Brits spend five years of their life hungover: poll

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 at 11:59 AM - 8 Comments

The average British person will spend over five years of their life with a hangover, according to new research reported in the Daily Mail. That same person will suffer through a day-long hangover (usually on a Sunday) at least once a week between the ages of 21 and 38. During that time, 12 days a year will be spent “retching, sweating and feeling lousy” from drinking too much the night before. The frequency of hangovers reduces with age, the study shows, but they tend to continue at an average rate of 22.8 days per year until age 60. In the course of a lifetime, the average person spends more than five-and-a-quarter years (or nearly 2,000 days) with a hangover, according to a survey from Sweet Lady Beverages, which makes alcohol-free drinks.

Daily Mail

UN panel foresees 80 per cent of world’s energy as renewable by 2050

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 at 11:51 AM - 16 Comments

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that renewable resources (like solar and wind power) could provide up to 80 per cent of the world’s energy needs by 2050, helping to reduce greenhouse gases. In order to get there, governments will need to spend a lot more money and shift their energy policies to integrate renewable sources into existing power grids, the panel says. Further development of renewable sources will demand investments of $1.5 trillion by 2020, and maybe up to $7.2 trillion from 2020 to 2030, they said. The use of renewables is rising just as their price keeps declining, so the right policies could expand them significantly.

CBC News

Arnold Schwarzenegger separating from his wife

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 at 11:51 AM - 8 Comments

Arnold Schwarzenegger, the movie star and former governor of California, is separating from his wife, TV correspondent Maria Shriver, a member of the Kennedy clan. The couple issued a joint statement about their 25-year marriage, saying that they are “living apart while we work on the future of our relationship.” Shriver, 55, has moved out of their Brentwood mansion, although they continue to raise their four kids together (ages 21, 20, 18 and 14). The couple got together after meeting at a celebrity tennis tournament 34 years ago, and had some rough patches, including allegations during Schwarzenegger’s 2003 campaign for governor that he’d groped several women. He apologized for his inappropriate behaviour and Shriver defended him.

Los Angeles Times

Not so feudal after all

By John Fraser - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 at 11:45 AM - 0 Comments

Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

The marriage of Catherine Middleton and Prince William of Wales came off without a hitch as close to two billion people around the world watched the British dust off their ancient institutions—from Westminster Abbey (10th-century origins) to the state landaus and coaches from the last two centuries—and make a hugely successful fuss over their future king and queen, now titled the duke and duchess of Cambridge.

Out of it all, a new sort of monarchy was seen to emerge, one more approachable, more savvy, and much more likely to survive the assaults regularly hurled its way. And that is thanks not just to a with-it and photogenic young couple, but also to the palace’s adroit use of new media.

The couple has not made one mistake, and the only criticism of their pre-wedding behaviour—that they lived together “in sin”—not only redounded to their credit, it turned out the cohabitation had been almost blessed by the archbishop of York, the second-highest-ranked cleric in the realm. As the archbishop’s daughter said, couples “want to test whether the milk is good before they buy the cow.”

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Don't split the difference

By Erica Alini - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 at 11:26 AM - 17 Comments

Conservative strategist Ken Boessenkool and NDP strategist Brian Topp dispute the vote-splitting conventional wisdom.

The Conservatives and the NDP won their seats with, on average, large pluralities and considerable margins over the party that finished second – which was usually not the Liberals. Across Ontario, within the GTA and in British Columbia – the battlegrounds of the election – the Conservatives and NDP increased their vote, had large pluralities or outright majorities across the seats that they won.

REVIEW: Dogs at the Perimeter

By Kate Lunau - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

In award-winning Canadian novelist Thien’s latest book, a woman named Janie discovers the impossibility of ever really leaving the past behind. Janie has been struggling in her role as wife and mother. One frigid Montreal winter, she abruptly leaves her husband and young son and retreats to the empty apartment of her mentor, Dr. Hiroji Matsui, a neurologist who’s recently disappeared. Janie believes Hiroji has taken off to find his missing brother, James, a Red Cross doctor transplanted from Vancouver to Phnom Penh, who mysteriously vanished in 1975 during the final stages of Cambodia’s devastating civil war. She eventually decides to follow Hiroji there.

