'I will consider the matter closed'

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, June 18, 2010 at 12:14 PM - 27 Comments

With a slight allowance for the potential of future trouble, the Speaker officially declined yesterday to entertain a point of privilege from Jack Harris on Afghan detainee documents—more or less clearing the Conservatives, Liberals and Bloc to proceed with their memorandum of understanding.

In considering this matter, the Chair has taken great care to assess whether the existence of this consensus satisfies the broad conditions that were imposed on the parties in the ruling of April 27.

I must stress that it is not for the Chair to examine the details of the agreement or to compare it to the agreement in principle tabled on May 14. I am responding to the interventions that have been made on behalf of an overwhelming majority of members who have stated that they are satisfied with the consensus agreement that has been tabled.

The Chair can only conclude, therefore, that the requirements of the ruling of April 27, 2010, have indeed been met and, accordingly, I will not call on the honourable member for St. John’s East to move a motion at this time. Instead, the Chair will allow time for the processes and mechanisms described in the agreement to be implemented. Should circumstances change, members will no doubt ensure that the Chair will again be seized of the matter, but for now I will consider the matter closed.

Opening weekend: Losing home in ‘Winter’s Bone’ and ‘Toy Story 3′

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, June 18, 2010 at 12:06 PM - 0 Comments

Jennifer Lawrence in 'Winter's Bone'

This weekend offers a classic choice between blockbuster entertainment and rugged indie drama—between cartoon fantasy and gritty Ozark realism. Movies great and small for wildly different demographics. But Toy Story 3 and Winter’s Bone are both tales of characters terrified of losing their home.  In Toy Story 3, a band of played-out toys are driven out of the house as “their” child heads off to college, and trapped in a daycare gulag. In Winter’s Bone an intrepid teenage girl trying to save the family house from being sold off plunges into an Ozark mountain underworld in search of her bail-jumping dad. Both movies are worth seeing. Toy Story 3 is a solid sequel to a trusty franchise—a 3D  ride to the dark side of toyland, buffered by sentiment. With enough wit to amuse the parents and enough adventure to captivate the kids. It’s had a lot of attention already. So I’m going to reverse the usual protocol and lead with the little movie, Winter’s Bone (which opens in Toronto today, and expands to Vancouver and Montreal next week)  This Sundance award-winner is a superbly acted, beautifully wrought film. Chances are it will be a contender for my Top 10 list by the time winter comes around.

Talk about counter-programming. The farthest thing you could imagine from the bright summer midway of Iron Men and A-Team hijinks and Karate Kids, Winter’s Bone is an austere, harrowing suspense story of a hard-headed girl who ventures into an Ozark heart of darkness, a backwoods hell of crystal meth and family menace and unforgiving cruelty. Jennifer Lawrence delivers a powerful, unwavering performance as 17-year-old Ree Dolly, who is trying to track down her father. He put up their house for a bail bond then vanished without a trace. If she can’t find him, she will be homeless, along with the rest of her family. As she heads into woods to question friends and relatives, she runs up against an outlaw code of silence and risks her life with each step that takes her closer to the truth behind her dad’s disappearance. She confronts her ruthless addict uncle, the incongruously nicknamed Teardrop (John Hawkes), and passes through a declension of ever darkening characters. The movie’s desaturated palette is expertly controlled. This is a gray world and we don’t see a glimmer of sun in the sky, or a smile from our resilient heroine, until close to the end.

Based on the novel by Daniel Woodrell, the film is set and shot in the mountains of southern Missouri, a world that is captured with stunning authenticity. I was reminded of Canadian director Jennifer Baichwal’s fine documentary, The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Adams’ Appalachia. This film portrays mountain culture with the same photographic richness,  avoiding the hillbilly stereotypes, while etching Gothic character portraits of scary potency. And the stark dialogue has an archaic, almost biblical cadence. Director and co-writer Debra Granik, who shot the film in real Ozark family homes, worried about playing into the stereotypes. “Moonshine and meth,” she says, “are gasoline on the bonfire of cliches depicting mountain culture. Thirty-five years after Deliverance, even a banjo can still be a loaded symbol. But in our trips down to southern Missouri, banjos kept popping up in the most mysterious and alluring ways. Ultimately the banjo found its way into the film, offering notes of hope and perseverance. I came to think of it as a fresh start for that image.”

