EU seal product ban temporarily suspended

By macleans.ca - Friday, August 20, 2010 at 11:01 AM - 0 Comments

The EU’s controversial seal products ban has been suspended—at least for now. The ban, which was supposed to start Friday, will not be imposed until after the EU’s General Court settles a legal challenge from the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatama, which represents Inuit in Canada, Greenland and Norway. Gail Shea, Federal Fisheries Minister, says she was pleased to hear the injunction had been granted until the case is heard in the fall or early winter. While the ban already exempts seal products produced by aboriginal groups, ITK president Mary Simon says the effect of the ban would be a collapse of the market. Stephen Harper said Wednesday that he is “very strongly in opposition” to the ban and has called it “flagrant discrimination.” The seal products ban was agreed to by 27 EU members in 2009 in recognition that many citizens view the annual seal hunt, during which animals are bludgeoned to death with clubs, is cruel.

CBC News

Hard to get (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, August 20, 2010 at 10:53 AM - 0 Comments

A week ago, the National Statistics Council publicly renewed its offer to meet with the Industry Minister about the census. As of last night, according to NSC president Ian McKinnon, there had been “no expression of interest from the minister’s office in meeting with representatives of the Statistics Council.”

Mailbag: Stephen Harper, interstellar intercourse, the Old Spice Guy

By Scott Feschuk - Friday, August 20, 2010 at 10:41 AM - 0 Comments

Welcome to the Mailbag, where those seeking some fine summer songery for the waning weeks of the season are recommended to sample and delight in the following:

Sleigh Bells: Rill Rill, Kids

Tennis: Marathon

The Drums: Let’s Go Surfing

Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse: Little Girl (that’s Julian Casablancas of The Strokes on vocals)

Broken Bells: October

Male Bonding: Year’s Not Long

All songs guaranteed at least 85% awesome.

Also, if you’re a comedy geek – and, especially, an enthusiast of Kids in the Hall, or of how comedy is made, or both – don’t miss Kevin McDonald’s Random Roles at the Onion’s AV Club. Fascinating.

To the mailbag. The following questions were actually submitted by actual readers. And remember – there are no stupid questions, unless you’re asking whether members of the Sun editorial board want you kids to get off their property.

•••

Dear Scott:

I was devastated to hear that Inky Mark was retiring… the truth is I thought he had retired as a Reform MP in the late 90′s. Is there a record of Inky’s accomplishments anywhere? – TheJones

TheJones –

I don’t know if you have any freedom to travel this summer, but there is a comprehensive retrospective of the Inky Mark legacy that’s currently on exhibit in The Trunk of Inky Mark’s Car. Just climb inside and follow the directions to the banker’s box marked Stuff to Take Home. Make your way past the pens he’s swiping and, there on the left, you’ll see his award for Ongoing Excellence in the Field of Existing. Stop. Stare. Marvel.

I’m kidding, of course. I’m sure Mark has advanced the cause of Continue…

Iggy’s bus stops

By Mitchel Raphael - Friday, August 20, 2010 at 10:07 AM - 0 Comments

Michael Ignatieff is on his Liberal Express tour across Canada. In Toronto, he stopped at a BBQ in Thornhill just north of the city and then a restaurant downtown in Chinatown.

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Hey look: The communist takeover of Maclean's accelerates

By Paul Wells - Friday, August 20, 2010 at 9:49 AM - 0 Comments

In my column on the not-at-Ground-Zero more-than-a-mosque, Andrew Coyne’s column on Tamils in a boat, and Andrew Potter’s own mosque piece (hosted offsite at the Ottawa Citizen, his home-away-from-home emeritus), one begins to see why I have been getting anxious inquiries about how soon Mark Steyn can get back from vacation.