Learning more about James’s disappearance, Janie is brought back to her own childhood in Cambodia, where her family was violently ripped apart as the Khmer Rouge took control. In an effort to erase the past and start from scratch, the regime attempted to destroy any vestige of culture, tradition or family and return the nation to “Year Zero,” as it’s chillingly called. In the process, Janie and many others had their lives pulled apart. She was finally sent to Canada as a refugee, leaving her former identity behind in Cambodia—even her old name. The name Janie, she says, is her “Canadian name.”

If Janie left Cambodia for Canada, James did it the other way round, travelling to Phnom Penh after completing his medical training in Vancouver. Like Janie, he’s lived under different names: born Junichiro Matsui, he renamed himself James as a teenager, and decades later—after losing his home and family in the war—he is living under another name entirely, making it all but impossible for Hiroji to track him down. In stark, beautiful prose, Thien (whose first work of fiction, Simple Recipes, was a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book) shows that it’s through these characters’ relationships with others—like James’s complicated bond with his brother, or Janie’s with her husband and son, and the connection between Janie and Hiroji—that a more permanent identity is created.

REVIEW: Unfamiliar Fishes

By Rebecca Caldwell - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

“You can’t really understand Barack until you understand Hawaii,” Michelle Obama famously said about her husband. In her new history of the Pacific islands state, Vowell doesn’t so much seek to understand the U.S. president as the republic he governs. In particular, how the nation’s practice of engaging in foreign wars under dubious pretenses has a history a lot older than many Americans would like to think, and Hawaii is a case in point.

Hawaii is a popular tourist hot spot today, but America’s first interest in the 50th state was religious. Protestant missionaries landed on Big Island in 1820 and some of their achievements are near miraculous: Hawaiians had no written language, and in order to teach through Bible study, missionaries invented a spelling system using the Roman alphabet. Within 40 years, the literacy rate hit 75 per cent.

But Christianity was no match for a more fervent religion: capitalism. American businessmen saw easy money in the islands and subverted the native agriculture for sugar plantations. By 1890, nearly 90 per cent of the land was controlled by foreign interests. The following year, tired of King Kalakaua’s questionable spending and patronage, a group of mostly white businessmen forced the ruler to sign the “Bayonet Constitution,” vastly curtailing royal power. In 1893, they deposed the monarchy entirely, and Hawaii was annexed by the U.S. five years later.

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Still no justice for 9/11 victims

By Julia Belluz - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 at 9:45 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Donald Weber/VII Network

There was no jubilant eruption in Abigail Carter’s Seattle home when she heard the news. While enjoying a dinner of grilled salmon and curried cauliflower with friends, her daughter Olivia screeched from her bedroom: “Mom! Osama bin Laden is dead! And everyone is celebrating. It’s so weird.” The 15-year-old couldn’t understand why people were so excited about a man’s death—even if the man in question was the mastermind behind the 9/11 plot that killed her dad, Arron Dack, a Toronto-raised vice-president of a financial software company.

In many ways, Olivia’s ambivalence is shared by family members of some of the 24 Canadians who lost their lives when the World Trade Center was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001. After nearly 10 years, they say they have pretty well forgotten about bin Laden, and don’t believe his death will curb the threat of terrorism. “We may have gotten the face of the organization,” says Abigail Cater, “but the organization continues. It also doesn’t change the fact that Arron is still dead.”

In Winnipeg, Ellen Judd was flipping between news channels in search of the latest on the federal election, when the news out of Abbottabad, Pakistan, broke. “I didn’t want to look at [the joyous crowds],” says Judd, still mourning the death of her partner Christine Egan, who was in the south tower visiting her brother when the planes hit. “If we celebrate this as a military victory, we’ve missed the point.” Bin Laden’s death heightened Judd’s sense of solidarity with everyone who has been touched by the war—especially those in Afghanistan and Pakistan. “I have much more in common with the widows in Afghanistan than I do with anybody celebrating in the streets today,” she says. “They are trying to live their ordinary lives just as Chris and I were trying to do.”