As for Toy Story 3, it does not depart from the safe formula of the previous installments. Don’t expect anything as ingenious as Ratatouille or Up. But the formula works. A few brief observations culled from my recent article on sequels and remakes in the magazine:

Each movie in Disney-Pixar’s Toy Story franchise conforms to a strict narrative template: led by Woody (Tom Hanks), the vintage cowboy doll, a clan of animated toys get separated from their beloved master, Andy, and have to fight their way home. In Toy Story 2, the enemy was a venal collector. In Toy Story 3, Andy is off to college and his toys are once again playing dodgeball with oblivion. Will it be the attic? A yard sale? No, they’re donated to a daycare centre—a prison camp ruled with an iron paw by a strawberry-scented stuffed bear.

While the franchise’s sentimental mould is inviolable, this sequel has a darker, more satirical edge. Some of the Orwellian daycare toys are quite scary, like the mad-eyed, cymbal-crashing monkey on surveillance duty, or the big, blank-eyed baby doll. And in an apocalyptic set piece, the toys are sent on a harrowing flume ride through trash shredders to landfill hell. I’m not giving anything away by saying that this Toy Story, like the others, ends happily. Some things will never change.

More bad press for the G8/G20 summits

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 18, 2010 at 11:54 AM - 7 Comments

Criticisms about spending and management around this year’s G20/G8 summits continue to grab headlines in this country and beyond. The US has issued a travel alert for Americans, advising them not to visit Toronto during the G20 summit as protests could quickly turn violent. “Even demonstrations that are meant to be peaceful can become violent and unpredictable,” the advisory reads. “You should avoid them if at all possible.” Bloomberg News weighed in saying this summit has allowed Canada’s opposition to attack the Prime Minister’s economic credibility, damaging a the message Harper wanted to impress on colleagues and voters: that this country was the last in the G7 to enter the global recession and the first to recover. The Conservatives have fallen to their lowest level of popularity—30.5 per cent—since forming government in 2006, an EKOS poll released yesterday showed. New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton said yesterday, “People just shake their heads at the kind of expenditures that are going on. They talk about that fake lake—it really bothers them.”

Winnipeg Free Press

Bloomberg

After dropping for six months, the number of EI recipients levels off

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 18, 2010 at 11:06 AM - 1 Comment

Roughly the same number of Canadians filed for Employment Insurance in April as did in March. The number of people on  benefits didn’t change much either. That follows a 19.5% drop since the peak of 829,000 recipients in June 2009. Ontario has seen the fastest rate of decline in beneficiaries with 26.5% fewer people on EI in April than there were last June.

CTV

Attorney General of Utah “tweets” prisoner’s execution

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 18, 2010 at 11:01 AM - 2 Comments

Twitter users are questioning the etiquette behind Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff’s latest Tweet, reports tech-blog Mashable.com. “I just gave the go ahead to Corrections Director to proceed with Gardner’s execution,” tweeted Shurtleff. “May God grant him the mercy he denied his victims,” he added. Ronnie Lee Gardner was the first to die by firing squad in the U.S. in 14 years when he was shot this morning. One user of the social media site named diptychal called it “… the dumbest most disgusting use of Twitter ever.”

Mashable

Harry Potter theme parks opens in Florida

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 18, 2010 at 10:54 AM - 2 Comments

If hippogriffs, Twiward Tournament and Ollivander’s wand shop sounds familiar to you, then the just-opened Harry Potter theme park in Florida may be your next vacation destination. The 20-acre Wizarding World is within the Islands of Adventure complex in Orlando Florida. In it includes Harry Potter favourites including a Hogwarts Express train and Zonko’s joke shop. The park was designed in close collaboration with Harry Potter author, JK Rowling as well as the production designer and supervising arts director of the Harry Potter film crew. However, the waiting times are predicted to be formidable—queuing time is predicted to be up to five hours.

