BlackBerry eyes Russia

By macleans.ca - Monday, April 25, 2011 at 12:28 PM - 0 Comments

It’s no secret Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev is a fan of Apple’s iPad: he’s been spotted with the device at various state meetings. But on Monday, the leader met with Jim Balsillie, RIM’s co-chief executive, who offered Medvedev a new Blackberry tablet in a discussion about developing technology. Balsillie said he has “extremely ambitious plans to sell Blackberry in Russia, invest in R&D, (and) also to invest in start-ups.” Russia’s communications minister, Igor Shchyogolev, said Russia wants the most up-to-date technologies on the market. Balsillie also said that Russia needs to find a balance between state security and innovation in order to foster development of new technologies. Earlier this year, RIM fought with India after it demanded the rights to monitor BlackBerry services, including corporate emails. (RIM gave India the means to access its Messenger service, but not corporate emails).

Moscow Times

A Hollywood agent for conjoined twins Krista and Tatiana

By Ken MacQueen - Monday, April 25, 2011 at 12:20 PM - 2 Comments

Photograph by Roman Cho/Getty Images

We meet at the Magic Castle—a private club for magicians, in a rambling mansion off Hollywood Boulevard. It’s Friday night, and the valet attendants are dealing with a line of cars disgorging sharp-dressed folks in suits and ties or cocktail dresses. This is old Hollywood—exclusive and a touch bizarre—and even if you wrangle an invite, you don’t get in looking like a bum. We’re here because this is Chuck Harris’s kind of joint, and because he knows the owner, naturally. And because Stoil & Ekaterina, one of Harris’s many, many incomparable acts, is headlining in the castle’s main theatre.

In the mansion’s entrance alcove, Harris points to a statue of a gilded owl sitting on a walled bookcase. “Say ‘open sesame,’ ” he says. With that, the bookcase swings wide, and we enter the buzz and chatter of the Grand Salon. That’s what Chuck Harris does: he opens doors.

Harris is an agent, just not a typical one. Oh, he’s got the cigar, and the patter; he’s got glasses the size of cruise ship portholes, some big-money clients and contacts around the world. It’s just that a significant portion of his client base is…way out there. “I am the conductor,” he has said, meaning it in the kindest possible way, “of a symphony of wackos.” You want a man who dances with four puppets and can do a one-man recreation of the Jackson Five? He’s got Christopher, who recently did a command performance for Mexico’s Carlos Slim, considered the world’s richest man. He’s got a one-armed juggler and a guy who balances a car on his head. You want Wolf Boy, Rubber Girl, or the world’s smallest Elvis imitator? He’ll have them on a plane the moment the contract is signed. The same with the Regurgitator, who swallows coins and brings them up in order. And he’s got Mr. Methane, who for safety reasons probably shouldn’t be double-billed with Electricity Girl.

Continue…

What is Pashto for "gong show"?

By Andrew Potter - Monday, April 25, 2011 at 12:08 PM - 16 Comments

UPDATE: Lord, it gets worse by the minute. From the Guardian’s narrative of the bust-out, one Taliban escapee had this to say:

Suspicions were immediately roused that the escape plot must have enjoyed support and help from prison guards to suceed, but the Taliban escaper doubted it. “They were just sleeping,” he said amidst extended laughter.

“The guards are always drunk. Either they smoke heroin or marijuana, and then they just fall asleep. During the whole process no one checked, there was no patrols, no shooting or anything.”

…

As many as five hundred Taliban prisoners were busted out of Kandahar’s Sarpoza prison yesterday. The circumstances are quite remarkable: Insurgents spent 50 months digging a 300-metre tunnel from a safe house northeast of the prison. Prison staff only realized what had happened a half hour after the prisoners had escaped. Continue…

Last day for advance voting

By macleans.ca - Monday, April 25, 2011 at 11:58 AM - 4 Comments

Monday is the final day for voting at advance polling stations across the country, which will be open from 12 p.m. to 8 p.m. local time. Elections Canada officials say the participation rate for the first two days was high, although the official tally of Canadians who voted won’t be known until Tuesday. Poll locations can be found at Elections Canada’s website, and citizens must be registered to vote and bring proof of identification, such as a driver’s license. The deadline for registering to vote by a special ballot is April 26.