What a season of sexual harassment suits says about the modern office

By Anne Kingston - Friday, August 20, 2010 at 9:31 AM - 0 Comments

Justin Sullivan and Jacob Andrzejczak/Getty Images/ Richard Lautens/Toronto Star

Just as 1967 is remembered as the summer of love, 2010 will be the summer of sexual harassment—or at least of sexual harassment claims. The latest in an ongoing parade of allegations led to the resignation of Hewlitt-Packard CEO Mark Hurd earlier this month, after a contract employee who planned VIP events said he’d sexually harassed her.

HP investigated Jodie Fisher’s charge and concluded it “was not supported by the facts.” But Hurd was out in any case, on grounds that he had violated the company’s expense account policies and “misused” corporate assets. The probe also found that he had not reported his “close personal relationship” with Fisher, a former soft-core porn actress, which consituted a conflict of interest.

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Using a mosque to prey on U.S. fears

By Paul Wells - Friday, August 20, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Mark Peterson/Redux

There are, by one count, 23 mosques in Manhattan. Four are south of Canal Street, in Lower Manhattan. According to the New York Times, the two closest to the site of the former World Trade Center have become snug fits for their worshippers in recent years as Manhattan’s Muslim community grows. People who want to pray are routinely turned away.

So if we were talking about, say, sporting-goods stores, the case for a new one would be pretty clear. Such things are not unheard of in the neighbourhood. There is a demand for more of them. So make some more.

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The arctic: Au nord, peu de nouveau

By Paul Wells - Friday, August 20, 2010 at 8:27 AM - 0 Comments

The Globe’s John Ibbitson does the thing we’ve all had to do, attempting to insert some drama into a report because he has exclusive access to it.

“In a historic shift, Canada will make finding solutions to Arctic boundary disputes this country’s top foreign-policy priority in the Far North, according to a Foreign Affairs paper that will be released on Friday.

“The Conservative government now wants swift and permanent solutions to border issues that this and previous governments had preferred to leave unresolved.”

The point of it all? To “transform the Arctic from a hotbed of jurisdictional conflicts into a stable, rules-based region.” It’s like the opening up of the west all over again. Cartesian rigour and the common sense of the common law combining to tame a lawless frontier.

This is, it must be said, the way everyone is required to talk about the Arctic ever since Harper signed that secret Order-in-Council, “Let’s All Huff and Puff About the Arctic,” in 2006. The problem, as I wrote a year ago, is that across the vast majority of its territory the Arctic is already a stable, rules-based region; that its jurisdictional conflicts are so few in nature and trivial in stakes as to produce only a lukewarm hotbed at best; and that on the only really hard issue, navigation rights through the Northwest Passage (which is the only point of dispute in that waterway; Canada’s control of lands and resources is uncontested) we’d probably lose any legal dispute. Continue…

Newsmakers

By macleans.ca - Friday, August 20, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Andy Murray’s big win
Scotland’s Andy Murray, 23, overcame two tennis giants and weather delays at Toronto’s Rexall Centre to win the Rogers Cup championship for the second year in a row. He beat Rafael Nadal in straight sets and ground down Roger Federer in the final, before clambering into the crowd to hug his mother.

The soldier takes a bride
Retired infantry Capt. Trevor Greene has put aside work on a book about his remarkable recovery from an axe attack four years ago in Afghanistan to soldier away on a new writing project: wedding thank-you cards. In late July, Greene married Debbie Lepore, the woman he credits with helping drag him from the edge of death after his traumatic brain injury and setting him on the path to recovery. They married in Nanaimo, B.C., before 120 guests, including their five-year-old daughter Grace, in Lepore’s sister’s backyard, “which had been transformed into a bucolic, candlelit sanctuary for the occasion,” he said in an email to Maclean’s. He may not have walked down the aisle, but he stood at a set of parallel bars as Lepore became Mrs. Greene. They’ll soon resume work on the book, and he’s added workouts in a pool to his rehab routine. “My physio said that is where I will take my first steps in the fullness of time,” says Greene.

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People willing to endure what the Tamils did are just the kind we want

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, August 20, 2010 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments

Jonathan Hayward/CP

For all the breathless coverage it has attracted, it’s still unclear just what the issue is in the matter of the boatload of Tamils that arrived off the coast of B.C. last week.

