The battle of pubs vs. pot

By Nicholas Kohler - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 2:00 PM - 0 Comments

Getty Images

For years, France’s wine industry backed the efforts of temperance advocates to demonize absinthe, the emerald-green spirit remembered today primarily as the tipple of choice for fin-de-siècle bohemians in Paris. The drink remained widely criminalized for decades as a result, a boon to vineyards everywhere.

The same tactic may now be at work in California, where voters are poised to decide on a ballot proposition to legalize another green substance—marijuana—but where an alcohol industry lobby group is funding a campaign to keep the drug verboten. This month, the California Beer & Beverage Distributors donated $10,000 to Public Safety First, a committee opposed to Proposition 19, which, were it to pass in November, would permit the regulation of marijuana.

Though it’s not commenting on the donation, the beer distributors’ group has good reason to worry that pot would cut into beer’s market share. Observers expect other beverage groups will soon contribute to the anti-Proposition 19 campaign. It’s a fight that makes for odd bedfellows: another big backer of the anti-pot Public Safety First lobby is California law enforcement. The police worry about impaired drivers—though not enough, it seems, to be wary of joining forces with the alcohol industry.

Stop using food stamps to buy sodas, New York mayor says

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 2:00 PM - 0 Comments

Mayor Michael Bloomberg is trying to get the U.S. government to allow him to bar New York City’s 1.7 million food stamp recipients from using government cash to buy soda or other sugared drinks. The state, which administers food stamps locally, has already signed on to the request. A similar request in 2004 from the state of Minnesota was turned down, since the Agriculture Department said the plan would “perpetuate the myth” that food-stamp users make bad shopping decisions. Still, Bloomberg and his health commissioner, Dr. Thomas Farley, says the ban will help slow the city’s obesity epidemic. Nearly 40 per cent of New York City’s public school children from kindergarten to eighth grade are overweight or obese, and numbers are much higher in poor neighbourhoods, where the consumption of sugary drinks is also higher. The ban would affect beverages with over 10 calories per 8 ounces, and wouldn’t affect fruit juice without added sugar, milk products or milk substitutes.

New York Times

Saying 'nein' to street view

By Stephanie Findlay - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 2:00 PM - 0 Comments

CARSTEN REHDER/DPA/ZUMA/KEYSTONE PRESS

It’s been a rough couple of weeks for Google in Europe. Governments and residents are not thrilled with the company’s Street View service, which allows users to get an up-close-and-personal 360-degree image of any given location, including residential areas. In Guernsey, two of Google’s Street View cars were vandalized. Meanwhile, the Czech Republic shot down Google’s second request to collect data from Czech streets, saying the collection represents a threat to citizens’ privacy. One of the concerns revolves around the cameras, which are posted 2.7 m on top of Google’s cars. The Czech office says the cameras are too tall and allow intrusive photographs to be “taken over the fence.”

There’s similar resistance in Germany. Even though Germans are among the most frequent users of Street View, they reportedly aren’t so comfortable over the possibility of seeing their own houses online. Over 100,000 have already registered to have their homes blurred out on Street View, slated for a full launch in Germany’s 20 biggest cities by the end of the year. Others have until Oct. 15 to apply for their houses to be pixelated unrecognizable.

Border between Pakistan and Afghanistan remains closed

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 1:57 PM - 0 Comments

Pakistan has not yet decided when it will reopen a key border crossing used by NATO to ship supplies to Afghanistan. Though a U.S. apology for a helicopter attack that killed two Pakistani soldiers was expected to prompt the reopening, a Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesman said authorities were still evaluating the situation and would make a decision “in due course.” Immediately following the attack, in which American helicopters mistook Pakistani soldiers for insurgents, Pakistan closed the Torkham border crossing along the famed Khyber Pass. This has left NATO supply convoys, and hundreds of trucks stranded alongside the country’s highways or stuck in traffic on the way to the one route into Afghanistan that has remained open.

