Week in Pictures: June 18th – 24th 2010

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 6:16 PM - 0 Comments

Isner wins world’s longest tennis match

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 6:06 PM - 0 Comments

The grudge match between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut at Wimbledon has ended after eleven hours and five minutes of marathon playing, resulting in a score of 70-68 Isner. The previous longest match was just over six and a half hours, a thought that will no doubt weigh on Isner’s mind as he prepares for his next game in less then 24 hours. “I’m going to do everything necessary to get myself ready for tomorrow,” he said. “I know my opponent (Thiemo de Bakker, who also had a long game in his first round), he’s not the freshest one either. Not nearly like me, but I definitely think I can win.”

ESPN

Expert commentary

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 5:32 PM - 26 Comments

The text of a press release received a few hours ago.

Karl Rove is coming to Toronto to a closed address for the G-20 Summit for Faith and Business Leaders at 7:00pm.  However at 6:40 Mr. Rove will speak to the press commenting on the G-20 and the moral question of massive spending and debt.

Organizer Charles McVety says “in 18 months the G-20 leaders have wasted 7 trillion dollars of stimulus spending, much of it on frivolous agenda driven projects.  If you stack one hundred $100 bills, they would be a half an inch high.  $7 trillion dollars is a stack of $100 bills, five hundred thousand miles high, sky high reckless spending to the moon and beyond.”

Co-organizer Brian Rushfeldt, Canada Family Action, says “massive immoral debt mandated by G-20 leaders is fiscal child abuse of future generations and maternal exploitation placing women and children in financial peril.” Rushfeldt goes on to express concern that “forcing Canada to abide by G-20 and United Nations social policy undermines Canadian democracy and sovereignty.”

No doubt Mr. Rove has many questions to answer on this subject, the administration he advised having helped add something like $4.3-trillion to the American debt.

Leno doing worse than Conan

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 5:04 PM - 6 Comments

Conan O’Brien’s Tonight Show was notorious for performing worse than Jay Leno’s, and when Leno took the show back, he went back to winning the late night wars—or did he? TV By the Numbers has looked at recent ratings and discovered that although Leno started out doing well, his current “ratings trend” is actually a bit below Conan’s in the same period, and he is back to being tied with David Letterman in the 11:30 slot—and this is before O’Brien’s cable talk show starts competing with both of them. And as one observer noted, Leno doesn’t even have Conan’s excuse for these ratings: having Jay Leno as a lead-in.

Newser

Lady Gaga to bring death to the stage

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 5:02 PM - 26 Comments

Singer Lady Gaga has already acted out her own death on stage, and now plans to outdo that performance by including dead bodies in an upcoming show. She is now said to be in talks with scientist Gunther Von Hagens—best known for his Body Worlds—about ways to use his knowledge in her Monster Ball tour. She reportedly asked Gunther to create a set for her shows in Las Vegas for March next year. “She is fascinated by Gunther’s work and life. He grew up in Germany, a country she loves,” a source told British newspaper The Sun. “They’ve spoken over email and it’s gone well. She is keen to have some Body Worlds element in one of her shows, with Vegas being the obvious fit.”

Stuff.co.nz

1972-2010 | Apichat Sudsaneh

By Stephanie Findlay - Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 5:00 PM - 2 Comments

Illustration by Julia Minamata

Apichat Sudsaneh was born on Dec. 2, 1972, in Phrae, Thailand, to Sangwan and Yut Sudsaneh, the middle child of their three sons. When he was 13, he stopped going to school in order to begin working to help support his family. By then his father had died, and Paitoon, his older brother, wasn’t making much money in his chosen career as a farmer, so Apichat worked as a mechanic’s assistant to help Kriengsak, his younger brother, go to school.