The Guardian

15 million pounds of SpaghettiOs recalled

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 18, 2010 at 10:43 AM - 2 Comments

Campbell Soup Co. has recalled 15 million pounds of SpaghettiOs with meatballs on Thursday. The SpaghettiOs are believed to be undercooked, because of a cooker malfunction at one of the company’s Texas plants. To identify the recalled products look for “EST 4K” as well as a use-by date between June 2010 and December 2011 on the bottom of the can. There are believed to be 35,000 of the cases of SpaghtettOs on the market now. Cambpell Soup Co. has recalled 14 million pounds because that is all the cans that were made since December 2008, but many of them have probably already been consumed.

NPR

Zoo & Aquarium Controversy

By Takeoffeh.com - Friday, June 18, 2010 at 10:34 AM - 3 Comments

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the world’s largest animal rights organization, does not believe animals should be used for entertainment or kept in zoos, theme parks or aquariums. Responding to a recent piece on TakeOffeh.com, PETA’s Captive Exotic Animal Specialist, Lisa Wathne, had this to say:

Lisa Wathne: We at PETA were disappointed to hear that you view the decline of ticket sales at SeaWorld following the death of trainer Dawn Brancheau, who was attacked by one of the theme park’s captive orcas, as “unfortunate” (“The Upside of Bad Situations,” 10 May). After being pulled into a tank by an orca, Brancheau’s scalp was torn from her head, her arm was ripped from her body, and her spine, ribs, and facial bones were broken. Families and children watched as an orca slammed a woman, who had just been smiling at them, to death. It is hardly good news that by reducing the price of admission, SeaWorld is, in essence, trying to bribe people into ignoring their better judgment and supporting what is basically an attractively decorated prison for marine mammals.

We all know how much people of all ages love the natural world and the creatures that inhabit it, and how much joy children get out of interacting with animals. We asked Lisa Wathne for some alternatives.

TakeOffeh: How can marine life be enjoyed without captive animals being involved?

Lisa Wathne: There are many ways to learn about, appreciate, and enjoy sea life without supporting marine theme parks and aquariums. People can explore the wonderful world of marine animals through books, magazines, videos, sophisticated computer programs, and displays such as “Conny,” the life-size sperm whale replica at The Children’s Museum in West Hartford, Connecticut.

Several displays, including Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom Adventure Tour, offer an interactive experience that uses realistic animatronic animals to convey the excitement and adventure of nature. Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom Adventure Tour travels across the U.S. for appearances at fairs, festivals, and other venues.

Last year, IMAX theaters opened Under the Sea 3D, a film that gives viewers face-to-face encounters with some of the most mysterious creatures of the sea. It offers a uniquely inspirational and entertaining way to explore the beauty and natural wonder of the oceans and discover how they are affected by global climate change. In IMAX theatres, the images “leap” off the screen and appear to float around the room, virtually putting the audience in the movie.

<!––>Virtual Dolphin Therapy at La Quinta Healing Arts in California recreates an underwater sanctuary with a multimedia mix of dolphin vocalizations, a screen showing frolicking dolphins, and a vibrating sound-wave table.

TakeOffeh: For some people books, films and animatronic machines will never replace the real thing. How about some ideas that include viewing real, live marine life?

Lisa Wathne: John Pennekamp National Park in the Florida Keys is fabulous. Established in 1963, John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park was the first undersea park created in the U.S. The park and the adjacent Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary encompass 178 nautical square miles of coral reefs, sea-grass beds, and mangrove swamps. These areas were established to protect and preserve the only living coral reef in the continental U.S. You can swim there, but you can also take advantage of reasonably priced snorkelling tours that allow you to go right in with the animals—in their home and on their terms.

Key West’s new Eco-Discovery Center offers interactive displays and walk-through labs, but the animals there swim freely. And it’s free!

North America’s only natural freshwater aquarium is located in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada. Opened in 1990, the Fluvarium provides nine panoramic glimpses into a real diverted brook in which brown trout swim freely in and out of the viewing areas, which include deep and shallow ponds and a fast-flowing “riffle” where the fish spawn in the fall.

