Fearing the fallout

By Jason Kirby and Nancy Macdonald With Julia Belluz - Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 1:37 PM - 0 Comments

Asahi Shimbun/EPA/Keystone Press

Like most office workers in Japan, when the massive earthquake hit Friday afternoon, Dan Ayotte ducked under his desk as light fixtures and filing cabinets smashed to the floor around him. “It sounded like a train, it just kept getting more intense,” says the Peterborough, Ont., native. “I thought I was never going to see my family again.”

But Ayotte wasn’t just another terrified cubicle dweller in a swaying Tokyo skyscraper. As a mechanical technician with GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy Canada, Ayotte had spent the past three months working on one of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. It was a position that put him front and centre for the full devastation the quake was about to unleash. (General Electric designed the plant’s reactors and is a partner with Hitachi in the nuclear industry.)

When the violent shakes finally ended after five long minutes, Ayotte and a co-worker drove down to the edge of the sea. Along the way, they passed gaping cracks in the road so wide they’d swallowed trucks. All around, landslides snapped trees like matchsticks. Then Ayotte saw it, stretching across the horizon in the distance—a wall of water nine metres high, roaring straight toward the plant and its six reactors. The pair spun their car around and raced to a lookout point on a cliff high above the facility. What Ayotte witnessed next left him stunned. The first wave hit nearby cliffs with such force that dirt and debris exploded into the air “like it was hit with an artillery shell.” A fishery plant down by the water’s edge was swept away in seconds. And then the waves began to pound the plant and its reactors. “The nuclear plant took the full brunt of that first wave,” he says. “The water rolled right over the southern part of the station.”

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Down shovels: the city should clear the sidewalks

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 1:21 PM - 5 Comments

Tom Hanson/CP

It’s the middle of March and winter has yet to relax its icy grasp on Canadians. Last week, much of the country faced a late-season snowstorm and the prospect of yet more shovelling. Regardless of the snowfall, however, the burden of hoisting snow and chipping ice is not distributed equally across the country—particularly when it comes to sidewalks.

Many Canadian cities plow their sidewalks, as well as roads. Like drinkable water and street lights that work, clear sidewalks are a basic municipal service in these urban centres. And yet numerous other cities have abandoned their sidewalk plows and dumped the job on residents instead. Is this fair?

Last month, Calgarians received two snowy surprises. An early February blizzard left much of the city under a thick white blanket that required removing. Calgary residents must clear the sidewalk in front of their homes down to bare pavement within 24 hours of a snowfall, on pain of a $150 bill for a city crew to do the work. To the surprise of many, however, it was subsequently revealed that residents are responsible for shovelling any community trails that abut their property as well. A homeowner’s obligation to clear Calgary’s 700-km-long pathway system was apparently added to the books in 2004, but left unpublicized until now. Hey Calgary: don’t forget to stretch.

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The end : Ray Norman | 1946-2011

By Julia Belluz - Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 1:19 PM - 1 Comment

Illustration by Byron Eggenschwiler

Ray Norman was born on May 18, 1946, in Prittlewell, on England’s Essex Coast, and grew up in Ilford, on the of edge of London. His mother Phyllis was a piano teacher who taught Ray how to play, and his father, Christopher, a former freewheeling sailor who took a job in a law firm in order to provide for his family. By age five, it was apparent that Ray had inherited an independent and venturesome streak from his dad. Though he was told to cross the street while holding his mother’s hand, a neighbour discovered him crossing back and forth, over and over, to prove he could go it alone.

By age 11, he was one of a few young men from modest backgrounds who got a scholarship to a private boys’ school called Bancroft’s, near London. Ray excelled both in the classroom and on the field, playing rugby, field hockey and cricket. By 18, he earned a spot at Churchill College at the University of Cambridge. While there, Ray took a trip with classmates to Greece, where they climbed Mount Olympus. This experience left a deep impression on him, and he continued to hike and climb for the rest of his life. He was also passionate about piano, and even dreamed of becoming a concert pianist, but decided to focus on math; it seemed a more prudent route.

Ray graduated in 1967, and ended up working in IBM’s research and development lab in Hampshire, England. There, he met a young woman named Celia Austin. The two played at the same squash club after work, and one night, Ray offered Celia a lift home. On the way, he asked if she wanted to stop at a coffee bar for a drink. “He tried to woo me with his superior intelligence of the pinball machine,” says Celia. And it worked. Three weeks later, he proposed. Three months later, in September 1969, they married.

