'Sensible, pragmatic, courageous'

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 at 2:47 PM - 31 Comments

Scott Brison considers British Columbia’s carbon tax.

“If you look at Campbell’s government in terms of tax policy and carbon tax, he was a centrist,” Brison said during a one-hour interview with The Province editorial board. “A carbon tax is not a left-wing or a right-wing policy, it’s simply a sensible, pragmatic, courageous [policy],” adding it also was “a risky idea” politically.

Here is the official explanation of that carbon tax.

Church of Scientology builds new headquarters in Ontario

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 at 2:32 PM - 17 Comments

The Church of Scientology is planning to build its national headquarters in a former resort near Orangeville, just outside of Toronto. The church is planning a significant overhaul of the Hockley Highlands Inn and Conference Centre in Mono, which sits on more than 80 hectares of land and will allow Scientologists to establish a campus with five buildings totaling 160,000 square feet. “All told, it’s exactly what is required to assist Canadian Scientologists through the ultimate frontier at the top of the bridge to total freedom,” says the narrator in a promotional online video. But Adam Holland, a former member of the church says the isolated location of the site will make it difficult for people to leave the church of their own free will, and plans to “educate local residents to be ready to help out anyone who does escape.” Holland says that Scientology officials “did everything within the threshold of the law” to prevent him from leaving after volunteering at the church’s Toronto centre for two years. Church officials denied Holland’s claim and say that anyone is free to leave.

Toronto Star

Chernobyl's radioactive legacy

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 at 1:08 PM - 4 Comments

As Japan works to prevent a meltdown at its earthquake-hit Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant, Ukraine is preparing to mark the 25th anniversary of the world’s worst nuclear accident. The legacy of the meltdown at the Chernobyl plant includes a 30-km uninhabited ring around the site of the meltdown, billions of dollars spent cleaning the region, and a major new effort to raise US $840 million in funds that Kiev needs to build a more durable casement over the stricken reactor. Psychological and physical scars persist, too. Studies have found that “exposed populations had anxiety levels that were twice as high” as people unaffected by the accident, as well as a “dramatic increase in thyroid cancer incidence” in the Ukraine and just across the border in Belarus. But there are differences between Chernobyl and the disaster in Japan. Chernobyl was the product of human error, while the Japanese failure was triggered by an earthquake and tsunami. Chernobyl occurred in a secretive Soviet society, and authorities attempted to cover-up the truth until three days after it occurred, which delayed international aid. Most notably, thick containment walls at the Fukushima Daiichi plant shielded the reactor cores so that even if there was a meltdown, it’s unlikely to lead to a major escape of dangerous radioactive clouds into the atmosphere. Chernobyl had no such structure.

Reuters

Trudeau backtracks on honour killings remark

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 at 12:54 PM - 68 Comments

Montreal Liberal MP Justin Trudeau apologized on Tuesday for criticizing Conservatives’ use of the word “barbaric” to describe honour killings. Trudeau’s misgivings about the word rose to the forefront of the debate over changes to the federal government Discover Canada guide aimed at immigrants seeking citizenship. Ottawa added a passage to the guide to inform readers ”Canada’s openness and generosity do not extend to barbaric cultural practices that tolerate spousal abuse, ‘honour killings,’ female genital mutilation, forced marriage or other gender-based violence.” In an interview with a local radio station, Trudeau said he was “uncomfortable” with the description. Conservatives were quick to pounce on the remark, leading Trudeau to backtrack on his criticism. “Perhaps I got tangled in semantic weeds in my comments, particularly in view of the Conservatives’ cynicism on these issues,” he wrote in an email to Postmedia News. “I want to make clear that I think the acts described are heinous, barbaric acts that are totally unacceptable in our society.”

Postmedia News

Japanese crisis hits the global economy

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 at 12:45 PM - 0 Comments

The devastation of the tsunami and the threat of a nuclear crisis in Japan have hit financial markets hard, with the Canadian dollar down more than one cent and the TSX losing more than 300 points in the opening five minutes of trading on Tuesday. The Nikkei stock index plunged by 11 per cent, or 1,000 points, while the NYSE invoked Rule 48, which allows the exchange to suspend required price dissemination and official floor approval before opening. The U.S. dollar is benefiting as investors seek treasuries to protect against a “demand destructive event.”