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U.S. considered 1969 nuclear strike on North Korea

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 4:59 PM - 2 Comments

Declassified documents released on Wednesday revealed the United States studied plans for a nuclear strike on North Korea in 1969, but backed down after then-president Richard Nixon decided it was best to remain calm. In 1969, North Korea shot down a U.S. spy aircraft over the Sea of Japan, killing the 31 personnel on board. The documents, released after requests under the Freedom of Information Act, show the government considered a number of options, including conventional and nuclear attacks. In one contingency plan named “Freedom Drop,” the United States would use nuclear weapons to destroy military command centres, airfields and naval bases in North Korea. Then-defence secretary Melvin Laird said civilian casualties “would range from approximately 100 to several thousand” in a classified memorandum to Nixon’s national security adviser Henry Kissinger. There is no indication that the government seriously considered a nuclear strike.

Ottawa Citizen

Well, here we are then

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 4:10 PM - 6 Comments

I’ll spare you too much description of the international media centre, here on the exhibition grounds in Toronto. Looks a bit like an airplane hanger, only with a wine bar, an impressionistic model of Toronto’s financial district and several large monitors strung up from the ceiling with an endless loop of footage from scenic Huntsville. The World Cup is playing on other monitors and every so often a roar or groan of some kind can be heard. Remember, the goal of any “media centre” at a large event such as this should be to discourage leaving and thus experiencing anything outside the controlled environment or, worse, practicing any kind of journalism. On that count, this seems a fine media centre. Indeed, I just passed a half hour lounging in a Muskoka chair and barely noticed my own sloth.

It is of course required to make some comment on the fake lake (or, apparently, have your picture taken in front of it), so here goes. As artificial water features go, it seems nice enough. Though it does demonstrate, once again, that one should always downgrade any artist rendering by about 10% to arrive at a more accurate idea of the construct in question.

Anyway. The real business starts tomorrow, several hundred kilometres away in apparently scenic Huntsville. Official buses will be provided for those who wish to leave the cozy confines here for the cozy confines there.

Pedophiles on drugs

By Jen Cutts - Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 4:00 PM - 6 Comments

Getty Images

Poland has a new tool in its fight against pedophiles—chemical castration. A new law states that men convicted of raping a child under 15 or a close relative can be forced to take libido-lowering medication, even after their sentence has been served. The law came into effect June 8 after being passed in Poland’s parliament last September. Prime Minister Donald Tusk first raised the issue in 2008, when Poles were shocked by the case of a man who had allegedly imprisoned his daughter for six years, raping her repeatedly and fathering two children. At the time, Tusk angered human rights groups by saying, “I don’t believe that such individuals, such creatures, can be called human. In this case one can’t even argue on behalf of human rights.”

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Man with chainsaw, pick axe and crossbow arrested in Toronto

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 3:40 PM - 7 Comments

Police have arrested a man just outside the G20 security zone near Scott Street and The Esplanade, the Globe and Mail reports. Police noticed a homemade sheet metal box on top of his silver Hyundai and pulled him over to investigate. The box contained a crossbow, five arrows, a sledgehammer, a pick-axe, a chainsaw, a baseball bat, a gasoline canister and a cola bottle. Police Constable Michelle Murphy of the G20 Integrated Security Unit said the car also contained “hazardous materials.” The driver is believed to be 53 years old.

Globe and Mail

California, Here McGrath Comes

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 2:59 PM - 1 Comment

I’m sad and happy to read Denis McGrath’s post today, where he announces that he has a job in Los Angeles and is suspending his blog, Dead Things On Sticks, for the duration.

Happy because he’s a good guy and a good writer, and I’m glad he got the job. Sad because Dead Things On Sticks has been one of the best TV blogs around for most of the years I’ve been blogging. To the extent that I am more interested in the Canadian TV scene than I was a few years ago, it’s because of what I learned from his blog, or from the other blogs I discovered through him.

We’ve still got the other blogs he mentions (plus hopefully this will drive me to pick up some slack and write more about the behind-the-scenes world of our TV business), along with the invaluable Diane Wild, but this is going to leave a gap. But, more importantly, his blog is part of the reason why the gap is not as big as it would have been if he’d left a few years before. We know a lot more about Canadian television, the business and craft of it, the promise and potential and frustrations of it, because of that blog.

