U.S. prosecutors expect to indict John Edwards

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 1:11 PM - 0 Comments

Federal prosecutors in the U.S. expect to indict former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards in the coming days, according to a report by the Associated Press. Investigators have been on Edwards’ trail for the better part of two years, probing almost his entire political career in connection with allegations that he violated campaign financing laws. At the heart of their investigation is money that went to keep Edwards’s mistress out of the public eye while he campaigned for the presidency.

Associated Press

Have you hopped aboard the Vancouver Canucks bandwagon?

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 1:05 PM - 9 Comments

Canadians missed 9.1 days of work for personal reasons in 2011

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 12:50 PM - 6 Comments

New figures compiled by Statistics Canada show eight per cent of Canadians with full-time jobs skipped out of work for personal reasons during an average week last  year. In all, full-time employees lost an average of 9.1 days in 2010 for personal reasons, down from 9.5 days in 2009, but up significantly from eight days in 2000. Public sector workers were much more likely to miss work, skipping 11.8 days of work time in 2010 for personal reasons, compared with 8.2 days for their private-sector counterparts. Unionized employees were similarly more likely to miss work. Full-time workers who belonged to unions, or who were covered by collective agreements, missed an average of 12.9 work days for personal reasons in 2010, compared with 7.3 days for their non-unionized counterparts.

Canadian Press

Palestinian leadership says Netanyahu speech obstacle to peace

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 12:42 PM - 1 Comment

Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas has dismissed a speech given by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the U.S. Congress. Abbas said Netanyahu’s address simply made peace harder to achieve. In the speech, Netanyahu said Israel was willing to make difficult compromises, but rejected an earlier call by US President Barack Obama for a peace deal based on pre-1967 borders. Abbas also said that if no progress is made towards peace by September, the Palestinian Authority would unilaterally seek recognition from the UN. Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat told the BBC that Israel’s terms for peace – which include an undivided Jerusalem, a demilitarized Palestine, and a refusal to scale down Israeli settlements in the West Bank – prove Israel cannot be a partner for peace.

BBC News

French Finance Minister announces bid for top IMF post

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 12:32 PM - 0 Comments

French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde announced her candidacy on Wednesday for the top post at the International Monetary Fund. Lagarde, 55, told reporters that if elected by the IMF’s board of executives, she will bring “expertise as a lawyer, a minister, a manager and a woman,” to the job. Several European countries have already backed Lagarde’s leadership bid, including Britain and Germany. Traditionally, the IMF’s leadership post has been reserved for a European, something that Brazil, Russia, China, India and South Africa, with their emerging economies, feel is wrong. In a joint statement, these five countries said the election of the next IMF chief should be merit-based and not biased in favour of a European. The leadership race began last week after former director Dominique Strauss-Kahn resigned amid accusations of rape. The next leader is expected to be named by the end of June.

CBC News

Opto Civitas

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 12:12 PM - 38 Comments

The NDP is apparently keen to be a civil official opposition.

Moments after leader Jack Layton publicly addressed his caucus for the first time since a record 103 New Democrats were elected, self-proclaimed “loudmouth” Pat Martin pulled out a set of colourful buttons bearing the words “Opto Civitas.” ”I choose civility. That’s the new me,” he proclaimed.

He apparently made 300 of them in various party colours. There’s even one for Green Party leader Elizabeth May. He plans to hand them out when Parliament resumes June 2 … [Layton] later noted that the “heckling” that’s become commonplace during question period over the course of several minority governments, needs to stop and that it’s time for “respectful discussions” that don’t drive school groups out the door in shame.

Tim Hortons CEO quits

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 12:09 PM - 0 Comments

Tim Hortons announced on Wednesday that its president and CEO, Don Schroeder, has abruptly left the company. He will be replaced on a temporary basis by predecessor Paul House. It’s not clear what prompted Schroeder’s departure, though one unnamed analyst speculated to CBC News that the split wasn’t amicable. Tim Hortons stock price dropped by more than four per cent after its quarterly results, released two weeks ago, fell short of analysts’ expectations.