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Living like a centenarian

By Susannah Benady - Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 1:09 PM - 5 Comments

Photograph by Stephanie Noritz

It has been the stuff of myth and fairy tale since the earliest times and across all cultures: an elixir of life that can make the old young again. But two drugs—already in use to treat blood cancer—are the first medications that can reverse some of the effects of aging, perhaps allowing people to remain healthy longer into old age.

It is the aging of our cells that causes us to develop most diseases, says Dr. Nir Barzilai, professor of medicine and genetics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. “We know this, paradoxically, because of the amazing success we have had in treating heart disease. We have been able to save people from heart attacks with stents and bypass surgery—only to find that within a year or two they develop Alzheimer’s, diabetes or cancer at an alarming rate. Why? Because we have never treated the underlying aging of their cells. We have simply treated the disease manifestation.” So, explains Barzilai, if we can find the processes in the body that control aging and find a way to treat them, we will be able to protect people from the diseases of aging.

Barzilai heads a unique longevity study of more than 500 people who have reached the age of 100. The LonGenity study is looking at the genetic makeup of centenarians to identify the biological markers that explain why they live so long and so well. Because the remarkable thing about these people is not simply that they live to the age of 100, it is that they live to 100 in pretty good health. Just why they live that long without getting sick and dying is what Barzilai wanted to find out.
His first discovery was that it wasn’t because they did what the doctor ordered. “These people were more obese, smoked more and did less exercise than everyone else, so it certainly wasn’t their lifestyle,” said Barzilai in an interview at the American Society of Hematology conference last December in Florida, where he presented his latest research. Clearly, the centenarians’ genetic makeup was protecting them from what he calls the “environmental effects” of lifestyle. “If you are one of the one in 10,000 people destined to live to 100, you will be protected against environmental effects right from the outset.”

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On cynicism

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 1:04 PM - 27 Comments

From Rick Mercer’s latest rant.

Apparently our opinion of politics and the people who practice the art is now so low that no matter what the behaviour, we’re no longer surprised. It’s like going to a family wedding. Why bother getting upset because Uncle Jerry has too much to drink and makes a holy show of himself out on the dance floor?It’s Uncle Jerry, that’s what he does.

Japan steps up efforts to cool nuclear plant

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 12:47 PM - 4 Comments

Japan’s military Chinook helicopters and a water cannon doused the Fukishima Daiichi plant reactors with tonnes of seawater on Thursday in an attempt to prevent fuel rods from melting. Four loads were dumped by aircraft before they were forced to leave the area due to radiation exposure, but given high winds it was difficult to know whether the water dumps were hitting the target buildings. Japan has asked the U.S. to fly a drone over the site to assess the situation on the ground. As a result of the nuclear crisis, China has said it will suspend its approval for new nuclear sites. The confirmed death toll from the earthquake and subsequent tsunami has now surpassed 5,400 people, with about 9,500 still missing. Around 380,000 people are living in temporary shelters.

BBC News

How To Save Canadian Film and TV (Still)

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 12:43 PM - 3 Comments

Thanks for Will Dixon for pointing to this 1995 article by the late John Harkness, where he suggests three things that might help the English-Canadian movie industry (or “industry” as it’s called in the piece, and the use of scare quotes is understandable). The suggestions are to place less emphasis on film schools, film festivals, and government funding, and most of the piece reads as relevantly now as it did then. Particularly the concluding section, which talks about how the funding of Canadian film is approached from the wrong end: we help movies get made, but we don’t help them actually find a place for people to pay to see them.

Some of these things are applicable to television as well; we have more ways to get shows made than actually get them shown. I’m not convinced that government funding is a net negative — there has been plenty of wonderful film and TV that got made with government subsidies. (Even more if you count tax breaks.) What we still don’t have is a positive incentive for English-Canadian networks to make, promote and schedule shows effectively. Having to make something to keep your license rarely produces the best results. Look at the decline in the quality of broadcast TV kids’ shows in the late ’90s, after the FCC mandated a certain amount of “educational” programming as part of the license requirements.

What we would like English-Canadian TV networks to do is what cable networks did in the States: create original programming, improve the quality of that programming over time through trial and error, and learn to schedule those shows in such a way as to call attention to them — all because they felt it was worth their while, in a business sense, to have something more than reruns (the cable equivalent of the U.S. simulcast). It seems to me that it should be worth our while to make films and TV shows and put them in front of a wide audience, if only because of the financial rewards of a hit, but it’s pretty clear that much content is only aired and distributed out of a sense of duty. A sense of duty does not produce the most sparkling entertainment.