CBC News

The information era (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 at 12:36 PM - 5 Comments

Glen Pearson pitches the religion of open data.

Each political party must now ask itself what it must do in order to renew not only Parliament but itself in the process. While progressive governments around the world have deployed digital technology to advance transparency and unshackle information to fuel knowledge and innovation, Canada has been held in check by the most secretive government in its history. It remains to be seen whether the technological revolution that is succeeding in renewing government representation throughout the Middle East and Africa will actually unfold in Canada, where research announced yesterday stated that we spend more time on the Internet than any other nation.

RCMP seeks missing Canadians in relation to terror plot

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 at 12:13 PM - 0 Comments

The RCMP have laid terrorism-related charges against two missing Winnipeg men believed to have been involved in a 2009 plot to blow up New York subway cars. Ferid Imam, a University of Manitoba student, is alleged to have trained the Al-Qaeda terrorists who were to carry out the plot and faces a life sentence if he is convicted. He vanished from Winnipeg in 2007, and is believed to be somewhere in northwestern Pakistan. His accomplice, Miawand Yar, faces up to 10 years in prison for participating in a terrorist conspiracy. The case will test Canada’s Anti-Terrorism Act passed in 2001, which allows police to charge terrorism suspects who commit crimes outside Canada’s borders.

The Globe and Mail

Has Atlantis been discovered?

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 at 12:09 PM - 10 Comments

A team of researchers say they might have found the lost city of Atlantis, which is thought to have been destroyed by a tsunami thousands of years ago. They believe its ruins could be buried under mud flats in southern Spain, just north of Cadiz. Using deep-ground radar, digital mapping and underwater technology to survey the site, archaeologists and geologists believe they found the city buried in the marshlands of Dona Ana Park. Head researcher Richard Freund, a professor at the University of Hartford, Connecticut, found a series of “memorial cities” built in Atlantis’ image by refugees after its likely destruction, which convinced researchers it could very well be the real thing. Accounts from Greek philosopher Plato, written 2,600 years ago, were used to help them pinpoint it. The region is notorious for its tsunamis, although debate about whether Atlantis really existed has gone on for thousands of years.

Reuters

Third blast rocks Japanese nuclear plant

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 at 11:35 AM - 23 Comments

Radiation at the Daiichi nuclear plant in Fukushima has reached harmful levels, the Japanese government says, after a third blast damaged the containment system of the second reactor. A fire that broke out at the plant’s fourth reactor also caused more radioactive leaks. Cooling seawater has been pumped into the plants first and third reactor, stabilizing them for the time being. Radiation levels were higher than normal in Tokyo, which lies about 250km away from the Fukushima Daiichi plant, although officials say there are no immediate health dangers for residents in the capital. The 140,000 residents living within the 30km exclusion zone who have not already been evacuated are advised not to leave their homes. The latest death toll from the earthquake and tsunami sits at 2,400 but is estimated that at least 10,000 people have been killed, and 500,000 people are homeless.

BBC News

Lawyers behaving badly

By Kate Lunau - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 at 11:11 AM - 59 Comments

Photograph by Aaron Vincent Elkaim

Young, ambitious and intelligent, Ryan Manilla was, by almost all accounts, on the road to becoming a first-rate lawyer. He excelled at Osgoode Hall Law School, graduating in the top 10 per cent of his class. He won a summer job in the New York City offices of Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg, one of Canada’s leading firms. In 2009, he completed his articles with Pinkofskys in Toronto, where he intended to practise criminal law.

But in September, Manilla’s career came to a crashing halt. The Law Society of Upper Canada (LSUC), which regulates Ontario’s lawyers and paralegals, denied his application to join the profession, based on its ages-old “good character” requirement. (Manilla’s appeal was heard last week, and a decision is pending.) It wasn’t a strictly professional issue that convinced the law society panel to bar Manilla—it was the young man’s dealings with his condominium board.