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What we're talking about when we talk about Harvard

By Erica Alini - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 at 9:44 AM - 59 Comments

Following yesterday’s Boston Globe story, Mark Leccese considers how Harvard has been used as a political slur.

The future of al-Qaeda

By Charlie Gillis - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 at 9:35 AM - 7 Comments

Getty Images

In the spring of 2004, as investigators scoured mobile phone records for evidence in the Madrid train bombings, a disturbing truth about the killers began to emerge. Far from bloody-minded professionals carrying out Osama bin Laden’s orders, these suicide bombers appeared to be novices—self-radicalized warriors who believed themselves to be carrying out the al-Qaeda leader’s wishes. The closest many of them ever had come to the man was reading his polemics on a jihadist website.

This phenomenon wasn’t new. In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, cells of wannabes had popped up around the world; most showed all the acumen of Wile E. Coyote hunting the Road Runner. But the coordinated assault on Madrid’s commuter rail network marked a frightening new turn for the world’s first truly global terrorist organization. With its leaders in hiding or on the run, it had managed to outsource its work to self-styled “affiliates”—from the absurdist amateurs of the so-called “Toronto 18” to the homegrown jihadis who killed 52 people by bombing the London Underground. Just when Western intelligence agencies thought they had a handle on the threat, the threat had morphed into something almost as dangerous.

This quicksilver quality had long been al-Qaeda’s key to survival. Bin Laden had assembled his following in the late 1980s from remnants of Arab volunteer brigades who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan, and who shared his outrage at the Saudi royal family’s decision to allow U.S. troops on their soil during the 1990 Gulf War. Though the scion of a construction dynasty in Saudi Arabia, he was expelled from the country the next year, and quickly shifted operations to Sudan, where his organization began to live up to its name (in Arabic, al-Qaeda means “the base”).

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Fresh, warm—yes, warm—mozzarella

By Jacob Richler - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 5 Comments

Photographs by Andrew Tolson

Notwithstanding the distinct society’s insatiable appetite for french fries dressed with springy curds, or our pan-national enthusiasm for cheeseburgers made with gooey orange “singles,” mozzarella and cheddar are by far the most popular cheeses in Canada. And we make what we need: we produced at least 30,000 tonnes more of each last year than we did butter.

Most of that is made by our cheese giants, like Saputo and Kraft Canada. While even young, mass-market cheddar is still cheddar, in mozzarella’s case the industrial variety is a hybrid type pressed to expel moisture so it shreds easily and lasts for months. This is the variety that is even sold pre-shredded, for those too busy watching TV to do it themselves.

At the opposite end of the spectrum of quality, volume and price, you find the Italian progenitor, made from the rich and rarefied milk of the water buffalo—a product the Italians believe tastes best the day it is made, and should always be consumed within its first week, but are nonetheless willing to sell to us at a premium well after that. For this reason one does well to seek out local buffalo mozzarella, like the grassy, artisan product from Natural Pastures in Courtenay, B.C., on Vancouver Island, or the milder tasting version from Quality Cheese, in Vaughan, Ont.

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Bin Laden’s ruinous legacy

By Nicholas Köhler and Stephanie Findlay - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 at 9:05 AM - 2 Comments

In ruins: The destruction on 9/11 of the World Trace Center was bin Laden's greatest coup

The ancient Yemeni port of Aden, on the southwest tip of the Arabian Peninsula, reaches into the blue waters separating the Middle East from the Horn of Africa to form a natural harbour. Yet the safe haven for foreign ships has over the years been less than friendly to visiting foreigners. “Aden is a terrible rock, without a single blade of grass or a drop of good water,” the 19th-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud wrote after arriving to work in the coffee trade. It remained a desperate place even a century later, when, in the early 1990s, the United States used the city as a staging ground to service its troubled military venture across the gulf in Somalia, and as an R & R spot for soldiers due back in Mogadishu, the Somali capital.

