of both sides of the brain—similar to heterosexual women. Heterosexual men tend to favour the right hemisphere for such tasks. “Our results suggest that both gay men and heterosexual women code faces bilaterally. That allows for faster retrieval of stored information,” says study lead author Jennifer Steeves, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Health. Steeves and her colleagues also investigated the influence of hand dominance on such tasks. They found that left-handed heterosexual participants had better face recognition abilities than left-handed homosexuals, and also outperformed right-handed heterosexuals.

York University

They like us, they really like us

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, June 22, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 5 Comments

More than half of people around the world say they would abandon their homelands and move to Canada if they could, according to an international survey commissioned by the Historica-Dominion Institute in partnership with the Munk School of Global Affairs and the Aurea Foundation. Fifty-three per cent of adults in the world’s 24 leading economies said they would immigrate to Canada. The reason? Canadian’s positive attitudes about newcomers, and our dearth of anti-immigration parties—which most European countries have. Eighty-six per cent of respondents said Canada is a country where rights and freedoms are respected; 72 per cent said Canada is welcoming to immigrants; 79 per cent said Canadians are tolerant of people from different racial and cultural backgrounds; and 79 per cent said Canadians have one of the best qualities of life. “Canada is considered desirable for people all around the world,” said Andrew Cohen, president of the Historica-Dominion Institute. This survey suggests Canada may lead the way in the global talent wars. “The shining city on the hill, as America was, and remains, for many people.”

Globe and Mail

France's team disgraced

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, June 22, 2010 at 10:42 AM - 1 Comment

France, runner-up at the last World Cup, is suffering through a national embarrassment as its soccer team falls to pieces while both winless and goalless in this years tournament. Fans are in a rage over the expulsion of team’s superstar striker, Nicolas Anelka, who was kicked out after swearing at his team’s manager during a 2-0 loss to Mexico, prompting his comrades to boycott training. Team director Jean-Louis Valentin has resigned in disgust, and even French President Nicolas Sarkozy has condemned the entire situation. “It’s no longer football; it’s no longer sport. In fact, it’s no longer a team,” said Presidential adviser Henri Guaino. Sponsors are trying to quietly remove themselves from the chaos, and France’s sports minister is now staying in South Africa to try and sort out the mess. The situation is only made worse by accusations that the problems stem from the multi-racial makeup of the team, a sharp contrast to celebrated 1998 victors who were celebrated as “blacks, blancs, beurs”—blacks, whites and Arabs. The controversy has become so vile that many French fans now say they’re hoping for a loss and a quick return home to end the embarrassment.

BBC News

Gen. McChrystal gets hacked

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, June 22, 2010 at 10:25 AM - 102 Comments

Gen. Stanley McChrystal will be on a flight home from Kabul today, under orders from President Obama to attend the Wednesday strategy meeting on Afghanistan in person instead of by teleconference. McChrystal is in a spot of hot water over some wildly incautious remarks he and his entourage made to a freelance reporter for Rolling Stone. He probably won’t lose his job over this, but there’s no guarantee of that.

Now here’s the thing. The reporter who got all these excellent quotes (“Biden? Did you say ‘Bite me?’”) is Michael Hastings, a name I wasn’t familiar with. So I googled him and the first thing that caught my eye was a piece called “Hack: Confessions of a Presidential Campaign Reporter,” which he wrote for GQ after pitching in on the Newsweek special election issue. (Ah, the life of a freelancer.) Given the day’s events, it’s pretty much a must-read.

Hastings is blunt about the fun a reporter on short-term assignment can have when he doesn’t have to worry about the repercussions of what he writes. “My job was basically: Ride the buses and planes with the candidates, have big lunches and dinners on the expense account, get sources drunk and singing, then report back the behind-the-scenes story.”

Continue…

Why the oil spill is even worse than it looks

By Joseph and Amanda Boyden - Tuesday, June 22, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 24 Comments

Gerald Herbert/AP/ Win McNamee/Joe Raedle/GETTY IMAGES

Louisiana boasts a healthy hawk population. The birds hang on air currents everywhere, scoping out rodents or roadkill, taking in views we can only imagine. What their understanding of the oil spill from above might amount to, it’s hard to say. Maybe a hawk thinks Earth is bleeding.