CBC News

The end of the vote subsidy

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 10:44 AM - 225 Comments

The Conservatives will, as promised, move to phase out the per vote subsidy. Marc Garneau, whose Liberal party will be most wounded, wonders if it’s time to raise the limit on individual donations.

Liberals will, however, press for an increase in individual donation limits if Conservatives do end the subsidy, he said. “If individuals want to give more than the $1,100, that’s something that should be discussed,” he said. “I think it’s regrettable. We will vote against it, but given the fact that we can’t stop it, I think that one has to put that on the table as a possibility.”

Canadians live well, but many know hard times

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 10:23 AM - 8 Comments

A new OECD report finds that Canada ranks high among the organization’s 34 member countries in terms of quality of life. For instance, 87 per cent of Canadians have a high school diploma or the equivalent. More than two-thirds own the home they live in, and those homes are bigger on average, at 2.5 rooms per person, than the OECD average of 1.6 rooms. Overall, Canada “performs exceptionally well,” concludes the Paris-based group. Yet the Salvation Army has released a report that shows a remarkable number of Canadians have had to depend on charity at some point in their lives. Nearly 25 per cent of Canadians, according to the organization’s survey report called “Canada Speaks,” have had to depend on services such as food banks or other charitable groups at some point during their lives, with seven per cent reporting they had to sleep on the street or in a homeless shelter due to unavailable housing. Still, that doesn’t seem to translate into wide sympathy for the down-and-out: about 60 per cent of respondents to an Angus Reid survey conducted for the Salvation Army said money given to those living on the street would be spent on drugs and alcohol. On the other hand, 93 per cent said nobody should be homeless and housing access should be a fundamental right.

Toronto Sun

Postmedia

Big pain at the gas pumps

By Jason Kirby with Chris Sorensen - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 10:05 AM - 12 Comments

Sheila Boardman/CP

When gasoline prices in Central Canada hit record highs in early May, Industry Minister Tony Clement did what he always does when consumer rage boils over: he donned his populist cape and channelled citizens’ fury against a shadowy adversary—in this case, Big Oil. Standing in the driveway of a Toronto home, flanked by black and white Volkswagens and facing a wall of TV cameras, Clement bemoaned the lack of transparency in how pump prices are set. He then vowed to summon executives from the refining, distribution and retail industries to Ottawa for hearings. “All I know is that prices are going up and down and sideways and no one really knows why,” he said.

He was partly right, in that prices are zig-zagging wildly. At the start of May, oil and gasoline prices reached punishingly high levels, rekindling dark memories of the spike in energy costs that tipped the global economy into recession in 2008. Then, in the span of just a few days, oil prices, along with most other commodities, went into free fall. Gas prices have begun to drift down too, though not nearly as fast. But by the time MPs actually get around to holding hearings several months from now, the price of crude may well have fallen to the point that this most recent bout of pain at the pumps will have been forgotten—or it may have soared so high that the only affordable way anybody will be getting to Parliament Hill is by bicycle.

But where Clement was wrong was in his contention that nobody can explain what’s behind the extreme price movements. On the contrary, a growing number of experts in the industry as well as academia have come to the conclusion that excessive speculation by traders and investors, aided by ultra-low interest rates and easy money, is severely distorting the market. “You simply can’t explain these levels of volatility by supply and demand because market fundamentals don’t shift that quickly over such a short period of time,” says Michael Greenberger, a law professor at the University of Maryland who, in the 1990s, was in charge of the trading and markets division at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the U.S. government agency that regulates commodity futures. “Most observers now believe speculators are actively manipulating oil prices.”

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High prices leave the polar bear population at risk

By Nicholas Köhler - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Kevin Frayer/CP Photo

Earlier this year, word began spreading among the Inuit families of the Belcher Islands, a treeless archipelago of rock and snow in Hudson Bay, that their cousins across the sea ice in Quebec had shot many dozens of polar bears this winter. For some in Nunavut, the rumour rankled. Hunters there must follow strict quotas governing the number of polar bears each community can harvest. Their cousins in northern Quebec, meanwhile, don’t.