For starters, there is very little that anyone can do about it, or would, beyond what is being done already. No one is suggesting we should have turned the boat back on the high seas, or expelled the Tamils without hearing their refugee claims; both options are in any case illegal. Neither is anyone proposing that they should be admitted to our soil without a proper vetting, to ensure at a minimum that no terrorists lurk amongst them.

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Right As the Rain; Also, What's the Use of Smellin' Watermelon?

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 8:58 PM - 0 Comments

As a fan of musicals and TV history, I wish I could see more of the musicals that were produced live for TV in the ’50s. New York was the centre of U.S. TV production at that time. (It would soon shift to Los Angeles, which is where a lot of the arguments in U.S. TV come from: the idea that there used to be a Golden Age of New York-based television that was betrayed by the philistines is at the heart of a lot of anti-TV arguments and movies like Network.) So it was natural that the American musical, at that time at its commercial peak, was a major presence in early TV. While cameras weren’t allowed into the theatres themselves, there were some original TV musicals like Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, while there were live TV stagings of already-classic musicals from the ’30s and ’40s, particularly the ones that hadn’t been made into feature films. One of the live stagings that’s most familiar is an Annie Get Your Gun with Mary Martin (who had played the part on tour) and John Raitt (ditto), a rare chance to experience the book and score more or less as they originally werer, albeit with some cuts to fit it into a prime-time TV slot.

This clip below is from a live TV production of another ’40s classic, Bloomer Girl, which aired in 1956 as an episode of the anthology show Producers’ Showcase. This mishmash of the Civil War, feminism, anti-racism and romance isn’t very well known now, but it ran for a year and a half based on its canny stitching-together of everything that was popular in 1944 when it was produced: it had a bit of Gone With the Wind, a lot of the previous year’s big hit Oklahoma!, and songs that sounded a bit like Cabin in the Sky (one of the songs was even written for that movie, but cut). The TV production seems to have had a well-chosen cast: Barbara Cook, then young and starring in the cult flop Candide, as the spunky feminist heroine, and Broadway baritone Keith Andes — who, however, sometimes seems less than certain about which musical entrance comes when — as the guy who’s courting her for her money but eventually falls in love with her for reals.

This clip has two separate moments from the show, both fantastic songs by my favourite U.S. songwriting team, composer Harold Arlen and lyricist E.Y. Harburg (they did The Wizard of Oz together, most famously). “Evelina” is a teasing duet and a combination of period pastiche with Arlen’s bluesy style, while “Right as the Rain” is one of the best ballads written for Broadway. But it’s much better to see these numbers in something resembling context than to hear them on a record.

There have been lots of TV musicals since then, including many productions that followed the exact pattern of these shows: take an old musical and do it for TV with modern-day performers (like The Music Man with Matthew Broderick and Kristen Chenoweth). But this is one type of thing where live-from-New-York TV broadcasting probably works better than doing it on film: even though most of these production didn’t try to stage the plays exactly as they would look in a theatre, they did have a kind of raw energy that suggested live theatre, and even more the energy of the theatre community at that time.

The only other clip from that show online is a re-creation of Agnes DeMille’s show-stopping dance number from the 1944 production, the Civil War Ballet (with Arlen’s tunes arranged into a ballet score by Trude Rittmann, who wrote ballets for most of the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows among many others).

1925-2010 | George Herczeg

By Jen Cutts - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 5:00 PM - 0 Comments

Illustration by Marian Bantjes

George Herczeg was born in the small mountain village of Nagyvisnyo, Hungary, on Oct. 26, 1925, to Rose and Jeno Herczeg. George was a mischievous, fun-loving child, and he and his younger sisters, Klara and Lillian, enjoyed a privileged childhood; the Herczegs owned a coal mine and a lumber mill, and were a generous and respected family at the centre of Jewish life in the village.