Canadian law societies have required lawyers to be “of good character” virtually as long as the profession has been regulated, but it’s rare for someone to be barred because his character was found lacking. Even the meaning of “good character” can be a little bit hazy: it isn’t defined in the Law Society Act, but it’s been described as having a strong moral fibre, a belief the law must be upheld, and an appreciation of the difference between right and wrong. The law society can wield that requirement to decide who gets to be a lawyer—and sometimes, who doesn’t, as the Manilla case shows.

Continue…

The Googlization Of Everything (And Why We Should Worry)

By Chris Sorensen - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 at 10:52 AM - 0 Comments

At first blush, this book looks to be a few years too late. The chatter in Silicon Valley these days is about social networking site Facebook, which, after several years of heady growth, is being touted as the next Internet game-changer. Of course, that doesn’t mean we’ve stopped using Google, only that we’ve ceased to be amazed by it—which is exactly Siva Vaidhyanathan’s point. He argues that Google has become so commonplace in people’s lives that we no longer question how much power we’ve already ceded to the Mountainview, Calif.-based giant.

Adorned with its colourful logo, Google’s clever search engine effectively determines what we view on the Web, filtering results based on popularity, location of users and even personal search histories. We assume Google is on our side because we find its services useful and pleasing, but we seldom question whether Google’s view of the online world—or, more accurately, the picture of the online world Google allows us to see—is the same one we’re actually interested in exploring.
The core problem, according to Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia, is that we’re not actually Google’s customers. We’re its product. Advertisers pay Google billions to use the information it collects about users to better target us with ads. While that doesn’t necessarily lessen the utility of Google’s services, Vaidhyanathan says it should make us think carefully about Google’s noble-sounding mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” when it comes to opening up our university libraries and other shared resources of human knowledge for Google to copy and index. After all, there are no guarantees that Google, a for-profit business, will always act in our best interests. Nor can we be sure it will still be around a decade from now, let alone 100 years or more.

Big Society, big con?

By Leah Mclaren - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 at 10:52 AM - 10 Comments

Oli Scarff/Reuters

It’s been a difficult few weeks for David Cameron’s much vaunted Big Society.

The concept behind the British prime minister’s plan to rejuvenate the economy is either the great hope for modern Britain or a puff of political hot air, depending which side of the debate you fall on. As the initial round of deep public spending cuts approaches later this spring—the first of a planned $130 billion through 2015—some former champions are backing away from the notion of what Cameron calls the “plan to dismantle Big Government and build the Big Society in its place.”

So what exactly is the “big society” anyway? In the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition agreement, it is described as a plan to “take power away from politicians to give it to people.” Labour MP Ed Balls, on the other hand, has dubbed it “the big con.” Three points are certain: it seems to involve less government, more civic engagement, and the PM is very, very excited about it.

Others less so. Lord Wei, a consultant tasked by Cameron with pushing the Big Society agenda, revealed last month he would be scaling down the amount of time he devotes to the project (the irony of having a key volunteer abandon the volunteering bandwagon has been giddily noted in the country’s left-wing press). And in the same week, Liverpool city council, which was a test case council for one of four pilot volunteer schemes, announced it was pulling out and no longer supports the Big Society, as a direct result of the Tory-led government’s funding decisions.

Continue…

Monaco's royal pains

By Patricia Treble - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 at 10:28 AM - 2 Comments

Lionel Cironneau/AP

Wearing a sleek black Speedo suit, her long blond hair tucked into an orange cap, Charlene Wittstock strode out of the water in Kwazulu Natal, South Africa, on Feb. 12, looking more like the competitive swimmer she used to be than the royal bride she is. She’d just completed the Midmar Mile, a massive open-water swim, and helped raise $80,000 for the Special Olympics. In July, the statuesque South African beauty marries Monaco’s reigning prince, Albert II, and becomes his princess consort. Monaco hasn’t had a princess consort in almost 20 years, since Albert’s mother, Princess Grace, died in 1982. Like Grace, an American who gave up an Oscar-winning acting career upon her marriage to Prince Rainier, Wittstock, 33, is an English-speaking outsider to the tiny, ultra-exclusive Mediterranean playground for the rich and famous.