On Dec. 29, 1992, a security guard at the swank, modern Aden Hotel spotted two men apparently fitting a bomb to the underside of a car parked in the hotel lot outside, a not unusual occurrence in wild Yemen. Seeing the guard, one man stood and was striding directly toward him when the briefcase in his hand exploded, dismembering his arm and spewing shrapnel into the guard and the man’s accomplice. Though foiled, the attack was evidently part of a broader plan: later that day, at the Goldmore Hotel, another Aden resort, an explosive device planted in a hallway closet killed a hotel worker and a 70-year-old Austrian tourist who had just sat down to eat dinner with his wife.

Yemeni police later uncovered an arsenal of weaponry associated with the plot, including 25 other explosive devices, two anti-tank mines, two machine guns and a pistol. That stash and the large quantity of cash recovered from a suspect’s apartment pointed to an operation of means and sophistication. The two bombers at the Aden Hotel, who’d survived their injuries, described attending training camps in far-flung Afghanistan operated by a still-obscure religious leader and veteran of the anti-Soviet Afghan mujahedeen campaigns. Osama bin Laden had recently run afoul of the ruling family in his native Saudi Arabia and now lived in the basketcase African nation of Sudan, raising horses, growing sunflowers and using his business acumen to fund terrorist exploits.

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What Andrea Canning wants…

By Anne Kingston - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 5 Comments

Photograph by Erika Larsen/Redux

It’s 10:30 on a Sunday night in mid-April, and ABC TV’s Andrea Canning is gently grilling a 17-year-old girl about the serial killer who allegedly murdered her sister. The hunt for the prostitute-killing psychopath is big news in New York; Canning has just snagged the first on-air interview with the Buffalo, N.Y., teenager who says she received calls on her sister’s cell from the man two years ago. The girl is filmed in shadow to protect her identity. Before tape rolls at an ABC studio in Manhattan, Canning expresses her sympathy, then breaks the ice by joking that some days she’d like to be filmed in shadow. “No hair and makeup!” The southern Ontario native then bonds with the girl’s entourage: “I grew up knowing too much about Buffalo news,” she says. Then she gets down to extracting enough footage for a one-minute clip for her regular stint on Good Morning America (GMA) the next day. It’s a challenge: the girl’s answers are monosyllabic. The scene has a mutually predatory aspect to it. The lurking question, “Why are you risking your life?” isn’t asked. The answer is obvious: it’s her 15 seconds of fame.

For Canning, the girl is a minor prize in her roster of high-profile “gets,” a list that includes fugitive actor Randy Quaid and his wife, Evi, 13-year-old Rebecca Black, whose song Friday elicited Internet snark, and, most famously, an unhinged Charlie Sheen. Canning’s 90-minute February sit-down with the actor, his first network interview after being fired, was a sensation. Sheen’s mash-up spoof of the encounter, now part of his North American tour, was a YouTube hit. It propelled Canning’s rising star at a time when it’s not enough for network news to simply report the news; it now has to make news itself. Celebrities and scandal are the ideal vehicles. “Gadhafi is important but Sheen pays the bills,” Canning says, quoting an ABC executive.

Coaxing ratings gold from Malibu’s “warlock” is a world away from Canning’s childhood in the Collingwood, Ont., area, where her grandfather founded the Blue Mountain ski resort, now run by her father. A “shy kid” who skied competitively, she majored in psychology at the University of Western Ontario before a summer acting course at the University of California led to the TV journalism program at Toronto’s Ryerson University. A gig as a Baywatch intern (David Hasselhoff remains “a good friend”) paved her way to an intern position at the tabloid TV show Extra. While in L.A., Canning shared a house with the then-unknown Ryan Seacrest, who was “very driven,” she recalls. “We say there was something in the water in that house.” Extra provided her first taste of the adrenalin rush of breaking scandal when she confirmed a 1997 phone tip that the woman accusing sportscaster Marv Albert of sexual assault faced criminal indictments.

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Berthier-Maskinongé: the NDP's Stalingrad?