Photo Credits: imax.com, virtualdolphintherapy.com, pennekamppark.com

When ancient grievances are played out on the soccer pitch

By Stephen Marche - Friday, June 18, 2010 at 10:27 AM - 0 Comments

When the U.S. tied England, it was as good as a victory HOANG DINH NAM/AFP/Getty Images

There is a very small chance that North Korea and South Korea will meet each other at this year’s World Cup. Just thinking about that possibility, however distant, offers a peculiar and dangerous thrill. A game played with a bouncy ball on a field of grass would undoubtedly affect the military situation of East Asia. Politics and football have always tended to mix explosively.

Games have stopped wars, as in the 1967 exhibition game in Lagos, starring Pele, for whom the warring factions in the Nigerian civil war called a 48-hour truce. And football has started wars too, like the 1969 “Soccer War” between El Salvador and Honduras, begun over a qualification game. The World Cup contains many rivalries whose origin, whether on or off the pitch, can be difficult to distinguish. (England and Argentina in 1986 being a prime example.) If war is politics by other means, then football is war by means of a game. The world-historical background to many of the contests on the pitch is one of the most subtle and enduring pleasures of the tournament.

Continue…

Fangs down, ‘True Blood’ is the trashiest show on TV

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, June 18, 2010 at 10:17 AM - 19 Comments

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY BRADLEY REINHARDT

A decade ago, HBO was touting its willingness to make something different from the escapist soapy programming on the broadcast networks. Now its biggest hit is True Blood, an escapist, soapy, and sometimes campy show about vampires in the U.S. South, full of bad accents, severed limbs, and lines like “you were fighting the Nazi werewolves.”

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Newsmakers

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 18, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Run all the way home, boys
Prime Minister David Cameron jogged with British troops in Afghanistan Friday and said their mission was about “our national security in the U.K.” The task isn’t a “dreamy idea” of building a model society, he said. “We are here to help the Afghans take control of their security so we can go home.”

Anything but harmonized
British Columbia’s version of the anti-tax Tea Party continues to gather steam. On Friday, provincial Energy Minister Blair Lekstrom quit the cabinet and the Liberal caucus to protest government plans to press ahead with the Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) on July 1. Opinion is divided: was Lekstrom acting on principle or trying to save his political skin? More than 15 per cent of B.C. voters have signed a recall campaign opposing the tax. What isn’t in dispute is that Premier Gordon Campbell is in trouble, thanks to recall organizer Bill Vander Zalm. The 76-year-old Vander Zalm resigned as premier in 1991 after questionable business dealings caused a public uprising.

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Shaking up the news world

By Paul Wells with Martin Patriquin and Philippe Gohier - Friday, June 18, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 285 Comments

Photograph by Blair Gable

The evidence of your eyes deceives you, Kory Teneycke was saying the other day.

It’s true that only a year ago the boyish, flint-eyed 35-year-old spent his days trying to push news out of the Prime Minister’s Office—where until July he was Stephen Harper’s communications director—into the nation’s newspapers and broadcasts. And it’s true that now, suddenly, he is in charge of finding news to fill the political pages of Sun Media’s newspapers and that he plans within months to have the same role at a new news-and-talk cable TV channel. What does his old job have to do with his new one? “I think it’s neither here nor there.”

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Marvelous Maureen Forrester

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, June 18, 2010 at 12:19 AM - 4 Comments

A belated link to Ken Winters’ obituary for Maureen Forrester, the Canadian contralto, who died Wednesday at the age of 79.

She was one of the greatest classical singers Canada ever produced. Though there were arguments about how to classify her voice, it often sounded like one of the last high-profile examples of the true contralto voice, a kind of deep, rich, “earth-mother” voice that was mostly supplanted in the 20th century by the higher, brighter mezzo-soprano. The grand style of her singing sometimes made her sound emotionally cool, which may be one of the reasons why she felt more suited to concerts and songs than to opera — though she had a number of successes in the latter field, including the part of Cornelia in the New York City Opera production that restored Handel’s Julius Caesar to the standard repertoire.

