Hey look: A homegrown brain gain

By Paul Wells - Friday, November 12, 2010 at 1:54 PM - 8 Comments

From our university rankings issue, the hands-down winner for least-commented article: my column describes the excellent work the University of Victoria is doing to attract Aboriginal students and ensure their success.

Did the Earth's pull help shape the moon?

By macleans.ca - Friday, November 12, 2010 at 12:29 PM - 1 Comment

Authors of a new study suggest that Earth’s gravitational pull distorted the shape of the moon, creating “bulging” at the equator, which could explain why the far side of the moon is more elevated than the closer side. The far side of the moon is a mystery: it’s densely cratered, and has few of the volcanic plains seen on the near side. It’s also several kilometres higher in places. In a new study published in the journal Science, researchers suggest that over four billion years ago, before the moon had solidified to its core, the crust floated on a sea of magma. Earth tugged on the floating crust and distorted it, a lot like the moon tugs on our oceans today to create tides.

BBC News

The myth of the returning hero

By Aaron Wherry and John Geddes - Friday, November 12, 2010 at 12:00 PM - 11 Comments

Prentice with Harper after the announcement | Chris Wattie/Reuters

It was not long after Jim Prentice announced his impending departure from federal politics that speculation about his leadership aspirations began anew. But it’s entirely possible, perhaps even probable, that Ottawa has seen the last of him.

Explaining the decision to accept a senior executive position with CIBC, Prentice said it was merely a matter of time. “When I entered federal politics in 2001 I made a commitment that my time in politics would last eight to 10 years,” he said. “It has now been nine years and it is time for me to pursue new opportunities outside of public life.” A well-regarded cabinet minister who ran for the Progressive Conservative party leadership in 2003 (finishing second to Peter MacKay), he was sometimes thought to be a potential successor to Stephen Harper. That speculation will not end with Prentice’s exit, but if he stays away he would do so in good company.

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'They need to know that their Parliament is behind them'

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, November 12, 2010 at 11:56 AM - 40 Comments

As futile as it may be to hold Mr. Harper’s past pronouncements as a guide to present and future action, here is what the Prime Minister said four years ago when he sought to extend the nation’s commitment in Afghanistan by two years.

Mr. Speaker, as members of the House know, we made a pledge during the last election campaign to put international treaties and military engagements to a vote in this chamber. If we made this promise, it was because before we send diplomats, relief workers and soldiers on dangerous missions abroad, it is important to be able to tell them that Canada’s parliamentarians believe in their objectives and support what they are doing…

Despite the fact that members of three of four parties in the House have consistently voiced support for a mission in Afghanistan, Canadians on the ground in Kabul, Kandahar and in the PRT have never received a clear mandate from this Parliament. That is not fair to the brave men and women who wear the maple leaf. They need to know that their Parliament is behind them.

Mr. Harper also specifically addressed what his government would do if Parliament voted against extending the engagement. Continue…

Opening Weekend: Man vs. object in ’127 Hours’ and ‘Unstoppable’

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, November 12, 2010 at 11:45 AM - 0 Comments

James Franco in '127 Hours'

What will it be? Hard-core or soft? That’s the choice if you’re planning a thrill ride at the multiplex midway this weekend—between Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours and Tony Scott’s Unstoppable. Two monster movies in which the monster is a large, heavy object. The better of the two by far is the hard-core option, 127 Hours, based on the true story of climber Aron Ralston, who spent five days pinned by a boulder in a Utah canyon before finally performing surgery on his arm with a blunt penknife. Personally, I couldn’t watch the surgery part, but among those who did there are reports of people fainting.  Despite my queasiness—I couldn’t even watch my son getting his pinkie finger stitched up at emerg this week—I don’t disapprove of the graphic gore in 127 Hours. It has the necessary cathartic effect, and cutting off the damn arm is, after all, what we spend the rest of the movie waiting for.

What’s more irritating, however, is Boyle’s manic direction. Because our hero is going to spend the better part of an action movie alone and virtually immobile, the director has gone out of his way to compensate, determined that there will never be a dull moment. He jams as much gonzo action as possible into the scenes leading up to the accident, with split screens, speeded-up footage, and relentless rock music, establishing that Ralston is one crazy cowboy who’s about to get a bone-crushing lesson in hubris—Sisyphus stuck between his rock and a hard place.