Associated Press

Broadway Returns To Its Star-Driven Roots

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 1:37 PM - 0 Comments

I wanted to say something quickly about the news that the Broadway revival of Promises, Promises, a very successful and profitable production that was bringing in lots of money every week, will close in January after running only 291 performances. The revival was built around two major stars, Sean Hayes and Kristin Chenoweth; their contracts are up, and the producers decided to close the show because its success was completely dependent on them.

As the linked article notes, this is something that’s happening all over Broadway, though this is a pretty extreme case. Producers know, more than ever, that they need to have stars to keep a show running. But what interests me is that — especially when it comes to musicals — this is both a reversal and a reversion. It’s a reversal because it’s very different from the way we’re used to thinking of musicals. In most of the biggest hit musicals of the ’40s through the ’90s, the show was the star. The original Promises, Promises ran for 1,200 performances with a leading man (Jerry Orbach) who wasn’t at all well-known outside of New York at the time, and a leading lady (Jill O’Hara) nobody had heard of before the show, and who didn’t do much afterward.They were replaceable, and the show could go on without them.

Even shows that had a clear star part, dominating the evening, could run forever by putting relative unknowns into that part, as long as they were up to the challenge. Fiddler On the Roof is an example: it’s a star vehicle, Continue…

Harper FAQs

By Scott Feschuk - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 1:27 PM - 0 Comments

My column from last week’s magazine offers up some helpful advice for Stephen Harper’s incoming chief of staff. And all I now ask in return is a significant portion of his fabulous riches? Is that so unreasonable?

Who's on first?

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 1:18 PM - 0 Comments

Maxime Bernier maintains he received a thousand e-mails per day when he was Industry Minister, but he can’t say for sure how many of those pertained to the long-form census. But that’s besides the point anyway because the change to the census was about the principle.

Statistics Canada says it received 138 complaints about the content of the 2006 census, but if that seems a small number, Industry Minister Tony Clement reminds that anyone worried about state coercion obviously wouldn’t take their complaint to the state. But that’s beside the point anyway because even one complaint can be enough.

And indeed, on that count, Mr. Clement has a record of one such complaint: a letter sent by a Liberal MP in 2006 registering the concerns of a few of his constituents. But then that Liberal MP has a copy of Mr. Bernier’s response, in which the former industry minister assures that ”information collected by the census is needed and is used only for statistical purposes,” that “questions are designed to meet important information requirements that would be extremely difficult to satisfy efficiently from other sources” and that “these questions continue to be essential for providing the information needed by governments, businesses, researchers and individual Canadians to shed light on issues of concern to all of us—employment, education, training, transportation, housing, immigration, income support, pensions for seniors, transfer payments, aboriginal issues and many more.”

Sheriff Joe comes to tea

By Patricia Treble - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 1:00 PM - 0 Comments

ROY DABNER/EPA/KEYSTONE PRESS

Joe Arpaio’s reputation as a tough-on-immigration sheriff in Arizona is garnering him rock-star status among Tea Party members. And increasingly his influence is extending outside the borders of his home state. Last weekend he headlined a fundraiser for Colorado gubernatorial candidate and Tea Party fave Tom Tancredo.

Arpaio joined Duane “Dog the Bounty Hunter” Chapman in singing the praises of Tancredo, whose anti-immigration bona fides—he lambastes the “cult of multiculturalism”—are as impeccable as those of the sheriff of Maricopa County, which includes Arizona’s capital Phoenix. And early in September, Arpaio gave a strong thumbs-up for Sharron Angle, the Tea Party candidate trying to unseat Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid in next-door Nevada. Angle reciprocated by stating every state needed a police chief like Arpaio.
For the five-term elected lawman, going after illegals involves more than stopping them crossing the border.

“Let’s say lock them up in the interior,” he declared at a rally near the border with Mexico, organized in part by the Tea Party Caucus. He claims to have arrested, investigated and detained more than 40,000 migrants in the past three years, in part by having officers stop people in immigrant neighbourhoods for minor infractions, such as jaywalking, and then ask their immigration status. Critics call the technique racial profiling, a charge Arpaio denies.