Portland woman alleges Al Gore groped her in hotel room

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 2:48 PM - 7 Comments

A Portland massage therapist claims former U.S. vice president Al Gore groped her, kissed her and made unwanted sexual advances during a massage session in October 2006 in a Portland hotel suite. The woman said she informed two friends about the incident and kept the clothes she wore that night, including a pair of black pants with a stain on them, but police did not investigate further due to lack of sufficient evidence to support the allegations. In a detailed statement given to Portland sexual assault investigators in January 2009, the woman said she was called to a hotel room on the night of October 24, 2006 to give Gore a massage after he attended a speaking engagement. While giving Gore an abdominal massage, she said he demanded that she go lower and soon grabbed her right hand and shoved it under the sheet. The woman said she tried to use an acupressure technique to relax Gore and thought she put him to sleep, but said Gore fondled her back, buttocks and breasts as she was trying to break down her massage table. She said she did not initially tell police about the incident for fear of not being believed. The woman’s attorney filed a complaint with police about two months after the encounter, but the woman didn’t show up for three scheduled interviews with investigators. At that time, police were told the woman did not want to press criminal charges and would pursue a civil case instead. No civil suit has been filed.

The Oregonian

Martha and Kate and Edith Piaf

By Elio Iannacci - Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 2:40 PM - 1 Comment

PHOTOGRAPHY BY ROGER LEMOYNE

You could learn a lot about a singer by the way he or she steps on stage. Lady Gaga’s entrances guarantee an epic costume, Madonna’s an onslaught of HD video, Mariah Carey’s at least one giant fan blowing.

Yet at a Martha Wainwright concert, the star of the show seldom makes a splash when the curtains open. “It’s her magic trick,” says avid fan, actor-model Isabella Rossellini, who has seen Wainwright sing live several times. “Martha walks into her set very modestly, very subtly,” Rossellini explains. “At first, you might think that she could be part of the band. Then, bang! That strong voice comes out and she traps you in a time machine!”

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Going into battle, alone

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 2:00 PM - 2 Comments

Jeff McIntosh/ CP; John Ulan/CP

“You can only be bloody and unbowed to a point,” grumbled a frustrated Liberal candidate, calling upon the opposition parties to stop splitting their vote against a monolithic right-wing governing party. “We have passed that point.” The Liberal brand, he complained in an election-night interview, should be abandoned in favour of uniting the parties on the progressive side.

“We would have to get by the personal pride of the leaders and the hollow speeches,” he ventured. But he had spoken with “high leaders” in opposition, he said, and “had found agreement with his views.”

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Outlet Malls go online

By Chris Sorensen - Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 2:00 PM - 2 Comments

Getty Images

Originally conceived as a way to off-load discontinued, overstocked and defective merchandise, outlet stores and outlet malls have become a key retail channel over the past decade as consumers chase big discounts on name-brand items. But a growing number of investors believe the future of outlet shopping doesn’t involve cluttered big box stores on the outskirts of town—it’s online.

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Will it fly again?

By Chris Sorensen - Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 1:40 PM - 2 Comments

Reuters

The Concorde, the world’s first supersonic commercial aircraft, made its final transatlantic flight in October 2003. After a 3½-hour flight from New York, the pointy-nosed jet touched down at London’s Heathrow Airport in front of a crowd that had gathered to say goodbye. But now enthusiasts are hoping to get the Concorde off the ground once again at an estimated cost of $22 million—ideally in time for the opening ceremonies of the 2012 Olympics in London.

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Bay Street’s big bear

By Jason Kirby - Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 1:20 PM - 1 Comment

CP Images

Investment analysts aren’t exactly a glass-half-empty crowd. Most rate the stocks they cover a “buy.” Bearish ones might begrudgingly issue a “hold.” But a “sell” from a big Bay Street or Wall Street firm is rare. Which explains why a report last week from Mark Steele, an analyst at BMO Capital Markets, has drawn so much attention. Steele’s advice: sell everything.

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It's protection with real teeth

By Stephanie Findlay - Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 1:20 PM - 5 Comments

GIANLUIGI GUERCIA/AFP/Getty Images

A condom designed by a South African woman is offering spiky, barbed protection against sexual assault during the FIFA World Cup. The Rape-aXe is a latex sheath embedded with razor-sharp barbs worn inside the vagina like a tampon. When an attacker attempts vaginal penetration, the barbs attach themselves to the penis. When the attacker withdraws, the Rape-aXe remains hooked on. The device must be surgically removed from the penis, identifying the rapist as a criminal to medical professionals.