But for those of us living in Louisiana and elsewhere along the Gulf of Mexico coast, the shape the BP oil disaster takes is one that looks horrifically like a torturously slow-moving hurricane, one that will put all others before it to shame. From a centre plume of crude come bands after bands of destruction. Only the outer bands have arrived on shore so far, a mere hint of the storm’s eye.

On a recent mission to discover first-hand what true havoc is unfolding, we drive from New Orleans down to the southernmost point in Louisiana, a tiny fishing community called Venice. Surrounded by water, Venice is where the Mississippi River finally flows into the Gulf, not in what one might expect, a giant deluge of water, but rather in a series of complicated mazes that only the locals know how to navigate.

Unexpectedly, to navigate the current politics of this place is just as confusing, even a little frightening. A military presence lurks, as does the sensation of a police state. Still, a general disorganization permeates the air, and shuttles for workers who appear to do nothing but arrive and depart fill the dusty shell and dirt roads. Louisiana state cruisers perch at many corners of town, and when we stop to ask the mostly beefy officers sitting bored in their vehicles where we might find the BP Media Center, or any facility for media orientation, they just shrug and send us on our way.

A couple of hours and numerous laps through town later, we come across a nondescript tan building with a large parking lot nearby and a number of security guards sweating and lounging under canopies. None of them seem to know anything about BP beyond it being responsible for this latest nightmare as well as their temp jobs. Finally a Coast Guard petty officer approaches and immediately takes control. He promises that if we show up at an ungodly early hour the next day, he’ll arrange to take us out on a boat ride to some of the affected areas.

Leaving New Orleans before seven the following morning, we pass swampland and refineries, drive on roads always wet for no other reason than the fact that they actually sit lower than the surrounding wetlands.

Of course, marshes and swampland comprise much of lower Louisiana. Roads, towns, and sometimes entire cities are built from what Mark Twain aptly described as “made ground” here. Maybe it’s not the wisest place to settle. Maybe it’s not meant to finally endure. One might argue that it’s the very nature of coasts to erode, change, and take new shapes every millennia or so.

Others, though, would argue that humans can and should settle where they sense they belong. Home for millions is California’s west coast, earthquake central. The residents know what they’re in for. Vancouver Island is due for a tsunami. There’s the New Orleans parallel example of the Netherlands, a below-sea-level region corralled by levees.

And Tornado Alley in the American Midwest loses residents every summer to twisters. If people want to live in a wetland and net shrimp, harvest oysters, and watch the airboats cut paths through the grassy waterways, who’s to say they shouldn’t be allowed to do so?

Admittedly there are always at least two sides to any controversial issue, environmental, economic, or otherwise, but for those of us here in Louisiana, the BP disaster hasn’t divided us into the two most obvious camps: us vs. them.

Because, of course, some of us are some of them. Some of us work for BP. Some of us need the local oil industry to survive, to feed our families and to put clothes on our backs. Others of us need the second (or third) degree of separation to contribute to our livelihoods: waiters serve up oysters on the half shell in New Orleans’ fine dining restaurants to patrons spawned directly from the oil industry who ultimately pay our rents.

Still others shrimp for a living, or we captain recreational fishing boats and take out loads of visitors to catch Gulf redfish and speckled trout and flounder. We own mom-and-pop seafood shacks and rental units on Grand Isle, waiting for tourists. We bartend and gas cars and sell groceries. And we volunteer for the Coast Guard.

That next morning, our guide for the day, Chief Petty Officer Lonnie Evans, a reservist of the U.S. Coast Guard and marine science technician who’s one of the first to be flown into Venice, begins to shed light on how intricately aligned and divided the local community is.

