The wife with the angry memoir

By Brian Bethune - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 10:45 AM - 0 Comments

Elin Berge/Moment/Redux

Millennium Stieg, as Stieg Larsson’s widow Eva Gabrielsson, 57, disdainfully refers to the celebrity afterlife of her common-law husband of 32 years, is still going strong. Seven years after the Swedish writer’s death, sales of his crime novels, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and its two sequels—collectively known as the Millennium trilogy—have topped 40 million copies worldwide. Far from fading, the buzz is only going to increase. The Hollywood version of the first book, starring Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara, which bills itself as “the feel-bad movie of Christmas,” reaches theatres in December; and “There Are Things I Want You to Know” About Stieg Larsson and Me—Gabrielsson’s long-awaited version of her Stieg, her bitter dispute with Larsson’s family, and her take on the much-rumoured fourth volume—will be in bookstores this month.

Gabrielsson’s book is compelling: in places poignant (her life with Larsson) or raw (the immediate aftermath of his fatal 2004 heart attack), and in others, uncomfortably self-aggrandizing. In Gabrielsson’s account, Stieg poured their common life, from their upbringing in northern Sweden to their joint leftist and feminist advocacy, into the trilogy. “I cannot tell exactly what part of the Millennium trilogy comes from Stieg and what comes from me.” It may have been his fingers on the keys, but the story is theirs: she, and only she, Gabrielsson argues, could finish Larsson’s work. Whatever its merits as a memoir, There Are Things I Want You to Know is also a weapon, deliberately crafted and wielded, in the widow’s war with the Larssons.

Stieg, a mostly penniless investigative journalist dedicated to battling far-right extremism, and Eva, a scarcely better off architectural planner and writer, did share everything for three decades, including their one solid material possession (a 600-sq.-m Stockholm flat), and the dangers posed both by Stieg’s violent political enemies and by Swedish law. They had practical reasons not to marry or have children. In the 1990s neo-Nazi groups murdered more than a dozen people in Sweden, including journalists; such incidents in the trilogy were drawn from real life, Gabrielsson writes: “nothing was made up.” If Eva and Stieg had wed, she would have been linked to him in publicly available databases, and so it was safer for Eva that Stieg be listed as “single” in official documents.

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Idea alert

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 9:31 AM - 18 Comments

Ethics commissioner Mary Dawson wonders whether we might need a code of conduct for MPs.

Dawson said she regularly gets complaints from people who think politicians are abusing their positions or behaving inappropriately.

“Misleading statements, personal attacks and the like that come with the partisan nature of political life are often distasteful to many Canadians,” Dawson wrote in her reports on both the Conflict of Interest Code for MPs and the Conflict of Interest Code Act. ”Some assume that this sort of behaviour must be covered by one or another of the various accountability regimes in force. In fact, there is no comprehensive regime that governs political conduct in general.”

Opening Weekend: Green Lantern, Mr. Popper's Penguins, Beginners

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 11:22 PM - 3 Comments

Ryan Reynolds in 'Green Lantern'

It’s the battle of the Canucks. I’m not talking about Vancouver’s ill-fated hockey team, but about Ryan Reynolds and Jim Carrey, two Hollywood Canadians butting heads at the box office this weekend as stars of studio blockbusters: Green Lantern and Mr. Popper’s Penguins, respectively. Both give charming performances in ridiculous movies. Just in time for Father’s Day, both Reynolds and Carrey play heroes whose destiny is cast by the legacy of a dead dad. Neither movie is as bad as I expected it would be from the trailer. But I can’t heartily recommend either of them—unless you’re too young to be reading this, in which case the pooping penguins might strike you as the funniest thing you’ve ever seen. If you’re a grown-up, however, and don’t feel a need to escape into a computer-generated fantasy world, there’s a superb and mature alternative—Beginners, which also happens to explore father-son issues and feature a Canadian, Christopher Plummer. (Unlike the two blockbusters, it opens in Toronto only this week, with Montreal and Vancouver to follow June 24.)

