Federal government tightens rules for nannies, foreign workers

By macleans.ca - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 2:37 PM - 0 Comments

Effective April 1, 2011, the federal government will apply a more rigorous assessment of regulations affecting live-in caregivers and temporary foreign workers, as well as the people who hire them. The assessment will consider whether employers have followed the rules in the past before they can hire a nanny or temporary foreign worker, and a bad track record could lead to a two-year prohibition on hiring foreign workers. According to the federal government, consultations held over the past two years revealed that employers were exploiting some live-in caregivers because the system made them vulnerable. The first round of changes took place in April 2010, and mandated that employment contracts must spell out wages, benefits, accommodation, duties, hours of work, and holiday and sick leave entitlements.

CBC News

There’s no such thing as a “cougar”

By macleans.ca - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 2:29 PM - 0 Comments

A British study analyzing the age preferences of 22,000 men and women on dating websites in 14 countries claims the phenomenon of the “cougar”—older women on the prowl for younger men—does not actually exist in the real world. The study determined women generally seek older men, whereas men desire a young and attractive woman, and often prefer a much younger partner as they themselves age. The study’s findings dispute the phenomenon popularized in television shows like Cougar Town of women over 40 seeking younger “cubs.” Dr. Michael Dunn, a psychologist at the University of Wales who led the study, says the findings support an “evolutionary theory” that holds that women focus more than males on cues indicative of wealth and status, which logically accumulate with age. Men, says Dunn, focus on physical attractiveness cues that are correlated with the years of maximum fertility in women.

The Telegraph

Not for public consumption?

By Stephanie Findlay - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 2:20 PM - 0 Comments

Michaela Rehle/Reuters

Following increasing levels of disruption from imbibers, politicians in Germany are campaigning to ban public drinking. While places like Heidelberg have had success enforcing bans on alcohol sales at night, politicians in Freiburg, for instance, are having a tougher time stopping people from drinking in the streets.

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Sing Tao Daily Newspaper says it is 'independent'

By macleans.ca - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 2:01 PM - 0 Comments

I am the president of Sing Tao Daily Ltd., publisher of Sing Tao Daily Newspaper, Canada’s largest Chinese-language daily newspaper. I am writing on behalf of the newspaper and its team of reporters, editors and staff. We were all greatly disappointed and offended by the article published in the July 19 edition of Maclean’s headlined “A question of influence” (International), stating that “As Beijing ramps up attempts to use Chinese-Canadian media to promote its own propaganda, new questions arise about just how free the press really is.” Sing Tao Daily Newspaper is an independent newspaper guided by highest standards of responsible journalism. Editorial decisions relating to the newspaper are made by its team of editors in Canada through the exercise of independent editorial judgment and without regard as to whether these decisions please the Chinese Communist party or anyone else. Your article states that our newspaper is “half-owned by the Toronto Star.” In fact, the majority shareholder of Sing Tao Daily Newspaper is the Torstar Corporation, a Canadian public company and news organization that also operates pursuant to the highest standards of responsible journalism.

Sing Tao Daily Newspaper has earned a large, loyal and ever-growing following over its 30 years of serving the Chinese community in Canada. Our readers trust us to consistently provide a fair, accurate and independent report on news and matters of interest to Chinese-Canadians. We assure our readers that allegations made against our paper and its team in the article are untrue, and that we will continue to provide them with a newspaper built around journalistic excellence for years to come.

Louis Cheng, President, Sing Tao Daily Ltd., Toronto

Need a boost?

By Chris Sorensen - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 2:00 PM - 0 Comments

Larry Downing/Reuters

Ever since its unveiling in 2007, General Motor’s Volt plug-in car has been held up as the future of the troubled automaker. It was meant to prove that GM, then barrelling toward bankruptcy and a bailout, could still lead the industry with high-tech vehicles dripping with car-magazine cool. But appetite for the Volt appears to be on the wane just as GM gears up to finally start selling it in the U.S. this fall (it won’t be available in Canada until next summer).

The car, which started as a low-slung concept, now looks like a somewhat dull sedan, which can only be driven 64 km on an electric charge before a small gasoline engine kicks in. Potential buyers are also balking at its US$41,000 price tag. That’s US$8,220 more than Nissan’s planned Leaf electric car, which gets 160 km on a single overnight charge, albeit without a backup motor. The fear now is that the Volt will just leave buyers in sticker shock.

The great big helmsman

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 2:00 PM - 0 Comments

Jason Lee/Reuters

He’s a part-time blogger and a military historian. He was also born into China’s most vaunted political bloodline: the only grandson of Mao Zedong, the founder of the People’s Republic and enduring icon to millions in China. And now, after almost 12 months of speculation, Mao Xinyu, the Great Helmsman’s beefy, 40-year-old heir has been made the People’s Liberation Army’s youngest major general.

