Amrullah Saleh and the Afghan detainee controversy

By Michael Petrou - Monday, June 20, 2011 at 11:43 AM - 7 Comments

Amrullah Saleh was head of Afghanistan’s secret police, the NDS, during the time that Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin alleges detainees transferred to the NDS by Canadian Forces were tortured.

As near as I can tell, Saleh has not spoken to media about these allegations (though he has addressed them in letters and reports — including to the former Afghan ambassador to Canada — that have been made public).

I met with Saleh in Kabul. The bulk of our interview concerned his involvement in the political movement opposed to a peace deal with the Taliban. We did, however, briefly touch on the detainee issue. Here, for the record, is what he said:  Continue…

Highest number of refugees in 15 years

By macleans.ca - Monday, June 20, 2011 at 11:41 AM - 1 Comment

The United Nations refugee agency said Monday that 43.7 million people around the world have been displaced from their homes by conflict or persecution. The figure is the highest it’s been in 15 years. Of those displaced, 80 per cent come from the world’s poorest countries. Pakistan, Iran and Syria were the world’s biggest hosts of refugees while Germany has the largest refugee population (594,000) of any industrialized country. In the next year, the agency estimates that 747,000 places will be needed for displaced people.

New York Times

Ottawa hints at abolishing Senate if reform doesn't pass

By macleans.ca - Monday, June 20, 2011 at 11:36 AM - 16 Comments

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney says Stephen Harper could choose a more confrontational path if senators don’t come around to Conservative proposals to reform the upper chamber. The Harper government has advocated imposing term limits on senators and subjecting them to elections, and is expected to put forward a bill to reform the Senate this week. However, senators, even those appointed by Harper, have expressed reservations about the proposed changes. With the spat between the federal government and senators taking place in full public view, Kenney is now reminding senators “we are prepared to entertain more dramatic options.”

The Globe and Mail

One in 12 US kids might have a food allergy, survey shows

By macleans.ca - Monday, June 20, 2011 at 10:52 AM - 0 Comments

According to a news study published in Pediatrics, one in 12 kids in the United States might have a food allergy, and more than one-third of them have severe allergies. What’s more, allergies are more common in the children of minority groups. Previous studies estimated that between two and eight per cent of kids had a food allergy, but most were based on studies asking lots of different health questions, not just about allergies. This study focused solely on the rate and severity of food allergies, surveying a representative sample of almost 40,000 adults who lived with a kid under 18. The results showed that 8 per cent of kids had a diagnosed food allergy or symptoms that indicated one, most commonly to peanuts, milk, and shellfish.

Reuters

Socialist in name, for now

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, June 20, 2011 at 9:54 AM - 21 Comments

New Democrats voted this weekend to defer a change to their constitutional preamble.

The lineups at the microphones when the constitutional resolution came up for debate was long and NDP MP Pat Martin (Winnipeg Centre) led the charge in favour of the new wording, saying the socialist language in the constitution was an anchor holding the party back — and scaring voters away — at a time when it is closer to forming government than every before.

“Socialism is not an anchor, it’s a rocket,” Barry Weisleder, who chairs the unofficial socialist caucus that meets in its own room at NDP conventions, shot back. “You can take socialism out of the preamble, but you can’t take socialism out of the NDP.”

'Fulfilling the dream'

By Erica Alini - Monday, June 20, 2011 at 8:55 AM - 35 Comments

The prepared text of Jack Layton’s closing speech to the NDP convention in Vancouver this weekend.

Mes amis, Il y a deux ans, les néo-démocrates se sont réunis à Halifax pour notre congrès. Nous avons créé un projet marquant qui nous a tous uni. Mener le NPD vers une grande percée. Plusieurs personnes nous disaient que ce serait impossible. Que vouloir changer Ottawa était un vœux pieux. Que les choses sont comme elles sont et que rien ne va changer. Le 2 mai, les Canadiens avaient une autre idée en tête. Les néo-démocrates ont montré qu’on pouvait y arriver. Quatre millions et demi de Canadiens ont clairement indiqué qu’un choix positif était possible. Ils ont voté pour le changement. Ils ont choisi un parti qui se bat à chaque jour, depuis cinquante ans, pour que les familles d’ici passent en premier.