Green Lantern

Wednesday night’s preview of Green Lantern overlapped with the first period of the Stanley Cup’s Game 7. Having seen the trailer, which looked abysmal, I swore to myself that if the movie clearly sucked after an hour, I would bolt to watch the game—rationalizing that Ryan Reynolds, its Vancouver-born star, would probably do the same. But I ended up staying for the whole damn thing, which doesn’t mean that the film was so good that I couldn’t tear myself away. On the contrary, it was more like not being able tear myself away from a train wreck—a movie so exotically misconceived that it became strangely fascinating. I had to see how the carnage would play out. And I felt for the film, which seemed almost sheepishly aware of its own shortcomings. Continue…

Vancouver's 40-year-old virgins

By Charlie Gillis - Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 6:04 PM - 9 Comments

Deep in the fuggy, aromatic basement of TD Garden, in a corner of the Boston Bruins’ dressing room, Johnny Boychuk’s words to live by loom above his stall: “Move your feet, play physical, shoot the puck!” They are not so much a credo as a command, penned on a strip of yellowed masking tape like a reminder to an errant child. The defenceman reddened last week when a visitor noticed. “Just something I wrote to myself,” he mumbled through his playoff beard. But there was no need to be sheepish, because here was Bruin hockey boiled to its essentials—skate, hit, shoot. Thus did Boston find its way to the 2011 Stanley Cup final. They would forget it at their peril.

They didn’t, of course. The Bruins championship was a masterpiece of blood and sweat, forged from the work of role players and a goaltending performance for the ages. And the Canucks? They might have used that bit of tape. Continue…

Afghanistan: Progress reports, in more than name

By Paul Wells - Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 4:32 PM - 3 Comments

We have paid fairly constant attention to the quarterly Afghanistan progress reports the federal government has submitted since special advisor John Manley recommended greater transparency (along with other things) in 2008. The tale has been pretty consistent, and bleak: progress against limited, quantifiable goals on specific projects, in a general context of worsening violence and despair. It wouldn’t have been too unfair to summarize most of these reports as, “Construction continues on schedule, but the locals who haven’t died yet are terrified that they’ll be next.”

That’s changing. Quite starkly. For the better. Continue…

The daily shaming

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 4:09 PM - 11 Comments

Charlie Angus’ two questions in QP this morning, neither of which convinced Tony Clement to stand and respond.

Mr. Speaker, a minister of the Crown has an obligation to treat taxpayers with respect and be accountable to Parliament. The President of the Treasury Board has failed miserably on both counts, because since the Auditor General’s report, he has been hiding under the desk of the foreign affairs minister. Since he cannot seem to stand up in this House and apologize for his out-of-control booty run through the backwoods of Muskoka, I will keep it simple: go to the Twittersphere, 140 characters or less, hashtag, I am sorry, Canada.

Mr. Speaker, there are 150-plus Conservatives sitting behind the Treasury Board minister, I am sure all of them would love to siphon taxpayers’ dollars off for their own personal pork barrel projects. That is why we have rules. That is why we have Treasury Board. What message is the government sending by putting him in charge of Treasury Board, that it is open season on the taxpayers’ trust? Otherwise, why would the Prime Minister put the Muskoka fox in charge of the taxpayers’ henhouse?

Photo gallery: Riot in Vancouver

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 2:58 PM - 4 Comments

Heckling the hecklers

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 2:58 PM - 2 Comments

Kate Heartfield considers civility.

If you really want your MP to be an amateur off-colour comic, a lack of heckling doesn’t have to get in the way of that. A ban on heckling doesn’t mean a ban on humour, snappy comebacks and sharp critiques. I have no doubt that NDP MPs such as Charlie Angus, Pat Martin and even Jack Layton will continue to include highly partisan zingers in their questions in the House of Commons. They’ll just do it when they’ve got the floor. That is what grown-ups do.

Ottawa to intervene in Canada Post lockout

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 1:33 PM - 9 Comments

The federal government says it will introduce back-to-work legislation before the end of the week to end the labour dispute at Canada Post. The legislation will end Canada Post’s lockout of union workers and force an arbitrated settlement to the dispute. “They are unable to reach that agreement by themselves,” Raitt said, “even though they have had ample opportunity to do so and much support from this government and from Labour Canada.” Ottawa had also previously announced it would force a settlement between Air Canada and its striking workers before the two sides reached a tentative deal on Thursday.