Continue…

The Trouble With Classical

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 12:51 PM - 0 Comments

After noticing the increased use of classical music as a young-people repellent — in libraries, in subway stations, in the Manulife Centre in Toronto where I seem to hear Haydn every time I go in — Colin Eatock writes a good piece about the various problems classical music has in attracting new audiences.

I would have to put the lack of viable new music at the top of the list. Imagine if the television airwaves were dominated by shows that were created before most of the viewers were born. Even people like me, who love the old as much as (and sometimes more than) the new, accept that it’s the new stuff that connects with people, and speaks to what they are going through today. This is as true of an abstract form like music as it is of a concrete form like literature. In Mozart’s time, people expected current, up-to-date music in modern styles to dominate the programs; even older music often had to be brought up-to-date to be accepted, which is why Mozart was hired to re-orchestrate Handel’s Messiah for a contemporary audience. Even today, concerts of modern “serious” music, even avant-garde and uncommercial music, frequently attract a lot of young listeners. It’s hard to create a musical culture without a healthy amount of music that’s “today.”

Rachel wants a baby

By Kate Fillion - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 12:40 PM - 0 Comments

Adrianna Williams/Corbis/ Photograph by Brian Howell

Douglas Coupland—clothing and furniture designer, biographer, artist and sculptor, screenwriter, landscape architect and, oh yeah, author of Generation X and 12 other novels—insists he is not a Renaissance man but “just someone who went to art school. It makes you perpetually curious and you learn there’s always some new way of looking at an object or situation.”

Case in point: his five-hour-long Massey Lectures, which begin on Oct. 12, will take the form of a real-time, five-hour story—a novel, in other words. Player One is set in an airport cocktail lounge, where apocalypse and romance are on the agenda along with the Big Ideas you’d expect from a lecture series that has previously been helmed by the likes of Northrop Frye and Charles Taylor.

Coupland says he “wanted to take everything I’ve been doing since 1990 and to put it in Superman’s hand and have him crush it into a diamond.” Accordingly, Player One revisits quintessential Coupland themes, chiefly, how the speed of change, both technologically and socially driven, is altering the world, our own sense of self and our souls. “The future is happening so fast and furious right now, there’s no language to describe all these new sensations, so we have to begin inventing one,” says Coupland, who in Player One delivers a glossary for the future with such terms as “Bell’s law of telephony: no matter what technology is used, your monthly phone bill magically remains about the same size.”

For someone who’s been avant-garde for almost 20 years, Coupland is surprisingly down-to-earth, with a deep, jolly laugh that sounds too sincere for a hipster. Comments on his versatility are deflected with oh-but-you-could-do-it-too charm. “Look, even on the best day of writing you’re ever going to have in your life, it’s only going to be about 2½ hours of actual, ‘Wow, this is really shooting out of my brain’ time,” he says. “And then there’s the rest of the day. What are you going to do, go ride in a boat? No way. You’re here to feel and experience and interpret life.”

And, apparently, express those interpretations in every medium possible, with a minimum of artistic angst. “When something feels like homework, I’m out of there,” says Coupland. That can’t happen too often, judging by his output over the past 12 months: a biography of Marshall McLuhan, the opening of a Toronto park he helped design, a commission to create a monument in Ottawa honouring firefighters, the launch of a new clothing line for Roots, the unveiling of a new sculpture at the Vancouver Convention Centre, and now, Player One, which is already on the long list for the Giller Prize.

Continue…

Spring rolls with a side of doom, please

By Alex Shimo - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Sandy Nicholson

At first glance, diners might be forgiven for thinking Toronto’s Loving Hut is just another little vegetarian restaurant. But few other eateries are as devoted to serving messages of imminent doom with their food.

“We have only 884 days left to save the planet,” intone the entertainment-system-sized televisions on either side of the room. The screens show footage of flooding in North Korea, China, Pakistan, northern India; a brick apartment building crashing down, as in the middle of an earthquake; and a dead-looking child with half a dozen flies on her face. On a recent weeknight, several people look up, then continue on with their spring rolls, “sweet and sour fireballs” and “spicy cha cha.”