At a time when polar bear hides are fetching between $5,000 and $11,000 at auction—double the price of just a couple of years ago—it was the kind of gossip that could only excite envy. “That means more income for them,” says Lucassie Arragutainaq, manager of a local Nunavut hunters and trappers association. A polite, cautious man who likes to stress the high cost of gas and ammunition in the north, Arragutainaq couldn’t say whether the number of polar bear kills in Quebec was as high as he’d heard: “It may be,” he allowed, “but I could be wrong.”

Actually, the number was even higher than initially reported. Hunters from the community of Inukjuak, Que., shot as many as 60 polar bears this winter, perhaps more—the official numbers aren’t yet released—all of them likely from a population centred in southern Hudson Bay that’s particularly at risk. The situation is this: high prices for polar bear skins on the world market is putting Canada’s oldest industry—the fur trade—on a collision course with what’s become the most potent symbol of global warming: the polar bear.

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NBC is Still NBC, Book 2

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

As Fox and CBS continue to be boring juggernauts and ABC is just flaky and incomprehensible, it’s good to still have (for now) NBC making the most simple, unaffected mistakes. Like announcing that Chris Meloni, star of Law & Order: SVU, was a lock to return for another season, only to have him turn around and reject their contract offer. Several sources, including the one I linked to just now, are reporting that Meloni won’t be back next season and that Dick Wolf is already looking for a replacement – this after Mariska Hargitay already announced she’d only be in about half the episodes.

Of course, continuing a series with different actors is something Dick Wolf knows all about, but SVU isn’t a regular Law & Order show – which is one reason it’s still on the air when the original L&O is not. The show depends heavily on the two leads, and their apparent inability to investigate a case unless they have some kind of personal emotional attachment to it. Besides, Wolf no longer has the power he used to, either at Hollywood or within NBC (which treated his original show pretty shabbily toward the end), and might not be able to pull off the kind of casting coup that would keep the show going; if the best he can do for the female lead is Jennifer Love Hewitt, what’s he going to get for the male lead? Maybe the Muppets, but they’re rather busy this summer.

William Quintero Martinez

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 9:55 AM - 0 Comments

Illustration by team macho

William Quintero Martinez was born on Dec. 2, 1993, to Eduardo Quintero and Floralba Martinez Romero in Tocancipá, outside the Colombian capital of Bogotá. “We lived in pretty little cottage in the mountains, with a nice view,” says Floralba, who stayed home with the kids (William’s big sister, Esperanza, was three years older) while Eduardo ran an importing business. “We had a chauffeur and a cleaning lady; the chauffeur would drive us into the capital, and Eduardo to his office.”

When William was still a baby, his father died suddenly. Later, Floralba told her son that he’d been killed in a car accident, but that wasn’t the case. “I didn’t want to upset him,” she says, “but his father was assassinated by the chauffeur,” who planned to steal the family’s car. The chauffeur, a teenager at the time, spent two years in prison. Floralba was devastated. “I couldn’t live in the house where William’s father died, so I stayed with my sister in the capital,” she says, and eventually rented an apartment there. She got a job as a hairdresser, and as an office receptionist. “I felt like I was finally starting over, because I had my two children with me, and a job.” But when William was a toddler, tragedy struck again: while on vacation with another family member, his sister Esperanza drowned in a pool. Floralba sank into a deep depression and “couldn’t eat or sleep,” she says. “I thought a lot about William’s future, and knew I had to get better for him. He was my life.” After Esperanza’s death, a psychologist visited with William—a loving, social child—and told Floralba, “He’ll be okay.”

When William was still young, Floralba paid two visits to Montreal, where she knew other Colombians who’d emigrated. “I decided that I had to leave Colombia because there were too many memories,” she says. “I started thinking I’d like to go to Montreal so that William could grow up there, where it’s safe, and we could start over.” When her son was five years old, they boarded a plane for Canada—this time, to set up a new home. “It wasn’t hard for him at all,” she says. “In the plane, I told him, ‘We’re going to a country where there’s snow, like in the movies.’ He was very excited.”