The Globe and Mail

Hacker group LulzSec gets into the CIA's computer system

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 1:21 PM - 0 Comments

Infamous hacker group LulzSec has taken another victim: the CIA. The attack on the intelligence agency is the group’s the latest since the high-profile breaches of corporate giants Sony, Citibank, and PBS. The attack against the CIA’s computer system shut down the agency’s website for two hours and gave the hackers access to highly confidential information. CIA officials say they are looking into the breach. LulzSec refer to themselves as “the world’s leaders in high-quality entertainment at your expense,” and boast some 158,000 followers on Twitter. The group is now encouraging fans to phone its hotline with suggestions of which organization they should target next.

The Washington Post

Idea alert

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 12:34 PM - 34 Comments

The NDP’s Peter Stoffer is going to try again to ban floor crossing.

“If I pick up the phone right now and call Mr. Harper’s office and if they’re in agreement, within an hour I can become a Conservative member of Parliament,” Stoffer said Monday. “I don’t have to go to my constituents, I don’t have to tell my party, I could just sit tomorrow as a Conservative MP. That’s wrong on every count.”

His bill, if passed, would prohibit MPs from crossing the floor. Instead, if an MP wanted to change parties, they’d have to quit and run for the new party in a by-election, assuming they won the nomination. They could still sit as an independent, but someone elected as an independent couldn’t join a political party after the election.

Mr. Stoffer’s previous attempt, in 2006, was defeated with New Democrats voting in favour, Bloc and Liberal MPs voting against and the Conservatives almost evenly split. If those splits occurred again, the bill would pass.

Anthony Weiner steps down

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 12:33 PM - 4 Comments

Anthony Weiner will forfeit his seat in Congress and resign from his position in light of the sex scandal that has tarnished the politician’s reputation. Fellow Democrat Nancy Pelosi was among those who pressured Weiner to resign, requesting he spare the Democratic Party further embarrassment. President Barack Obama added he would step down if he were in Weiner’s shoes. The Democrats were about to conduct an ethics probe into the disgraced lawmaker to investigate further congressional abuse when he decided to resign after long talks with his wife, Huma Abedin. Weiner has admitted sending sexually explicit photos to a university student over Twitter.

BBC News

Congenital syphilis screening could save babies’ lives

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 12:23 PM - 0 Comments

Syphilis causes a half-million stillbirths and newborn deaths around the world, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, the BBC reports—but a new study of 41,000 women, published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, showed that testing and antibiotics could reduce that number by more than half. Syphilis, which is transmitted sexually, causes sores, a rash, and damage to the heart, brain and eyes; it can lead to death. Congenital syphilis occurs when the disese is passed from a mother to her child in the womb. More than two million pregnant women have syphilis each year, which can cause complications in more than two-thirds of cases, but the new study showed that screening resulted in a 58 per cent decrease in stillbirths, and a similar reduction in deaths in the first few weeks of a baby’s life; instances of congenital syphilis were also reduced.

BBC News

Lavigne gets six months behind bars

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 12:13 PM - 2 Comments

Raymond Lavigne, the one-time Liberal senator convicted of fraud earlier this year, was sentenced to six months in jail and ordered to make a $10,000 donation to charity on Thursday. Lavigne will also serve six months under house arrest in connection to his conviction on a charge of breach of trust. The former senator’s lawyers have indicated they plan to appeal the sentence and Lavigne complained to the court that “I do not feel that I received a fair and balanced trial.”

The Globe and Mail

Note to subscribers

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 12:07 PM - 4 Comments

Until the morning of June 15 we were able to work around the rotating postal strikes to ensure the delivery of our magazines.

While we continue to make our best effort to ensure timely delivery, the Canada Post lockout has caught everyone by surprise.

We are doing everything we can to ensure our readers receive their magazines by alternate delivery methods. Unfortunately we will not be able to reach all of our subscribers as quickly as we normally would. We will ensure, however, that your magazine will eventually reach you.