PMO requests RCMP investigation of former aide

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 12:42 PM - 15 Comments

The Prime Minster has asked the RCMP to investigate one of his former top advisors, Bruce Carson, for influence peddling after allegations arose that Carson used his position to offer access to the PMO. Carson is the director of the Canada School of Energy and Environment and the vice-chair of the Energy Policy Institute of Canada. During his tenure as a Harper aide, Carson was the top liaison on aboriginal affairs and co-chaired a government task force in charge of reforming the aboriginal land claims process. The Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN), which is planning to air an investigative report on Carson, alleges that he lobbied Indian Affairs Minister John Duncan’s office on behalf of an Ottawa water company, which was seeking to land contracts to sell poor quality water-filtration systems to native reserves. Upon being informed of the allegations by APTN, the PMO’s office has disavowed Carson. PMO spokesman Dimitri Soudas said the Prime Minister has “never met with, been spoken to or been lobbied by Bruce Carson on any of these matters.”

Globe and Mail

Pro-Gadhafi forces move on Benghazi

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 12:31 PM - 1 Comment

The U.S. is pushing for the UN to authorize aerial bombing of Libyan tanks and heavy artillery, now that pro-Gadhafi forces have reportedly begun a siege of the rebel stronghold at Benghazi. While the Obama administration has been hesitant to appear interventionist in the Libyan crisis, it is eager to support the rebels and no longer believes that a no-fly zone over Libya is an adequate enough solution. Any international intervention would have to have the backing of Libya’s Arab neighbours, which was given, in effect, last week when the Arab League voted on a resolution to back UN Security Council action. Meanwhile, Said al-Islam Gadhafi said he expects the rebel uprising to be defeated within 48 hours. Libyan rebels, however, were successful in shooting down at least two bomber planes and have commandeered tanks and helicopters as they struggle to defend their stronghold at Benghazi.

New York Times

The Traditional St. Patrick's Day Cartoon

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 11:36 AM - 2 Comments

It’s kind of strange that Porky Pig’s last theatrical film as a solo star (after this he would only appear as sidekick to Daffy Duck or Sylvester) should be a phantasmagoric cartoon about stereotypical leprechauns, but maybe not. Porky, being considered kind of a boring character by most of the directors and animators, was often placed in really surreal situations that he could react to without actually, you know, doing anything.

There’s something about the dialogue in films like this that I think is part of a great U.S. comedy tradition, the strange mash-ups of different types of language and the fascination with the way words sound. Many of the writers who wrote like this were New Yorkers, often the children of immigrants, and they would sort of create their own hybrid highbrow/lowbrow language out of all the different types of English they’d heard and read. Michael Maltese was one of the greatest practitioners of this kind of writing, and here he turns his attention to strange pidgin-Irish dialogue (“Now isn’t this sight enough to set the heart crosswise in ye?”) and dialogue that sounds like a fusion of stuff Porky has read in books (“You picturesque old peasant caretaker of the Old Sod, you!”). Lots of writers do colourful dialogue, but that kind of elaborate playfulness with the sheer sound of English is rarer.

The aftershock

By Terry Watada - Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 11:27 AM - 16 Comments

David Guttenfelder/AP

It was startling to wake up to CBC Radio spewing the news. I quickly submerged within the depths of cotton sheets, blankets, pillows and comforter as the details filtered through the haze of my half-sleep. 8.9-magnitude earthquake. 130 km away. Sendai affected. Tsunami warning.

The facts did trigger a dream: the water choking my seven-year-old self as I fell into the river flowing by my mother’s house in Fukui prefecture on Japan’s west coast before the images folded into the modern canals of Otaru, an artists’ village up in the northern island of Hokkaido, with a guitarist playing Fire and Rain. Everything came to a crashing stop and I found myself standing in the Peace Plaza in Hiroshima.

When I was fully awake, I turned on CBC Newsworld and CNN to see the black tsunami sweeping across the landscape like some evil Hayao Miyazaki monster laughing at seawalls, tossing vehicles aside like toys, and stripping buildings, boats and livelihoods to the bare bone. I kept flipping from one channel to the other. The horror was so intense, I felt the water gushing into my living room, grasping at family portraits, swelling saturated books, sliding across the floor in its unrelenting thirst for destruction.