In 1944, word spread that the Nazis were moving toward Hungary. Jeno prepared a hiding place in the mountains for his family, but they never made it. Jeno and George were taken one night and wound up in a forced labour camp near the Austrian-Hungarian border. Rose and the girls were brought to Auschwitz, where Rose died. George watched his father die of typhoid three weeks before their camp was liberated.

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Eight more for the list

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 4:29 PM - 0 Comments

For those still scoring at home, the CEO of Alberta Health Services, Charlottetown City Council, the City of Greater Sudbury, Caledon town council, former chief statistician Sylvia Ostry, New Brunswick Premier Shawn Graham, Spruce Grove City Council and the Planning Institute of British Columbia oppose the government’s changes to the census.

In such opposition, they join… Continue…

Developing world to bear brunt of cancer burden

By macleans.ca - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 4:22 PM - 0 Comments

By 2020, developing countries are expected to be home to 60 per cent of the global cancer burden, with the figure growing to 70 per cent by the following decade. And as it stands, the countries are not prepared to deal with the issue, according to cancer experts at CanTreat International. “Developed countries have been setting up plans and systems to cope with cancer all the time, but developing countries are not ready … treatment, diagnoses are made very late or not at all, so the (death) toll is much, much higher,” says Joseph Saba, a medical doctor and member of the group. According to the report, a breast cancer patient in the U.S. has an 84 percent chance of surviving for at least five more years. In Gambia, that rate is only 12 percent.

Reuters

Study: Gulf oil spill left Manhattan-size plume

By macleans.ca - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 4:20 PM - 0 Comments

A report published in the journal Science asserts there’s a 35-kilometer long submerged plume of oil in the depths of the Gulf of Mexico. The oily cloud measured two kilometers wide and 200 meters thick, and was drifting through the Gulf at a depth of at least 900 meters. The report is the most authoritative challenge yet to White House assertions that most of the 5 million barrels of oil that leaked into the Gulf are gone. “These results indicate that efforts to book-keep where the oil went must now include this plume,” said Christopher Reddy, one of the members of the team from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. The report also said that the plume was slow to break down by natural forces, which means the oil could have traveled long distances in the Gulf before it was degraded.

The Guardian

Chuck D and me, 20 years later

By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 4:00 PM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Liam Maloney

Public Enemy’s Anti-Nigger Machine begins less as a song than a sledgehammer, a collection of seemingly random noises punctuated by a snippet of a soul singer wailing what sounds like “bing” over and over, faster and faster, until the whole thing collapses. Chuck D comes in after a brief interlude, his voice booming and sustained: When I’m talkin’ rhyme time / To blow your mind time some say / It’s nothing worse than a verse / To hear some nigger curse.

Within days of its release in 1990, Fear of a Black Planet, the album on which Anti-Nigger Machine appeared, became the accompaniment to just about everything I did.

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Week in Pictures: August 13th – 19th 2010

By macleans.ca - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 3:57 PM - 0 Comments

The other girl detective: Judy Bolton

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 3:43 PM - 0 Comments

Margaret Sutton

Like the Hardy Boys, those Canadian-spawned all-American junior PIs, the adventures of Nancy Drew, girl detective, have never been out of print. The same can’t be said for Judy Bolton, one of the most popular of Drew’s rivals back in her heyday (1932 to 1967). That’s despite, or perhaps because of, the fact Bolton, for modern feminist critics, was a less flashy but more realistic character. Now publisher Applewood Books, which specializes in works about the American past and reprints of past fiction, has finished righting a historic wrong.

By September, nine years after the death of author Margaret Sutton at 98—unlike the ghostwritten Drew stories, the Bolton novels were one woman’s work—all 38 of Judy’s adventures will be back in print, displaying the small-town Pennsylvania sleuth in all her proto-feminist glory.

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The case of the missing conductor

By Jaime J. Weinman - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 3:40 PM - 0 Comments

Richard Termine/The New York Times

James Levine is one of the most famous conductors in North America, holding down two of its biggest jobs: musical director of the Metropolitan Opera and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. But he can’t always show up for either job. Jeremy Eichler, a music critic for the Boston Globe, told Maclean’s that the 67-year-old conductor “has for years struggled with back problems,” and over the past year, those problems have caused him to cancel many dates, throwing two cities into musical chaos. It turns out the most important thing about a conductor is not how insightful he is at interpreting Beethoven, but whether he’s in shape to get up on the podium.