In the meantime, we encourage you to enjoy a digital edition of Maclean’s magazine by visiting macleans.ca/myissue. The iPad edition of Maclean’s is also available every Friday at 8 pm.

My husband's job? Well, um…

By Rebecca Eckler - Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 12:05 PM - 23 Comments

Peter Cade/Iconica/Getty Images

“What is it I’m supposed to say you do again?” I ask my boyfriend as we head out to see friends. “Just say I own my own software company,” he says, which is true. But it’s a very specialized software company, focusing on registration for the “conference and trade show industry.” I’m still not sure what that means, though I have rehearsed my lines.

I’m not the only one who has a hard time explaining or understanding what my partner does. When I posted on Facebook recently that he was headed off to do his “something-something” job in Washington, numerous women replied, admitting to being in the same clueless boat I was. “I can’t even remember the current title of my hubby. So don’t worry about it,” wrote one. Another replied, “I had a guy like that once. I tried to explain to people what he did but in the end gave up and boiled it down to, ‘He goes to an office tower in a suit and comes home with money.’ ” Still another suggested I just “say he’s in business.” This woman added, “Gone are the days when everyone had one job responsibility or title.” I’ll say.

“Not knowing, understanding, or being able to say what your husband does is very this-generation,” says Sari Friedman, an HR consultant and career coach. “The landscape has changed so much. Roles are more specific these days and more complicated to explain.”

Continue…

Gay manners for every occasion

By Julia McKinnell - Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

Traditional etiquette books are full of wedding advice, but what if the couple is gay and neither would-be groom knows for sure who should propose? “You won’t get much help on the particular manners predicaments of LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered] people from mainstream etiquette books. We’re invisible there,” writes 54-year-old Steven Petrow, founder of gaymanners.com and author of the new Complete Gay & Lesbian Manners for Every Occasion.

Petrow’s book answers “queeries” from gays and lesbians as well as from straight people, like the one who wonders, “I’m not sure if my new neighbours are a gay couple, may I ask?” Not a good idea, says Petrow. “Feel free to invite them over for a drink but don’t just come out and ask them about their sexual orientation. Once you’ve started to get to know one another, it’s fine to ask them some personal questions. Their answer to your query, ‘Where did you meet?’ will usually do the trick. My guess is, they’ll come out to you then—unless they’re straight roommates.”

A gay man writes, “I find it annoying that every straight person I’ve met knows one gay man to set me up with. You know the drill—the gay neighbour, the gay mechanic, the gay lawyer. I appreciate the good intentions but how do I explain that being gay doesn’t mean I would go out with just any gay guy?”

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Ex-wives rail about phony Facebook dads

By Joanne Latimer - Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 11:50 AM - 4 Comments

Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

You see pictures of them playing with their kids in the park or posing at movie theatres. They document every family trip to a restaurant and every birthday present. Who are these seemingly devoted parents with digital cameras? They are the scourge of single moms everywhere: phony Facebook dads. “It’s infuriating! My ex’s Facebook page is full of pictures of our kids with their dad. Talk about false advertising! I still have to make him do activities with the kids!” says “Gail,” a single mom who is a translator in Montreal. (All of the single mothers in this piece requested anonymity.) “What am I going to post? Pictures of me making their lunch for school or banning the Xbox?”

“Tina,” a professor and another single mother, finally de-friended the father of her daughter. “He’s visibly trying to construct a narrative of himself as an involved father,” she noted. Aesthetician and single mom “Dina” put it another way: “What a crock! My ex’s photos say ‘Look at me, I’m a good dad,’ but I had to [garnishee] his wages to get child support. He complains about gas money to drive his daughter to birthday parties and he won’t babysit, yet he’ll post photos where he looks like the world’s best dad…right!”

Phony Facebook dads are the newest irritant for fractured families. “It’s very grating for the custodial parent, which is often the mother,” noted Deborah Brakeley, a clinical counsellor and collaborative divorce coach in Vancouver. “It’s well known that exes, particularly moms, become resentful when their partner suddenly becomes a more dutiful parent, or at least appears so. They ask, ‘Where were you?’ They feel deceived and angry.”

