Gone vacationing

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, July 18, 2011 at 1:18 PM - 31 Comments

Beyond the Commons will be taking the next few days off. I assume the NDP will be by shortly to explain how this week wouldn’t have been possible without the organized labour movement.

Until we return, feel free to peruse the complete and unabridged archives of The Commons—including 50 sketches from the year so far—and recall that funny and/or distasteful and/or abhorrent and/or charming thing that backbencher and/or cabinet minister and/or member of the Royal family did and/or wore that one time.

Petraeus exits Afghanistan

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 18, 2011 at 12:33 PM - 0 Comments

U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus officially handed over control of the Afghan war Monday to his successor, Marine Gen. John Allen. Petraeus, the architect of troop surges in Iraq and Afghanistan, leaves behind a still chaotic country beset by violence and political instability. The night before the handover, a prominent Afghan politician was killed by suicide bomber in a secure area in Kabul. A week earlier, the president’s half-brother, a major power broker in Kandahar, was shot to death in his own home. Most analysts expect Petraeus to continue to wield considerable influence in the Afghanistan/Pakistan theater is his new role as head of the CIA.

Christian Science Monitor

Xplornet asked me not to write this

By Jesse Brown - Monday, July 18, 2011 at 12:33 PM - 27 Comments

Photo by wheresmysocks/Flickr

File this one under “Streisand Effect.” It’s a story I wouldn’t be writing if I hadn’t been warned not to.

Let’s start with some background: in Canada, we supposedly have Net Neutrality. That means your Internet service provider can’t mess around with the speeds of your connection based on which sites or apps you use. Yet ISPs in Canada still mess with the speed of our connections based on which sites or apps we use. How is this possible? Two reasons:

1. Because there are exceptions to the CRTC’s Net Neutrality regulations (if ISPs say they have to slow you down in order to manage “network congestion,” they can).
2. Net Neutrality rules are only enforced after they are broken, only if consumers complain, and only if the CRTC bothers to investigate and act.

Recently, Internet law prof Michael Geist obtained public CRTC documents revealing that, though dozens have complained about cases of speed “throttling,”  the CRTC has only enforced Net Neutrality once, on a company called Barret Xplornet—a government-subsidized provider servicing rural areas with satellite service.

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Bob Rae offers talk therapy in Vancouver

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 18, 2011 at 12:30 PM - 0 Comments

Interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae played the good dad in the afterschool special Sunday, taking some time out to sit down and listen to party members at a meeting in Vancouver. About 50 federal Liberals gathered and gabbed with Rae about party transparency, communication, and how to mobilize the apathetic Canadian voter. The meeting was part of Rae’s summer listening tour, ahead of the party’s biennial convention in January. The Liberals, reduced to third-party status in the last election, will choose a new permanent boss in 2013.

Postmedia News

PBO database to help MPs decide on spending

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 18, 2011 at 12:27 PM - 0 Comments

Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page is radically changing Parliament’s “archaic” budgetary approval process, the Hill Times reports. The plan is to provide MPs with the tools and information necessary to make more informed decisions on government spending. Page has set up a database that tracks departments and spending programs every three months, in order to help Parliamentarians make informed decisions on more than $250 billion of annual spending and $11 billion in cuts over the next three years. “We don’t want people to have to wait from budget 2011 all the way to the fall of 2012 to say how did it turn out?” said Page. “[A database] raises the level of engagement, which actually raises the level of transparency and accountability.” Under the existing process, MPs have to wait 20 months from the start of the budgetary period to get data on spending.

Hill Times

One man seriously injured in Ottawa stage collapse

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 18, 2011 at 12:23 PM - 0 Comments

A 46-year-old man was seriously injured when the main stage at an outdoor concert in Ottawa collapsed in a raging storm on Sunday. The band Cheap Trick was onstage during the Bluesfest event when black clouds and lighting gathered suddenly at around 7:30 p.m., and the stage collapsed due to the strong winds. Thousands of spectators, including Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson, were sent scrambling for shelter. Four other men were treated on site, with two of them being taken to hospital for chest, neck and head injuries. Emergency crews did a complete search of the debris and found no other victims, but the man hit by the collapsing stage remains in serious condition at an Ottawa hospital with a fractured pelvis and leg. The Ontario Ministry of Labour is investigating the stage’s collapse.

Globe and Mail

YouTube

Social media to save NASA?

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 18, 2011 at 12:09 PM - 0 Comments

With the launch of the U.S.’s last space shuttle Friday, the space race, it appears, is over. (Ironically, the maintenance of NASA’s International Space Station will rely on Russian spacecraft to ferry astronauts from Earth and back). Over the past few years as the White House’s interest in space exploration has dwindled, NASA has been forced to review and revamp their fundamental mission to stay relevant. One way they’re doing this is through social media—by allowing the general public to interact with astronauts, engineers and other key personnel. “The coolest thing for me is seeing how the astronauts are embracing social media tools to reach out to the public in new ways—without filters,” says NASA Outreach Program Manager, Beth Beck, to PC Magazine. The idea is that the public will better understand NASA, which will in turn strengthen the agency.

PC Mag

Wall Street Journal

‘Deathly Hallows, Part 2′ makes box office magic

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 18, 2011 at 11:59 AM - 0 Comments

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 broke first-day box office records this weekend, taking in more than $80 million in domestic sales. The last installment in the series also broke records outside the U.S. for first-day sales in countries such as Australia, Italy, Sweden and France. Box office analysts say North American ticket sales over the three-day weekend will reach $125 to $150 million. If predictions are correct, the final Harry Potter movie will be the highest grossing of the series, and will put the film within reach of the title of biggest opening weekend ever.