CBC News

Elections Canada

Gabrielle Giffords to attend husband's shuttle launch this week

By macleans.ca - Monday, April 25, 2011 at 11:49 AM - 0 Comments

Gabrielle Giffords, the U.S. congresswoman who was shot in the head at a constituency event in Tuscon last January, has been cleared to attend her astronaut husband Mark Kelly’s space shuttle launch. Kelly, who is the commander of the Endeavour, told CBS News his wife’s reaction to the news was to pump her fist and say: “Awesome!” President Obama and other VIPs will also be present at the launch on Friday. Dr. Dong Kim, Giffords’ neurosurgeon, told the Arizona Republic that she has been given the green light to travel, and said that she is “maybe in the top 1 per cent of patients in terms of how far she’s come, and how quickly she’s gotten there.” Giffords is scheduled to undergo further surgery in May, when doctors will repair a section of her skull with a cranial implant. The bullet had passed through her brain’s left hemisphere, which controls speech and movement on the right side of the body. 22-year-old Jared Loughner has pleaded not guilty to charges relating to the shooting.

BBC News

Khadr held at Gitmo for intelligence

By macleans.ca - Monday, April 25, 2011 at 11:40 AM - 5 Comments

Documents released by Wikileaks on Sunday reveal that Omar Khadr, the Canadian who pleaded guilty to killing a U.S. medic in Afghanistan, was held in prison in Guantanamo Bay because he continued “to provide valuable information” during interrogations. The files say he gave details on al-Qaeda training camps, militants and NGOs that supported the terrorist organization. Khadr, whose advocates say he was tortured into confessing to terrorism charges and should have been treated as a child soldier instead of a militant, is one of the remaining 172 captives left at Guantanamo out of the more than 700 who were once held at the detention centre. He’s expected to be transferred to a Canadian facility later this year to serve the rest of his seven year sentence.

CBC News

Bill Gates is CN railway's largest shareholder

By macleans.ca - Monday, April 25, 2011 at 11:35 AM - 5 Comments

Bill Gates owns the largest slice of Canadian National Railway Co., according to a document released by the company ahead of its Wednesday annual meeting in Toronto. With $3.2 billion in shares, the Microsoft Corp. founder controls roughly 10 per cent of the Montreal-based railway, whose market valuation on Thursday was at $32-billion, or $69.88 a share. Gates holds 37.4 million CN shares through Cascade Investment LLC, and another 8.6 million as co-trustee of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust. Gates first emerged as a CN investor in 2006, when filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission revealed he owned a 6.6 per cent stake in the company. The decision to stock up on CN shares, analysts speculated, may be the result of advice from Gates’ longtime friend Warren Buffett, who acquired full control of U.S. rail company Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp. early last year.

Globe and Mail
Canadian Press

Hundreds of inmates escape from Afghan prison

By macleans.ca - Monday, April 25, 2011 at 11:31 AM - 3 Comments

At least 480 prison inmates have escaped Sarposa prison in Kandahar overnight on Monday, after Taliban insurgents dug a 1,000-foot tunnel underneath the facility. The breach was only discovered at 4:00 a.m., a half hour after all the prisoners escaped. Mohammed Abdullah, an inmate who spoke to the Associated Press on the phone after the escape, said that he and his accomplices were given copies of the cell keys from “friends,” suggesting the cooperation of prison guards. Militants began digging the tunnel about 5 months ago from a house near the prison complex, finally breaking through the prison walls around 11 p.m. on Sunday. Waheed Omar, a spokesman for Afghan President Hamid Karzai, said “a prison break of this magnitude of course points to a vulnerability.” Many of the 480 escaped inmates are Taliban fighters.

Globe and Mail

The preliminary round

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, April 25, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 41 Comments

In apparently the first of two endorsements, the Globe picks the Liberals over the NDP.