She’s also scandal-free, something that certainly does not apply to her 52-year-old groom or his sisters Caroline and Stephanie. For decades the Grimaldi family has hit the headlines with trashy tales of wildly unsuitable lovers, broken marriages and brawls. Indeed, illegitimacy and shotgun weddings are almost de rigueur: of the three siblings’ nine children, five were born out of wedlock while two others arrived less than nine months after their parents’ nuptials. Their shenanigans make those of Queen Elizabeth II’s four children look positively tame: while three first marriages of the Windsor kids broke down spectacularly, currently Charles and Anne have second spouses and Edward is still with his original wife, while Andrew never remarried. And certainly no illegitimate children have appeared.

In contrast, Albert, a lifelong bachelor, confessed, mere weeks after his father died in 2005 and he’d assumed power, that he’d fathered a boy, Alexandre, then three, with a Togolese flight attendant. The revelation at least put to rest the rumours that he was gay, which had dogged him for years. He hinted on French TV that there were other progeny. “I know there are other people who are in more or less the same situation. We will give them an answer at the appropriate time.” Then, in 2006, he acknowledged his 14-year-old daughter, Jazmin Grace, the result of a vacation fling in 1991 with a married Californian, Tamara Rotolo. Neither illegitimate child can inherit the throne. The revelations only put Albert on par with his headline-grabbing sisters.

Continue…

Your duly elected messenger

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 at 10:28 AM - 59 Comments

In case a $26-million ad campaign fails to deliver the good news, the Conservative caucus will fan out today to spread the prescripted word.

If they stick to the scripts provided for them, the MPs will tell their audiences that the infrastructure projects “resulted in jobs for engineers, architects, construction workers and many others when they were needed most.” ”I’m proud to say investments under the program have created and maintained jobs across Canada and made a difference to many Canadians and their families,” the prepared speech says.

The value of being a wheat king

By Erica Alini - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 at 10:26 AM - 0 Comments

The race is on to create noodle-perfect wheat. The University of Manitoba, for example, plans to use ultrasound technology to study the texture of doughs used in noodle-making, and single out the best wheat for the job. If successful, says Martin Scanlon, a professor in the department of food science, it could help bring to the market new varieties of highly competitive Canadian wheat-for-noodles in as little as five years. Tellingly, the federal government’s Canadian Grain Commission has a research program devoted to developing wheats that fit the “colour, appearance, and cooked texture” of noodles.

The heightened interest reflects a broad trend in global trade. Canada’s wheat exports have been shifting east, with Asian markets now absorbing about half of our wheat exports, a quarter of which go into noodle production. Last year, Canada sold almost $1.5-billion worth of wheat to Asia, which was three times its exports to European Union countries. “The traditional view of Canada as the breadbasket of the world is not entirely correct anymore,” says Scanlon. And while much of our Asian wheat exports currently turns up in Japanese noodle bowls, trade flows to the region are likely to grow thanks to the increasingly deep pockets of Chinese consumers, says Graham Worden, senior manager of technical services at the Winnipeg-based Canadian Wheat Board. China has traditionally pursued a policy of self-sufficiency on wheat, but the local crop tends to be cheap and rather low quality, says Worden. The hope is that the Chinese will develop a large appetite for high-end noodles, only made possible, say experts, with top-quality wheat.

The Company We Keep: A Husband-And-Wife True-Life Spy Story

By Brian Bethune - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 at 10:22 AM - 0 Comments

John Le Carré’s notorious double agent Bill Haydon believed that a country’s intelligence services were the true embodiment of its national character. Seems to be so, judging by this very American story of two burned-out spooks who fall in love. Their twin-track stories unfold all over the world, wherever the U.S. has interests, while both agents watch their first marriages crumble under the strain of secrecy, lies and frequent absence. And perhaps most American of all, after Bob Baer retired in 1997 he didn’t fade into the shadows but became the best-known ex-agent in CIA history. Time magazine’s online intelligence columnist, he has written for Vanity Fair and the Washington Post, and authored several books, one the basis for the Oscar-winning film Syriana. George Clooney’s character, Bob Barnes, is loosely based on Baer.