When rumours of his promotion began circulating last September, officials refused to confirm them, apparently to avoid the scent of nepotism. But once the author of Grandpa Mao Zedong started turning up at events with a major general’s single star sewn to his red and gold epaulettes—as he did during a visit to the province of Sichuan last week—it became impossible to keep it under wraps.

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Here and there

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 1:54 PM - 0 Comments

As noted by Susan Delacourt, Vanity Fair has published a study of the Washington game that will, at various points, sound awfully familiar.

The long-building trend toward coverage of the presidency and politics as pure sport has reached absurd levels. Obama makes fun of this, as he did in his recent speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, when he displayed a series of mock headlines, summing up how Politico might have covered great debates of the past, including this one: LINCOLN SAVES UNION, BUT CAN HE SAVE HOUSE MAJORITY? As images flashed on giant screens in the Washington Hilton ballroom, Obama added, “I don’t know if you can see, there’s a little portion there. ‘He’s lost the southern white vote.’ It’s an astute analysis.” The nomenclature of the reigning political chatfests and tip sheets says it all: Hardball, Playbook, The Daily Rundown. Forget Congressional Quarterly. It’s the Daily Racing Form. “The whole town is kind of in the thrall, in the grips, of A.D.D.,” David Axelrod says. “It’s hard to keep anyone’s attention focused on anything, and everything is judged through the prism of what this means for the election next November.”

Taking the higher road

By Jane Switzer - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 1:40 PM - 0 Comments

Getty Images

Drivers on the congested roads in Beijing’s Mentougou district may soon have to get used to sharing the road with a rather futuristic-looking bus. The light-rail “straddling bus,” developed by the Shenzhen Hashi Future Parking Equipment Co., will allow cars less than two metres tall to travel beneath an upper level carrying as many as 1,400 passengers. The bus, which is about six metres tall and two street lanes wide, aims to reduce pollution (it will run partially on solar power) and up to 30 per cent of traffic.

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Roger Clemens indicted for perjury

By macleans.ca - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 1:34 PM - 0 Comments

Federal authorities have decided to indict Roger Clemens on charges of making false statements to Congress about his use of performance-enhancing drugs, according to two people who spoke with the New York Times. The indictment comes nearly two and half years after Clemens and his former trainer Brian McNamee testified under oath at a hearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, directly contradicting each other about whether Clemens had used the banned substances. The committee held the hearing in February 2008, just two months after McNamee first tied Clemens to the use of the substances in George J. Mitchell’s report on the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball.

UPDATE: Clemens is facing three counts of making false statements and two counts of perjury in connection with his February 2008 testimony.

New York Times

Harry goes to university

By macleans.ca - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 1:29 PM - 0 Comments

In October, Durham University is to become one of the first in the U.K. to offer a 200-hour course on boy wizard Harry Potter as part of the education studies degree. Students will study “important contemporary issues, such as peer pressure, good citizenship and ideals of adulthood, and also explore ways in which the Harry Potter series has helped to re-brand Britain,” according to University registrar Carolyn Fowler. She added that, “Harry Potter is a culturally iconic phenomenon and has already been the subject of many well-regarded academic studies over recent years. It is only fitting that a leading university like Durham responds to new developments in our academic and wider social and cultural environment in developing new modules like this.” The northern city and its magnificent cathedral were the setting for large parts of the first two Potter films, with children from city schools drafted to play fellow students at Hogwarts. Interest among incoming students, who have grown up during Pottermania, is high—more than 70 have signed on so far.

ChronicleLive

A casualty of war

By Michael Barclay - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 1:20 PM - 0 Comments

AP Photo

Despite the fact that 12 people were killed, children were wounded, and vehicles were hijacked and used as battering rams, residents of Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, didn’t see, hear or read anything in the media about a five-hour war in their streets last month between a powerful drug cartel and the Mexican military. That’s because the drug cartels are making it clear to journalists that they could be killed or kidnapped if they don’t comply with the cartels’ demands for favourable coverage.

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A road that cleans the air

By Tom Henheffer - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 1:20 PM - 0 Comments

Getty Images

Take crushed limestone, add some gravel, throw in a bit of cement and you’ve got the basic recipe for concrete. Then add a white coating of titanium dioxide and you’ve got a powerful air scrubber that’s now helping to clean air in cities across the globe.

Titanium dioxide is a naturally occurring photocatalytic chemical that reacts with sunlight to remove nitrogen oxides—car exhaust pollutants that cause smog and acid rain—from the atmosphere by turning them into nitrates that can be washed away by rain. Tests show that when added to concrete it removes anywhere from 35 to 60 per cent of those chemicals from surrounding air, and, because titanium dioxide also breaks down dirt, it makes concrete self-cleaning.