Sonnet Ehlers, the condom’s inventor, was inspired by a rape victim who said to her: “If only I had teeth down there.” Ehlers planned to distribute 30,000 of the condoms for the World Cup. However, in a region infamous for its HIV-denial and high rape rates, critics say the condoms won’t address the bigger problem—a lack of sex education. Ehlers maintains that, at the very least, the condom’s surprise factor will give women a chance to escape.

Rape-aXe is part of a larger trend that sees an increasing number of South African women opting to use female condoms. Earlier this June, the Female Health Company announced it had fulfilled an order for the World Cup for 3.5 million FC2 female condoms. The condoms are being distributed by the UN Population Fund as part of a campaign called the Global Female Condom Initiative, which oversees female condom programming in 23 countries. The condoms are not a cure-all, but their growing popularity suggests women are eschewing cultural taboos in favour of protecting themselves.

Torontonians are sound cannon “guinea pigs,” lawyer argues

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 1:18 PM - 18 Comments

Civil liberty groups made a last-minute pitch to prevent police officers from using sound cannons on unruly crowds just days before G20 leaders make their weekend descent on Toronto. Lawyers for police and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association argued back and forth on just how dangerous the cannons are and what the risk of hearing loss is. Police have bought four sound cannons, which emit a loud beeping noise similar to a smoke detector. Police will also use the sound cannons to broadcast pre-recorded voice messages to crowded demonstrations. Lawyer Paul Cavalluzzo, who was hired by the civil liberties association and the Canadian Labour Congress, said Torontonians should not be used as “guinea pigs” to test the sound cannons. He argued that the devices can cause permanent hearing loss and said police are not properly trained to use the devices. He also accused police of relying on manufacturer studies about safety, rather than independent research. Police lawyer Darrel Smith argued that sound cannons are needed to communicate with crowds so noisy they may drown out a traditional megaphone. Smith compared the maximum decibel level to that of an ambulance siren or leaf blower, and said police would move at least 75 metres away from a crowd before changing the settings to full blast. Although Cavalluzzo compared the use of sound cannons to unregulated Tasers, Smith said the two devices are not comparable because Tasers are designed to cause bodily harm. Ontario Superior Court judge David Brown will give his decision on Friday morning.

Toronto Star

Alzheimer’s detection could be on horizon

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 1:04 PM - 0 Comments

U.S. researchers may have found the first reliable way to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease in patients with memory loss, the New York Times reports. The findings still have to be confirmed and approved by the Food and Drug Administrations, but if they are, doctors might finally have a way to figure out if drugs are slowing, or halting, the disease. Since it was first described in 1906, there’s been only one way to know for sure if a person has it: after death, an examination of the brain reveals tiny black freckles that stick to brain slices, known as plaque. There’s no treatment to slow or stop Alzheimer’s progression, but drug companies are developing them now—although the question is, who should get the drugs? Who’s actually developing it? In fact, 20 per cent of people with dementia who are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s don’t actually have it (no plaque is found on their brains when biopsied). Dr. Daniel Skovronsky, whose small start-up company named Avid is behind the new research, has developed a dye that goes into the brain and sticks to plaque.

New York Times

Swingers have higher disease risk than prostitutes: study

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 1:01 PM - 4 Comments

A new study in the British Medical Journal shows swingers—straight couples who regularly swap partners, and engage in organized group sex—report higher rates of sexually transmitted infections than prostitutes. Dutch researchers say that those over age 45 are particularly vulnerable, although the group doesn’t get enough attention from health care services, the BBC reports. In the study, researchers looked at the number of patients getting treatment at sexual health clinics in the Netherlands in 2007 and 2008. These clinics have recorded if a patient is a swinger since early 2007. In the study, there were about 9,000 consultations, and one in nine patients was a swinger with the average age of 43. Combined rates of Chlamydia and gonorrhea were just over 10 per cent among straight people, 14 per cent among gay men, less than 5 per cent among female prostitutes, and 10.4 per cent among swingers.