I never heard her live, but her recording of the female songs from Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn, made in Vienna in the early ’60s, is one of the best examples of Mahler vocalism on record. And my favourite critic, Conrad L. Osborne, was effusive about her singing of Verdi’s Requiem in a recording by Eugene Ormandy (which I believe was released on a Sony CD):

There is one outstanding soloist here: Maureen Forrester. What a pleasure it is to hear a round, firm contralto and a really adult musical approach in this music! The Liber scriptus is splendid, with a really gripping articulation of the repeated “nil,” and the same vocal and musical level is maintained through the Recordare, the Lacrimosa, the Agnus Dei. This is the best voicing of the mezzo music on records.

This is a somewhat scratchy-sounding CBC performance of her signature song, Mahler’s “Urlicht,” which is both part of his Wunderhorn cycle and his second symphony; Forrester recorded the song at least three times and performed it constantly, as a stand-alone song and part of the symphony. The conductor here is Glenn Gould, making one of his periodic attempts to go from keyboard to baton.

Music: Come, Creator Spirit

By Paul Wells - Friday, June 18, 2010 at 12:02 AM - 11 Comments

On Friday Yannick Nezet-Séguin makes his first appearance in Philadelphia as the music director-designate of that city’s great orchestra. It is said he will be made to eat a Philly cheese steak as proof of his new allegiance. “Well,” the local papers quote him as saying, “Maybe just one.”

As his Canadian fans have come to know, the 35-year-old Montreal conductor is game for just about anything. He still leads his hometown Orchestre Métropolitain and the Rotterdam Philharmonic and is principal guest conductor of the London Philharmonic. He has been keeping up a punishing pace as a guest conductor, although those nomadic days may already be coming to a close for him. National Arts Centre brass already fear his performances Wednesday and Thursday of this week will be his last for some time. He made sure they won’t soon be forgotten.

Nézet-Séguin brought his Orchestre Métropolitain and the orchestra’s choir (whose members include his mother) to join the NAC Orchestra, a bunch of Ottawa choirs, and eight vocal soloists for Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, the Symphony of a Thousand. There were “only” 459 musicians onstage. The NAC has rarely heard anything like it. (The whole crew travels to Montreal to repeat the extravaganza on Sunday at Place des Arts.) The Governor General came out to give the conductor an award and they played an NFB short film about him before that, and as always he was humble and gracious about the fuss.

If you’ve paid no attention to Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, as I hadn’t before this month, you’ll be struck by eccentricities that go way beyond the scale of the thing. It’s in two parts, the first sung in Latin, the second in German. The first part is a setting of a ninth-century hymn, Veni Creator Spiritus. The second is the last scene of Goethe’s Faust. Their common theme is redemption, but the obvious structural oddities (uh, we missed the first several scenes of Faust) could be offputting. So could the dramatic arc: ecstatic and bombastic from the first bars, then brooding and understated in the second half.

On Wednesday the wunderkind from Montreal had no evident difficulty navigating it all. More than that, he made a coherent and touching musical case for this behemoth. Conducting in the huge gestures which have become his stock in trade but which made functional sense here — he’s not a tall man, and musicians in every corner of the hall had to keep his cue — he led his armies with unflagging stamina. The long orchestral introduction to the second half was my favourite, brooding and eerie. But he deployed his soloists, the assorted choirs — often pivoting 120 degrees to cue children’s choirs in the balconies behind each shoulder — and the two intermingled orchestras with constant care and attention.

Of the vocalists, tenor John Mac Master was easily the standout. I could point to standout instrumental performances but that would show only that I know the NACO better and am a fan of many of its members. Quite beyond its logistical audacity, this was a night of wonderful music. The Philadelphia appointment has made this week the most important of Nézet-Séguin’s career to date, but his stopover in Ottawa was not a detour from that week, it was part of its triumph.

The Commons: A day like any other

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, June 17, 2010 at 8:35 PM - 40 Comments

The Scene. As Bob Rae began the first question of the last Question Period before this third session of the 40th Parliament pauses for the summer, a respectful silence took hold.

