Bin Laden the movie star?

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, May 6, 2011 at 11:15 AM - 3 Comments

Jonathan Olley/Summit Entertainment/AP

Kathryn Bigelow may be glad her next movie is tentatively titled Kill Bin Laden. The independent film, which Bigelow has been trying to finance and cast as a follow-up to her Oscar-winning war drama The Hurt Locker, is said to focus on one of the U.S.’s failed attempts to take out the al-Qaeda mastermind. And according to Variety, the special forces unit she focuses on is “the very team that wound up killing the terrorist leader.” Literally overnight, the project is one of the “timeliest movies in Hollywood,” writes Deadline’s Mike Fleming.

It has company, though, since other studios have Osama bin Laden ideas languishing in development hell. Paramount has the rights to Jawbreaker, a book about how the U.S. let bin Laden escape at Tora Bora in December 2001. The studio has gone through several drafts of the script, including one Oliver Stone was attached to. Paramount even considered featuring Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan character in the hunt for public enemy No. 1.

Considering these projects were all developed when it seemed the U.S. would never catch bin Laden, the latest news out of Abbottabad, Pakistan, will undoubtedly alter the plots—or at least the endings. The Hollywood Reporter said that Bigelow and her Hurt Locker writer, Mark Boal, are “digesting the news and will spend the week figuring out their next move.”

Continue…

What now? (II)

By Philippe Gohier - Friday, May 6, 2011 at 10:38 AM - 11 Comments

Chris Selley considers.

It’s easy, and frankly appropriate, to laugh at the gaggle of orange poteaux — “posts,” as Quebecers call cipher candidates — soon heading to Ottawa to take their seats as New Democrat MPs (and to move into their very first apartments!). But whatever their shortcomings, it’s safe to assume they’re full to bursting with idealism and self-esteem. Many of them aren’t long out of high school. Try to bully them and by God, they’ll probably call the police.

There’s 57 new NDP MPs from Quebec — almost 20% of the House of Commons. They have a real opportunity to make a difference in the way Parliament conducts its business.

The real reason this election will go down in history

By the editors - Friday, May 6, 2011 at 10:20 AM - 5 Comments

Nathan Denette/CP; Photograph by Chris Bolin

When Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff triggered a federal election by bringing down Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s minority government in March, he called it “a historic day in the life of Canadian democracy.” It certainly was, though not in the way he might have hoped.

This week’s stunning election has completely rewritten Canada’s political map, and marks a milestone in the country’s history.

The biggest news is Harper’s long-sought majority government. Three consecutive victories is a substantial accomplishment in Canadian politics, and this win—the first majority for a Conservative leader in over two decades—is particularly noteworthy given the fragile beginnings of the Conservative Party of Canada in 2003. Jack Layton and the NDP have seized the title of official Opposition after running a picture-perfect campaign heavy on Layton’s personal appeal and light on traditional NDP policies. The Liberals, meanwhile, have been relegated to third-party status for the first time in history, and the Bloc Québécois, which many saw as a roadblock to coherent national politics, may now be a spent force.

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Back to school (II)

By Philippe Gohier - Friday, May 6, 2011 at 9:36 AM - 43 Comments

Michael Ignatieff talks to the Globe.

“I’m going back into a classroom because the only damn thing I can do that’s any use to anybody is to teach kids what I learned and what mistakes I made … The life that I like the best is teaching. It’s the end of my life as a politician.”

Jodie Foster on the ‘broken’ Mel Gibson

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, May 6, 2011 at 9:25 AM - 4 Comments

Photograph by Andrew Tolson

Jodie Foster knows that you can’t talk about The Beaver without addressing the elephant in the room: the unholy mess of Mel Gibson. In the movie, which Foster directed, he plays a walking disaster whose manic bid for redemption, via a puppet, makes his family, and viewers, cringe. There’s no disputing the scary power of his performance. But you can’t watch it without being reminded of Gibson’s own demons, and his need to salvage a ruined reputation—especially with lines like “people seem to love a train wreck.” Foster won’t deny that Gibson’s story upstages the one in the movie. “And is that a bad thing?” she asks rhetorically, sitting down with me in Toronto last week. “I don’t think it’s a bad thing. But I don’t know.” Then the 48-year-old Foster, crisply attired in pale blue shirt and black slacks, just laughs. “I don’t have any choice. The good news is that I’m not the distributor. It’s not my job to market the film.”