By Colby Cosh - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 6:58 PM - 101 Comments

We are all having a good time chortling about the Ruth Ellen Brosseau Crisis (Day 7!), which has become the biggest “cute white girl goes missing” news story since Natalee Holloway. But I think political horserace-handicappers need to start considering, seriously, whether the New Democratic Party is starting to foul up their foul-up. Humour is the most powerful acid in politics when it comes to dissolving confidence and momentum; a politician can fight a lie, but he cannot fight a good joke.

The NDP has left us with the impression that it has all but kidnapped Brosseau and is putting her through some kind of sadistic round-the-clock training—perhaps in a basement lit by a single bare light bulb—in the hope of making her presentable to the cameras at some point. This really is getting kind of creepy, and the English-language phone interview with somebody who can only be described as “a person claiming to be Brosseau” didn’t help. Nor does the media’s collective failure to establish any meaningful proof of Brosseau’s prior existence. (There are no candid photographs extant of a campus pub manager? There’s nothing on Flickr?)

I suppose Brosseau’s captors/handlers can argue that she is a grown-up who signed nomination papers on the dotted line, and that it will not do for her to back out now. The problem they have is that the longer we have to wait for her to manifest her existence, the greater the NDP’s apparent investment in her success, and the higher the standard that will eventually be applied to her. The party brass did have the option, in the hours following the election, of distancing themselves politely from her, slapping her on the back, wishing her good luck, and letting her take her own chances. They could have said “We’re a party with a strong grassroots, and we don’t handpick elite candidates according to their polite capitalist credentials or the content of their tax returns.” Instead, at the very moment its professionalism should no longer have been in serious question, the party made the decision that the new Quebecois empire must be defended to the last ditch. Which seems to have left it playing out a bizarre fast-forward retelling of Shaw’s Pygmalion.

Love conquers all

By Leah McLaren - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 5:45 PM - 0 Comments

Gareth Fuller/PA/Keystone Press

One kiss was not enough.

As a sea of well-wishers roared their approval, the newlywed duke and duchess of Cambridge felt the people’s love—and returned it. It was the second kiss that sealed the deal, a marriage the dean of Westminster had just pronounced a “mystical union,” and one that succeeded in uniting not just a young man and his winsome bride but a monarchy with its subjects.

There they stood, awkwardly assembled on the Buckingham Palace balcony—the royal family in all their silly-hatted glory. Echoes of a similar scene 30 years ago hung heavily in the air, until Prince William acted with the kind of open-hearted spontaneity he could only have inherited from that sadly absent guest.

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Where the votes were

By Philippe Gohier - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 4:31 PM - 43 Comments

Working with the rebate threshold, Alice Funke tallies the number of ridings in which each party received at least 10% of the vote. Those totals are as follows, with changes from 2008 in brackets.

NDP 306 (+63)
Conservatives 283 (-15)
Liberals 217 (-52)
Bloc Quebecois 65 (-6)
Greens 8 (-34)

Alice also busts a few myths while she’s at it.

Lawrence Cannon says goodbye

By macleans.ca - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 4:20 PM - 11 Comments

Outgoing Foreign Affairs minister Lawrence Cannon bid farewell to his post in Ottawa on Monday. He was defeated on the May 2nd election by an NDP candidate in his Western Quebec riding of Pontiac. Mr. Cannon entered the cabinet post with no international experience in 2008. In a speech at his department’s headquarters, he argued he would not have changed “one iota” in Canada’s failed campaign for a seat on the United Nations Security Council.  “The force of the instinct for democracy can sometimes surprise us, as has been the case in Tunisia, in Egypt, in Libya, and Syria – and I’m almost tempted to add, in Pontiac,” Mr. Cannon said. “But I don’t think anybody ever thought of me as Maniwaki Gadhafi.” Mr. Cannon was the longest-serving foreign minister since Lloyd Axworthy in the 1990s.

Globe and Mail

Canadian Tire buys Forzani Group

By macleans.ca - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 3:21 PM - 0 Comments

Canadian Tire has agreed to purchase Forzani Group’s chain of sporting goods outlets for $771 million in cash. Forzani, which operates the Sport Chek, and National Sports brands, is Canada’s largest sports retailer, with about 500 stores across Canada. The purchase price is based on a bid of $26.50 per share, or about 50 per cent more than Forzani’s latest closing price. Canadian Tire CEO Stephen Wetmore expects the deal will help his brand attract younger customers.