The story really picks up after Bob and Dayna work a mission together in Sarajevo during the wars sparked by the breakup of Yugoslavia, before accidently meeting again back at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., where they can finally reveal their real names to each other. They leave the agency and move to (of all places) Beirut, which Bob had come to love during his stints as a Mideast op. Shadowy acquaintances readily accept the couple is no longer tied to Washington, but believe that means they must be up for anything: they receive dodgy offers of work in the oil business and an invitation to join a murder-for-hire plot. Bob and Dayna keep moving around, like the rootless agents they were, but eventually settle down. And they decide to adopt a Pakistani baby, embarking on an uncertain process that provides the most heart-stopping suspense in the entire book. The Company We Keep is one of the oddest spy tales ever penned, and if the reader sometimes pauses at what’s being stated by authors who were, after all, accomplished professional liars, there’s enough rough verisimilitude here to conclude the book truly is something even more rare: a spy story with a happy ending.

Gbagbo has brought his country to the brink of civil war

By Alex Derry - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 at 10:08 AM - 0 Comments

Amir Cohen/Reuters

With the world’s attention focused on the Libyan conflict and pro-democracy uprisings sweeping North Africa, another African dictator’s refusal to give up power has resulted in the complete collapse of his country, leaving it on the brink of anarchy and civil war.

In Ivory Coast, Laurent Gbagbo continues to cling to the presidency despite losing the November 2010 election to his rival, Alassane Ouattara. It was a power grab that resulted in international condemnation, economic sanctions and a delegation of African Union leaders paying him a visit to demand that he cede power. Instead, Gbagbo unleashed a wave of violence. So far, 365 people are dead, and an untold number of rapes, abductions and disappearances have been conducted by security forces and pro-Gbagbo thugs.

Today, Abidjan is a war zone, with pitched battles raging between trained militias loyal to Gbagbo and the insurgent Forces Nouvelles rebels who support Ouattara. Both are using heavy weaponry; pro-Gbagbo youth militias are looting and burning the houses of pro-Ouattara politicians. There are unconfirmed reports of soldiers entering hospitals and executing wounded victims. “You can’t really understate how cruel and sadistic the combat has become,” says Marco Oved, a Canadian journalist with the Associated Press based in Abidjan. “What is going on here are war crimes.”

Continue…

Australia's haves and have-nots

By Josh Dehaas - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 at 10:06 AM - 0 Comments

New South Wales (NSW), with a third of Australia’s population and its largest financial centre, Sydney, was once the economic engine of the country. But next year, the state will receive $1 billion more in funding as part of national equalization—increasingly, NSW is a “have-not” state.

The rapid rise of resource revenues in the frontier territories, along with slower growth in the country’s southeast, have contributed to the imbalance. It’s a familiar story for Canadians: Ontario, with 38 per cent of the population and the country’s main financial centre, tipped into “have-not” status in late 2008. And much like some politicians in Western Canada, leaders in Queensland and Western Australia aren’t pleased about the increasing burden of NSW and Victoria (the latter, with a quarter of the country’s population, has long been the country’s greatest recipient).

Upon hearing his state will only receive 93 cents of every GST dollar it collects next year, Queensland Treasurer Andrew Fraser accused the southeast of “burglary.” Western Australia, meanwhile, is getting only 72 cents per dollar, because it produces 36 per cent of the nation’s exports and is booming. It can afford to share, said the Commonwealth Grants Commission in its annual report.

The female MP Michael Moore is championing

By Mitchel Raphael - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 at 10:06 AM - 26 Comments

Photograph By Mitchel Raphael

The youngest woman in the House

When Vale, the world’s second-largest mining company, decided to close a nickel smelter and refiner in Thompson, Man.—which the Brazilian giant took over as part of its 2006 purchase of Inco—months after receiving a $1-billion loan from Export Development Canada, local NDP MP Niki Ashton mobilized her constituents. “This is an example of a foreign takeover gone wrong,” says Ashton. Aiming to bring attention to the cause, she helped produce a video and then suggested to her supporters they show it to maverick filmmaker Michael Moore. Four days after they sent it, Moore’s people got back to her. They asked Ashton for more information and then the video and the story went up on michaelmoore.com, prefaced with a message from Moore himself titled “Why I support the people of Thompson, Canada—and you should too.” Moore added: “Don’t be embarrassed if you need a map to find Thompson, though—blame the U.S. media, which will only tell you about Canadians if they have some connection to Justin Bieber.” As of early this week, the video had over 21,000 hits on YouTube—a number way higher than the entire population of Thompson. Moore was so impressed by Ashton that his people asked her to be a regular contributor to his website. Notes the MP, “One of the things that really excited them was that I am currently the youngest woman in the House of Commons.” Ashton, who is 28, is in fact the second-youngest woman ever to be elected as an MP. She says Moore’s people told her they are very interested in tackling youth apathy when it comes to politics.