Once Ralston is jammed in that canyon, Boyle performs all manner of camera tricks to keep his solitary confinement lively, from a looming water-bottle cam to showbiz soliloquies that Ralston delivers as a kind of reality-show performance art for his video camera. It’s all wildly entertaining. Gotta admit I got sucked in. I found myself along for the white-knuckled ride to the point that the climber’s final liberation was truly exhilarating—I felt I’d been shot out the end of some high-pressure water slide, and walked out of the movie  physically and emotionally exhausted. But all the razzmatazz filmmaking gets in the way of the story, making you wonder what really happened. Also, Franco is such a strong and committed actor that I wish Boyle had allowed his performance more room to breathe, and taken the more dangerous option of exploring the empty, existential silence of a man trapped with his own fear.

Denzel Washington in 'Unstoppable'

For more on 127 Hours, go to my article in the magazine— Forget Saw 3-D. This is authentic horror, featuring interviews with Danny Boyle and Aron Ralston. As for Unstoppable, unless you have a deep and abiding affection for freight trains (not that there’s anything wrong with that), you can afford to skip it. To read my review of Unstoppable, go to: Yet another runaway Denzel vehicle.

15,000 mammograms under review in Quebec

By macleans.ca - Friday, November 12, 2010 at 11:35 AM - 0 Comments

After an erroneous interpretation of a pathology test for breast cancer markers was discovered two years ago, Quebec’s College of Physicians began a random quality control review. The results show a significant number of errors which all trace back to a single radiologist. The doctor, whose name has not been released, worked at three clinics: Radiologie Jean-Talon Bélanger and Radiologie Domus Médica in Montreal, and Radiologie Fabreville in Laval. Now, 15,000 mammograms will be reviewed over the next six months. Patients won’t be required to undergo new mammograms, but the College admits that the discovery of false negatives and false positives is “likely.” The College said that the radiologist in question was skilled at analyzing all diagnostic scans except mammograms, so only those will be checked. Recent quality control reviews in St. John’s, Nfld. and Windsor, Ont. also found large numbers of mistakes attributable to single incompetent doctors.

CBC News

Muslim protesters burn poppies in London

By macleans.ca - Friday, November 12, 2010 at 11:34 AM - 199 Comments

Roughly 35 Islamic protesters, many masked, demonstrated in London on Armistice Day, carrying banners that read “Islam will dominate” and “Hands off Muslim lands.” The group burnt a giant red poppy in Hyde Park at 11 a.m., just as millions of Britons and Canadians observed two minutes of silence to honour soldiers past and present. “The British soldiers you remember on this day are soldiers who have taken innocent lives in illegal occupations and unjust wars,” Asad Ullah a 23-year-old protester told The Telegraph. He added: “We will do this again. Until the British people condemn the British Government for these illegal wars, we will not stop protesting.” Members of the group clashed with police as they made their way through Kensington. Around 50 counter-demonstrators organized by the anti-Muslim English Defence League gathered nearby, but officers managed to keep the two groups apart. Three people were arrested in a scuffle, including one Muslim protester who assaulted a police officer. The officer was sent to hospital with a head injury.

The Telegraph

Do you support keeping Canadian troops in Afghanistan past 2011?

By macleans.ca - Friday, November 12, 2010 at 10:33 AM - 98 Comments

'The government has to be free to act'

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, November 12, 2010 at 10:31 AM - 36 Comments

The Prime Minister doesn’t think a vote in Parliament is necessary to move forward with a training mission in Afghanistan.

“My position is if you’re going to put troops into combat, into a war situation, I do think for the sake of legitimacy, I do think the government does require the support of Parliament,” he said. “But when we’re talking simply about technical or training missions, I think that is something the executive can do on its own …  I’m not resistant to having debates on that matter in the House of Commons. But I do think when it comes to decisions such as this, the government has to be free to act.”

The Liberal foreign affairs critic doesn’t necessarily disagree with him.

The G20 promotes aid through entrepreneurship

By John Geddes - Friday, November 12, 2010 at 10:12 AM - 0 Comments

Peace Dividend Trust, a non-profit organization that works to link peacekeeping and humanitarian operations to local entrepreneurs in strife-torn countries, was recognized today at the G20 summit in Seoul.