Reuters

A low-cost paradise lost

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 1:00 PM - 1 Comment

Bobby Yip/Reuters

Last week, Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics contractor, made an unusual announcement: it would stop making so-called “condolence payments” to families of Chinese workers who kill themselves. These payments could total what a worker would bring home in about 10 years of work, and may have contributed to a spate of suicides—11 so far this year—at its factories in China.

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The race to the deepest place on earth

By Jaime J. Weinman - Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 1:00 PM - 0 Comments

Mountaineers can see how far they must go, while cave explorers, groping in the dark, can't even be sure if they're in the right place.Stephen Alvarez/GETTY IMAGES

BLIND DESCENT
James M. Tabor
Drowning, fatal falls, premature burial, asphyxiation, hypothermia, hurricane-force winds, electrocution, earthquake-induced collapses, poison gases, rabid bats, snakes, troglodytic scorpions and spiders, microbes that cause horrific diseases: there are so many more, and more gruesome, ways to die descending in a supercave than there are while engaged in its mirror opposite, ascending one of the world’s 14 8,000-m mountains. Even when things are going well, at least by cave diver standards, when they are able to crawl forward on their bellies for kilometres at a time or rappel down 300-m drops, they are working in pitch blackness. Small wonder, then, that humans stood atop Everest by 1953 and even landed on the moon in 1969, but at the turn of the 21st century had not yet reached the deepest place on earth.
Wherever that might be. Another difference between those seeking earth’s extremes, perhaps the most crucial, is that the ascending mountaineers can see where and how far they must go, while the cave explorers, groping in the dark, can’t even be sure if they are in the right place. Tabor’s extraordinarily tense story follows two 2004 expeditions racing to be first to the bottom of the world. American Bill Stone has placed his bets on Cheve Cave, located in southern Mexico and dangerous even for a supercave. Ukrainian Alexander Klimchouk is trying his luck in Krubera, a freezing cave in the Caucasus mountains.
The two leads in this modern-day reprise of Amundsen and Scott’s race to the South Pole are complete opposites: Stone distrustful of bureaucracy, impatient, single-minded, seemingly unconcerned with the toll he was exacting from team members, family and friends; “Father” Klimchouk, calm, methodical, a team-oriented mentor. And also exactly the same: driven, hyper-competitive, with the same tragedies, triumphs and frustrations in their backstories, and prepared to take just about any risk to win. By the time one team leader crosses the once-scoffed-at 2,000-m-deep level to a point beyond which there is no passage, and names that spot Game Over, the reader is almost as wrung out as the cavers. BRIAN BETHUNE

EMPIRES OF FOOD
Evan D.G. Fraser
and Andrew Rimas
Forget the old stages of human history, the familiar stone, bronze, iron age sequence: University of Guelph geographer Fraser and journalist co-author Rimas make a convincing case that food—or rather, food surpluses—best explain the rise and fall of civilizations. If cultures produce more than farmers eat, and find a way to store, transport and exchange that extra, then urban centres can flourish. Trouble is, food empires have always, so far, grown to the limits of their carrying capacity, hanging on precariously until the weather changes or pests strike, and the whole thing collapses. It’s happened everywhere, as Fraser and Rimas demonstrate in their entertaining tour of past disasters. And maybe it’s happening again: in five of the past 10 years the world has eaten more than it has produced, causing us to draw down on our grain stocks. There may yet be a lot more food to wring out of technological progress; then again, there may not be.
Fraser and Rimas are conscious that modern-day doomsayers have, so far, been dead wrong. In the 19th century, as the British and American navies came close to blows over guano islands off Peru, dire warnings were sounded that a shortage of natural nitrogen fertilizer—guano is the finest available—was about to starve the world. But then two German scientists invented the Haber-Bosch process for creating artificial nitrogen fertilizer, which is why the planet has gone from supporting 1.6 billion people 100 years ago to 6.6 billion now. Thanks to Haber-Bosch, soil degradation—once an inevitable by-product of ramping up food supplies—is no longer a problem for us; now we can produce food out of nothing but dusty ground and a sack of chemicals. But Haber-Bosch has created a new dependency: it requires huge amounts of natural gas. And in an era when the long-term trend—at best—is toward escalating prices for oil and gas, argue Fraser and Rimas, the rest of the century seems set for a race between reaching peak population (at least another two billion people) and the inputs and creativity needed to feed them. BRIAN BETHUNE