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Festival of sirens

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 9:55 AM - 1 Comment

Photograph by George Pimentel/FilmMagic; Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images

In Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, which kicked off Cannes, Owen Wilson stars as a Hollywood screenwriter vacationing in France with his fiancée, a shrewish Malibu princess played by Rachel McAdams. He’s a frustrated novelist who dreams of being a writer in the café society of the 1920s. This being a Woody Allen movie, magical thinking produces magic, and our artiste manqué time-travels to the salons of the Golden Age, mixing with the likes of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Picasso—and falls in love with an artist’s muse portrayed by Marion Cotillard. She, in turn, considers her own era a bore, and longs to be transported back to the belle époque of the 1890s. The absinthe is always greener on the other side.

Living elsewhere, of course, is why we go to movies. And the unabashed nostalgia of Midnight in Paris served as a fitting amuse-bouche for the 64th annual Cannes International Film festival, an event where the past could not have been more present. Cannes is the shrine of auteur cinema, “the pinnacle,” as Johnny Depp acknowledged when he dropped anchor to promote Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides—part of the Hollywood sideshow that keeps the media flocking to Cannes. But as blockbuster culture erodes the fragile ecology of the art film, the art-house fortress of Cannes has never seemed more intent on honouring the past. This week it staged a tribute to Jean-Paul Belmondo, whose role in Breathless in 1960 helped launch the French New Wave. And among the 20 features in competition, one film after another conjured nostalgic visions of paradise lost, from a miraculously good black and white silent movie called The Artist, to Terrence Malick’s eye-popping vision of a ’50s childhood (and all of Creation) in The Tree of Life.

That smoky siren played by Cotillard in Midnight in Paris could be a poster girl for this festival—if the official poster was not already adorned by the ghostly image of another icon, a young Faye Dunaway with mascara eyes wide shut and endless legs folded in supplication. This edition of the festival feted a pantheon of mostly male directors—including Lars von Trier, Pedro Almodóvar and the Dardenne brothers—but Cannes has always held a special place in its heart for the Siren. No, not the one on the Starbucks logo, but the sort of screen goddess who embodies the mystique of cinema. Sophia Loren. Ingrid Bergman. Monica Vitti. Marilyn Monroe. We’re still looking for the latest incarnation, in the fiery brilliance of Penélope Cruz or the erotic majesty of Angelina Jolie, but it’s like hunting for a new Dalai Lama.

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Reviving the search for Madeleine McCann

By Michael Barclay - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 9:50 AM - 0 Comments

M. Spencer Green/AP

Madeleine McCann went missing while her parents were vacationing in Portugal in May 2007. Four years later, on the child’s eighth birthday last week, her mother Kate released a memoir, simply entitled Madeleine, which details not only the family’s grief surrounding the disappearance, but also the pain of being vilified by the British press and Portuguese police, who suspected the parents were complicit in the crime—or at least negligent, for dining nearby while leaving three children under five alone in a hotel room. The book, which found a publisher with the help of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, is already a British bestseller and is being translated into Portuguese. The parents’ hope is to raise $1.5 million to pay for two more years of private investigators’ work.

As the McCanns were doing press to promote the book, Portuguese authorities announced that, for the first time, they were allowing London’s Metropolitan Police squad into the country to review their files. As well, British Prime Minister David Cameron instructed Scotland Yard to reopen the case, citing its “exceptional” nature and its “international dimension.”

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Review: Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 9:50 AM - 0 Comments

Can Malcolm Little, the man, be separated from Malcolm X, the symbol? Marable, who died shortly after completing this book, explains that if Martin Luther King Jr. was the leading anti-segregation voice of the U.S. South, the Nebraskan Malcolm became the voice of northern blacks living under de facto segregation. To this day he resonates with people who “perceive passive resistance as an insufficient tool for dismantling institutional racism.”