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New poll shows Conservatives pulling ahead

By macleans.ca - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 1:02 PM - 0 Comments

The latest EKOS poll shows the Conservatives pulling further ahead of the Liberals, who are now nearly five points back of the Tories. Support for the Conservatives now stands at 32.5 per cent, with the Liberals at 27.9 per cent. Meanwhile, the NDP is at 17.4 per cent, the Green Party at 10.3 per cent and the Bloc Québécois at 9.2 per cent support. Despite their inability to close a gap that had shrunk to slightly more than a point in the last poll, the Liberals are making significant in-roads with university-educated voters, increasing their support by more than eight points to 34.4 per cent. Overall, 50.4 per cent of Canadians believe the country is moving in the right direction and 44 per cent approve of the job the federal government is doing.

CBC News

Caught on Facebook

By Julia Belluz - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 1:00 PM - 0 Comments

CHRISTOPHE ARCHAMBAULT/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Just when you thought Facebook was only good for organizing parties and stalking ex-boyfriends, the social networking site has become a weapon in the fight against traffic crime in India.

Police in New Delhi—a city of 12 million people (more than half of whom are motorists) and about 5,000 traffic cops—recently launched a Facebook page in the hopes of improving communication with the public. But the site has turned into a hub for airing grievances and tattling.

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Who says Canadians are polite?

By macleans.ca - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 1:00 PM - 0 Comments

Getty Images

National: Fifty-six per cent of Canadians say they use profanity on a “regular” or “occasional basis.” That’s higher than those in both Britain (51 per cent) and the U.S. (46 per cent).

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A quick study

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 12:43 PM - 0 Comments

Justice Minister Rob Nicholson introduced Sue O’Sullivan, the new victims of crime ombudsman, yesterday at the National Press Theatre. Ms. O’Sullivan took questions and precisely six questions after she assured the audience that she’d have no problem speaking truth to power, she was asked the following and responded as follows.

Question: I’m curious. You say you have 30 years of policing under your belt.  What are your thoughts on the long-gun registry that’s supported by most police chiefs and police officers across the country?

Sue O’Sullivan: Well, I think right now what I want to focus on is the priorities for victims.  And that’s what – to talk about making sure that their rights are respected and certainly there’s going to be a lot of different important issues that come along but for me in this ombudsman office and the role that it is, is to help victims individually and collectively and is to look at discussing some of those important issues but today just to focus on those priorities.

Question: Wouldn’t police officers argue that the long-gun registry protects potential victims?

Sue O’Sullivan: Yes, they would and, as we’re well aware, that position has been put out there.  But I’m here as Ombudsman to be focussing on what the rights and what the needs of those victims are and that’s where the priorities are going to be for the Ombudsman’s office.

What’s the new global source for fresh, shiny produce?

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 12:40 PM - 0 Comments

Nancy MacDonald/ REUTERS/Stringer

Visit a supermarket in Abu Dhabi and you’ll be greeted by row after row of picture-perfect produce, most of it imported. The Indian subcontinent has long supplied food to the wealthy desert capital. These days, though, it’s likely those rows of shiny vegetables and fruit came from an improbable source: Ethiopia, a country practically synonymous with famine. Yes, Africa, where one in three people is malnourished, is now growing tomatoes and butter lettuce for export.

Ethiopia’s biggest greenhouse farming operation is kept hidden from curious, or hungry, eyes; even in Awassa, the southern city where it’s housed, few know it exists. Two kilometres down a dusty private road, past a checkpoint guarded with AK47s, hundreds of pristine, white greenhouses suddenly appear, alien to the setting. Farming in Ethiopia is still done by sickle and ox-driven plough. But inside Awassa’s cool, humidity-controlled greenhouses, vines are fed by a computerized irrigation system, the latest Dutch agricultural technology.

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France to send 700 Roma back to Romania

By macleans.ca - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 12:26 PM - 0 Comments

France has put 79 Roma migrants on a plane back to Bucharest, Romania, the first expulsion of migrants since President Nicholas Sarkozy vowed to remove the growing community in July. Another 262 will be flown back Friday. Each adult will be given 300 euros, with an additional 100 euros for each child. France wants 700 jobless migrants living in camps to go back to eastern Europe. Tens of thousands of Roma have fled poverty and discrimination in Bulgaria and Romania for better opportunities in wealthy Western Europe since Romania joined the European Union January 1, 2007. The EU has warned France that it must abide by the freedom of movement rules which apply to all citizens of member states. France’s foreign ministry says the expulsions are legal because individual countries retain rights to restrict movement for reasons of public order, security or health. Overall, there are an estimated 15,000 Roma living in France.