My friends, 2 years ago, we came together in Halifax and left united behind a single purpose. To lead the New Democrats to a major breakthrough. The sceptics said it couldn’t be done. They said it was a fool’s errand to try to bring change to Ottawa. They said the way things are is the way things will always be. Well the Canadian people had a different idea.  And on May 2nd, New Democrats proved the sceptics wrong.

Continue…

The Less Than Thrilling, Unfulfilling KILLING

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, June 20, 2011 at 12:30 AM - 1 Comment

Spoilers for The Killing (the English-language U.S. version, not the subtitled Danish version that the UK got to see, and loved) after the jump:
Continue…

This is the week that was

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, June 18, 2011 at 1:17 PM - 12 Comments

The House debated Libya and the meaning of regime change. The opposition demanded to hear from the President of the Treasury Board. Charlie Angus mocked Tony Clement. Then mocked him again. And again.

Jack Layton took his place in Twitter history. A former Liberal MP worried that Parliament wasn’t serving Canadians well. Ruth Ellen Brosseau was applauded. Elizabeth May dissented. Mr. Clement looked on the bright side and clarified what he meant by “anachronistic” and dismissed what he’d said about user fees. The ethics commissioner suggested a code of conduct for MPs. Peter Stoffer proposed a ban on floor crossing. The youngest MP in history made his maiden remarks. Continue…

The cost of a peace deal in Afghanistan

By Michael Petrou - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 10:24 PM - 6 Comments

My second article from Afghanistan is about Afghans opposed to President Hamid Karzai’s Western-backed efforts to reconcile with the Taliban.

This movement is, I believe, consequential, and may present Afghanistan’s international allies with a biting dilemma.

“After a lot of effort and many, many hundreds of millions of dollars, you may reach that peace deal,” Mahmoud Saikal, a former Afghan deputy foreign minister who is now organizing against Karzai, told me. “But you will have lost the Afghan people.” Continue…

How do you solve a problem like Roberto Luongo?

By Charlie Gillis - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 5:26 PM - 15 Comments

He’s never been one to pour out his soul, so one might reasonably interpret the phone call Roberto Luongo placed on April 21 as a full-on cry for help. After two straight blowout losses to the Chicago Blackhawks, Vancouver’s superstar netminder had lost the starting role in Game 6 of the Western Conference quarter-finals to his backup, Cory Schneider. Now, with the Hawks threatening to erase a 3-0 deficit in the series, Canucks coach Alain Vigneault was having a public crisis of confidence in his $10-million-a-year goaltender. Luongo’s future hung in the balance.

So he reached out to his brother Leo, a goaltending instructor in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League, and like any good coach, Leo steered the conversation toward the positive. Roberto’s recent failures went unmentioned, as did the attendant pressures of his epic 12-year, $64-million contract. “We talked about him staying focused and sharp and being ready,” Leo told Maclean’s. “In hockey, you never know what’s going to happen.”

As it turned out, Schneider went down in Game 6 with leg cramps, and Luongo entered the game in the third to make a series of impressive stops in an overtime loss. Continue…

Betty Fox has died

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 4:30 PM - 0 Comments

Betty Fox, the mother of Canadian icon Terry Fox, has died. Betty was in her early seventies when she succumbed to illness at a hospice in Chilliwack, B.C., according to a statement released by the Terry Fox Foundation, which she ran for 30 years. Following Terry’s death from cancer on June 28, 1981, Betty and her son Darrell established the Terry Fox Foundation, which, through annual Terry Fox Runs taking place in 28 countries, has raised over $550 million for cancer research. Betty is survived by her husband Rolly, and her children Darrell, Fred and Judy.

CBC News

Where are the documents?

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 4:24 PM - 38 Comments

On April 14, midway through the election campaign, the two judges involved in the review of Afghan detainee documents wrote to Messrs Harper, Ignatieff and Duceppe to explain that nothing could be released because the House had been dissolved and, thus, the ad hoc committee of MPs no longer existed. Both the Conservative and Liberal sides expressed their desire to see documents released, but nothing more came of it.

On May 6, four days after the vote, the Prime Minister’s Office confirmed that the government supported the release of the judges’ report.

On May 17, John Baird, at that time still the government House leader, stated that a number of documents “should be able to be tabled in short order.”