MADE BY HAND
Mark Frauenfelder
Almost everyone can agree there are some things that are better homemade (fudge comes to mind) and others (wiring your house) better left to the experts. There’s still a vast middle ground though, the arena in which diehard do-it-yourselfers flourish, the sort of people celebrated by Frauenfelder. And the sort of guy Frauenfelder—a nerd’s nerd, the founder of boingboing.com—is himself: a chicken-raising, espresso machine-hacking, wooden spoon-whittling DIYer. There is no possible way the opposite sort of diehard—those occasionally referred to in Made By Hand as HAP (hire a pro) lovers—can approach this book without a degree of wary cynicism. That’s only accentuated when the author earnestly and repeatedly proclaims that mistakes and flaws are all part of handmade heaven. (Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?) Hence the game determination the author exhibits after his daughter, home-schooled in fractions but ignorant of how to pace herself during exams, fails a big math test; when a coyote eats one chicken and wounds another; when the injured bird is painstakingly nursed back to health, only to fall victim to a raccoon.
Yet it is precisely in the story of his chickens that the author disarms his would-be critics. The tale of Darla, Jordan, Daisy, Rosie and the children’s two favourites, Ethel and Hazel, is by turns funny (the free-range eggs brought the unexpected aesthetic challenge of eating something one’s “pet had excreted”), sad (it was the two favourites that died), and weirdly engrossing—what it takes to get antibiotics into a chicken’s stomach has to be read to be believed. By the end of the story it’s evident that Frauenfelder has gained what he wanted above all from the DIY experience: almost the whole of his quotidian existence, from the smallest decision on, seems weighted with moral issues and consequences in a way his past life was not. When you do something yourself, he sums up, “the thing that changes most profoundly is you.” Call it the Tao of chickens. BRIAN BETHUNE

FROM VICTORIA
TO VLADIVOSTOK
Benjamin Isitt
Short, inglorious, hugely unpopular at the time and largely forgotten now: most Canadians probably have no idea that, once upon a time, this country invaded Russia. Perhaps it’s the mutiny that’s to blame. As a battalion of 898 men of the Canadian Expeditionary Force (Siberia) marched to a Victoria troopship on Dec. 21, 1918, dissent was very much in the air. The Great War had been over for six weeks but two-thirds of the marchers were conscripts still bound by the Military Service Act of 1917, and most of those draftees were from Quebec, where even the defence of France had found little traction. As for fighting Communism in Russia, the expeditionary force’s purpose, much of Canada’s working class looked on the early days of the Bolshevik Revolution with hopeful eyes. Victoria was full of protest meetings echoing with shouts of “Hands off Russia!” When the troops reached the corner of Fort and Quadra streets, a platoon of Quebecers refused to go further. Their colonel fired his pistol over their heads—in the main street of Victoria, no less—and ordered his more obedient soldiers, mostly from Ontario, to remove their belts and whip the mutineers along. “They did it with a will,” recorded a Toronto lieutenant, and backed by 50 other troops with fixed bayonets, forced everyone on board.
As it began, so the entire shambolic enterprise continued. Some 4,200 Canadians ended up in Vladivostock, where—because of the disorganized state of the railways and the anti-Bolshevik forces the Canadians had come to aid—they did little but garrison the town. By June 1919, the Canadians were home, save the 20 who died, mostly from disease. Isitt’s extensive analysis of why we were there—mostly trying to deprive revolutionary workers at home of an international beacon—is convincing, as is his ironic conclusion: the blatant class warfare of the expedition did more to incite radicalism at home than it did to suppress it in Russia. Less than six months after the Victoria mutiny, a rising tide of industrial unionism would spark the Winnipeg General Strike. BRIAN BETHUNE