There is, in other words, sufficient distance between the NDP and the Liberals for preferring the latter to the former. They may be chasing some of the same votes, but they are not interchangeable – the Liberals remain a welcome antidote to ideological politics.

Aw, voting two whole times in five years?

By Scott Feschuk - Monday, April 25, 2011 at 10:50 AM - 40 Comments

Getty Images; Photo illustration by Taylor Shute

Attention voters: because he’s been mentioning it only every other sentence, instead of every single sentence, you may be unaware that Stephen Harper would very much like to be granted a majority government on May 2.

He doesn’t want it for his own sake, mind you. Heavens no. He wants it for Canada. In fact, when you think about it, a majority for Stephen Harper is really a gift we’d be giving ourselves. [Dear editor: please print this paragraph in the font Sarcastics.]

Steve used to be taciturn about his majority urges. He refused to discuss them in public. He seemed ashamed.

Continue…

On third thought

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, April 25, 2011 at 10:44 AM - 19 Comments

A few days after revoking his previous endorsement of a Conservative candidate with a controversial past, Peter Kent revokes his revocation.

“I regret any embarrassment that my remarks may have caused the Prime Minister,” Mr. Kent said in a statement sent to The Globe and Mail after Mr. Harper defended the candidate, Gavan Paranchothy, during a weekend campaign stop in Mississauga, Ont.

What a recent publication ban reveals about Russell Williams's wife

By Michael Friscolanti - Monday, April 25, 2011 at 10:20 AM - 0 Comments

DND/Reuters

A judge has attempted to give Russell Williams’s wife the one thing she so desperately craves: privacy. In a ruling released last week as part of the couple’s ongoing divorce case, Madam Justice Jennifer Mackinnon issued a rare but sweeping publication ban that prohibits the press from further identifying the serial killer’s spouse—despite the fact that her name and photograph have already appeared in countless news reports. As the judge concluded, the woman now known as M.E.H. is “vulnerable and is entitled to be shielded from further publicity to some extent.”

Lawyers representing the ex-colonel’s wife did not actually ask for such a ban. In fact, they conceded that “an anonymity order would not be helpful,” considering that her name is already scattered across cyberspace. They were much more concerned about keeping her private medical records, including a recent psychiatric assessment, confidential.

Yet the judge essentially did the opposite. Mackinnon’s written ruling, available to any member of the public, includes lengthy portions of the very medical evidence that Williams’s wife was anxious to keep under wraps. So while her identity is now technically a secret, the judgment provides the clearest glimpse yet of the pain and desperation M.E.H. has endured over the past 15 months—including bouts of “disorientation,” “occasional heart palpitations,” and a perpetual fear that “people will recognize her.”

Continue…

In conversation: historian Andrew Roberts

By Leah McLaren - Monday, April 25, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 1 Comment

Photographs by Steve Simon

Andrew Roberts is a British historian who has written a dozen books, the most recent of which is The Royal House of Windsor (available exclusively on Amazon Kindle). He is a staunch monarchist and expert in British military history.

Q: In your new book you make an impassioned argument for why royal wedding fever is both culturally important and historically warranted—how so?

A: This wedding isn’t just about a pretty dress. It’s important to keep in mind that Kate Middleton is going to be in her new job for far longer than any democratic leader is going to be in power. The monarchy isn’t just there to attract tourists. It’s also a profoundly important constitutional factor in the way Britain is run. Of course they haven’t brought an act of Parliament since the 18th century, but nonetheless, the monarchy gets to the heart of what the country is all about.

Continue…

Air Canada's plan to shake things up by launching yet another discount airline

By Chris Sorensen - Monday, April 25, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 13 Comments

Air Canada

The late 1990s were heady days for penny-pinching North American air travellers. Southwest Airlines, Frontier and WestJet were shaking up the industry with rock-bottom airfares and an army of fresh-faced employees in golf shirts prone to making jokes over the cabin public-address system. Suddenly finding themselves under attack, big, bloated network carriers attempted to respond by rolling out their own discount outfits, splashed with spirited names like Ted (United Airlines), Song (Delta Air Lines), MetroJet (U.S. Airways) and Tango and Zip (Air Canada). The idea was to not only mimic their new rivals’ low prices (although not necessarily their low cost structures), but also the look and feel of a fresh upstart—sometimes with amusing results.