Bloomberg

Quebec floodwaters are receding

By macleans.ca - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 3:16 PM - 0 Comments

About 3,000 homes have been flooded, with 1,000 people forced to leave, after Quebec’s Richelieu river flooded, the Montreal Gazette reports—but now, with waters dropping by three centimetres on Sunday, the waters are finally receding. Today and Tuesday, reductions of up to four centimetres are expected, but victims of flooding won’t get private insurance payments to repair their homes, according to the Insurance Bureau of Canada. Spokesperson Jack Chardirdjian said that those who buy a home near a river should expect flooding, and if an event is predictable, insurance won’t cover it. “It’s like buying a home next to a railway track. You know the trains are going to go past,” he said.

Montreal Gazette

Looking north (II)

By Philippe Gohier - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 2:43 PM - 39 Comments

The Boston crowd considers Michael Ignatieff’s defeat.

Alex Keyssar, a Kennedy School professor who was a Harvard graduate student with Ignatieff in the 1970s, said he was sorry that his former colleague’s years at Harvard may have cost him the election. “If he had been at the University of Toronto his whole career,’’ he said, “it would have been different.’’

Hospitals perform too many CT scans on kids: study

By macleans.ca - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 2:38 PM - 0 Comments

According to a study of more than 40,000 U.S. children, hospitals might be doing up to twice as many CT scans on kids with head injuries as are necessary, Postmedia News reports. Researchers found that waiting in the emergency room to see if a child’s symptoms improve before a scan can reduce the use of CT scans of the head by as much as half, without increasing the risk that something important will be overlooked. In Canadian children’s hospitals, scans for minor head injuries climbed from 15 per cent in 1995 to 53 per cent in 2005, even though there can be long-term risks, such as cancer, which can be triggered by radiation.

Montreal Gazette

Pakistani PM lashes out at critics

By macleans.ca - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 2:32 PM - 1 Comment

In a speech to the Pakistani parliament, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani denounced claims his country was either incompetent or uncooperative in the search for al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. “It is disingenuous for anyone to blame Pakistan or any state institution of Pakistan…for being in cahoots with al-Qaeda,” Mr. Gilani told lawmakers. “It was al-Qaeda and its affiliates that carried out hundreds of suicide bombings in nearly every town and city of Pakistan.” The high-level military operation has put a marked strain on relations between the U.S. and Pakistan, which has accused the Americans of violating its sovereignty. Pakistani opposition leader Nisar Ali Khan asked the government to explain “how four helicopters intruded Pakistan in the dark of the night!” The comment was loudly applauded by parliamentarians. Mr. Gilani also used the address to announce an investigation into the raid by Pakistan’s military, elements of which the U.S. says helped shield bin Laden.

Wall Street Journal

The Problem With "Everybody's a Suspect"

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 2:31 PM - 9 Comments

This post is going to be shorter than the subject deserves, but I was reading this post about the possible killers on The Killing (I think I may have accidentally found out who the killer was in the original, but luckily the U.S. version may go differently) and thinking again about the issue so many murder mysteries have with characterization. It’s an issue that is forced on them by the format, and it’s as follows: when you have to create a world with a lot of potential murderers, you have to create a whole bunch of characters who “read” the same whether they turn out to be murderers or not.

A murder mystery needs potential suspects, but the trickiest part is not simply finding a reason why each of them might have wanted to kill the dead person, or leaving each one of them without a true alibi. It’s that every one of the suspects must be a plausible murderer, meaning that someone who would never kill anybody – which describes most of the Continue…

Hey look: Maybe it's just a bunch of stuff that happened

By Paul Wells - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 1:51 PM - 13 Comments

From the magazine, the last chapter of our election saga (SPOILER: Conservatives win). This installment features more analysis from me than do the earlier segments; it’s an attempt to draw conclusions and make predictions, written on the day after the election.