Well, in a way it is. Foster, who plays Gibson’s distraught wife in The Beaver, has been busy burning up the promotion trail while her star lies low. Gibson, who is locked in a custody battle with ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva over their daughter, pleaded no contest to a misdemeanour battery charge and was sentenced to three years’ probation and a year of counselling. That was in March, days before Foster attended The Beaver’s South by Southwest festival premiere without him. After its release was postponed three times, the film finally opens here this week. And it’s likely Gibson will brave the red carpet for a Cannes premiere this month. “I think Mel’s going,” says Foster. “The French love him. They were like, ‘Did he have a scandal?’ They don’t know. They honestly don’t know.”

CLICK HERE FOR BRIAN’S FULL Q&A WITH JODIE FOSTER

A family drama spiked with dark comedy, The Beaver is the story of Walter Black (Gibson), a severely depressed toy executive, whose wife and teenage son (Anton Yelchin) have abandoned him as a hopeless case. After hitting bottom with booze and pills, and making a pathetic attempt to hang himself from a shower rail, Walter gets his mojo back via a bossy alter ego—a beaver hand puppet with a cockney accent. Eerily empowered, Walter charms his younger son with a new-found passion for woodworking, and rejuvenates his sex life and his company. But there will be blood before bedtime.

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"I had this dream"

By Andrew Potter - Friday, May 6, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 7 Comments

Michael Ignatieff goes back to teaching:

Sex, drugs and combat photography

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, May 6, 2011 at 9:05 AM - 0 Comments

eOne Films

Sometimes a film can be too timely for comfort. Last week, Manhattan’s Tribeca Film Festival hosted the U.S. premiere of The Bang Bang Club, based on the true story of four combat photographers working in South Africa during the final days of apartheid in the 1990s. One of them was killed by gunfire, another took his own life. The premiere took place the day after photojournalists Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros were killed by a bomb in the Libyan city of Misrata. Their loss may make the film more relevant, driving home the fact that photographers still routinely risk their lives in the line of fire. But it also sends a chill through this retro romance about combat photography—a Molotov cocktail of a movie that mixes graphic violence with bursts of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll bravado.

The Libyan deaths “cast a shadow over the premiere,” Steven Silver, the film’s South African-born, Toronto-based director, told Maclean’s. “But if the film was released three months or six months from now, there’s a good chance we’d be talking about the death of another journalist.”

This predominantly Canadian co-production is based on The Bang Bang Club: Snapshots from a Hidden War (2000), a memoir by Johannesburg photojournalists Greg Marinovich and João Silva, the two surviving members of the group. (Last November, Silva lost the lower half of both his legs to a land mine while shooting in Afghanistan.) The story focuses on the war between Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress and the Zulu warriors of the Inkatha Freedom Party, which received covert support from the apartheid regime. The conflict, which killed almost 20,000 people from 1990 to 1994, was ignored by the censored South African media until the photographers’ images hit the front pages of the world press.

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Bestsellers

By Brian Bethune - Friday, May 6, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Top-selling fiction and non-fiction titles (week of May 2nd, 2011)

Fiction

Non-fiction

LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)

The West is in and Ontario has joined it

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, May 6, 2011 at 7:00 AM - 147 Comments

Photograph by Chris Bolin

Democracy, great and terrible as the sea: unknowable, implacable, irresistible, destroyer of parties, deliverer of others, humbler of leaders, elector of bricklayers and assistant pub managers. Tremble before it, and stay out of its path when it moves.

Five parties were picked up, shaken out and tossed aside by the voters in this astonishing election, but of all the many implications one is fundamental: the Conservatives are now in a position to replace the Liberals as the natural governing party in Canada, as dominant, potentially, in the 21st century as the Liberals were in the 20th. This isn’t just a victory, the first Conservative majority in a generation. It is (at least under the terms of the current electoral system) a realignment. Simply put, the West is in—and Ontario has joined it.

The temptation, looking at the wreckage of the Liberal and Bloc Québécois parties and the meteoric rise of the NDP, is to compare this election to 1993, which shattered Brian Mulroney’s old Conservative coalition into its Bloc and Reform party fragments. But it’s much more consequential than that. In retrospect, 1993 changed very little. It handed power to the Liberals, but it did nothing to alter the long-term dynamic of Canadian politics: the remorseless shrinking of the Liberal base.