The Telegraph

When George Galloway met Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 12:12 PM - 0 Comments

It’s possible that somewhere on this Earth there is the leader of a despotic, vote-rigging, prisoner-raping regime whose boots George Galloway, the failed politician and cat impersonator will not lick, provided he is hostile to the West, but Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad apparently isn’t it. Continue…

Canada: jobs juggernaut

By Jason Kirby - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

Getty Images

After months of national back-patting over our relatively strong economy, July’s tepid jobs report splashed cold water on the notion Canada is free and clear of the recession. Amid 9,000 lost jobs, Canada’s unemployment rate inched back up to eight per cent, the first increase in nine months. But a quick glance at the horrendous situation in the U.S., where another 131,000 jobs vanished last month, offers a further reminder of how much better off we are. In a historic shift from the past, when the U.S. regularly outperformed this country, the mighty American job machine has come to look like a two-stroke engine compared to Canada.

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Mitchel Raphael on the celeb who claims Ottawa has a nightlife

By Mitchel Raphael - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

What got Rona Ambrose upset
Rona Ambrose, minister for status of women, was recently in Israel where she met with her counterpart Gila Gamliel. Ambrose also toured the Israeli-Lebanese border and met three brigades of female soldiers. The women’s job is to protect the frontier through intelligence gathering and high-tech surveillance. The leader of the brigades told Ambrose that when the women are done serving, high-tech companies swoop in and hire them because their skills are in such demand. The minister also met the leader’s commander, 45-year-old Lt.-Col. Dov Harari. The two talked about the hardware store Harari owned with his brother and then chatted about his family. When Ambrose discovered the commander had relatives in Toronto, she asked whether he had ever been to Canada. He hadn’t he said. Ambrose encouraged him to come visit, but Harari pointed to the border he had been working to protect so much of his life, and said, “I have this to take care of.” Last week, Ambrose’s staff broke the news to her that Harari was killed in the recent skirmish on the Israeli-Lebanese border. Ambrose, who had been very impressed with Harari, was visibly upset by the news.

Among her other projects, Ambrose is now working with Governor General Michaëlle Jean on a special conference. The plan is to have a gathering of all the women who have influenced Jean to celebrate the end of her term.

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'We would like to express our deepest sorrow'

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 11:08 AM - 0 Comments

The government’s apology, delivered by Indian Affairs Minister John Duncan, to Inuit who were forcibly relocated in the 1950s.

On behalf of the Government of Canada and all Canadians, we would like to offer a full and sincere apology to Inuit for the relocation of families from Inukjuak and Pond Inlet to Grise Fiord and Resolute Bay during the 1950s.

We would like to express our deepest sorrow for the extreme hardship and suffering caused by the relocation.  The families were separated from their home communities and extended families by more than a thousand kilometres.  They were not provided with adequate shelter and supplies.  They were not properly informed of how far away and how different from Inukjuak their new homes would be, and they were not aware that they would be separated into two communities once they arrived in the High Arctic.  Moreover, the Government failed to act on its promise to return anyone that did not wish to stay in the High Arctic to their old homes.

Shell of its former self

By Tom Henheffer - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Dave Sidaway/Montreal Gazette

Shell’s been trying to close its rusting out, money-hemorrhaging oil refinery in East Montreal for over a year, but it has not been an easy goodbye. The courts are now blocking its exit and the city is desperately fighting to keep its refinery business alive.

After conducting a “strategic review” of the plant last year, Shell announced it was looking for a buyer. But with no takers, the company said in January it would turn the site into a fuel-storage terminal. The province and union then struck a committee to look for buyers to prevent the conversion, and in July the union managed to obtain a court injunction preventing the plant from being dismantled until September. Jean-Claude Rocheleau, the union head that represents the refinery’s workers, says the loss of the plant, which injects about $200 million annually into Montreal’s economy, will be irreparable. “That’s 800 direct jobs and 3,500 indirect jobs,” he says. “If the refinery goes, that is the end of the industry in Quebec.”

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The controversy behind a remote town’s stimulus project

By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

Geoff Howe/CP / Stéphane Voyer

Havre-St-Pierre on Quebec’s North Shore is famous for its whale watching, though getting there is almost as much of a trek for tourists as it is for humpbacks. A 15-hour drive from Montreal, the town tends to attract only the hardiest of nature lovers.

Still, local businessman Daniel Dresdell recently opened up a 100-room, three-star hotel in the town—convinced, he says, that tourists will flock to the town of 3,280 if they have a decent place to stay. Apparently, the federal government is convinced as well: last December, the Conservative government financed 20 per cent of Dresdell’s project to the tune of a $1.1-million two-year interest-free loan, just one of the fiscal stimulus measures of its Economic Action Plan. “Tourism contributes significantly to the socioeconomic development of Quebec’s regions and the well-being of their residents,” said Conservative MP Denis Lebel at the time.

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