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Cupcake gridlock

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 11:40 AM - 0 Comments

Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Bradley Reinhardt

By now Steve Abrams is used to the gushing that inevitably occurs when he tells people what he does for a living. “They go, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe it. I love you.’ Everybody wants to talk.” That’s because Abrams and his wife, Tyra, own New York’s Magnolia Bakery, which in a cupcake-obsessed world is like owning Mecca, only a lot sweeter. When the Abrams bought the the retro, hole-in-the-wall Greenwich Village bakery in 2007 it was already a tourist destination known for lineups around the block, thanks to a 20-second scene in a 2000 episode of Sex and the City that showed Carrie and Miranda sitting in front of it nibbling on cupcakes. Since then, the Abrams have been in expansion mode, opening four locations in New York, one in Los Angeles and a franchise in Dubai’s Bloomingdale’s.

Abrams is sitting in a corner table at his shop in the Upper West Side, which, like many urban neighbourhoods across North America, is in cupcake gridlock. Around the corner there’s an outlet of Crumbs, a New York-based cupcake chain publicly listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange this year, which plans to open 200 North American locations by 2014. Across Central Park is the equally ambitious Sprinkles, the upscale Los Angeles-based chain opened in 2005 by Charles and Candace Nelson, former investment bankers who fled the profession in 2001 after the dot-com bubble imploded. Famed for pioneering side “shots” of pure frosting and for using high-end ingredients like Nielsen-Massey Madagascar bourbon vanilla and Callebaut chocolate, Sprinkles took off after Barbra Streisand sent a box to her good friend Oprah, who gave them a shout-out.

Abrams waves away the suggestion that we’re approaching cupcake saturation. He points to his own shop, which is suffused with the vintage, been-here-forever vibe that’s now part of Magnolia’s corporate identity. On a weekday afternoon, it’s packed with mothers with strollers, teenagers and tourists. Most are lined up for the small, all-natural, thickly iced cupcakes, which come in a range of flavours and cost $2.75 to $3.25. Cupcakes make up half of Magnolia’s business, says Abrams, who won’t discuss sales figures, though the company is estimated to net some US$20 million annually.

Continue…

Nobody puts Cleopatra in the corner

By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 11:35 AM - 0 Comments

Photography by Roger Lemoyne

Johnny Zoumboulakis, the trim 61-year-old owner of the Montreal strip club Café Cleopatra, favours button-down shirts and dark ties underneath rumpled sports coats. He could pass for Ralph Nader promenading through a blacklight-bathed maze of scuffed bar tables and naked flesh.

“I like the Main,” Zoumboulakis said recently of St-Laurent Boulevard, the heart of Montreal’s historic red-light district. The man who just wants to keep his little piece of the street fabulously trashy speaks quietly, his accent tzatziki thick. “I don’t see anything wrong with being red-light. Almost every city has a red-light district. Some people want to erase it, change the image, and the Cleopatra is the last one standing, I guess.”

That Cleopatra’s sign still advertises strip-teaseuses and spectacles continuels between glimmering lights (along with two stark naked lasses beckoning patrons to come inside) is a testament to Zoumboulakis, who recently fought off a two-year expropriation campaign on behalf of developer Société de développement Angus. Already, SDA has bought out all the businesses (save for an electronics store and a Chinese restaurant) on the west side of what is known as the Lower Main, and plans to turn the area into condos, office towers and an entertainment complex where strippers and drag queens won’t likely be on the marquee.

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The Spirit finally gives up

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 11:15 AM - 0 Comments

NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Reuters

Saying goodbye is never easy, and on May 25, when NASA scientists finally bid farewell to the Spirit rover—a robot sent to explore the surface of Mars—it was impossible not to think of it as a living thing. Admitting he’d developed an emotional attachment to Spirit and its twin rover, Opportunity, Mars Exploration Rover project manager John Callas called them “the cutest darn things out in the solar system.” He and others were wistful as they praised Spirit’s achievements: intended to last just 90 days, the solar-powered rover operated for over six years, setting a record for humanity’s longest-ever mission to Mars. (Opportunity is still chugging along.)