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The untold story of the 2011 election: Chapter 3

By Paul Wells - Friday, May 6, 2011 at 7:00 AM - 42 Comments

Adrian Wyld/CP

Introduction: Politics turned over
How Harper got what he’s always wanted, Layton took centre stage, and Ignatieff and Duceppe were done in

Chapter 1: The first mistake
The seeds of Michael Ignatieff’s troubles were planted last fall, and by the Liberals themselves

Chapter 2: Not feeling the love
Harper was tightly controlled, Ignatieff loose and freewheeling. Layton? Just a guy most Canadians would rather have a beer with

Chapter 3: The velocity of indignation
The PM had problems: the auditor general kerfuffle, Bruce Carson, the folks kicked out of rallies. The Liberals railed, but the NDP stepped up.

Chapter 4: Turning up the heat
The leaders clashed predictably in the TV debates, but the election would soon turn unexpectedly on two key speeches: one by Ignatieff, one by Duceppe

Chapter 5: The orange wave rises
Years of quiet preparation in Quebec begin paying off for the NDP—Layton’s rivals wake up to a new reality

Chapter 6: The morning after, the years ahead
What do Harper and Layton have in common? An understanding of what works in Canadian politics in the Twitter age­—patience and determination.

To read the entire article now, pick up the latest issue of Maclean’s at your favourite newsstand.

*****

Chapter 3: The velocity of indignation

Later, when everything went crazy and pollsters started projecting 100 seats for the NDP, the people running the other parties’ campaigns were still mystified about how it happened. Was it the debates? That’s when the New Democrats began a long, steady climb in the polls. But debates don’t usually blow a campaign wide open, and there wasn’t much in Layton’s performance that anyone could point to as a hall-of-fame moment.

Layton’s breakthrough had its roots in events long before the debates. By the campaign’s end, voters who had never expected to abandon their old allegiances were swinging toward Layton. His performance at the debates, and in the days after, scratched a very specific itch for those voters: a growing frustration with the politics of allegation and accusation that dominated Stephen Harper’s Ottawa. That frustration had been building before the campaign even began, and the 10-day period before the debates was just more evidence that something had to change.

For the Liberals it began on a bright note, with the release in Ottawa of the party’s electoral platform. Two years earlier, Ignatieff had told a reporter that the party’s next platform “is not a Red Book.” Now here he stood, waving a red book. Reaffirming basic principles might not be such a bad thing for a party that had taken a beating. This event played to several strengths of the current Liberal team. Ignatieff spoke off the cuff, and well. The event was webcast on the Internet (the party said nearly 10,000 people watched), so it felt modern. The platform’s themes and the event’s tone were reminiscent of the discussions during Ignatieff’s April 2010 thinkers’ conference in Montreal, so the Liberals looked like an organization with an attention span and some follow-through.

Continue…

The Night of 1,000 Delusions

By Scott Feschuk - Friday, May 6, 2011 at 7:00 AM - 57 Comments

Adrien Veczan/Reuters

The most surreal moment of election night 2011 took form as it became apparent to one and all that Jack Layton, leader of the Opposition, had lost his mind.

It’s well and good to celebrate a historic surge in one’s popular support. A wide smile and a jubilant bit of cane-waving are undoubtedly in order. But a few lines into Layton’s speech, a nation gaped as it grew clear the NDP leader had mistaken his moral victory for, you know, an actual victory. He seemed to labour under the impression that he would hold sway in the next Parliament. Indeed, Layton went so far as to imagine that Stephen Harper would be psyched to meet with him to discuss NDP priorities.

It was kind of adorable, like a kitten pawing at a vacuum. One envisioned Layton’s aides whispering between themselves:

Continue…

The first Republican presidential debate in a nutshell

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 10:57 PM - 5 Comments

And they’re off…

Given how few big-name potential candidates showed up in Greenville, SC tonight, the debate was really a chance for former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty to introduce himself to a national audience and make some headlines, but it’s hard to see that he made a huge impression. One of his most memorable moments came when Fox News called him out for having supported cap-and-trade and he gave a full-throated apology and mea culpa (“I was wrong, it was a mistake, and I’m sorry”).  He now says would be damaging to the economy.

Pawlenty, who in the past has called Obama “weak” on national security, took a hawkish position. He said he supports waterboarding in some situations. While he said he “tipped his cap” to Obama for hunting down bin Laden, he also took the position that bin Laden was killed thanks to intelligence from Bush-era interrogation techniques that President Obama opposed. (Though this is not clear from the record.) He also called for an ultimatum to Pakistan: cooperate with us in Afghanistan or lose your aid.