My mind then swirled around to think about those I know in Japan. I have not been in touch with my relatives in Fukui since 1959, when my parents took me. In my mother’s childhood house, my aunts told me the story of their youngest sister, who fell off a low-lying bridge to a death by drowning in the river below. I, of course, wandered to the same bridge and slipped off, falling into the swift-running river leading to the Sea of Japan. If not for the quick actions of my adult cousin, I wouldn’t be alive today. I was severely punished, though I felt my mother’s warm arms around me and her body shaking in fear. Not unlike those on television.

My son was in Uryu, a farming village in the middle of Hokkaido, back in 2006, for a student exchange. At the Chitose airport, my wife and I met the host family, the Kanayamas, and apologized in anticipation of our son’s enormous appetite. The father in his gracious way said that was of no consequence since he has four sons and works a rice farm. We laughed. He then invited us for a visit. We said no since our son was already upset that not only were we in the same country but on the same island. “The other kids came without their parents!” he complained. Mr. Kanayama smiled knowingly and suggested we sneak into town. We laughed again.

Then I saw the explosions at the Fukushima nuclear reactors. Plumes of smoke rose in the air, vaguely reminiscent of the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I felt the chill of the past settle in my stomach. My parents took me to the Hiroshima museum during that 1959 trip. I absorbed the photographs of the victims, their charred bodies with melted skin hanging off useless arms and legs. I was too horrified to cry. I was told of my mother’s cousin, my father’s relatives. Did they suffer long with radiation poisoning or did they disintegrate into shadows on concrete like so many others? My wife’s family was saved by a mountain on the outskirts of Hiroshima, except for Aunt Chiemi, who worked in the hospital near ground zero. Remarkably, she survived the initial blast. She dragged herself for miles and hours through devastated, unrecognizable streets until she arrived home and found her two babies alive and well. She then collapsed and died. Could it happen all over again?

By the end of the weekend, with the endless loop of footage of the tsunami’s assault and aftermath burned into my brain, I suddenly envisioned a desolate land with only a hollow feeling left inside me. Will I never again taste the oyako donburi with salmon eggs, crab meat and rice of Sapporo? Will I never get to roam the back alleys of Tokyo’s Shinjuku district with its yakuza bars and disaffected youth squatting on the streets? Will I never tear up in the Hiroshima Peace Museum where my wife’s and my relatives are memorialized?

Irrational thoughts, an overreaction, but the effects of this earthquake and tsunami are more far-reaching than can be anticipated. The black waters, blotting, soiling and ruining everything they touched, jolted the sensibilities; in the aftershock, I realized all those I’ve known and all that I’ve seen in Japan will never be the same.

Terry Watada, 59, is a Toronto playwright, poet and novelist currently finishing a novel about Japanese-Canadian resistance to internment
during the Second World War.

Helplessness and humility in the nuclear age

By the editors - Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 11:10 AM - 1 Comment

Wally Santana/AP

Last week vast swaths of the country were devastated by a massive earthquake and tsunami. Now the country faces a nuclear crisis of equal ferocity. A cascading series of failures and explosions at a nuclear power plant in Fukushima following the earthquake and tidal wave has allowed radioactive clouds to drift up from the broken reactors and threaten densely populated areas to the south, including Tokyo. The situation may worsen in the coming days and it is possible the toll from this man-made disaster will eventually exceed that from the natural calamity.

The entire world is in shock at this rapid turn of events.

Nuclear accidents activate a deep-seated sense of panic and helplessness within the public, not unlike the fear of terrorist attacks. And whether rational or not, for the first time in a generation we must all face this fear.

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Who's to blame if no one cares?

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 10:55 AM - 87 Comments

That the public is generally disinterested in the business of Ottawa is something I blamed for the current state of the House of Commons. Scott Reid blames, in part, the press gallery for the fact that so few are interested.

We can begin with a Parliamentary Press Gallery that, increasingly, is dazzled by political tactics, bored by substance and disinterested in the awkward obligation of challenging authority. With too few exceptions — and one fewer with the sad passing of the Star’s Jim Travers — reporters seem more interested in sounding like in-the-know party strategists than detached observers.