The subject matter was this morning’s release of the final report from the inquiry into the Air India bombing. Mr. Rae commended the government and the inquiry’s commissioner. The Prime Minister stood and added his thanks to Justice Major. Mr. Rae probed for specific details of the government’s expected response, Mr. Harper offered assurances. The two danced quite delicately on the edge of combativeness, this adversarial system at its most sensitive.

Not until the Speaker called on the polarizing member for Ajax-Pickering, the Liberal Mark Holland, did the noise return to the chamber, government members groaning and moaning as Mr. Holland abruptly and loudly changed topics. Continue…

Week in Pictures: June 10th – 17th 2010

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 17, 2010 at 6:01 PM - 0 Comments

1984-2010 | William James John Bleach

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, June 17, 2010 at 5:00 PM - 0 Comments

William  James  John Bleach was born on April 22, 1984, in Guelph, Ont., to Marilyn Bleach, a nurse, and William James Bleach, who managed a nearby gravel pit. Named after his father and grandfather, most people called him Bill. Jeffrey, a younger brother, was born in 1985; the two were close, playing together, drawing pictures (Bill had an artistic side), and visiting garage sales with their family. It was at a garage sale that Bill, then just two, found something that sparked a lifelong fascination with aviation—a tiny model airplane. “He was drawn to it,” says Marilyn, 62. “Forget cars, Bill always had to have airplanes.”

When Bill was about eight years old, his mother took him and Jeff to California on a business trip. Their hotel window overlooked the airport runway, Marilyn recalls: “They were glued to the window, watching the planes take off.” At age 8, Bill joined the local flying club, taking out remote-controlled airplanes in a field near the city. At night, he’d curl up with a magazine on the subject. Bill’s father eventually moved north near Collingwood, while Marilyn stayed in Guelph. Bill lived with his father for a couple of years, learning to hunt and fish, and developing a love of the outdoors. Still, Marilyn says, he was “always focused on planes, and his art.”

Continue…

Who's suing who

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 17, 2010 at 4:40 PM - 1 Comment

Getty Images

Newfoundland: A group of Newfoundlanders is suing the federal government to save a pond in Long Harbour from becoming a dump site for mining waste. They claim cabinet changed the federal Fisheries Act in 2006 allowing small bodies of water to be used as tailings ponds, a decision, they argue, that should be made by Parliament.

Quebec: A Montreal couple claims their wedding was ruined by a lack of air conditioning and is suing the Ritz-Carlton for $150,000. They spent $120,000 on the event, which they argue was wrecked by “oppressive” heat that forced guests to loosen their ties and eat hors d’oeuvres outside.

Ontario: A roofer who went blind after spending five days in a Toronto jail in February 2009 is suing the Ontario government for $1.2 million in damages. He claims to have lost sight in his left eye, and thus his livelihood, after guards and doctors at the jail denied him medication needed to treat an infection, originally caused by a burning cigarette butt that landed on his cornea while he was helping a friend move.

Alberta: An Edmonton family is suing Air Canada for $1.5 million, alleging that employees threatened and falsely imprisoned them for an hour after they asked to leave a plane prior to takeoff due to safety concerns they had over a faulty cabin door.

British Columbia: A couple from Whistler is suing the federal government for $687,500 they claim they lost after contracts for housing members of the Vancouver 2010 Integrated Security Unit in chalet-style homes during the Olympics were cancelled. The government says mould, water leaks and unsafe wiring made the homes unacceptable.

Something's rotten at the Calgary Zoo: study

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 17, 2010 at 4:29 PM - 4 Comments

The number of animal deaths at the Calgary Zoo due to human error in recent years is “significantly greater” than at similar facilities in North America and is “indicative of an underlying problem,” according to the Globe and Mail. An independent report on the zoo, which was released Thursday, stated, “An increasing mortality at the zoo over the last few years and a clear increase in deaths that are human-related and in many cases could have been avoided by prompt and more aggressive response to identified problems.” The report was commissioned last December, after the zoo said it would investigate a series of accidents and animal deaths in the 2000s. These included the death of a capybara, the world’s largest rodent, which was pinned by a hydraulic door and crushed to death. A knife was also left in a western lowland gorilla enclosure, and a Turkmenian markhor (goat) hanged itself on a toy. Zoo officials maintained that the incidents were unrelated, even after critics said something was rotten at the zoo.