PDT’s’ Ottawa-based executive director, Scott Gilmore (full disclosure: he’s a friend), is standing on stage with President Barack Obama, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and others, in a photo here, on the website of Changemakers, which ran a contest for the G20 among social entrepreneurial organizations.

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You've got mail

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, November 12, 2010 at 9:24 AM - 27 Comments

The government that wants—on “principle”—to end the vote subsidy for political parties, finds a new way to use public funds for partisan purposes.

Conservative Senators are quietly using taxpayer-funded literature to target opposition ridings with a partisan crime message as the party gears up for the next election, the Toronto Star has learned. And at least one of the Senators sent the mailers out at the direction of the Conservative Party of Canada’s national campaign office…

By using the Senators to send out this kind of literature, the Conservative Party gets around the prohibition on MPs using tax dollars to send partisan messages to other ridings, which the House of Commons agreed must stop.

Where was the youth vote?

By Andrew Potter - Friday, November 12, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 84 Comments

Joshua Roberts/Reuters

If there is one thing that captures the sad decline of Barack Obama’s place in youth culture, it is the changing nature of his treatment on YouTube. Forget about making “Yes We (Still) Can”—Will. I. Am was busy last month making R-rated videos with sultry R & B singer Nicki Minaj. Comedian Sarah Silverman was too preoccupied with tweeting about her menstrual cramps to encourage students to head back to Florida for “The Great Schlep 2.0.” As for Amber Lee Ettinger, aka “Obama Girl,” the viral-video hottie who had a famous crush on Obama back in 2008—well, she was last seen back in March, as a contestant on Shear Genius, a reality show about hair cuts.

No, in the days leading up to last week’s crucial mid-term elections in the U.S., the most prominent sign of the President in social media was a parody rap video called Head of the State, featuring an Obama look-alike called “Baracka Flacka Flames.” In the video, Obama was played by the comedian James Davis, who bragged about how “I brought you change, nigga” while a Michelle look-alike danced behind him, smoking and drinking.

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One school's native intelligence

By Paul Wells - Friday, November 12, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 19 Comments

Photograph by Deddeda Stemler

Increasingly it seems we must look to the University of Victoria for good ideas. This year’s Times Higher Education Supplement rankings put it sixth among Canadian universities and 130th in the world. UVic does well in our own rankings too, as you’ll see. Rankings were the first thing David Turpin, UVic’s president, wanted to talk about when he visited me in Ottawa last month. But his other story was more focused and may be more important: Victoria’s success in attracting, retaining and rewarding Aboriginal university students.

In 2006, only eight per cent of Canadians with Aboriginal ancestry had university degrees, compared with 23 per cent of non-Aboriginal Canadians. This is not merely too bad. There is a genuine economic and human cost, because the correlation between higher education and various social goods is exhaustively documented. Post-secondary education attainment is associated with better health, increased civic participation, lower crime rates, higher income, correspondingly higher tax payments, reduced dependence on social benefits, and more.

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Newsmakers

By macleans.ca - Friday, November 12, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Doggone it
Cesar Millan, TV’s “Dog Whisperer,” was a hit with the crowd at sold-out Scotiabank Place in Ottawa last week, even though Ontario law deprived him of a key cast mate—Junior, the two-year-old American pit bull that recently took over from the dearly departed Daddy as Millan’s “right-hand man.” Millan, halfway through a tour of Canada, demonstrated training techniques on local dogs and expounded on his philosophy of calm assertiveness, but took time to criticize Ontario’s 2005 ban on pit bulls. “In the ’70s, the breed that people were afraid of was the Doberman,” he told the audience. “In the 2000s, it’s the pit bull. It’s not the breed, it’s the human behind the dog.”

Absolute powers of persuasion
Chinese authorities may not have much success persuading European governments to boycott the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony honouring jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo, but they’re having better luck at home. Author Yu Jie, a friend of Liu’s, said he and his wife have been stopped from leaving their Beijing home by security officers, for fear they plan to go to Oslo. Meanwhile, Guo Xianliang, an engineer from Yunnan province, disappeared while on a business trip in Guangzhou. He’d been detained for distributing flyers about Liu, according to fellow activist Ye Du. Police have also reportedly detained a young woman, Mou Yanxi, who tweeted her support for Liu. “If such behaviour goes on,” her friend Zhang Shijie tweeted last week, “it will eventually happen to all of us.”