SWINGING FROM MY HEELS: CONFESSIONS OF AN LPGA STAR
Christina Kim and Alan Shipnuck
Christina Kim, who turned pro at 18, has a reputation as the sassy-mouthed party girl of the LPGA. So it’s no surprise that the 26-year-old’s new book includes an anecdote about a reporter eventually declining to soften one of Kim’s profane quotes (originally, they’d settled on “Snuff the naysayers”). Using the 2009 golf season as the backdrop, Swinging From My Heels, co-written by Sports Illustrated’s Alan Shipnuck, focuses heavily on weight issues, the aftermath of a breakup with her former caddie, and friendships with fellow players, including Michelle Wie. (Not mentioned is Kim’s contemporary Erica Blasberg, who threatened to quit the LPGA tour hours before she was found dead last month.)
Though Kim’s distinctive style is muted when recalling hundreds of shots taken during the season, her lighthearted voice returns when she ditches shop talk and focuses on the emotional aspects of life on tour. She skims over early struggles with her one-time coach-manager father and seems anxious not to perpetuate the stereotype of young Korean-American women in the LPGA as dutiful puppets for overbearing fathers. Another stereotype—lesbianism in the LPGA—is dismissed as a non-issue (“Contrary to what many people think, we are not the Lesbians Playing Golf Association.”)
Though dubbed “Confessions,” the revelations aren’t all that salacious. She writes of some boozy celebrations and naughty sex talk between holes, but the book reads like the confidences of a giddy teenager—an account of meeting pop star Jason Mraz is gleefully adolescent. Despite the goal of portraying an outspoken woman who won’t apologize for who she is, Christina Kim has little to apologize for. duana taha

FURIOUS LOVE:
ELIZABETH TAYLOR, RICHARD BURTON, AND THE MARRIAGE OF THE CENTURY
Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger
Blame Cleopatra for TMZ.com. When Burton and Taylor fell passionately in love on the set of the expensive Egyptian epic, it created a new demand for scandalous photographs, and helped popularize the term “paparazzi.” Kashner and Schoenberger give a full picture of the stars’ affair, their hurried wedding in Montreal, their divorces and remarriages, and the tremendous amount of drinking the two did at every point. But they’re also telling the story of how celebrity culture was perfected: their lives became part of their public images, and their movies paralleled the gossip, “blurring the boundaries between what was real and what was imagined.”
The book also gives a fuller than usual portrait of the couple, probably because Taylor co-operated with the authors. Fearing that the world was forgetting Burton, whom she worked with even after their second and last divorce in 1976, she provided unpublished details from her autobiography—including a claim that she was threatened with a gun by Eddie Fisher, her previous husband—as well as letters Burton wrote to her. The new information sharpens the contrast between the lovers: Burton, the sharp-tongued pseudo-intellectual, liked fame but hated the destruction of his privacy, while the shrewd Taylor figured out how to exploit the paparazzi to increase her own popularity and wealth.
Because the “Liz and Dick show” lost its interest over time, the book can’t help but do so as well. It has to tell one too many stories of bad movies the pair made together (with the exception of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), Taylor’s weight gain, and Burton’s self-loathing. But one thing that never loses its fascination is the story of modern gossip and its effect: when Taylor visits Burton’s grave shortly after his death, and is ambushed by “a phalanx of reporters and photographers,” it’s a chilling scene of people being destroyed by the culture they helped create.

CSIS director under fire

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 12:56 PM - 6 Comments

Canada’s spy chief Richard Fadden has come under fire for saying that a number of Canadian politicians are under the influence of foreign states. B.C Premier Gordon Campbell called the charges by Fadden
“unprecedented and completely unprofessional.” He added: “To cast a shadow of doubt across municipal politicians or provincial cabinet ministers without so much as a shred of substantial evidence I have seen, or anyone else has seen, is simply not acceptable in Canada.” The Ontario and Saskatchewan Premiers, and several Western Canadian mayors, uttered similar criticisms. A spokesman for the Prime Minister said no one has requested any resignation. But while this ire has left his critics wondering whether Fadden will survive as head of the CSIS, some insiders argue Fadden simply expressed what has worried CSIS for years. “I was surprised to hear his comments—not what he said, but that he said it,” said Robert Simmonds, past RCMP commissioner.

Globe and Mail