Globe and Mail

Guess who's shaking up Montreal?

By Joanne Latimer - Thursday, June 17, 2010 at 4:00 PM - 8 Comments

Photograph by Roger Lemoyne

An infamous new citizen has single-handedly revamped the Montreal art scene. Georges Marciano, co-founder of the Guess? Inc. denim empire, decamped to the Old Port from L.A. this year after losing a high-profile defamation lawsuit and dropping out of the 2010 gubernatorial race for California. With him came his priceless collection of postwar American art—along with wads of cash, his 84-carat diamond, and four Ferraris.

Marciano couldn’t be happier about the move. He bought the grand L’Hôtel XIXe Siècle and renamed it Lhotel last month. Outside the front door is one of Robert Indiana’s iconic Love sculptures. Five of Marciano’s sculptures are installed outdoors throughout the Old Port for public viewing.

Continue…

CFB Wainwright staff face 70 drug charges

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 17, 2010 at 3:53 PM - 2 Comments

Twelve soldiers have been slapped with drug charges after cocaine, ecstasy, cannabis and a range of other drugs worth about $10,000 were seized from CFB Wainwright in western Alberta. A lab producing DMT, a powerful hallucinogen, was also discovered. “This is a rare occurrence where we have such an investigation of this magnitude with this result,” said Maj. Daniel Dandurant, the officer in charge of the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service’s Western Region Detachment. The accused are Cpl. Thomas MacDougall, Pte. Jeffrey Brennan, Pte. Benjamin Humphrey, Pte. Dominique Malette, Pte. Glen Morgan, Pte. Michael Polack, Pte. Claude Roger Rocan, Pte. Clayton Taylor and Pte. Matthew Wright, as well as Michael Masserey, David McKinnell and Melyssa Lake, three former privates who worked on the base.

CBC News

A fitting end

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, June 17, 2010 at 3:52 PM - 17 Comments

The last day of committee hearings into the dealings of Rahim Jaffer ends in bafflement, contradiction and scorn.

“We stood for democracy. We stood for freedom,” he told a Commons committee this morning, referring to the party he first joined and was elected to as an MP to Parliament in 1997. He was defeated in 2008. “The way my wife has been treated by your party and your government doesn’t represent anything that I have ever … worked for during the time I was an MP.”

Mr. Jaffer, clearly agitated, said that his wife, Helena Guergis, isn’t even allowed to run as a Conservative for the nomination in her Simcoe-Grey riding. “You want to talk about disappointment. That’s disappointment.”

Oprah rewards magazine staffers with iPads and cash

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 17, 2010 at 3:21 PM - 0 Comments

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of O, The Oprah Magazine, Oprah Winfrey stopped by the Hearst headquarters and gave every staffer an Apple iPad, a personalized leather iPad carrying case and a cheque for $10,000, regardless of how long the staffer has been with the publication. A Hearst spokesperson told CNN Winfrey surprised the staff with the gifts “as a thank you for their hard work and dedication.”

The Marquee Blog, CNN

Storms kill at least 19 people in France

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 17, 2010 at 2:42 PM - 0 Comments

Flash floods caused by torrential rain have killed 19 people and left seven missing on France’s Mediterranean coast after the worst downpours the region has seen since 1827, a French official said on Wednesday. More than 350 mm of rain fell on the Var department in southern France over the period of a few hours on Tuesday. More than 1,000 people took refuge in schools and other buildings as their homes were submerged by muddy waters and floods swept cars away. The airport in Toulon, closed late on Tuesday because its runways were flooded, reopened on Wednesday morning. Railway officials said train services along the coast are expected to return to normal on Thursday.

New York Times