“Somebody at United determined that one of the reasons Southwest was so successful was because they wore shorts,” says Marc-David Seidel, a professor at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business, recalling a visit to the California operations of Shuttle by United, another big carrier discount attempt. “So, you know the classic pseudo-military United uniforms that are made out of polyester? They basically just took those and cut off the legs.” It gets worse. “One day management decided employees were supposed to have more ‘fun,’ so all these poor people were running around San Francisco airport wearing those little beanies with a propeller on top.” Needless to say, the strategy didn’t work, and Shuttle was scuttled in 2001. Most of the other “airline-within-an-airline” efforts met a similar fate.

Now, a full decade later, Air Canada is once again toying with the idea. It’s trying to convince its unionized workers to support the creation of a new discount airline that would fly all-economy-class planes to various vacation destinations. But can Air Canada really make money on the cheap seats this time around? Though it’s far from clear whether the project will come to fruition after a key agreement with the airline’s pilots got bogged down last week, the reality is that Air Canada, which has seen its stock plunge nearly 90 per cent to around $2.40 since its post-restructuring IPO in late 2006, is steadily losing market share to younger, cheaper competitors such as WestJet, Transat and Toronto’s Porter Airlines. All this at a time when fuel prices, typically the second-biggest expense for an airline after labour, threaten to eat into already thin profit margins. It has no choice but to attempt a little shaking up of its own.

Continue…

Comment box

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, April 25, 2011 at 9:39 AM - 5 Comments

Respondents to an Angus Reid survey are dissatisfied.

A full 78 per cent of respondents to this newest survey believe politicians are less honest today and 62 per cent said they believed Canadian democracy was in crisis. More than half of the respondents — 52 per cent — said none of the political parties had satisfactory positions on issues important to the voters.

Stephen Harper is winning (UPDATED with late-breaking uncertainty)

By Paul Wells - Monday, April 25, 2011 at 9:30 AM - 268 Comments

I haven’t written about polls much here on the blog during this campaign. I take polls as significant but transient: they give useful information about the state of play today, but of course the state of play can change. Trends need time to change, however, so the closer you get to election day, the less time trends have to change. You can load a .pdf of all that here.

Salient points:

• The Conservatives have polled above their 2008 election-day share of the national popular vote on every day of this campaign. The stability of the Conservative vote is simply extraordinary. It went from roughly 29% to 36% over the Christmas holidays in 2005-06, notched up a couple of points in 2008, and is now a couple of points higher. That growth is very slow but as a rule of thumb, it doesn’t reverse. Continue…

'Does that irk you?'

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, April 25, 2011 at 8:30 AM - 107 Comments

From Dawna Friesen’s one-on-one interview with Stephen Harper.

Dawna Friesen: When this is all over, not just the election, but politics—and you’re out of this game—and you look back, you will go down in history as the only Canadian Prime Minister—the only Prime Minister in the Commonwealth—to ever have their government voted in contempt of Parliament. Does that irk you?

Stephen Harper: Not at all, well it irks me in a sense that I think this was this was a completely unjustified act. It was an example of the kind of political games and maneuvering that are taking place in this minority parliament. There was no basis for that … it was a pretext for an election that Canadians did not want.  There’s no case for that. This government—and we don’t say we’re perfect—but this government is focused on Canadians’ concerns and I think we’ve governed competently, our ministers and MP’s have acted with integrity, and we’re proud of that record and you know as I say, I think it’s unfortunate that those kinds of things are being done in a minority parliament but I think it tells you why we must have a majority government and not a minority parliament that focuses on that kind of stuff instead of the economy.