In the process of looking at Malcolm’s life, Marable fact-checks assertions in the famous Autobiography (whose co-writer, Alex Haley, often “felt that he had to insert himself into the text”). The book shows how he became such an important figure, first as a member of the separatist Nation of Islam and then, famously, as a NOI apostate who claimed to be “firmly within the civil rights mainstream.” The book is a valuable look at the Nation of Islam and how it deviates from regular Islam. Marable explains how the exclusionary, race-obsessed NOI didn’t live up to Islamic rules: “Islam was in theory colour-blind,” he notes, and Malcolm realized the conflict between Islam and black supremacy even earlier than he admitted in the Autobiography. Marable seems to prefer the Malcolm who emerged after he left the NOI: “His new commitment to gender equality confused and even outraged many members” of his new group, the Organization of Afro-American Unity.

But this reformed Malcolm only had a year left before he was struck down, which means it can be hard to get a clear picture of what he accomplished. What is clear is the extent of posthumous legend: from “the media’s sensationalizing of Malcolm’s anti-white image” to the Autobiography’s popularity with black and white audiences alike, what Marable calls his “modern version of Pan-Africanism” caught on worldwide. Marable may not know what Malcolm would have done had death not “cut short his maturity and full potential as a leader,” but it’s clear that in death, he did a great deal.

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Review: My New American Life

By Dafna Izenberg - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 9:45 AM - 0 Comments

On a drizzly October afternoon, 26-year-old Lula stares through her window and muses: does a leaf fall in New Jersey if no one is there to see it? It’s not as cliché as it sounds—Lula is really wondering whether that leaf will fall, in the absence of an appreciative audience. Perhaps that’s because, since coming to America from Albania more than a year ago, Lula herself has done little but try—and lie—to win people over. She fabricates a “Christmas wedding” in Tirana to persuade border officials that, a) she doesn’t plan to stay in the U.S., and b) she isn’t half-Muslim. She trades wretched fact (her parents were killed in a car crash in Kosovo) for horrifying folklore (her cousin and his bride were barricaded in a cave as part of a blood feud) to convince her boss, Mr. Stanley, that she needs rescuing from “the most backward Communist country.” She entertains her charge, Mr. Stanley’s son Zeke, 17, with claims that vampire lynchings are common in modern-day Albania.

Meanwhile, Lula has plenty of drama now. There is the gun she is babysitting for three Albanian brothers. There is the stalker who showers in her bathroom and writes a brilliant ending to an old Albanian legend she is appropriating as family history. There is Alvo, her cute but shady suitor, Dunia, her disappeared friend, and Ginger, Zeke’s mentally ill mom, who left the family on Christmas Eve.

In Lula, Prose showcases her keen sense of young people’s inner lives, in particular the constant vacillation between cynicism and hope, goofiness and sophistication. Lula’s scoffing observations of U.S. politics and culture infuse the story with wry humour, but she is too full of heart to let paranoia (“English for Balkan common sense”) carry the day. Mr. Stanley and Zeke may never understand her former life but, as they draw her into the fold with their vulnerability and generosity, Lula begins to find a place for herself in her strange new home.

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Review: The psychopath test: A journey through the madness industry

By Peter Shawn Taylor - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

As with most diagnoses, this book contains good and bad news. First the good news: Jon Ronson’s journey through what he calls “the madness industry” is a lively, engaging and often funny piece of work. The bad news: Canada appears to be overrepresented when it comes to stories about psychopaths.

Ronson is well-known to British audiences as the wry host of TV and radio shows, and as a humour columnist. Canadians will be more familiar with him as the author of the book behind the 2009 George Clooney comedy The Men Who Stare at Goats. His latest effort looks at the meaning of madness and its effect on the “normal” world. Ronson begins by investigating the origin of a cryptic book sent anonymously to scientists around the world. After solving that, he visits an inmate who faked insanity to avoid prison, only to be permanently locked up in a mental hospital for being too convincing. He spends time with conspiracy theory nut jobs, Scientologists, reality TV show producers, and psychologists and other academics—all of whom display varying degrees of madness. So what does “abnormal” really mean?

Of particular interest to Ronson are psychopaths—those among us who lack the capacity for empathy or meaningful emotional connections. It’s estimated that perhaps one per cent of the population is so constituted, although some claim that figure is higher among corporate leaders and career criminals. UBC psychology professor emeritus Robert Hare, who invented a checklist for psychopaths, figures prominently. Later, imbued with the power to spot psychopaths, Ronson finds he goes a bit mad himself.