Continue…

Those creepy Facebook apps

By Kate Lunau - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 at 9:54 AM - 0 Comments

Facebook isn’t a dating site, but countless users treat it as such, trolling friends’ pages to see who’s in a relationship and who’s available. Now, thanks to a handful of new applications, Facebook users can anonymously stalk their crushes with greater ease than ever—and maybe even nudge them out of a relationship they’re currently in.

Launched in late February by Dan Loewenherz, a 24-year-old computer programmer living in L.A., “Breakup Notifier” informs its users via email once targeted friends change their relationship status. The app has proved hugely popular: “It grew super fast,” Loewenherz told Maclean’s, attracting over 116,000 people to the site within 24 hours of launching. Hot on its heels, Loewenherz introduced “Crush Notifier.” People pinpoint friends they’re interested in, and if that person likes them too, both get an email.

Perhaps even more creepy/brilliant is the new “WaitingRoom” app, which Facebook users can install anonymously—it never appears on their profiles—and use to woo an unrequited love. Their target receives an email that someone is interested in them, but they won’t find out who until they ditch their current partners. (They have to change their relationship status on Facebook to “single.”) “If you’re already in a relationship, WaitingRoom will give you the confidence to become single again—if that’s what you really want,” promises the site.

The popularity of these apps indicates they’re meeting a “huge cultural need,” says Sidneyeve Matrix, a media professor at Queen’s University. Social networking sites like Facebook are by far the most promising places to find love, according to a recent study from Euro RSCG Worldwide, even more so than matchmaker sites. (Last month, Facebook made relationship statuses more customizable, adding “in a civil union” and “in a domestic partnership” to the options list.) “People are just inherently interested in being with somebody,” Loewenherz says, explaining the success of Breakup Notifier. Looking to make the next big app, he and other developers are only too happy to give them what they want—or at least, provide a new way to creep their crush’s Facebook page.

The information era

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 at 9:25 AM - 39 Comments

While the RCMP has been called in to investigate a former ministerial staffer, the information commissioner details the filing system at Public Works.

Legault’s intensive probe of the Togneri case uncovered a so-called “purple file” process at Public Works, by which the minister’s political staff reviewed potentially damaging access releases at meetings with the responsible public servants. ”This purple file process creates a high-risk environment for potential influence or interference with ATIA release decisions and timely disclosure under the Act,” her report found. The report says Public Works has since changed the process so there are no more face-to-face meetings between bureaucrats and minister’s aides. The political staff are no longer allowed to know the category of requester, whether news media or opposition MPs.

The sad news Bears

By John Intini - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 at 8:38 AM - 0 Comments

IMAGES; Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Bradley Reinhardt

The 1985 Chicago Bears were a perfect mix of fierceness and flash. Relentless, especially on defence, the Bears were also expert entertainers, as proven by their Grammy Award-nominated Super Bowl Shuffle performance. They could make you laugh at their lack of rhythm on MTV one day, and then make you cry when they pummelled your favourite team the next. Few pro teams have come close to matching their swagger. And the Bears backed it up, going 15-1 that season before embarrassing the New England Patriots 46-10 in the Super Bowl.

In the quarter-century since that lopsided title game, the greatest football team of all time has suffered tragedy and misadventures of a similarly epic scale. The first tragic blow struck in 1999, when Walter Payton, Chicago’s Hall of Fame running back, died of bile duct cancer at 45. Last month, it was revealed that fan favourite William “the Refrigerator” Perry, then a 320-lb. lineman, is now, at 48, stricken with a rare autoimmune disease and barely able to move from the chair in his living room. And just three weeks ago, Dave Duerson, the Bears’ Pro Bowl safety, killed himself. In a suicide note, he described vision problems and pain in the left side of his brain. So as to ensure his brain could be donated to science for concussion research, Duerson put a bullet in his heart.