To his credit, Evans is helping to maintain his small quadrant of coast incredibly well. He placates and attempts to reassure, saying, “We’re doing everything we can to prevent impacts from the oil in this area. This environment down here, the wildlife in the marshes and in the Gulf of Mexico, they’re very resilient. They deal with influxes of salt water and fresh water based on drought periods or floods, they deal with hurricanes, seasonal changes, not to mention the natural predators that are in the area, and we’re hoping they spring back after the spill.”

In Evans’s section of the Gulf Coast, it would seem that the gushing oil has been managed well and that the regional flora and fauna will take the presence of slick crude and its globular brother in stride. His extreme optimism is almost contagious, and until we meet others with a different story, he nearly succeeds in instilling a controlled and manageable view of the coast.

But one needs only to visit the International Bird Rescue Research Center and functioning shelter in Buras to know that Evans’s take on the erupting volcano of oil affects far more of the natural world, with far more dire consequences. On Wednesday, June 9, the IBRRC shelter allows a conglomeration of international journalists and photographers into the hub of its rescue operations. The sun has daggers, and the centre kindly offers water to the hordes. The captured, oil-soaked birds don’t live air-conditioned lives; in turn the facility is cooled only by fans.

We’re informed by Jay Holcomb, the executive director of the IBRRC, that the shelter’s pelican numbers have grown exponentially in the last week.

Pelicans feed solely on fish, and the buildings containing the rescue efforts reek of fishy offal. The crated birds, both oiled and newly cleaned, object with grunts closer to moose than to what one might expect from birds, their cries guttural and low-registered. It’s the chorus effect that proves so haunting. As of June 9, the centre has already treated 415 birds, the majority of which arrived in the previous five days. For all intents and purposes, the number reflects only the tip of an iceberg.

The pelicans, brown and white, covered in oil, are each held down by three volunteer workers in metal buckets and scrubbed with dish soap. It is a searing sight, one not easily forgotten, miserably sad and heart-wrenching, and in the din of bird noise and camera clicks, it’s impossible to believe the worst has passed. A wave of death for Gulf birds and fish builds in certainty and impact.

In the meantime, the IBRRC, a non-government agency, depends on its corps of volunteers to clean the birds and, under media pressure, among other factors, set the scrubbed specimens free within a week. If some measure of the oil spume has been contained by BP’s temporary cap, the pressure placed upon environmental and emergency agencies has only gained in magnitude. In the Buras facility, words like “giant scope” and “catastrophe” fill the fetid, hot air like so much fishy stink. We are delivered the classic hospital emergency ward analogy when we ask how the workers deal with the sights, the sounds, the wounded and dying: “If you cry every time somebody or something comes in injured, you have no place being here. Save the ones you can. Move on.”

No doubt BP would like to move on. Its evasive tactics and constantly adjusted numbers would indicate it would willingly, happily, deceive the public for weeks, months, or even years. What can no longer be denied, however, is that since the April 20 explosion, the well has vomited tens of millions of gallons of oil into the blue-green waters of the Gulf. We can all see it.

At the time of writing, the oil that has risen to the water’s surface covers over 6,400 square kilometres of water. Square kilometres. To look at it another way, a noxious, murderous mass bigger than all of Prince Edward Island floats in the Gulf.

Few man-made entities can be seen from space without magnification. The Great Wall of China is a notable exception. Now, too, we can include BP’s oil disaster. It is viewable, easily, from space. Its mass has grown to such proportions that satellites pick up its floating presence inside the ovoid parameters of the Gulf of Mexico as easily as, oh, the land mass of the state of Delaware were it to be relocated to the subtropical climate.

Canadian families, snowbirds, and young people on March break have long packed up and headed south to the beautiful white sands of Alabama and Florida. Coastal Mississippi towns fill their casinos with tourists, and Louisiana’s fishing waters abound with visiting sports enthusiasts. Here’s hoping everyone’s gotten their fill before this summer. While the casinos might not close, it’s a certainty that the beaches and fishing waters will. They’re already slamming shut with the repetitive clank of a row of bank vaults. A Sunday lounge on the Orange Beach, Ala., waterfront turns into a mass evacuation; the utterly pristine shores are now desecrated by giant oil globs and dark swaths of greasy crude. Pensacola Beach seems to be the oil’s next target. Those of us living in Louisiana watch with horror as the black bands of the man-made hurricane destroy not only our home but our neighbours’ as well.