Week Four

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, April 24, 2011 at 5:56 PM - 28 Comments

This is the week that was. Week One of the campaign was recounted here. Week Two was recounted here. Week Three was recounted here.

Michael Ignatieff explained how democracy works. Stephen Harper refused to agree and rejected the question of compromise. Ned Franks clarified the situation. Brad Wall felt it necessary to impart his own wisdom. John Duffy wondered if Mr. Harper remembered Mackenzie King.

Mr. Ignatieff addressed Edmonton and heard the concerns of British Columbians. Mr. Harper spoke to the faithful in Campbell River.

Jack Layton talked to Peter Mansbridge. Michael Ignatieff talked to Nardwuar and chatted with me. And then took to the Easter airwaves. Continue…

It Means I'd Like To Sell You New Orleans

By Jaime Weinman - Sunday, April 24, 2011 at 4:08 PM - 0 Comments

Treme, which comes back for a second season tonight, is a bit of an odd fit with the current HBO, even with the “classic” early ’00s HBO that made David Simon one of its star producers. I love watching it; it’s a great-looking show, excellent acting, and there are always some really good scenes (along with some that don’t quite work so well, but when a show is so loosely constructed, that’s to be accepted). But it’s not the sort of show where you feel compelled to rush back every week to find out what will happen, and I don’t mean that in a negative way. It expects you to know who the characters are; it doles out its storylines in little pieces, so the impact is cumulative. But while its stories are often quite dark, it’s not monolithically dark in tone, and it’s not a high-intensity show. It’s a place where you drop in and watch some people doing some stuff, and slowly notice that there’s some sort of theme or storyline taking shape.

The basic unit of scene construction for Treme is the short scene that’s left unresolved. This is a common HBO technique, setting it apart from the network drama, where there’s always pressure to make Continue…

Half an hour to make his case

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, April 24, 2011 at 1:46 PM - 87 Comments

The 30-minute Liberal ad that airs across the country today.

John Geddes on Jack Layton's meeting with Maclean's

By macleans.ca - Sunday, April 24, 2011 at 12:29 PM - 1 Comment

Jack Layton in conversation: riding high, talking policy and politics

By John Geddes - Sunday, April 24, 2011 at 11:06 AM - 24 Comments

After catching a strong updraft the polls, Jack Layton stopped by Maclean’s in Toronto late last week for a wide-ranging discussion with editors and writers. The NDP leader held forth on everything from protecting consumers, to paying for his platform promises, to his party’s apparent mid-campaign breakthrough in Quebec (covered in a previous posting here).

As well, Layton talked about post-election scenarios, repeating his pledge to work with any part in all parties if the result is an unstable minority House. He looked energized and sounded upbeat. Yet at the outset of this campaign, Layton was widely regarded—after prostate cancer treatment in 2010 and hip surgery early this year— as frail, and his party in danger of being squeezed between the Conservatives and Liberals.

Layton’s defiance of those dire early predictions is arguably the campaign’s biggest development so far. An edited text of the conversation, held in a sunlit boardroom on the morning of April 21: Continue…

What it sounds like

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, April 23, 2011 at 9:12 PM - 108 Comments

It is a lovely evening here in Campbell River, where, some time ago, Mr. Harper addressed about 400 partisans inside a community centre gymnasium. Here is what that sounded like.

All or nothing

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, April 23, 2011 at 3:46 PM - 107 Comments

Susan Delacourt notes an interesting question posed at an all-candidates debate in Kitchener.

One of the audience members had posed an intriguing question during the debate — he said MPs are valued for their independent-mindedness, so in that spirit, could all the candidates say what part of their party’s platform they don’t endorse? Former Liberal MP Andrew Telegdi said he had some problems with his party’s support of some law-and-order measures by the Conservatives. The Green Party candidate, Cathy MacLellan, said she was still “working through” some of  the finer points in her party’s platform  on genetically modified organisms. Then, when it came time for the NDP candidate to speak up, Bill Brown said sorry, he supported the NDP’s platform in its entirety and wouldn’t be standing for office if he couldn’t. Peter Braid said more or less the same thing.