His is a much tougher position than the one being taken by Republican committee leaders in the US Congress who say they have “tough questions” for Pakistan’s government about their role in protecting bin Laden, but add that the US has a lot at stake in Pakistan and has been receiving cooperation on a number of fronts, including being allowed to make drone attacks on militants. (See my piece in the new Maclean’s print magazine for more on this subject.) Pawlenty also called the United Nations a “pathetic organization.”

Former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum was the field’s standard bearer for social conservatism. Santorum gave his most impassioned answer when arguing that “rights come from God.” He said there could be “no truce on moral issues” and was forced by Fox News questioners to defend past comments that appeared to link working women and what he called “radical feminism.” (He said he blamed radical feminism for celebrating women’s decision to work—rather than equally celebrating the decision of those who stay home to be wives and mothers.) He said he supports making English the official language of the US calling the “language of success” in America. He criticized Obama for not giving more support to the Iranian student movement and said that anything Obama has done right on foreign policy “was a continuation of Bush.”

Atlanta businessman Herman Cain was the only participant who said he would not release the photo of a dead Osama Bin Laden. He said the war in Libya lacks a “plan for victory” and also took socially conservative positions.

Texas Congressman Ron Paul thinks secret prisons are “authoritarian,” would not support raising the federal debt limit even if it led to a default, believes America’s fiscal problems result from its “militarism,” and doesn’t think many people would try heroin if it were legal.

New Mexico governor Gary Johnson ran 30 marathons, climbed Mount Everest, and wants to legalize pot.

Michael Ignatieff lands a job at University of Toronto

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 6:55 PM - 83 Comments

Ousted Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff has accepted a teaching position at the University of Toronto after his party’s devastating defeat in Monday’s election. He’ll be teaching in several departments, including the Munk School of Global Affairs, and becomes a senior resident at Massey College, according to an announcement by John Fraser, master of Massey College. Ignatieff had formerly taught at Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard Universities.

The Globe and Mail

The rich keep getting richer. Should we be worried?

By Erica Alini - Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 5:41 PM - 132 Comments

Photograph by Flickr user seven_resist

That the gap between rich and poor has been widening in the U.S. and Britain is old news. What’s new, according to a recent OECD report (PDF), is that in the last 30 years the income gap has been growing even faster in unlikely places: Sweden, Denmark and Germany. Despite their notoriously generous welfare systems, the three have seen the split between top and bottom incomes grow faster than anywhere else in the OECD in the past decade. (Canada also registered a sizable increase in its Gini coefficient, the standard measure of income inequality.)

So why are the rich doing disproportionately better than everyone else? The report highlights an interesting trio of possible causes: Continue…

Interview with South Carolina governor Nikki Haley

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 5:38 PM - 1 Comment

South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley held a round-table interview this afternoon with several reporters in Greenville, SC ahead of the first Republican presidential debate here this evening. The following is a condensed excerpt of the exchange. A daughter of Sikh immigrants from India, she is the first woman and the first non-white governor of the state. At age 39, she is also the youngest governor in US.

Tonight’s televised debate is the first in the Republican presidential nomination contest.

Q – The obvious question is that there is a sense of frustration that some of the bigger names aren’t here for this debate. We wanted to get your reaction…

A – I don’t know that it’s frustration. What we are looking at is the fact that some candidates want to be here early and want to show their aggressiveness they are doing that and I applaud them for doing that. The others are going to have to make up for lost time. And they’ll have to realize that when they come, they have missed the first chance to get that messaging out there. But they are all coming. And the people of South Carolina are ready and excited to hear what they have to say.

Q – Are they making a mistake in judgment?

A – I will tell you anybody that ignores the state of South Carolina is making a huge mistake.  To me as a candidate, you went anywhere and everywhere to let people know how much you cared. I think that the candidates need to show the people of South Carolina that they will be anywhere and everywhere to show how much they care.

Q – You have been very critical of the message you have heard from the candidates so far? Have you heard that yet, or what are you looking to hear?

A – The people of South Carolina and I don’t want a candidate coming in here telling us how they are going to win. We want a candidate that is talking about policy. What are they going to do to make us more energy independent? What are they going to do in reference to what the NLRB [National Labor Relations Board] has done with the unions against Boeing? What are they going to do in terms of our debt ceiling? What are they going to in terms of improvement of our quality of life and make sure we have more industry in the United States. What are they going to do in reference to our military and the fact that now we have Bin Laden now but now we have to continue to be vigilant.