On Thursday, June 10, cleanup crews work near the mouth of the Mississippi River in both the South and Pasalutra/North Passes. They clean in marshland reeds behind a row of booms that hasn’t succeeded in keeping the oil at bay, and on a large strip of blackened sandbar. The fact that the marshland’s Roseau cane serves as a nursery to uncountable aquatic species isn’t lost on anyone here. No bugs buzz in the blackened stalks. No birds perch among them.

More interesting than the strangely random and incredibly plodding feel of the workers’ efforts, however, is the difficulty in finding many of them. Whether our guide, Chief Petty Officer Evans, wants us to only see a small example of the oil making landfall, or that so few restoration efforts have yet to begin in the area, remains unknown. Possibly he hopes only to spare our feelings. Whatever the reason, none of the scenarios seem positive: the true cleanup is horrendous and shouldn’t be seen in its massive size lest the viewer become overwhelmed; or the workers are so ineffective as to render their efforts senseless or even useless; or maybe there just aren’t enough workers to go around; or BP isn’t paying enough to cover all the boom breaches or to actually place booms in the first place; or the oil is still, hauntingly, making its slow way to shore.

No matter what the reason for the smattering of cleanup crews, the workers themselves are being held to strictly enforced rules: 20 minutes on, 20 minutes off. The Louisiana heat slices through even the most hardy of locals, and as they sweat and sweat in their gear, the oil seeps and seeps into the sand and fingers its way deeper into the grasses.
Sadly, not all of the damage reports come from the shoreline. Recent news of deep plumes of crude below the surface has infiltrated the media and Internet.

Dr. Joe MacInnis, a Canadian physician-scientist, author, and famous deep-sea explorer who, along with his friend, the director James Cameron, has led numerous Titanic expeditions among many other accomplishments, writes of the oil plumes’ damage in his harangue “Oil Kill.” “The cell-swarm of killing continues . . . to the phytoplankton—the lungs of the planet,” he writes. “Trillions upon trillions upon trillions of dead diatoms and dinoflagellates rain down through the filthy procession of upward moving oil. In deep water they merge with uncounted corpses of copepods and in deeper water still, the lifeless remnants of big fish, small fish, turtles and invertebrates. The deluge of mega-death continues until the remains come to rest on the gaunt floor of the Gulf.”

Of course, a human way of life clings to this intricate ecosystem, one that’s been so momentously thrown off its course, too. The Louisiana shrimpers and fishermen, along with those who tend the oyster beds, supply 30 per cent of all the nation’s seafood. Talking with Venice fishermen, this much is obvious: the Louisiana seafood industry stands to take a hit from which it will never recover.

The political pundit James Carville is fuming. “We’re about to die down here!” he recently raged on a national morning show. In his hometown New Orleans paper, he explains further: “And then BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster hits us with the deadliest combination imaginable of corporate greed and governmental malfeasance. We’ve been lied to by BP at every turn, from oil flow estimates to the existence of plumes to health effects . . . Add that to the fact that we have not seen a single penny of royalties for oil produced more than six miles off our coast. We assume all of the risk, produce seafood and oil and gas, with none of the reward.” Strong words indeed from the man who’s touted as the maestro who won Bill Clinton the White House.

“It’s about done with now,” shrimp boat captain Dewayne Baham says. “The oil’s moved in. It’s about shut everything we got down.”

He continues with a shake of his head as he discusses BP’s inability to contain the oil. “If they don’t stop it from coming out, man, we’re in for it. It’s gonna be 10 years before we can catch any shrimp anymore.”

When asked what will happen if such a situation occurs, how Dewayne will feel, how he’ll feed his family and make a living, he says, “I don’t know. How’s a doctor going to feel if he gets told he can’t be a doctor anymore? You got to leave your house, your whole place where you grew up. At 46 years old [after 30 years of shrimping], where am I going to go to start at? I’d start at the bottom making chump change.” Dewayne, clearly, is far less optimistic than the Coast Guard.