The doomsday restaurant is run by the spiritual followers of Supreme Master Ching Hai, whose aim is to scare the world into vegetarianism. Hai, 60, a Vietnamese-born restaurateur, avid vegan, painter, poet, fashion designer, fundraiser and entrepreneur, also goes by “Suma,” from SUpreme MAster, or simply “Master.” Four years ago, Hai, who now lives in Europe but whose group is headquartered in Taiwan, told her followers to ditch their jobs, quit their regular lives, and set up the Loving Hut chain.

Continue…

The Bloc influence

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 11:34 AM - 0 Comments

Brian Topp recalls the coalition negotiations from his perspective.

As I recall they made a couple of useful suggestions (notably on toughening up the environmental plank) but did not add anything that stuck in my mind to the economic agenda … I was the NDP team’s lead negotiator and can report that the Bloc’s platform certainly did not influence my own thinking, since I had never read it in any detail and had last flipped through it several months before during the campaign … Nor did I hear anyone ever refer to a Bloc policy platform or other document at any point that weekend.

Mitchel Raphael on what happens if you don’t shake the PM's hand

By Mitchel Raphael - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

Justin’s look-alike
Can Justin Trudeau be in two places at once? Sort of, thanks to Michael Kirkpatrick, an investment adviser and financial planner at RBC in Ottawa. Kirkpatrick is constantly being mistaken for the MP from Papineau. People ask for his autograph and to be photographed with him. Even Trudeau’s own aide, Louis-Alexandre Lanthier, has made the mistake several times. One time when he saw Kirkpatrick walking around Ottawa, he actually got angry, wondering why Trudeau wasn’t in Montreal where he was supposed to be. Both government House leader John Baird and Pierre Pettigrew, the Liberal who was once the MP for the riding Trudeau now represents, have been tripped up. Pettigrew had to be enlightened mid-conversation; Kirkpatrick said the chat was very interesting. Asked if the resemblance has helped him on the dating front, Kirkpatrick says: “Hopefully they are with me more because of me and not just because I am a Justin look-alike.” Is he a Liberal? Kirkpatrick says he tends to be “more Conservative,” but allowed that all the people who have mistaken him for Trudeau have had only positive things to say about the MP. Trudeau was relieved to hear Kirkpatrick is nice to people who’ve got the wrong guy; the MP says he met a John Baird look-alike who doesn’t in fact like Baird so is intentionally rude to people who think they’re talking to the House leader.

Continue…

Clash of the cruisers

By Chris Sorensen - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments

Chrysler Group LLC/ Mike Segar/Reuters/ Ford Motor Co.

For the first time in more than a decade, Dennis Simcoe won’t be able to simply pick up the phone and call Ford Motor Co. when it’s time to replace one of Edmonton’s 230 Crown Victoria police cruisers. That’s because Ford, which currently boasts 70 per cent of the North American police car market, is finally retiring the aging, tank-like police car next year, creating unease among police departments and an opportunity for competitors to step in. “It’s a very well-performing police vehicle,” says Simcoe, who oversees fleet operations for the city of Edmonton and already sounds a touch nostalgic for the Crown Victoria. “You can pound on them and they still keep ticking.”

For Ford, though, the “Crown Vic” lost its commercial appeal a long time ago. Built in St. Thomas, Ont., the car has been relegated to police and taxi fleets since 2007 after Ford decided the consumer market for big, rear-wheel-drive sedans had all but disappeared, save for a handful of Florida retirees. Even taxi companies are moving away to smaller and more fuel-efficient cars. And police departments, although important and high-profile customers, only buy about 60,000 of the roughly $30,000 vehicles a year in total—not enough to justify a dedicated assembly line.

Ford is now attempting to convince police to move to a car based on its front- and all-wheel-drive Taurus platform, as well as a sport utility vehicle, promising performance benefits that stem from modern vehicle stability systems and the improved fuel economy of a smaller but still powerful V6 engine. “We can add that advanced technology and maybe change the way people think about police cars,” says Marisa Bradley, a Ford spokesperson.