Sent to investigate whether the freeze-dried planet was once wet and warm enough to sustain life, Spirit and Opportunity landed in January 2004, each at opposite sides: Spirit at the Gusev crater, and Opportunity on a flat plain near the Martian equator. “The environment for Spirit was always harsher than for Opportunity,” Callas said in a letter to his team. “The winters are deeper and darker,” he noted, and Gusev is a windy, dusty place, which threatened to clog Spirit’s solar panels. Scientists thought the Gusev crater might be an ancient Martian lake bed, but it turned out to be a volcanic plain—so the robot aimed for the Columbia Hills, visible only as bumps on the horizon. Not only did Spirit reach them; it actually climbed them (which it was never designed to do), and became the first robot to summit a hill on another planet.

After Spirit’s second Earth year on Mars, one of its front wheels failed. It had to improvise, driving backwards and dragging the failed wheel along the ground. “Out of lemons, Spirit made lemonade,” Callas wrote. The broken wheel eventually kicked up a trail of bright-white soil, which Spirit’s onboard tools identified as silica—suggesting that hot springs might once have bubbled up through the ground, potentially supporting some kind of microbial life. Cornell University’s Steve Squyres, Spirit and Opportunity’s principal investigator, calls this one of the most important findings of either rover.

Continue…

Greedy Rita, meter maid

By Jen Cutts - Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 11:10 AM - 0 Comments

Brian Harris/Alamy/Getstock

There’s nothing like a parking ticket to ruin an otherwise pleasant day, and in the U.K., they’re being ruined at record levels. The 4.2 million tickets issued by town halls in England and Wales (excluding London) from April 2009 to March 2010 was nearly twice the number in 2002-03, according to figures from the country’s Traffic Penalty Tribunal. The increase has led to accusations that councils are using the resulting funds to fill out their budgets, which were shrunk by deep spending cuts announced by the British government last October. “We can only suspect they do want to increase revenue,” says Paul Watters, a spokesman for the Automobile Association, commenting on the rise in tickets, as well as plans by some councils to step up fine amounts.

The tribunal, however, insists the increase is simply a result of more communities opting to take over parking enforcement from police, which has been an option since 1992. The U.K.’s Traffic Management Act states councils aren’t allowed to generate revenue through fines and must reinvest in improving transportation. But “local authority finances are complex,” says Watters. “It is hard to prove any sleight of hand.”

A new racial divide?

By Alex Ballingall - Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 2 Comments

Gallo Images/Getty Images

South African President Jacob Zuma was recently scolded by a prominent former leader for turning his back on the spirit of the country’s non-racial, post-apartheid constitution. F.W. de Klerk, the last president of white-ruled South Africa, who helped formalize the end of apartheid with Nelson Mandela, accused Zuma and his ruling party, the African National Congress, of orchestrating a “massive and forced redistribution” in wealth and property from the country’s white minority to its black majority.

Much of his criticism centred around what he sees as Zuma’s failure to rein in Julius Malema, the controversial leader of the ANC’s youth chapter. Malema is known for insisting on his right to sing apartheid liberation songs, one of which includes lyrics that celebrate the shooting of white landowners. He also reportedly supports the nationalization of the country’s mines and a more aggressive redistribution of farmland from whites to blacks, policies he sees as important to attaining racial equality.

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The quiet cuts

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 10:23 AM - 9 Comments

Chris Cobb finds a 20% cut to the budget of the National Research Council.

Although the cuts at NRC are “significant,” added Corbett, the issue is less about numbers and more about expertise. “If you have a rocket scientist going out the door, you can’t replace that person with an insect scientist,” he said. “It’s a pretty specialized field and that’s the part the government doesn’t appear to understand.

“The government is putting its fiscal policy ahead of everything and ordering all the science-based departments and agencies to cut,” he said. “And they are having a hell of a time doing it. On one hand they are trying to deliver the programs they are mandated and legislated to do, but on the other hand they are having to make some serious choices. It looks like one essential program will live at the expense of another.”