Dewayne’s not the only man aboard his boat who’s upset. But deckhand Myron Smith isn’t just upset. He’s apoplectic with anger, with BP’s ineptitude, with frustration at The Man and the entities he can’t see or touch or argue it out with. “Shoot the f–kin’ Queen,” he says, apparently referencing the homeland of British Petroleum. “Hang the CEO of BP!” Myron spits. “And leave his corpse hangin’ there. Vultures need to eat, too.” He goes quiet for a moment, still full of rage. “I don’t have nothing good to say. And I need to keep my job.” For what little time he might have left at that job, it seems fair to say.

After listening to Myron Smith, though, the dividing line suddenly begins to delineate itself with more clarity, notwithstanding Mr. Smith’s clear affection for the Queen and her United Kingdom. This disaster doesn’t ultimately come down to warring parties necessarily, to foreigners vs. locals or interlopers vs. the home turf. It’s an us vs. them of a different kind, the result of which will reverberate for decades.

Both the natural world and the people who depend upon it for their livelihood—the humans who have long traditionally harvested what the natural world offers up to feed the rest of us—are the ones who stand to lose it all. Those of us who like to sun near the surf will find other beaches. And the oil executives will find new ways to take from Earth whatever they want.

But now, what’s done to the natural world by the BP oil debacle is already done. We can’t stuff Pandora back into her box. The aquatic breeding grounds of so many fish and mammals, alongside the bivalve oyster beds, have died or are, right this moment, being choked to death. Birds continue to seek out what prove to be their last meals by diving for fish swimming beneath floating crude. Shrimpers who’ve not made a profit since Katrina have begun dry-docking their boats and putting them up for sale; their source of livelihood has been polluted into near oblivion.

Some believe the measure of any culture’s humanity can be gained by observing how it treats its elderly. Others would argue that taking a culture’s temperature is most accurate by looking at how we treat our prisoners of war. Not just those of us living in Louisiana but in all the world should redirect our communal gaze this year. We must measure the success or failure of our utter worth by how we treat our natural environment. How much, exactly, can we inflict upon Earth before it decides to quit? Not tomorrow or next year or a decade from now, but today, this very day, is the right time to reassess our dependence on oil. Our economic dependence alone tolls a warning bell for all who can hear it.

It might be so much anthropomorphism to believe the hawk flying its slow circles in the southern Louisiana sky thinks Earth is bleeding. Hawks likely don’t think metaphorically. But one thing’s certain: the hawk knows that what it sees isn’t right. The shape of the thing, the dark mass in the waters, isn’t right.

June introduces the literal hurricane season. It barrels in on us now. Predicted by experts to be worse in scale and number of storms than the last few years, these coming months on the horizon feel to Gulf Coast residents like guns loaded with armour-piercing bullets. The man-made BP oil fiasco, in the vortex of a furious natural phenomenon, threatens to morph into a cataclysmic disaster beyond all reckoning. Humans need to fix this. We have to fix it now.

Studio vs. Network, Gold Monkey-Style

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, June 21, 2010 at 6:00 PM - 4 Comments

Last week Shout! Factory distributed the DVD release of the one-season cult show Tales of the Gold Monkey. It’s a very good package, presenting the episodes uncut, with commentaries on several episodes (by Tom Greene, a writer-producer who has a lot of interesting things to say) and a making-of featurette.

There are only two flaws in the set: one, creator Don Bellisario didn’t participate — it seems like he can’t be found anywhere since he was booted off NCIS. And two (this one is a bit more important), because this set was originally mastered for a Region 2 release, the episodes are taken from PAL masters, meaning that they are a little sped-up from the original versions. (They run about 47 and a half minutes; an un-sped version would probably be a bit over 48 minutes.) However, the speed difference isn’t very noticeable apart from the theme song, which does sound a bit too high-pitched.