Continue…

Home sweet home?

By Chris Sorensen - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments

Steve White/CP

Canada’s hot housing market may be cooling off, but that doesn’t mean owning a home is about to get any cheaper. A study this week by the Royal Bank of Canada suggests that affordability continues to deteriorate across Canada, placing “greater than usual stress” on homebuyers. The problem is that, while interest rates are rising and fewer people are buying, housing prices haven’t budged because fewer homes are being put on the market. RBC says the situation doesn’t present an immediate threat for most of the country, with the possible exception of Vancouver where hikes in mortgage rates are amplified by a greater disparity between home prices and income levels. “Generally, we have dismissed the case of housing market bubbles in Canada,” the report said. “But the situation in Vancouver is probably the closest to one in the country.”

Col. Russell Williams to plead guilty

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 10:39 AM - 0 Comments

Col. Russell Williams—the senior air force officer who led an elaborate double life as a serial predator—will likely spend the rest of his life behind bars after agreeing to plead guilty this morning to a long list of heinous crimes that rocked the military and shocked the public.

Appearing in court for the first time since his arrest eight months ago, Williams sat silently in a bulletproof prisoners’ box as his lawyer, Michael Edelson, told a Belleville, Ont., judge that his notorious client will plead guilty to all counts he faces: two first-degree murders, two sexual assaults, and dozens of bizarre break-ins that targeted women’s lingerie.

Williams will formally enter his guilty plea during a sentencing hearing Oct. 18, Edelson said.

RELATED STORIES:

• Col. Russell Williams to plead guilty—Accused killer and former base commander will plead guilty to all counts, says lawyer (October 7, 2010)
• Surviving Colonel Williams (EXCLUSIVE)—Laurie Massicotte describes the hours of hell she endured at his hands (October 5, 2010)
• Colonel Williams’ wife, under attack—An accused killer’s spouse struggles to rebuild her shattered life (July 27, 2010)
• Col. Russell Williams, accused sex killer, makes brief court appearance—Murder victim’s brother among those in attendance (July 22, 2010)
• Williams faces additional charges—Former CFB Trenton commander linked to 82 more crimes around Ottawa, Belleville and Tweed (April 29, 2010)
• Colonel accused of double murder tries to kill himself—Russell Williams used mustard to write his suicide note (April 5, 2010)
• I feel pity for Colonel Williams if he’s guilty—Barbara Amiel on the blessing and the curse of human sexuality (February 23, 2010)
• Col. Russell Williams, a timeline (PHOTOS)—The busy schedule of an accused killer (February 18, 2010)
• The secret life of Colonel Russell Williams—If police are correct, he was a cold-blooded planner who in hours could transform from commander to monster (February 16, 2010)
• The two faces of Col. Russell Williams (VIDEO)—Portrait of an accused predator (February 10, 2010)
• Round up: Investigating Col. Russ Williams—Tire tracks led police to Williams; investigators look into unsolved crimes (February 9, 2010)
• Col. Russell Williams’ double life?—Top officer facing murder charges commanded Canada’s largest air base, flew top diplomats (February 8, 2010)

Treasure island

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 10:20 AM - 0 Comments

Getty Images

While the future of Saskatchewan’s potash industry is grabbing attention around the world, the real hub of Canada’s resource sector may be emerging in an unlikely place: Baffin Island. The remote and sparsely populated Arctic island could soon be home to companies extracting everything from diamonds to oil to gold.

Among the largest projects being studied is Baffinland Iron Mines Corp.’s plan to build a huge open-pit iron ore mine at Mary River, about 1,000 km northwest of Iqaluit. The $4-billion project would allow the Toronto-based company to tap a site that’s believed to hold some 500 million tonnes of high-grade reserves.

Just who gets to develop the site, however, remains up in the air after rival Nunavut Iron Ore put in an unsolicited offer last week to buy out Baffinland for $274 million in cash.