It is they, in particular, who tell us repeatedly that “no one cares.” And all too frequently, there is little, if any, suggestion that part of the media’s function is to serve as a check on abuse of authority. Put another way, if Woodward and Bernstein had followed the same method we sometimes witness in Ottawa, they would surely have shrugged off Deep Throat, explaining that no one cares about such a technical, complicated story and that, in any event, Nixon’s triumph over McGovern rendered the matter moot.

The new transsexual chic

By Elio Iannacci - Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 10:42 AM - 0 Comments

Mauricio Lima/Pierre Verdy/AFP/Getty Images

When Givenchy’s creative director Riccardo Tisci decided to photograph Brazilian model Lea T for the luxury clothing label’s 2010 fall-winter promotional campaign, he had no idea what kind of impact it would have. The 28-year-old Ms. T.—formerly known as Leandro Cerezo—was the only transgender woman in the shoot. When word got out about Ms. T.’s past—that she was a man transitioning to be a woman—both indie fashion magazine Lurve and style bible French Vogue booked her for shoots. Even Oprah was onto the story.

“By doing the [Givenchy] campaign, I was thinking [I could help] another transsexual in a similar situation to me—being a female in the wrong body,” said Ms. T. in an interview with Models.com. “I hope a 20-year-old transsexual can see me in a magazine and feel more comfortable with herself. It’s a big message for girls and boys who are changing to say that people believe in us.” On Oprah last month, Ms. T. walked a shocked audience through the medical process of transitioning from male to female (her gender reassignment surgery is reportedly scheduled for later this year).

Following Tisci’s lead, French designer Jean Paul Gaultier recently capped off his spring 2011 couture collection in Paris by having male model Andrej Pejic walk down his runway in a wedding dress (the same one Rihanna wore at this year’s Grammy awards). Although 19-year-old Pejic does not identify as a transsexual woman, his feminine figure and facial features had the majority of front-row attendees convinced he was a she.

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The people's preacher

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 10:25 AM - 0 Comments

Dick Darrell/Toronto Star

Even before his political career began, Tommy Douglas—who immigrated to Canada from Scotland as a child, and came from hardscrabble roots—understood that, “at the end of the day, politics needed to be about practical things,” says Vincent Lam, an emergency room doctor and Giller Prize-winning author, whose latest book, part of Penguin’s Extraordinary Canadians series, profiles the father of universal health care in Canada (in stores March 8).

During the Depression, Douglas—then a small-town preacher in Weyburn, Sask.—was deeply affected by the poverty and inequality that surrounded him, Lam writes, and worked tirelessly to address the problems. “For him, being a preacher was completely practical,” Lam says, “because it meant you would deal with people.” This was Douglas’s guiding philosophy in those years, as well as through to his stint as Saskatchewan premier, and, finally, as the first leader of the federal New Democratic Party. Douglas “wasn’t someone who came to socialism from a rarefied academic perspective,” Lam says. “His thinking came from the ground up.”

As premier, Douglas presided over North America’s first socialist government, from 1944 to 1961. Yet he proved to be a unifying figure, admired by those on both sides of the political spectrum. “Some of the most creative thinking in policy and government doesn’t bow to those easy ideas of left and right,” Lam says. The health care system, he adds, “is part of the idea that societies should be constructed primarily to take care of people, and for people to help each other.”

EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT

While those investors who had become rich in the soaring equity markets of the 1920s lost their shirts in the Depression, many workers and farmers lost their pants, socks, and underwear. As Tommy and Irma, a young couple who looked more like teenagers than a pastor and his wife, settled in Weyburn, Sask., the price of grain collapsed, local businesses were shuttered, loans were called in, and family farms were foreclosed. Children did not attend school in the winter for lack of shoes to wear. The streets of Weyburn were lined with young men who had nothing to do. Saskatchewan was economically devastated.

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‘There is no normal in this family'

By Ken MacQueen - Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 10:09 AM - 6 Comments

Photograph by Brian Howell

On the last day of February, the family of Krista and Tatiana Hogan, Canada’s only conjoined twins, piled into a van leased by the provincial government for the journey southwest from Vernon, B.C., to Vancouver for a week-long series of medical appointments for the girls. The trip almost ended in disaster when they were caught in the midst of a multi-vehicle pileup during a blizzard on the mountainous Coquihalla Highway. They narrowly missed hitting a vehicle stopped on the highway during whiteout conditions. Louise McKay, the twins’ grandmother, put the van into a skid, stopping sideways on the road. Behind them, a car crashed into a semi-trailer and two pickups slammed into ditches on either side of the van. “God was looking after us,” says McKay.