The people of South Carolina want specifics. Any candidate who comes in and thinks they are just going to bring their high-powered consultants and visit GOP groups, they are making a mistake. They have to see every corner of the state, see every person, and talk about specifics. I did not win my election by the GOP establishment or the money people. I won by the cooks in the kitchen, and the parking meter attendants, and the law enforcement officers. People talk doesn’t go over well in this state but results and pure substance does.

Q – Tim Pawlenty has tried to impress you. Has he made any progress?

A – Absolutely. I applaud him for responding to the lawsuit against Boeing. And I challenge every other candidate to do the same.

When a candidate responds, he shows he is listening and answering tough questions, we have to give them credit…

Q – You mention energy independence. Have you thought about the issue of the proposed pipeline form Canada bringing more oil sands [crude]?

A – The one thing that we are hearing from our constituents are oil prices. … All I want are permanent solutions. I want someone who will come in and say,  this is how we’re going to handle it. This is where we’ll be a year from now and this is where we’re going to be two years from now. I would like to see us start to drill…

Q – South Carolina is known, particularly among Canadians, as being the South and everything that implies. You are the first female, Indo-American governor, you are in the your 30s, are you representative of some kind of new face of the Republican Party and what can you do to help the party nationally?

A – I represent a state that is going to show every other state in the country what a good state looks like. I am incredibly proud of our state.  I will tell you that I absolutely agree with my friend and national columnist, George Will, who said, “I you are looking for the state that has changed the most in the last 50 years, you’d say it was California. But if you are looking for the state that has changed for the best in the last 50 years, you’d definitely say South Carolina.” That is what the state is excited about. There is a new energy in our state. Unemployment rates are down for fourth month in a row, tourism rates are up, exports are up. We’ve got jobs coming in left and right.

I am on the phone with companies every day and they want to come. And the types of companies we are talking to are automotive, aerospace, manufacturing, research and development. They are coming because the cost of doing business in South Carolina is low and the trained workforce we are supplying to them. We are a strong right to work state that does not want the labour unions anywhere around us. The phones are ringing and we are quite excited.

Q – When you talk to Mitt Romney’s supporters about why he is not coming here, you hear, you know, people don’t like Mormons in South Carolina and that’s why he didn’t do well last time. You backed him last time. Do you think there is anything to that?

A – No. The people of South Carolina are good people. This will be very much like my election. It doesn’t matter if you are male or female or black or white, or what your religions is. What matters is what you are going to do to influences people’s lives… The person who communicates that the best and reaches out among everybody will win. I want to remind you that anybody who has won SC has gone on to win the Republican nomination. That is because South Carolina represents the country and all that is great about this country.

Q – How much of the NLRB decision do you blame on President Obama?

A – All of it. Absolutely all of it. He appointed Mr. Solomon to the NELB board. To sue a company just because they chose to expand into a right-to-work state is the biggest insult they could do to right to work state. They have picked the wrong state to mess with. I will tell you that this is a desperate attempt of the labour unions to get relevant and it’s just not going to work.

Q – Would you be interested in being Vice President in 2012, on the ticket?

A – No, everybody wants to talk about VP with me and what I tell them they need to be focused on the top of the ticket. We don’t have the luxury of talking about VP right now.

Q – What would you say is your biggest accomplishment since becoming governor?

A – For me, the biggest accomplishment is the fact that now every single legislator has to record their vote on record, that became law, and not only that, they have to show how they vote on every section of the budget. We went from being one of the weakest states on transparency to one of the strongest on accountability in the country and I’m incredibly proud of that.

Q – But you took on many in your own party for that, though. Do you think you’ll pay for that down the road?

A – No. Both parties have made mistakes. What we saw in last election is a chance for Republican party to define itself as conservatives again and to define itself about real issues again. That’s something I’m going to encourage through how I lead in South Carolina and something I’m going to encourage in how people talk to the presidential candidates.

South Carolina gears up for first Republican presidential debate tonight

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 5:24 PM - 5 Comments

Mitt Romney is not showing up. Nor is Sarah Palin, Jon Huntsman, Mike Huckabee, Michele Bachmann, or even Donald Trump. But tonight’s the first televised debate of the race for the Republican presidential nomination is taking place tonight regardless. The biggest name is former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, who will have a chance to grab the national spotlight. No Republican has ever won the party’s presidential nomination without winning the primary in South Carolina. It’s an early primary state where and heavily-Republican one that serves as a litmus test of a candidate’s appeal to the party and to the American South.