Continue…

The oracle of Tangshan

By Cameron Ainsworth-Vincze - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 10:20 AM - 0 Comments

Carlos Barri/Reuters/ David Yellen

This week, billionaire Warren Buffett visited China, where he paid a visit to one of his more recent high-profile investments, BYD Co. Ltd. The Chinese car and battery manufacturer has hit a rough patch recently, with sagging sales and a stock down 35 per cent in the past 11 months. Still, it has been a big winner for Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc., which had seen its initial $230-million, 10 per cent stake in BYD swell sixfold in two years, resulting in profits of more than $1.2 billion.

The man largely responsible for those gains is Li Lu, a fund manager and investor who helped introduce BYD to Berkshire Hathaway, and who many now consider to be one of Buffett’s potential successors when the legendary 80-year-old investor steps down—whenever that may be—from his position as company chairman and CEO. It has been widely speculated that Buffett’s responsibilities will be split among at least three people at Berkshire when that inevitable day comes, and Li, just 44, has a remarkable life story, along with an intriguing financial background, to support his candidacy.

Continue…

Harper and Ignatieff’s very different inner circles

By John Geddes - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Tibor Kolley/Globe and Mail/ Photograph by Blair Gable

If there were any doubts left about the stark difference between the teams assembled by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff, two recent top-level recruits to their rival staffs should go a long way toward putting them to rest. Harper reached into the rarified ranks of Toronto’s business elite to find a new chief of staff—Nigel Wright, maker of multi-billion-dollar deals at Onex Corp. Ignatieff raided the foreign service to fill his opening for a principal secretary—Patrick Parisot, who has served as Canadian ambassador to Chile, Portugal and, most recently, Algeria.

Those who know them would quickly protest that “businessman” doesn’t sum up Wright any more than “diplomat” captures Parisot. Both are partisan political creatures, too. As a young lawyer, Wright worked in Brian Mulroney’s PMO during two stints in the mid-1980s and early 1990s. At various times he’s been connected to the circles of Treasury Board President Stockwell Day and former Ontario premier Mike Harris. Parisot served former prime minister Jean Chrétien in senior communications and strategy posts from 1993 until 2001, when Chrétien rewarded him with his first job as an ambassador.

Yet these appointments signal more than the natural tendency of political leaders to tap the talents of devoted partisans. In choosing Wright, Harper has continued his clear pattern of relying almost exclusively on top aides who have never worked inside the federal public service. And in hiring Parisot, Ignatieff has kept up his habit of filling out his staff with precisely the sort of federal public service veterans who aren’t finding employment these days in the PMO.

Continue…

Playing a sad song

By Chris Sorensen - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Antti Aimo-Koivisto/Lehtikuva/CP

It’s not a tune the beleaguered recording industry wants to hear. Despite the popularity of music download services such as Apple Inc.’s iTunes, new numbers suggest that U.S. digital music sales have been slowing dramatically in recent months, and may have reached a plateau.

Data compiled by research firm Nielsen show that some 630 million songs were downloaded during the first half of this year, which is about the same as during the same period a year earlier. By contrast, the annual growth rate in 2009 was about 13 per cent, and 28 per cent in 2008. If the trend continues, it could stick a fork in the business model cooked up by record company executives in response to falling CD sales in the file-sharing era.

Continue…

Cancer answer?

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Tsar Fedorsky/Getty ImagesLeif Ellisen says 'smart drugs' will one day change the way cancer is treated

This summer, Vancouver cancer researchers announced a medical first. Presented with an extremely rare case of tongue cancer—it was so unusual there were no standard treatments to use—they sequenced the DNA of the patient’s tumour, and discovered similarities with another cancer (renal cell carcinoma, a type of kidney cancer) for which there’s a known therapy. The patient received drugs tailored to these results, and the cancer stopped growing for several months. Steven Jones, a molecular biologist with the B.C. Cancer Agency Genome Sciences Centre and one of two lead researchers on the study, calls it a breakthrough. It isn’t standard in hospitals to genetically sequence a patient’s tumour, but “the goal would be, maybe in 10 years, this would be routine,” he says.