The frequent medical trips to Vancouver, a 900-km round trip, are taking an increasing emotional and economic toll on the family, which subsists largely on social assistance and disability payments from the provincial Social Development Ministry. Money is so tight that they say they’re left destitute meeting the extraordinary needs of the 4½-year-old girls—craniopagus twins who are joined at the head and share a bridge between each girl’s thalamus, a part of the brain that relays sight and other sensory information.

McKay says the family used much of its March rent money to finance part of its recent trip to Vancouver, where the twins had a series of checkups and tests. They fear they’ll  face eviction if they don’t come up with the month’s $1,750 rent. Adults in the extended family of 14 sometimes go hungry to ensure there is food for the children. “We’ll go a couple of days sometimes without eating anything. As long as the kids are fed, we’re okay,” says McKay, who has diabetes, and who has a small disability pension for an anxiety disorder.

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Inshoring jobs

By Colin Campbell - Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 10:08 AM - 1 Comment

Ym Yik/Epa/Corbis;

For decades, manufacturing jobs offshored from North America have fuelled the massive Chinese economy. But as wages in China rise, at least one firm is taking the next logical step to hold its cost advantage: “inshoring” jobs away from coastal manufacturing areas to even cheaper provinces inland.

Foxconn Technology, one of the world’s largest electronics makers, has started shifting 200,000 workers from its home base in the coastal city of Shenzhen, near Hong Kong, to lower-cost provinces. The company plans to eventually move all of its manufacturing jobs out of Shenzhen and turn its facilities there into “an engineering campus,” reports the Financial Times.

The company has struggled recently with a series of suicides at its plants, which it responded to by raising wages. But it is also credited with helping transform Shenzhen into a global manufacturing centre, and it is expected to similarly boost the economies of new regions it pushes into.

This week : Good news, bad news

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 10:06 AM - 0 Comments

Good news

Adnan Abidi/Reuters

Fixing the House

Fed up with Ottawa’s increasingly partisan tone, Green Leader Elizabeth May has launched an attack ad attacking attack ads. More civility in, and out of, the House is a good idea, and we urge all parties to take heed. For example, Tory Michael Chong’s motion to bring back decorum to question period is stuck in committee limbo, and risks dying if an election is called. Perhaps a pledge from MPs to show up in the chamber more often might get things moving in the right direction.

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

While Steve Jobs has been forced to hand over the reins at Apple due to illness, it was reassuring to see him appear on a stage last week in San Francisco to reveal the company’s latest tablet, the sleek iPad 2. Jobs looked frail, but his participation was nevertheless a welcome reminder that he still has a hand in the game. We shudder to imagine what technology and design would look like without him.

The age of Discovery

The shuttle Discovery returned to Earth this week completing its 39th, and final, trip into space. In service for 30 years, the oldest remaining shuttle had many important missions, including the deployment, and later repair, of the Hubble telescope and construction of the International Space Station. Among the special tributes was a morning wake-up call for the astronauts from Star Trek’s William Shatner. Only two more shuttle missions remain before all the craft are retired. Time for the next generation.

Fashion and passion

The International Football Association has banned the wearing of “snoods”—combo neck-warmers and hoods—during matches. Critics, particularly in the English Premier League, groused that they were unmanly, but FIFA president Sepp Blatter says it’s a matter of safety. “It can also be dangerous. It can be like to hang somebody.” Given the amount of diving and fakery in the men’s game, it might be too late to preserve its dignity. Thankfully, there’s always the example of Canada’s women, who beat Scotland, Italy and England en route to a berth in the final of the Cyprus Cup. With our country set to host the 2015 Women’s World Cup, all the more reason to cheer.

Bad news

Rahmat Gul/AP

Mo’ Gitmo

President Barack Obama came to power vowing to shut down the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and bring its detainees—many held without charge for a decade—to justice. But in the face of strong opposition to warehousing and trying accused terrorists on U.S. soil, he reversed the first part of that plan. This week, he took another huge step backwards, reinstating George W. Bush’s system of military tribunals. Surely the world’s leading democracy shouldn’t fear free and open trails. Justice must be seen to be done.

Libya’s needs

While the international community dithers about imposing a no-fly zone over Libyan skies, Col. Moammar Gadhafi continues to use his air force to bomb and strafe both rebels and civilians. Removing this madman from power would clearly benefit not only the country, but the whole world. So far, the only thing anti-Gadhafi forces have been getting are snooping visitors, like the eight British spies and commandos captured and sent packing last week. Too bad the West seems to favour intrigue over real action.