Other health problems, including a kidney tumour, have caused Levine to miss performances in the past, but his back surgery kept him away for much of the 2009-10 season, plus the Boston Symphony’s summer festival at Tanglewood (where one of his replacements was the Canadian Opera Company’s Johannes Debus). In New York, Levine missed Alban Berg’s atonal Lulu, an acquired taste with audiences; his cancellation forced the company to stage the piece without the box-office appeal he would have brought.

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Super-sized philanthropy

By Jane Switzer - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 3:40 PM - 0 Comments

Getty Images

How could giving away at least $115 billion to charity win anything but universal, flattering praise, especially in a post-recession age where many charities are in desperate need? Here’s how.

America’s two richest men, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, plan to give away half of their fortunes (worth a combined US$90 billion), and last week announced they’ve convinced 38 other billionaires to do the same by signing what they’re calling the “Giving Pledge.” The list includes New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, media mogul Ted Turner, film director George Lucas and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison.

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Goodbye to 'The Hills' and to us

By Rebecca Eckler - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 3:20 PM - 0 Comments

Roman Cho/Getty Images

As Kristin Cavallari, star of the reality show The Hills, said on the series finale, “It’s time to make new memories.” Canada’s own Jessi Cruickshank, the skinny 28-year-old redhead who won our hearts and made us laugh on MTV’s The Hills: The After Show and its various incarnations over four years (including The City: Live After Show which she co-hosted with Dan Levy) is packing up and leaving Toronto, moving to Los Angeles to pursue another opportunity. “I have a very good offer, but I’m contractually obliged not to say anything at the moment,” she says. “I will definitely have a bigger audience.” (The Hills series finale was the most-watched program in MTV history; Cruickshank and Levy’s special After Show at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood attracted 300,000 viewers.)

It’s not the first offer Cruickshank has received from the U.S. during her four years on MTV. “Now just seems like the right time,” she says. Not bad for a girl who jokes that she got her start in life in a fast-food joint, an A&W in Calgary where her mom went into labour, which may explain why she is a vegetarian today. “Isn’t that the least classy birth you can imagine? I came unexpectedly early. I hope I wasn’t born on the floor at least. I mean, I hope I was at least born in a booth.”

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Home sales are falling fast, but the problem isn’t with record high prices

By Jason Kirby - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 3:00 PM - 0 Comments

AP Photo/Ted S. Warren

Across Canada the housing market took a beating in July, but the only thing more prevalent than the “for sale” signs gathering dust everywhere were excuses for why buyers have suddenly vanished.

In Toronto, July sales fell 34 per cent. They were down by 42 per cent in Calgary. And in Vancouver and the lower mainland sales plunged by around 45 per cent. If those watching the housing market thought sky-high prices were to blame, though, realtors were quick to correct them.

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High-tech and badly dressed

By Stephanie Findlay - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 3:00 PM - 0 Comments

Philippe Dureuil

Apple isn’t just dominating sales of electronics; it and other tech companies are now eating into just about every market segment. Americans are choosing to buy tech gadgets and big-screen TVs over appliances, furniture and cars. Compared to the first half of pre-recession 2007, sales of televisions, computers, video and telephone equipment grew 1.8 per cent in the first six months of this year, according to a new U.S. Commerce Department report. During the same period, spending on appliances decreased 3.6 per cent and spending on furniture fell 11 per cent.

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The other long-form census

By Tom Henheffer - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 2:40 PM - 0 Comments

Antonina Rogacheva/Shirshov Institute/ Kevin Raskoff/Monterey Peninsula

The International Census of Marine Life, which has taken 10 years and the involvement of thousands of scientists across 80 countries to develop, is still a work in progress.

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