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Yet another runaway Denzel vehicle

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, November 12, 2010 at 6:20 AM - 2 Comments

Robert Zuckerman/20th Century Fox

With a series of trail-blazing performances playing civil rights legends such as Steve Biko, Malcolm X and Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, Denzel Washington became the most significant black actor in Hollywood history. But eight years after winning his second Oscar—and his first for a lead role, as a corrupt cop in Training Day—he seems stuck in Groundhog Day, making the same movie over and over. Last summer, in Tony Scott’s The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, Washington played a veteran employee who tries to avert catastrophe as a hijacked subway train races out of control. Now he’s in another Tony Scott thriller, Unstoppable—playing a veteran employee who tries to avert catastrophe as an unmanned freight train races out of control.

In interviews, Scott (who has cast Washington in five films) sounds a tad defensive about making two train movies in a row, and points out the differences: Unstoppable has no real bad guys, just a careless yard worker and a venal railway boss. The villain is the train itself, which Scott calls “the Beast” and compares to the shark in Jaws. So he’s made a monster movie about the largest species on wheels: Moby Dick in a full-metal jacket. Or, to quote the yard master played by Rosario Dawson, “It’s not a train, it’s a missile the size of the Chrysler Building.” Whatever it is, the Beast is a classic American she-devil, and you know some guy will inevitably yell, “We’re going to run this bitch down.”

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More Asian?

By Paul Wells - Thursday, November 11, 2010 at 10:12 PM - 63 Comments

It’s a veritable blitz the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada has launched in India this month, in an attempt to put Canadian universities higher on the list of options the best Indian students consider when they head off to higher education. Fifteen Canadian university presidents are in India, along with federal science and technology minister Gary Goodyear.

The AUCC is running a blog on the events here. AUCC president Paul Davidson curtain-raised the trip with a Times of India op-ed you can read here. Eight universities banded together to announce a $3.5 million program to ensure that top-tier Indian students who’ve already checked Canadian universities out are encouraged to stay here to continue that education.

Western’s Amit Chakma, who’s not on the India trip but who’s participating in the $3.5 million stay-in-Canada scholarships, tried to explain why Ontario government scholarships for outstanding international students are a good idea. His argument ran smack into the legendary Globe online comment boards. Oh well.

UBC president Stephen Toope gave a speech today that tries to explain to an Indian audience what this delegation is doing over there, and why the country’s students should consider studying here:

“We take intercultural understanding very seriously. As I implied earlier, societies that have promoted cultural understanding and cooperation (India prominent among them) have proved in the past to be the most resilient, the most innovative and the most creative.

“People who live in an atmosphere of tolerance and understanding are more comfortable to do their best work. At UBC, we have found that cultural diversity creates an intellectual and social vitality that is itself so valuable that we – as with many other Canadian institutions – now actively work to further diversify our student body, and our faculty.

“Indian students who have already studied in Canada have also reported finding a concentration on critical thinking and problem solving rather than rote learning. We work hard to ensure that our students understand how to think, rather than trying to convince them of what to think.”

If it needs saying, I think this is all an excellent idea.

The Beastly Week, or the Newsy Beast, or Week Day, or…

By Paul Wells - Thursday, November 11, 2010 at 10:05 PM - 1 Comment

From the New York Observer, word that the failed negotiation between nonogenarian millionaire-not-billionaire Newsweek bailer-outer Sidney Harman and Daily Beast proprietor Barry Diller didn’t actually fail; it seems likely to produce a deal by which Newsweek and the Daily Beast will merge, with Tina Brown editing the whole online-offline shebang.

I think Tina Brown sometimes pursues buzz to the point of silliness, but the jolt she brought to Vanity Fair and then The New Yorker made both magazines relevant to the culture in a way neither had been for a long time. I prefer both magazines under Brown’s successors, but in The New Yorker‘s case in particular, if it’s true the magazine doesn’t make you #facepalm as often as it did under Brown, it’s also true it’s less audacious than she was at her best. It was Tina Brown, after all, who gave nearly an entire issue to Mark Danner’s account of a massacre 12 years earlier at a village in El Salvador.