Lingering danger

Spring is creeping closer, but winter remains Canada’s season of danger. In Chambly, Que., a man died when the snow fort he was making for his stepson collapsed on top of him. In southwestern Ontario, an eight-year-girl is missing and presumed drowned after falling through the ice of a creek behind her home. In Moncton, N.B., the city’s salt storage dome roof caved in after yet another heavy snowfall. Never underestimate nature.

Age and awareness

Elderly drivers are half as likely as younger ones to see pedestrians on the curb or sidewalk, according to a new study by Israeli researchers. Not only do they have a narrower field of vision, they take longer to respond to hazards once they finally notice them. And it seems that age-inspired ignorance isn’t limited to the road. Alan Simpson, the 79-year-old co-chairman of Obama’s deficit commission, went on TV this week to talk about social security and ended up chiding kids for their baggy pants and the crazy music of “Snoopy Snoopy Poop Dogg” and “Enema Man.” Learn to Google, Grandpa.

Radio Shangri-La: What I Learned In The Happiest Kingdom On Earth

By Rebecca Caldwell - Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

On the surface, Lisa Napoli’s mid-life crisis sounds familiar. In her early 40s, single, childless and with one failed marriage under her belt, not even her successful public radio career could shake that hollow feeling: “I was tired of observing life from a distance, of synthesizing and distilling data with little time to process its meaning.”

But instead of just enrolling in yoga or a positive-thinking class (although she did the latter, too), Napoli fled her Los Angeles home for Bhutan, a tiny kingdom nestled in the Himalayas between India and China. Officially she was there to advise a struggling new radio station. Unofficially, she was there to learn from the only nation that cares so much for the emotional well-being of its people that it measures prosperity by its Gross National Happiness rather than its Gross Domestic Product.

At first, Napoli’s journey is charmingly kooky. The youth-based Kuzoo FM has the engaging can-do spirit of the underdog fighting the odds: the DJs make do with lacklustre equipment and Napoli needs to post signs reminding them to make sure the mikes are actually on during transmission. Outside the studio, the walls of houses are painted with giant phalluses, a roundabout way to ward off material jealousy through shaming viewers. Monks offer to perform a ritual chanting to “cleanse” Napoli of her obstacles.

Bhutan is not all bliss, however. The standard of living for the mostly rural population is distressingly low. And Napoli feels like a “hypocrite” for instructing the Bhutanese in Western media practices she worries are spreading the very culture of mindless consumption that drove her there in the first place.

Still, if Napoli can’t ever reconcile the two hemispheres, she realizes she may not have to. Life is complicated everywhere, and true happiness comes from within, no matter what country you’re in.

Betting the farm – and winning

By Sarah Elton - Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 11 Comments

Cultura/Hugh Whitaker

The great plains of the Prairies grew the nation, fed the British Empire and fuelled our literary canon. Now the world’s breadbasket has a new role in a growing number of investment portfolios. Investors are buying Canadian agricultural land, betting that rising food prices, a ballooning global population and growing worldwide scarcities in farmland will mean a payoff for them.

“The interest we’re seeing has gone exponential,” said Stephen Johnston of Agcapita, one of a handful of private companies in this country that are investing in land on behalf of high-net-worth individuals and creating farmland funds because, he says, compared to other parts of the world, Canadian farmland remains cheap. Prices range from about $500 an acre in Saskatchewan or $700 in Manitoba to a steeper $1,200 in Alberta (versus anywhere from $6,000 to $10,000 an acre in Iowa, say, where prices have risen dramatically in the past year). Many predict that one day the land will be as precious as gold—or even better. “Unlike gold, farmland generates ongoing income,” said Johnston.

Not only are investors speculating on land, they believe they can make a profit leasing the acreages to farmers while they wait for the right time to sell. Investors in Saskatchewan are charging rent equal to seven per cent of a property’s worth, said Johnston. That would mean a farmer pays around $70,000 upfront in rent, per year, for an average-sized 2,000-acre farm from Agcapita. The number could climb with farm prices, which are already rising. According to Statistics Canada, the price of Alberta farmland almost doubled between 2000 and 2009. According to Marvin Painter, a business professor at the University of Saskatchewan, the dividend yield from the rent and the predicted capital gain from a future land sale works out to be only slightly below what a blue-chip stock would reap.