The show itself is one I’ve talked about before, but the DVD has made me more favourably disposed toward it. From a distance, and even from watching isolated episodes, it can seem like a Raiders of the Lost Ark ripoff, and that’s certainly what ABC wanted when they picked it up. However, Bellisario had pitched the idea several years earlier, and what he was actually borrowing from was the films of Howard Hawks, particularly two movies about tough men and women leading dangerous lives in hot climates: Only Angels Have Wings, about fliers in South America, and To Have and Have Not, where Humphrey Bogart fought Nazis in Martinique. (The two movies share a lot of similarities and even some of the same dialogue, since Hawks constantly borrowed from himself.) You can read more about the background of the show at Cult TV Flashback.

When ABC finally picked it up, it was because it was a premise and time period that could incorporate a lot of Raiders-style material, and the show that got produced did indeed have a lot of Indiana Jones borrowing in it, but it was always at its weakest when it tried to be like Raiders.

That’s probably partly because Bellisario’s heart wasn’t in the Indiana Jones stuff, and what he really wanted to do was the Hawks tribute stuff: Corky, the hero’s amiable drunk of a best friend, is based on the Walter Brennan character from To Have and Have Not, while the heroine (Caitlin O’Heaney) is kind of a mashup of the two types of women who populate both movies (both Angels and To Have feature a sexy musical performer with a past and another young woman who’s prim and uptight). Then you’ve got Stephen Collins, who’s just been signed up as a regular on the upcoming No Ordinary Family; his character is supposed to be the stoic, good-humoured hero who takes chances for a good cause without getting all mushy about it, like Cary Grant in Angels and Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not. The more the show feels like an old movie, or borrows the tropes and story ideas of old movies, the more it seems like the writers are really engaged with the material.

But the other reason why the show doesn’t work as an Indiana Jones-type thing is that it simply can’t afford to. One thing Tom Greene talks about on the DVD is that there was a struggle between the network, ABC, and the studio, Universal. (These conflicting demands always exist in TV; they don’t even go away when the network and the studio are part of the same company.) ABC wanted more production values, more action, more stunts — in other words, something like Raiders. Universal was always after them to keep costs down.

They couldn’t deliver the kind of show ABC wanted on the money they had. But what they could do for that money was deliver Only Angels Have Wings/To Have and Have Not type of stories, because those movies took place mostly indoors, in cramped settings, focusing more on what people do when they’re not in a plane or on a boat. (It works, too; those movies never feel cheap or claustrophobic, and the dullest scenes in To Have and Have Not are the ones where they get out on the boat.) So Bellisario was pitching an idea that could easily be done on a TV budget, and ABC was demanding that they compete with multi-million dollar movies. But it’s much easier for a show to make an impact with characters interacting in a smoky, specific atmosphere — that is, the island where the show takes place and particularly the bar where they all hang out — than to be a globe-trotting adventure story. But ABC wanted a globe-trotting adventure story, and canceled the show because it wasn’t going to go farther in that direction.

I wonder if that’s true of other shows — that they try (either on network orders or misplaced ambition) to do more than they can do effectively with the money they have, rather than the things that they can do well. I guess it’s a bit different now because shows have more money to throw around, but it still seems like many of the biggest hit series are the ones that fully exploit their home setting (hospitals, backlot neighbourhoods) before they start wandering off to new and more expensive places.

"I want to plead guilty 100 times over"

By macleans.ca - Monday, June 21, 2010 at 5:57 PM - 6 Comments

Faisal Shahzad, the defendant in the Times Square bomb plot, pleaded guilty to all counts for his role in the aborted attack. This marks an abrupt end to a terror plot that extended to Islamic militant groups in Pakistan, where he said he went to learn from the Pakistani Taliban how to build a bomb that he planned to detonate on US soil. In court, Shahzad listened as each count of the 10-count indictment was read to him, and then indicated that he understood the charges and the penalties that he faced. “I want to plead guilty 100 times over,” he said. This plea is consistent with his compliance with authorities since his arrest on May 3. He now faces life in prison.

New York Times