Anyway. I don’t think the newsweekly format plays to her strengths, but her strengths are extraordinary and the magazine is (if this deal gets done) in far better hands now than under the earnest, weird, boring Jon Meacham. The odds of there still being a Newsweek in a decade just got better.

Hey there, CBC, glad you could finally make it.

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, November 11, 2010 at 9:23 PM - 15 Comments

The CBC catches up with a story Maclean’s broke more than a year and a half ago.

CBC: Nov 11, 2010

Maclean’s: March 23, 2009.

Ralph Ronald O'Neil | 1959-2010

By Stephanie Findlay - Thursday, November 11, 2010 at 5:00 PM - 0 Comments

Illustration by Team Macho

Ralph Ronald O’Neil was born on Aug. 27, 1959, to Eunice and Richard O’Neil, a homemaker and a farmer in the eastern Ontario town of Winchester. He had three older brothers, Robert, Clarence and Allen, and a younger brother and sister, Brenda and Rick. As kids, the O’Neils would play baseball and hockey, and fish for sunfish and perch in the St Lawrence River. Even then, Ralph had a “love for horses and cows,” and since he was 13 he worked on farms, says his 54-year-old brother Bob. “He, like the rest of us, quit school when he was 16,” says Bob. “He just didn’t like it.”

One evening, when Ralph was 21, he was strolling along a street in Winchester and ran into his aunt. She was walking with her friend, Heather Moodie, a 31-year-old from Ottawa who had started a natural food store in Winchester. “She introduced me to Ralph, and he was such a cute little thing,” says Heather. “There was just something about him—he had a great sense of humour and a twinkle in his eye.” Ralph swung by his aunt’s house later that night, and he and Heather were together ever since.
About a year into their courtship, Heather had returned to a job in Ottawa because her business had folded. With the couple trying to maintain a long-distance relationship, Ralph proposed over the telephone. “He couldn’t wait to see me,” says Heather. They were married on March 25, 1981, in Heather’s mother’s living room in Ottawa.

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We welcome the world, sort of

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, November 11, 2010 at 4:12 PM - 23 Comments

Canadians feel variously about immigration.

The firm also said that while 71% of respondents said they felt immigration was good for Canada, the number declined to 48% when asked if they thought it was good for their neighbourhood … More than half of Canadians (54%) said they think the number of immigrants coming to Canada is about right, up from 49% in 2004; Almost one in four (23%) said there are too many immigrants, down from 31% in 2004.

The Zombies Are Taking Over

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, November 11, 2010 at 4:01 PM - 2 Comments

I wasn’t personally a fan of Rubicon, but a lot of people I respect were fans, and on their behalf I’m sorry that the show has been canceled after one season. I was wondering whether the success of The Walking Dead — success far beyond anything AMC has ever had before — would be good or bad news for Rubicon, whose ratings were low but comparable to the first seasons of AMC’s two flagship shows (Mad Men and Breaking Bad). Some people thought that this new success would make the network more willing to take a chance on a low-rated show that they like. Others argued that The Walking Dead created new expectations for this network: once they prove that they can get a big audience, it’s harder to make excuses for a show with a small audience, because the term “not bad for AMC” no longer applies. It looks like the latter might have been closer to the truth. Not that AMC will never pick up a low-rated show, but they’ve already got a low-rated show in Breaking Bad, and that show is more acclaimed (and better) than Rubicon. In general, though, low-rated shows have a better chance on struggling networks: we’ve seen repeatedly that NBC has a lower threshold for renewing a show than CBS does, because the expectations are lower at NBC. Future AMC shows may be expected to perform… not as well as Walking Dead, but certainly better than Rubicon. The show could be a victim of sudden increased expectations.

Though Rubicon was not to my taste — even though it undeniably got better over its run — the news can’t help but sadden me a little, and not just because its fans probably deserved a better ending than what turned out to be the series finale. It was a show that didn’t feature a great deal of violence; though it was undeniably a melodrama, it wasn’t a spectacular show. This may be why the producers found, to their surprise, that the show was skewing older than AMC’s other shows — along with the fact that it was a tribute to movies from the mid-1970s. With the cancellation of this show and the arrival of a comic-book horror show as the network’s new flagship, it feels like we’re moving closer toward a day when everything on high-end cable will have to be spectacular and young-skewing. (This is not a slam on The Walking Dead specifically; just an observation that AMC will be wanting more shows that deliver a similar audience.) They’ve built up enough good will and enough of a brand that virtually anything they do will be taken seriously, and so they can theoretically concentrate on shows that have broad popular appeal in addition to the inevitable critical respect.