The 41st Parliament was opened on June 3 and has now conducted nine days of business. Nothing has been tabled. In response to questions about when something might be tabled, the Prime Minister’s Office says that the “government will honour its commitment to table the report.”

Assuming the House must be in session for anything to be tabled, there are four days next week to do this before the House breaks for the summer, not due to return until Sept. 19.

Canada Post is all but obsolete

By Jesse Brown - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 3:43 PM - 108 Comments

I have regard and sympathy for postal workers. Their mission was once critical to the world, and they have a sense of duty and a code of professional ethics that reflects this. They also have enjoyed all of the security and privilege that comes with performing such a crucial task.

Today, the ideals (and the comforts) remain, but something has changed. The mail just isn’t critical to society anymore. In most cases, it’s an anachronism—overdue for obsolescence, economically and environmentally indefensible. The Canada Post lock-out will help nudge the obsolescence along

I still check my mailbox with great anticipation every day. Not for personal correspondence or periodicals—I get those online. Not for parcels—private couriers handle those. But as a freelancer and contractor, I still get paid through the mail, and that keeps me interested.

But why am I still paid by mail? Why is it taking so long for companies to put in place a direct-deposit system for non-employees? Why is it still so difficult for me to email payment to the people I hire? And why does the government still spend millions mailing out cheques for pension, social security, welfare and unemployment?

Everyone who deposits these cheques has a bank account, so their finances are already part of a digital network. The paper slip is just a note from one computer that tells another computer to change some data. The postal workers and the Canadians who cart these objects around are redundant, fleshy bottlenecks in the process. Why are we still locked into such a wildly expensive and inefficient system?

Entropy, I suspect, and a bizarre sense that removing the last physical artifact of money will somehow melt the brains of anyone over 45.

The Canada Post lock-out will help with the entropy. Organizations have trouble innovating from within, but can become surprisingly nimble when pressured externally. Nothing will force an overdue move to digital transfers like necessity. Then, once the sky fails to fall, what will remain is a much quicker and much cheaper system.

At that point, why will anyone go back to snail mail?

Betty Fox

By Paul Wells - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 2:39 PM - 9 Comments

Terry Fox’s mother passed away this morning. Shortly before the 1993 Terry Fox Run I interviewed her in Montreal for The Gazette. Here’s that story:

Break time. Betty Fox sank gratefully into a chair and talked about the difficulty of carrying on the work begun by her son Terry, one of the few heroes a modest country has permitted itself to celebrate.

Twelve years have passed since Terry Fox died at 22 of cancer, 10 months after he had to cut short his cross-Canada “Marathon of Hope.”

Even after all that time, touring the country talking about the disease that killed Terry before he could kill it is “still difficult,” his mother said quietly.

“It’s telling Terry’s story, talking about Terry not just once a day but many times a day. It’s meeting other cancer patients, it’s meeting parents of children with cancer, people who may have seen Terry on the road and relay those stories.

“All of that – it’s really trying, it’s really very hard.” Continue…

Socialist or merely social

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 2:22 PM - 10 Comments

Joanna Smith previews this weekend’s existential crisis.

New Democrats are preparing to cast off the shackles of the socialist label by eliminating the word from the federal party constitution at a policy convention this weekend. “The New Democratic Party is dedicated to the application of social democratic principles to government,” reads part of a proposed new preamble to the party constitution, which will be voted on at the 50th anniversary convention in downtown Vancouver. “These principles include an unwavering commitment to economic and social equality, individual freedom and responsibility, and democratic rights of citizens to shape the future of their communities.”

That language is much different from what exists in the current version of the constitution, where the principles of “democratic socialism” are described as being against making profits and for social ownership.

In full, the new preamble would read as follows. Continue…

The Origins of Itchy and Scratchy

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 1:46 PM - 2 Comments

Jerry Beck of Cartoon Brew is excited about the upcoming DVD release of “Herman and Katnip” cartoons. Herman and Katnip were among the many cat-and-mouse teams created for theatrical and TV cartoons in the wake of Tom and Jerry, and they’re famous for being the most gruesomely violent and mean-spirited of all of them. (This was par for the course for Famous Studios, whose cartoons were among the most violent and cruel – rarely very funny, but sometimes interesting because of that.) Matt Groening has cited them as being among the inspirations for Itchy & Scratchy, because as Simpsons writer Mike Reiss put it, the fascination of H&K is that “there’s nothing deft about them. It’s just ugly violence.” Herman and Katnip are what Tom and Jerry would be if it looked like Tom was really in horrible pain and if the sadistic subtext became text; Itchy and Scratchy are just Herman and Katnip taken to their logical conclusion.