Duerson is one of 300 athletes—half of them football players—to have pledged their brains to Boston University’s Sports Legacy Institute, which studies the long-term effects of sports-related head trauma. Jim McMahon, the team’s cocky quarterback, is another. Last fall, McMahon went public with his struggle to remember things, a result, he said, of taking too many hits to the helmet. “My memory’s pretty much gone,” the 51-year-old told the Chicago Tribune. “There are a lot of times when I walk into a room and forget why I walked in there.” (For fans, what’s impossible to forget is his similarly disheartening role as a spokesman for MVP, an erectile dysfunction drug. In ads for the pill, which promises to increase stamina and size, McMahon says it can “make you a champion in the bedroom!”)

Continue…

The Japanese economy: what now?

By Erica Alini - Monday, March 14, 2011 at 6:56 PM - 6 Comments

As Japan grapples with what Prime Minister Naoto Kan described as the country’s biggest crisis since WWII, analysts are racing to predict what the impact of the earthquake will be. There’s much doom and gloom about how much the reconstruction effort will cost, what footing the bill will do to Japan’s public debt, how long it will take for production in key industries such as electronics and the auto sector to go back to full gear, and the threat of inflation a result of the vast destruction of Japan’s farmland which will mean a hike in food prices.

However, there are reasons for moderate optimism. The massive rebuilding that will follow the quake is bound to act as a powerful stimulus on the economy, and that could cushion a near-term GDP slowdown. The earthquake will also probably generate a rally-‘round-the-flag sentiment, and shake off the political stalemate that has paralyzed Japanese politics in recent years.

Also, the earthquake didn’t hit Japan in the worst possible spot. The epicenter was closest to the Miyagi district, which accounts for 1.7 per cent of Japan’s GDP. By contrast, the 6.9-magnitude quake that roiled Japan in 1995 hit an industrialized urban area that accounted for as much as 4 per cent of the country’s economy, according to Roubini Global Economics, an economic and market strategy research firm.

Even when looking at the financial markets, where Tokyo stocks suffered their biggest fall in two years on Monday, there’s a way to see the glass as half-full. The earthquake is a huge blow for insurers, but it is not expected to translate into capital flights and runs on the yen, according to Roubini.

On the other hand, the impact of the quake has been unexpectedly heavy for the luxury industry. Investors focused their concerns on Tiffany and Coach, which have a massive retail presence in Japan and whose stock tanked in the S&P 500 today. Even this pessimism, though, might be unwarranted, according to analyst Brian Sozzi from Wall Street Strategies, a stock market research company. The companies’ exposure to the Japanese earthquake, he wrote in an email to clients, will depend more on whether their stores are clustered near disaster areas than their sales volumes in Japan.

If you’re wondering what the earthquake will do to the nuclear industry, don’t miss Jason Kirby’s in-depth analysis coming out in our print edition of Maclean’s on Thursday, March 17.

Barbie learns China isn't the easy mark it's thought to be

By Erica Alini - Monday, March 14, 2011 at 6:12 PM - 4 Comments

Just two years after inaugurating her six-storey superstore in Shanghai, Barbie, Mattel’s iconic doll, is packing up. Her bright-pink mansion, which included a spa, a cosmetics counter, and a cocktail bar, served its purpose of establishing the brand in the new market, the toy maker said, but analysts insist the closure proves that Barbie failed to charm Chinese consumers.

Some experts say the doll’s exquisitely Western glamour—she was last seen wearing sexy clothes designed by Patricia Field of Sex and the City—didn’t quite cut it with a female public that adores the more girly gadgets of Hello Kitty. Others cited Chinese parents’s legendary rigor to explain why local children have displayed an unusually muted enthusiasm towards the toy industry.

Admittedly, Barbie’s sales have been stagnating across the world for years. But other thriving U.S. retailers have seen similarly awkward debuts in China. Both Best Buy and Home Depot recently announced store closures there. Like Mattel, the two retail giants offered expensive products that Chinese consumers could easily get from cheaper local competitors. Even as retail sales grew more than 18 per cent in 2010 from year-ago levels, China, it turns out, isn’t a sure money-maker.