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Another RCMP investigation

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 9:59 AM - 65 Comments

As a result of APTN’s reporting, the Prime Minister’s Office has asked the RCMP to investigate the actions of Bruce Carson, a former senior advisor in the PMO.

In one email, obtained by APTN, Carson wrote two officials with the company, H2O Pros, claiming he had spoken with the prime minister on Aug. 5 about the pending appointment of Duncan to the Indian Affairs portfolio. “I spoke with the PM last nite and with (Assembly of First Nations national Chief Shawn) Atleo-the movement of John Duncan to INAC does not slow anything down (sic),” wrote Carson, in an email dated Aug. 6 and received at 7:01 a.m. “Both Shawn and I know John very well-and I will be calling the new Minister this morning-so it is still full steam ahead.”

Carson told APTN on camera that he lied in the email, but that he had spoken to “someone,” but did not elaborate.

A reason to love cheetos

By Erica Alini - Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 9:56 AM - 0 Comments

Ballooning food prices are throwing much of the developing world into disarray, but in rich countries, and particularly in the U.S., consumers have mostly continued to roll through the grocery aisle blissfully immune from the double-digit increases that many credit for sparking riots in the Middle East. In the U.S., the price tag for food at the supermarket inched up only 0.3 per cent in January.

The reason for this, according to a recent CitiGroup report, is—to put it bluntly—that most of what we eat isn’t really food. “For better or worse,” notes the study, “this reflects the very high processing content of food.” In processed foods, in fact, price hikes for basic ingredients can be easily absorbed by slimming production and marketing margins. More evidence of this comes from the calculations of Mark Perry, an economics professor at the University of Michigan-Flint. He has found that finished consumer food products in the U.S. have floated only three per cent above or below the average price for their last 10 years, while raw-food commodities, meanwhile, have swung 14 per cent on average. Cheez Whiz, Pizza Pops and other processed foods may not be healthy, but, it seems, they are at least a helpful ally against food inflation.

Stylish investments

By Julia Belluz - Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 9:12 AM - 1 Comment

Akira Suemori/AP

Those looking to diversify their portfolios with an attractive investment may consider heading to Kerry Taylor Auctions in London, England, on March 17 and picking up some royal garb. In advance of the April 29 wedding of Kate Middleton and Prince William, the “dress that started it all” will be up for grabs. Middleton modelled the see-through shift over black lingerie at the annual University of St. Andrews charity fashion show in 2002. Though it cost a mere $30 to make, it’s now expected to fetch between $12,000 and $15,000.

That might sound steep, but Middleton’s sexy number is a bargain when you consider the estimated value of two of Diana’s dresses, which are also on Kerry Taylor’s auction block. A white lace evening gown worn by the late princess of Wales on a state visit to France is expected to earn up to $95,000. Meanwhile, a pretty pink chiffon dinner dress, which Diana sported in Japan, could attract between $47,000 and $63,000.

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Angry grannies, fists of fury

By Matteo Fagotto - Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 9:12 AM - 2 Comments

Photograph by Sarah Elliott

Sitting on a wooden bench in a dusty, barren clearing surrounded by walls of corrugated iron, a group of old ladies watch their mate, 72-year-old Wambui Kimuhu, kicking and punching an unlucky sparring partner 30 years younger than her. Using her bare hands and legs, Kimuhu yells an intimidating “No!” after every stroke, forcing him to retreat until instructor Sheila Kariuki stops the fight. “The training is finished, you don’t have to kill him!” she shouts, while the surrounding grannies clap.

Photograph by Sarah Elliott

Here, at the Streams of Hope and Peace charity training centre in the slum of Korogocho, Nairobi, more than 30 local grannies are undergoing a free martial arts course to protect themselves from a recent spate of house robberies and rapes. Aged from 50 to 100 (many don’t know their age), the “Cucu Takinge,”—”Grannies defending themselves” in Swahili—learn the basics of karate and kung fu, along with “dirty tricks” such as pokes in the eyes and kicks to the groin. The course aims to give the old ladies time and space to seek help in case of an attack; therefore, accuracy in the strokes and yelling are more important than strength. There are even specific techniques conceived for blind people. “Remember, your goal is to force back the attackers and attract attention. Never try to compete with younger guys, because they will win,” Kariuki warns the ladies, some of whom appear strong and fit while others struggle even to lift their legs, hampered by their long African gowns.

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