The story of Jack

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 12:55 PM - 0 Comments

From the latest issue of the print edition, John Geddes tells Jack Layton’s life story.

When Layton became the club’s “junior commodore”—inevitable for a boy who always seemed to end up running things—he realized he might actually be able to do something to protest the inequity. And it could be fun. The club held weekly teen dances in the summer. Layton scoured its rule book. “Buried in the rules was that everybody can bring one guest, except the junior commodore, who can bring more than one. No limit was proscribed,” he says. Layton and his buddies invited the whole town. “So every kid who wasn’t a member, I signed in.” That meant a lot of low-income, francophone teenagers…

The next morning, Jack was summoned down to the club and chewed out. “I was called into the boardroom,” he says. “I was scared, but I was upset because I thought they were judging these French kids.” The disgruntled grown-ups threatened to scupper the youth club. Layton didn’t let them have the satisfaction. “You can’t disband it,” he declared, “we’re canceling it.”

Forget Freud, Forget Marx. Rioting, above all, is fun.

By Andrew Potter - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 12:45 PM - 99 Comments

Photograph by Simon Hayter

White riot – I wanna riot
White riot – a riot of my own
White riot – I wanna riot
White riot – a riot of my own

– The Clash, “White Riot”

There is nothing better than a good old-fashioned downtown hockey riot to get everyone’s ideology pumps working overtime. Probably the most predictable analysis came from Adrian Mack and Miranda Nelson over at the Georgia Straight, who took a bus in from 1969 and blamed the alienating character of capitalism. In trashing the downtown of their own city, the rioters were simply rehearsing the violence that is inherent in the system: “The market practices institutional violence on every single one of us, every day, just by virtue of existing,” they write. Meanwhile, demonstrating the law of conservation of rhetoric that holds that for every idiocy there is an equal and opposite idiot, Don Cherry apparently claimed that the Vancouver rioters were left-wing pinkos (which, come to think of it, is not necessarily at odds with the Mack/Nelson view of things.)

Getting into the shallower ends of the thought pool, the Vancouver police officially blamed “anarchists” for starting the riot, and drunken youth for making it worse. And in a column that has been widely circulated and praised as the best thing written on the riots, National Post sportswriter Bruce Arthur took the most direct route, daring to suggest that of course the rioters were hockey fans, largely those possessed of an overload of “machismo and rage and nihilism.”

Arthur is closest to getting it right, but even he feels the urge to take it further, wondering what it is about the Lower Mainland, why  “this strain of poison leaches from a city that, while it has a bright line between rich and poor that grows brighter every day, is generally a good place.”

Everyone, Arthur included, is over-thinking this way too much: Any proper discussion of the riot and why it occurred has to start with the recognition that rioting, especially for young men, is a huge amount of fun. The only reason there isn’t more of it is that if you do it by yourself or in a small group, you’ll almost certainly get caught. It’s like the old joke about owing the bank money: If you do five million dollars damage to downtown, you’re in big trouble. If a hundred thousand people do five million dollars to downtown, the city is in big trouble.

The point is that if you can get enough people to riot, then you all get away with it. The trick, then, is getting enough people willing to do it, in the same place and at the same time, to create a tipping point effect. And so when it comes to starting a riot, what the participants are faced with is essentially a coordination problem.

A coordination problem is a situation where all the relevant actors have a common goal, but there is imperfect information. We are collectively trying to achieve the same general outcome, but don’t know how each person is going to act to get to it. In the 1950s,  the economist Thomas Schelling described a situation in which two people wish to meet in New York City on a given day, but cannot communicate the time or place at which they should meet. How should they act? He suggested that beneath the clock at Grand Central Station at noon would be an ideal time and place– this is what he called a “focal point” for coordination. (He no longer believes this to be the case, though; it is interesting to think of where the focal point would be in New York City today, or in a given city of your choice.)