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Who's the real supreme leader?

By Erica Alini - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 9:35 AM - 2 Comments

Reuters

The latest piece of political theatre in Iran features a bitter public tussle between the country’s hardline president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and its equally hardline supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It’s the kind of venomous power struggle that Iranians love cracking jokes about over a good cup of chai. Who’s up and who’s down? And is the battle real or just an act? Collective cabs in Tehran, those four-wheeled vehicles for gossip, are buzzing with elaborate conspiracy theories on the issue, the PBS news site Tehran Bureau reports from the capital.

It all started in mid-April with a revelation worthy of a spy novel: the offices of Ahmadinejad’s chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, had allegedly been bugged by none other than the Ministry of Intelligence. Ahmadinejad promptly sacked the intelligence chief, Heidar Moslehi, but the supreme leader, who notoriously dislikes the president’s right-hand Mashaei, ordered the embattled spymaster reinstated. In a fit of pique, Ahmadinejad then boycotted cabinet meetings and avoided public appearances for over a week.

His defiance quickly precipitated the spat into a full-blown political storm, with personalities from across Iran’s conservative political spectrum—from influential clerics to top-level members of the elite Revolutionary Guard—thundering that an affront to the supreme leader constituted an affront to the Islamic Republic. Some even suggested the president should be impeached. A sulky Ahmadinejad eventually reappeared in the majlis, Iran’s parliament, after receiving an ultimatum to return or resign. But in a sign of how much the president’s gutsy standoff irked many within Iran’s conservative camp, several associates of his ally Mashaei, a highly controversial figure among Iran’s hard-liners, were arrested on charges ranging from corruption to demon worship and sorcery.

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When the cat's a stray

By Stephanie Findlay - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 9:30 AM - 2 Comments

Last year, when Carla Leardi joined the Cat Assistance Team (CAT), a non-profit volunteer group in the small southwestern Ontario town of Amherstburg, friends wondered why. After all, Leardi, an owner of two dogs, doesn’t have a cat. But the fortysomething office assistant considers herself an equal-opportunity animal enthusiast. And she was quick to take on CAT’s biggest task: dealing with Amherstburg’s proliferating cat population—a problem that’s more than a little gross. “One gentleman,” says Nancy Greenaway, a board member of CAT, “complained because his very expensive hockey equipment had been sprayed.”

Leardi’s solution is a “cat sanctuary.” She’s proposing that CAT’s volunteers build and maintain a fenced-in site for the local herd. Each feline would get a “cat condo”—a small house, complete with linoleum floors, straw and a shingled roof. The plan, says Leardi, is more cost-effective than the $50,000 it would cost to trap and euthanize all the town’s approximately 100 wild cats. By comparison, neutering a cat costs about $200, shelter is $400, and food is about $5 a month. It’s also, she says, simpler than introducing and enforcing stricter animal bylaws. (She uses Ottawa’s Parliamentary Cats, a similar residence behind Parliament Hill, as an example).

In April, CAT met with the town council and requested a piece of land and $10,000 to cover start-up costs for a 20-cat colony—donations and fundraising will cover ongoing needs. The idea was well received, says Greenaway, and CAT hopes it will be approved soon. “People are starting to say ‘how can we help?’ ” she says. “And it’s not only the people that want to get rid of the cats and have threatened to poison them.”

A sommelier in your pocket

By Stephanie Findlay - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 9:15 AM - 4 Comments

Photograph by Jenna Marie Wakani

Last year, VinTank, a “digital think tank for the wine industry” based in Napa, Calif., released a report that reviewed 75 wine-related iPhone apps. Last month, VinTank did a redux of the report—this time the number of apps on the market had soared to 452.

A small industry has sprung up around smartphone apps for wine. Some better than others, says Paul Mabray, VinTank’s chief strategy officer, who notes, “there’s a ton of trash out there.” Mabray suggests the best wine apps are the ones with a specific function and a simple interface. Some of his favourites include: Cor.kz, a bar-code scanning app that pulls up info on 750,000 wines, and Nat Decants, described as a “personal sommelier in your pocket,” run by noted Canadian wine writer Natalie MacLean. (It also has a label scanner for wines sold in B.C., Ontario and Quebec.)