“I will tell you, anyone who ignores the State of South Carolina is making a big mistake,” South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley told reporters yesterday. Just ask Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor whose attempt to win the nomination without campaigning in South Carolina was a bust. Romney and Trump are scheduled to appear in the state later this month, and Bachmann has been through. Huntsman is scheduled to give a commencement speech in the state on Saturday.

David Wilkins, the former US ambassador to Canada and the former Speaker of the South Carolina legislature, said the issue for voters in the state’s Republican primary will be “the economy, jobs, deficits, out of control spending, and fiscal restraint.”

At a round table with reporters at his Greenville law office, Wilkins recalled his time as chairman of the late Strom Thurmond’s senate campaign in 1996: “All we talked about was ‘Strom Thurmond brings home the bacon. Strom Thurmond brings home the goods,” he recalled. “Now that’s not what people want to hear. Now it’s: ‘What are you going to do to curtail spending?’” Indeed, Tea Party activists were holding a rally blocks away from the debate to press their small-government cause.

Back to school

By Philippe Gohier - Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 5:08 PM - 51 Comments

Michael Ignatieff will take up residence at the University of Toronto.

“Political leadership often comes with onerous burdens and Dr. Ignatieff has met his challenges with both fortitude and imagination,” Fraser said. “He will be welcomed into the university community in Toronto by both faculty and students and honoured for his commitment to our national life. In return, we shall have the benefit from his learning and experience.”

Giving Obama his due

By John Parisella - Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 4:53 PM - 7 Comments

It was fitting that after a month of absolute and embarrassing silliness regarding Donald Trump’s birther campaign, President Obama would silence the conspiracy theorists with a gesture of presidential majesty—ending the search for the most wanted terrorist in the world, Osama bin Laden. Killing bin Laden, after having to make public the long version of his birth certificate to prove his legitimacy more than two years after his inauguration, seemed straight out of Hollywood. More importantly, however, it may have provided Americans with a moment of pause regarding the reason for the election of Barack Obama in the first place. Continue…

The fringe standings

By Philippe Gohier - Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 3:39 PM - 25 Comments

Popular vote totals for the sixth through 18th parties.

Christian Heritage 19,218
Marxist-Leninist 10,160
Libertarian 6,017
Progressive Canadian 5,838
Rhinoceros 3,819
Pirate 3,198
Communist 2,925
Canadian Action 2,030
Radical Marijuana 1,864
Animal Alliance 1,451
Western Block 748
United 294
First Peoples National 228

Mulcair backtracks on bin Laden comments

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 3:10 PM - 22 Comments

NDP Deputy Leader Thomas Mulcair has backtracked after telling a CBC host on Wednesday he doesn’t believe the U.S. has photos of a dead Osama bin Laden. Mulcair was back on the CBC Thursday to clarify his comments. He now says he doesn’t doubt the photos exist, and blames post-election “fatigue” for the gaffe.

CBC News

Bottle-feeding can increase a baby’s obesity risk: study

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 3:01 PM - 1 Comment

According to a new study in the Journal of Pediatrics, babies who are bottle-fed until age two are more likely to start school obese. U.S. researchers looked at nearly 7,000 kids who were still regular bottle users at 24 months, and found that they were 30 per cent more likely to be obese by age five-and-a-half. Meanwhile, 22 per cent of the two-year-olds they studied were using a bottle as their main drink container, or were put to bed with a bottle with a drink that provided calories. Nearly one-quarter of them were obese by age five, compared to 16 per cent of those who hadn’t been using a bottle at age two. Parents should stop using a bottle by age one so they don’t risk overfeeding, they said.

BBC News

'Thank you'

By Philippe Gohier - Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 2:54 PM - 31 Comments

Ken Dryden deals with defeat.

On Tuesday, he woke early in defeat. He grabbed one of his red campaign signs, pasted a message on it, then drove to the corner of Bathurst St. and Wilson Ave., where he held the sign and waved at passing cars. The message was two words long: “Thank you.”

Tom Mulcair clarifies

By Paul Wells - Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 2:25 PM - 37 Comments

Just kidding!

Life of a heroin junkie: A new doc about punk rock drug addiction

By Claire Ward - Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 1:40 PM - 0 Comments

WARNING: sensitive language

Interview by Claire Ward
Shot and edited by Tom Henheffer
Produced by Claire Ward