Back to the riot: Particular events, like Stanley Cup Game Sevens, become natural social focal points for  “reliable riots” — or reliable opportunities to riot. This is especially so once a city has an established reputation for hosting (and to some extent tolerating) riots: this is what is going on in both Montreal and Vancouver, in contrast with Edmonton and Calgary, for example.

Once a city becomes a known focal point for rioting, then a bunch of people show up to just to riot (indeed, they will even  travel great distances to do so), precisely because they know that a bunch of other people are also going to be showing up to riot. This is exactly what happened with the G20 in Toronto (and the antiglobalization stuff in general) and what happens now with the Stanley Cup final.

In principle, social media have the capacity to increase the amount of rioting, since “flash mob” technology can be used to solve the coordination problem – there is probably some of this at work in the Arab spring protests.  On the other hand, technology also tends to work against the rioters, by reducing the impunity that comes with the anonymity of crowds. The most important thing the Toronto police did, with the G20 riots, was not all the head-cracking and detentions, but going after people who were photographed committing crimes. The Vancouver police are currently gathering videos and images of the rioters and crowdsourcing their identities. They won’t catch everyone, but they will probably identify enough people that it will serve as a huge deterrent to future riots.

In the meantime, the chief lesson is to keep in mind that there is no reason to delve into the depths of class warfare, or to psychoanalyze the culture or the city, when there is a far simpler explanation for what is going on. As a rule of thumb, never invoke Freud or Marx when Hobbes is at hand.

Maclean’s: June 27, 2011 issue

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 12:30 PM - 0 Comments

FROM THE EDITORS

The one bureaucrat we’ve all come to trust

THIS WEEK

Good news, bad news

Newsmakers

OPINION

Barbara Amiel: As he lifted his leg, I watched, enviously

Andrew Coyne: Rain or shine, the monopoly must end

Scott Feschuk: A constant reminder of my failings

THE INTERVIEW

Gary Bettman in conversation with with Jonathon Gatehouse

CANADA

The making of Jack Layton

Paul Wells: When Tories agree to disagree

Colonel who?

Paying good money for awesome ideas

Who’s suing whom: A broken desk and a bumpy ride

Mitchel Raphael on Rae’s plans and the new Speaker’s muscle

WORLD

Afghanistan: Another civil war?

United States: What’s blocking up the pipeline?

Syria: Running from the regime

Letter from Europe: No sex please, they’re children

China: A dangerous herder mentality

India: Corruption stories, online

Britain: Archbishop battles ‘Big Society’

France: He really doesn’t like Sarkozy

Australia: Save the Earth, kill a camel

BUSINESS

Hacker attack

The last of his kind

The fashion big leagues

Can I crash at your place?

A Wii problem

Taking big box to Africa

Bright idea: Instant bottle

SOCIETY

The royal visit: Hail to the chief organizer

Blindsided

Greener pastures

Island of earthly delights

Are you going to eat those fries?

The stuff of science fiction

FILM

Bollywood confidential

TASTE

The definitive ($600) cookbook

FAME

The wife with the angry memoir

BOOKS

Review: La Seduction: How the French Play The Game of Life

Review: The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine

Review: The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars

Review: Ticket Masters: The Rise of the Concert Industry and How the Public Got Scalped

Review: Infamous Players: A Tale of the Movies, the Mob (and Sex)

Review: The Thirteen

STAGE

World’s most misguided musical returns

ART

Art’s original bad boy does Ottawa

THE END

Virginia Dorothy Little (1942-2011)

Hacker attack

By Chris Sorensen - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 11:50 AM - 5 Comments

Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images

Visitors to the Conservative Party of Canada’s website last Tuesday were confronted with a shocking message: the Prime Minister had been rushed to hospital in Toronto after choking on a hash brown. Media outlets scrambled to unearth more details about the breakfast-hour emergency only to learn that it was all a big joke. The party’s website had been hacked.

It didn’t take long to find out who was behind the prank. A group calling itself LulzRaft claimed responsibility on Twitter, and later followed up by breaking into the party’s donor database and posting names and emails of more than 5,000 people online. Why did they do it? “The Conservative party was really just a hack of opportunity,” wrote someone purporting to be the hacker in an anonymous email to Maclean’s. “We noticed the vulnerability and realized we could easily create some lulz, and draw some media attention without hurting anyone.” For the uninitiated, “lulz” is Web-slang for laughs—derived from the abbreviation LOL, for “laugh out loud.”