The wine app industry is still in its infancy. “There is a tendency for the application to be myopically focused on the oenophile,” says Mabray. He predicts wine apps will soon be more like Instagram or Foodspotting—visual apps where you can post pictures and trade notes with friends. “I’m looking forward to following what wines my friends are talking about,” says Mabray. “More like Facebook, or Twitter.”

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Big Mac-onomics

By Colin Campbell - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 0 Comments

Remy De La Mauviniere/AP Photo

Economists have long looked to global restaurant behemoth McDonald’s as a useful tool to mine data. The Big Mac index, for instance, was invented to measure whether world currencies are over- or undervalued. A new study suggests that McDonald’s in Europe might also be used to help gauge the entrepreneurial level of certain areas.

McDonald’s has a varied customer base, hires immigrants and, at least in Europe, is seen as a symbol of “cosmopolitanism and a modern urban lifestyle,” note economists at the University of Amsterdam. So a large number of McDonald’s in a region “may be used as a proxy for the openness and international connectedness of the region.” Researchers used that location data to help prove there is a link between innovation (measured by the number of patents filed) and areas with diverse groups of immigrants from regions with high skill levels. In other words, if you want to set up shop in an idea-rich part of Europe, McDonald’s may have already identified the best locations.

Did torture help the U.S. find bin Laden?

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 21 Comments

Joshua Roberts/Getty Images

The killing of Osama bin Laden had the potential to be a transformative moment for President Barack Obama. No longer easily portrayable as a vacillating, indecisive leader, he was the commander-in-chief who took a risk and brought down America’s most wanted man—something his predecessor, George W. Bush, had talked tough about but failed to accomplish. Heading into his 2012 re-election campaign, the event seemed likely to take the caricature of a foreign-policy weakling off the table.

But some Republicans quickly sought to portray the successful raid as a vindication of the very policies that Obama had campaigned against and then reversed upon taking office—in particular, the Central Intelligence Agency’s defunct secret prison program where detainees were subjected to an array of what the Bush administration referred euphemistically to as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Critics said those harsh tactics, like the controlled drowning technique called waterboarding, had stained America’s moral standing by giving official sanction to torture. Seizing a chance to redeem their reputations, the former Bush officials, who insist that the tactics did not violate anti-torture laws, argued that the much-maligned program had provided crucial information that eventually led to bin Laden.

“The intelligence that led to bin Laden,” wrote Michael Mukasey, who served as Bush’s attorney general from 2007 to 2009, “began with a disclosure from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who broke like a dam under the pressure of harsh interrogation techniques that included waterboarding. He loosed a torrent of information—including eventually the nickname of a trusted courier of bin Laden.”

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For your consideration: Lee Richardson

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 8:43 AM - 44 Comments

Yesterday, I emailed the offices of the seven MPs confirmed to be seeking the Speaker’s post. I sent each candidate the same set of questions with the promise that I would reprint here any and all responses in their entirety. Those questions were as follows.

1. First and foremost, why do you want this job?

2. To what degree have you been concerned about the levels of civility and decorum in the House during recent sessions? Would your approach to maintaining civility differ from Mr. Milliken’s and, if so, how?

3. Mr. Milliken objected to the use of statements by members to launch partisan and personal attacks? Do you share his concern and, if so, what could be done to deal with this matter?

4. Mr. Milliken made three closely watched rulings on privilege during the last Parliament: specifically on matters related to the opposition’s access to documents in regards to the transfer of detainees in Afghanistan, International Cooperation Minister Bev Oda’s dealings with the House and an opposition demand that the government comply with certain requests for information. Did you at the time, or do you now, have any objections to any part of those rulings? As Speaker, would you have handled those matters at all differently?

Responses will be posted here in the order they are received.

First up, Lee Richardson, the MP for Calgary Centre, who sends along the following. Continue…