Dr. Leif Ellisen, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, is working to bring tumour genotyping from the lab into the clinic. He and a team have designed a system that can screen relatively large numbers of patients for a variety of mutations across different cancer genes. These genetic mutations are a tumour’s “Achilles’ heel,” noted a recent editorial in the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine. “Every tumour has a flaw,” says Ellisen, who’ll be discussing his work as part of the Scienta Health Series in Toronto on Oct. 7, and his goal is to find it.

It’s the mantra of a growing number of researchers, who tout personalized medicine—treatments tailored to each individual—as the future of cancer care. Traditionally, cancer treatment “has been one-size-fits all,” Ellisen says. “If it’s breast cancer, you treat it one way; if it’s lung cancer, you treat it another.” The downside is that costly drugs are administered to patients, sometimes with harmful side effects and no real promise they’ll work. “The treatment needs to be tailored to the individual characteristics of the patient and, we’re learning now, the characteristics of the tumour,” he says. Cancers are typically classified by the organs where they arise, but it’s possible that a breast cancer and a lung cancer, for example, might share a genetic abnormality. As a result, they might even respond to the same treatment.

Continue…

Memo to the new chief of staff, poor sod

By Scott Feschuk - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute Here's the thing: As a rule, the PM does not wish to be spoken to, looked at, drawn by children or otherwise disturbed. Your job is to make it so.

In the news: Nigel Wright, a prominent Bay Street executive, has been hired to run the Prime Minister’s Office.

Dear Successful Applicant:

Congratulations on being named chief of staff to Stephen Harper. You follow in a line of individuals who have occupied this important position until growing weary of the time commitment and spankings. As a general rule, Mr. Harper does not wish to be spoken to, looked at, thought about, drawn by children or otherwise disturbed—except in the event of a national emergency or the guys from Loverboy wanting to jam.

Before attempting to contact the Prime Minister, therefore, please consult this list of frequently asked questions:

Continue…

Not so liberal after all

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Getty Images

As a wave of anti-immigration sentiment sweeps across Europe, Sweden has seemed relatively immune. The country prides itself on a tolerant attitude, not to mention generous welfare and immigration policies (it brought in some 40,000 refugees in the first four years of the Iraq war). This makes recent election results all the more surprising. On Sept. 19, Swedish voters re-elected the ruling centre-right coalition—but gave the far-right Sweden Democrats 20 seats, inviting them to make their first entry into the national parliament.

Led by Jimmie Åkesson, who’s called Islam the country’s biggest security threat since the Second World War, the Sweden Democrats stirred up controversy throughout the campaign. One advertisement, which showed an elderly white woman trampled by a horde of burka-clad women pushing baby strollers, was banned from television but scored tens of thousands of hits on YouTube. The party wasn’t allowed to join in televised debates, but the country’s attitudes to immigration may now be aligning more closely with some of its neighbours’.

Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt had asked voters for a clear majority. For now, at least, he’ll have to work with the fragile minority government he’s got.

Tuning in to Twitter

By Colin Campbell - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 9:20 AM - 0 Comments

Mario Anzuoni/Reuters

Hotels and airlines were among the first industries to recognize the value of social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, monitoring them to respond to angry customers. Increasingly, companies are taking the tactic to a new level, trying to listen in on every mention of their brands—tracking as many as 150 million sources—for a real-time gauge of what people think of their offerings, competitors and industry trends.

This month, Nielsen and the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. launched a tracking service in Canada called NM Incite. (In a recent analysis of the film industry, for instance, it identified the Toronto International Film Festival as the most talked about this summer, with 14,000 social media mentions compared to 9,000 for the rival Venice festival). ComScore recently introduced a rival service called Social Analytix. A lot is at stake for firms in this domain. According to eMarketer, ad spending on social media is growing 20 per cent year over year, and is expected to hit US$1.7 billion this year.