But the Tories aren’t laughing. Nor should they be. It’s an embarrassing breach of security for a governing party that, just a few months earlier, assured Canadians that it had a cyber-security strategy in place. It’s also the latest in a string of brazen attacks on high-profile targets around the globe, ranging from Sony Corp. and Google Inc. to defence contractor Lockheed Martin and the International Monetary Fund. In addition to attention-seekers like LulzRaft, experts say many more hackers are quietly working on behalf of organized crime and even foreign governments—so much so that Washington is now talking about cyberattacks as a potential “act of war.”

Continue…

China evacuates citizens after fatal floods

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 11:49 AM - 0 Comments

Hundreds of thousands of people in central and southern China have been evacuated after days of torrential downpour sparked deadly floods. The Chinese government says flooding in some areas has been the worst the country has seen since 1955. Troops have evacuated about 555,000 people so far. The floods arrived after months of drought that destroyed crops in central and northern China. The country has raised its disaster alert to the highest level, as more heavy rain is expected until Sunday.

BBC News

Boston Bruins fan attacked in Vancouver riots

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 11:46 AM - 0 Comments

Boston Bruins fan, Kris Griffin, was watching game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals in a designated downtown ‘fan zone’, when he began to get pushed and spat on by Vancouver Canucks fans. He says the crowd around him became more hostile as the game progressed, causing him to remove his Bruins jersey. However, a group of four or five people still proceeded to kick and punch him to the ground. He was attacked again, multiple times, while trying to stop the riots that unfolded as the game wound down.

Toronto Star

Review: Infamous Players: A Tale of the Movies, the Mob (and Sex)

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 11:45 AM - 0 Comments

The book doesn’t quite live up to the subtitle. It dishes lots about movies, less about the Mob, not so much about sex. It seems Peter Bart has never shaken his cautious instincts as a New York Times reporter—a career he ditched for a seven-year stretch as an executive at Paramount (1967-75), followed by two decades as editor of Variety. And much of his story has already been told more vividly in The Kid Stays in the Picture, a breathless memoir by his former Paramount boss, Robert Evans. Next to it, Bart’s book seems pretty tame. But with its breezy mix of journalistic detachment and first-hand authority it offers another valuable angle on the rise of the so-called New Hollywood.

Bart’s tenure spanned a fertile period in Paramount’s history, producing such films as The Godfather, Rosemary’s Baby, and Chinatown. But the biggest movie he made happen was the schlockbuster Love Story, starring Ali MacGraw, who became the third of Evans’s seven wives. Bart took far more pride in finessing Harold and Maude, an unlikely romance between a teen boy and a septuagenarian.

Bart coyly skirts around the era’s cocaine and hot-tub culture, comparing himself to “a teenager who’d been invited to an orgy but was too timorous to partake,” though he admits he habitually dabbled. There are some juicy tales of unhinged stars, from Frank Sinatra, whose “moods ran the gamut from rude to homicidal,” to Warren Beatty, who forced Bart to trim Julie Christie’s sex scene with Donald Sutherland in Don’t Look Now. As for the Mob, there are tantalizing glimpses of Evans’s legendary consigliere, Sidney Korshak, “a very civil and well groomed gangster.” (Korshak used his Vegas muscle to pry Al Pacino out of an MGM contract so he could do The Godfather.) Bart quotes Korshak telling him, “I hope you’re not keeping notes. I learned long ago that notes can be dangerous to your health.” Bart took his advice. Too bad.

Continue…

Canadian Embassy refused to help alleged rape victim

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 11:42 AM - 8 Comments

Officials at a Canadian Embassy in Eastern Europe refused to help a Canadian federal employee collect video-evidence of her alleged rape. The young woman was traveling in Eastern Europe on official government business, when she says a co-worker sexually assaulted her in his hotel room. When the hotel would not give her the security tape containing footage of the alleged assault, she appealed to the Canadian Embassy for help, but they refused. The Foreign Affairs Department also refused to take action—until a month later, when the Justice Department wrote an official letter requesting cooperation. The Justice Department is now investigating a suspect. His identity is unknown to the public at this time.

The Chronicle Herald