HBO, whose flagship is also a violent monster show, already appears to be moving in that direction; they just turned down what I thought sounded like their most promising pilot, “Miraculous Year,” a premise that was about people who are not involved in crime and violence — not yet, anyway. SyFy canceled the relatively unspectacular and uneven Caprica and will replace it with a younger-skewing, more action-packed Galactica prequel. Meanwhile, The Good Wife, arguably the best broadcast network drama and one of the more down-to-earth ones (albeit with a coat of sensationalism) is a hit in total viewers but a bubble show in the Coveted Demographic. If networks get the idea that their desired viewers don’t want certain types of drama, it’s going to make it hard for shows to get picked up, even on cable, if they don’t have Nazi werewolves in them.

With that in mind, I’ll be interested to see what happens to Men of a Certain Age, a show that belies TNT’s reputation as a network that doesn’t take chances, but which represents the kind of relatively quiet, old-skewing show that’s endangered these days. Its second season begins November 29, and its fate — along with that of The Good Wife and a few others — may say something about the future chances of certain types of hard-to-pigeonhole hour-long dramas.

Desperately seeking the next Pavarotti

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, November 11, 2010 at 4:00 PM - 4 Comments

Mary Altaffer/AP

On Oct. 17, Italian tenor Vittorio Grigolo made his Metropolitan Opera debut in La Bohème, and you’d have thought it was the opera event of the year instead of a 30-year-old production. The New York Times ran a long story calling him “the great tenor hope.” Sony, which is releasing Grigolo’s first album (unimaginatively titled The Italian Tenor), put out many press releases touting his good looks and his background—he used to be a “popera” singer and briefly was part of Simon Cowell’s group Il Divo. But Grigolo is only the latest in a long line of recent tenors who have received the same kind of publicity build-up, and it rarely works. “It’s always ‘the next Pavarotti,’ ” says Zachary Woolfe, music critic for the New York Observer. “The expectations are a bit unfair.”

The tenor voice, the high yet masculine sound that usually sings the hero’s music, has been the currency of operatic stardom since the 19th century. But since Pavarotti’s death and Placido Domingo’s shift into baritone parts, the music business hasn’t found anyone who can cross over into full-fledged popular stardom the way those tenors did. Most successful tenors today are relatively small-voiced lyric tenors who can sing Mozart or Rossini, but not the heavy parts (in Verdi, Puccini and Wagner) that feature the things that make big stars: loud singing and, above all, high Cs like the big one in the tenor aria from La Bohème.

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Heatin' up the bedroom

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, November 11, 2010 at 3:20 PM - 0 Comments

Tim McCoy/AP

Winnipeg is at war with bedbugs, and the latest weapon against them is a system of heaters that warms up a house, cooking the insects to death. It’s proven so effective that even the Manitoba government is using it.

Back in 2008, Manitoba Housing partnered with Heat Assault (a company that makes construction-grade heaters used to thaw frozen ground or cure cement) to develop the technology. Dave Funk, who heads up the government agency’s in-house pest control group—it has 20 full-time staff, including 10 exterminators—says they tweaked Heat Assault’s system into a powerful bug killer. Insecticides or other heat treatments can be “like bringing a knife to a gunfight,” says Clint Rosevear, co-owner of Monarch Pest Control, which also partnered with Heat Assault and markets the system.

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Currency deal among G20 countries unlikely

By macleans.ca - Thursday, November 11, 2010 at 2:54 PM - 1 Comment

Sources say talks between U.S. president Barack Obama and Chinese president Hu Jintao aimed at reducing tensions over claims of currency manipulation didn’t go as well as expected and that a deal between the two economic behemoths is unlikely. Meanwhile, other G20 leaders have voiced their concern about an impeding currency war between China and the U.S. Earlier on in the summit, British prime minister David Cameron said G20 leaders must address the issue of competitive currency devaluations in order for the global economy to grow and to be shielded against another financial crisis. “We need to deal with this idea that export success for one country is a disaster for other countries. Trade isn’t a zero-sum game,” said Cameron.

The Guardian