Daily Mail

Heat wave hits central Canada

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 18, 2011 at 11:57 AM - 0 Comments

A blistering heat wave struck much of the country this weekend, keeping in line with predictions Canadians would see above-normal temperatures this summer. The mercury rose in Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, but the Atlantic provinces and British Columbia were left in the relative cold. Officials issued a heat and humidity warning in Montreal after temperatures hit 32 C on Sunday, while Environment Canada recorded a record-breaking high of 34.6 C at Pearson International Airport on Sunday afternoon. Manitoba and Saskatchewan are both expected to see highs in the 30s this week.

CTV News

Loonie loses ground over debt worries in the U.S. and Europe

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 18, 2011 at 11:54 AM - 0 Comments

Jittery investors punished the Canadian dollar on Monday morning, sending it lower as they fled towards safe havens such as bullion. Ironically, the greenback strengthened against the loonie, even as the market fretted about the drawn-out debt-ceiling debate that has engulfed Washington. The Canadian dollar fell 0.55 of a cent to 104.24 cents U.S. Traders were also anxious about debt levels in Europe, even after the Friday release of the results of stress tests of the continent’s banks that were supposed to reassure the market. Those tests, though, didn’t consider a scenario in which a eurozone country defaults, something that might very well happen in Greece, experts say.

Toronto Star

Archeologists dig up former parliament beneath Montreal parking lot

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 18, 2011 at 11:25 AM - 0 Comments

Archeologists in Montreal are digging up a Montreal parking lot in the hopes of discovering pieces of the country’s political past. The site was home to the first permanent parliament of the United Province of Canada. Now, it is a narrow unmarked parking lot between St. Pierre and McGill streets. Canada’s parliament held its first session in Montreal in 1844 after moving there from Kingston, Ont. The building was burned to the ground in 1849 after legislation to compensate people whose property was damaged in the rebellions of 1837-8 caused an outbreak of fury in the city’s Anglophone community. Archeologists will dig at the site until October, uncovering about 30 per cent of the parking lot.

Toronto Star

Fox News At Its Foxiest

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, July 18, 2011 at 11:24 AM - 32 Comments

What is surprising in this clip is not that Fox News’s Steve Doocy and his guest (the head of a P.R. firm) defend Rupert Murdoch and attack “the media” for “piling on.” That’s standard. What is truly brilliant about this segment is that Doocy and gruff Fox Resident Expert Bob Dilenschneider try to turn this into a story about “hacking scandals” and the problem of hacking. They’re not merely portraying News International as a victim in all this, but framing the story as another one of the Scary New Internet World stories a cable news network must specialize in. Doocy brings it all home when he says this:

You’ve got the news about this thing at the Pentagon – I mean, it sounds like the country of China, who we owe a whole bunch of debt to, it sounds like they got into our Pentagon supercomputers and sucked out 24,000 files. Where’s that as a big story?

In one line(!) he manages to hit the points of government incompetence, the looming threat of China, the booming national debt, and the idea that the computer age has made our private information less safe – all while deflecting attention from the News International scandal. The people Roger Ailes hires are good at what they do, and what they do is bring everything back to a few themes, no matter what the topic.

Second Scotland Yard official resigns amidst phone-hacking scandal

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 18, 2011 at 11:22 AM - 0 Comments

John Yates, the deputy commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police, resigned on Monday, becoming the latest victim of the phone hacking scandal that is rocking the British establishment. Yates’s resignation follows the arrest of Rebekah Brooks, the former top executive at Rupert Murdoch’s News International, and the departure of Sir Paul Stephenson, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service, commonly known as the Met, or Scotland Yard. Both Yates and Stephenson claim to have done nothing wrong, saying it had simply become impossible to do their jobs.

New York Times

Japan defeats US 3-1 in Women’s World Cup Final

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 18, 2011 at 11:16 AM - 0 Comments

Japan defeated the US in a 3-1 shoot-out on Sunday in the FIFA women’s World Cup final in Frankfurt, Germany. Saki Kumagai scored the winning goal on American goalkeeper Hope Solo. The win comes as a fairy tale victory for the disaster-stricken country, Al Jazeera English reports. Japan is the first Asian team to win the women’s title.

Al Jazeera English

Nelson Mandela turns 93

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 18, 2011 at 11:06 AM - 0 Comments

12 million South African students celebrated anti-Apartheid activist Nelson Mandela’s 93rd birthday Monday, by singing a personalized version of “Happy Birthday” before their school lessons began. South African president Jacob Zuma and U.S. President Barack Obama also wished the retired activist well; Obama issued a formal statement calling Mandela a “beacon for the global community” and Zuma visited Mandela at his Qunu village home personally, where a brass band played in Mandela’s honour. Mandela’s birthday was declared an international day devoted to pubic service in 2009, USA Today reports.

USA Today

Libyan rebels claim key victory

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 18, 2011 at 11:03 AM - 0 Comments

Rebels have claimed victory in Brega, a bellwether town east of Tripoli. The rebels say Col. Gadhafi’s forces are retreating west, BBC News reports “Their food and water supplies are cut and they now will not be able to sleep. It is a matter of time before they come to their senses, we hope to prevent some bloodshed,” said Shamsiddin Abdulmolah, a rebel spokesman, to ADP news agency. Still, because the streets are strewn with mines, it’s hard for the rebels to secure the area.

BBC News

Scores dead after violent weekend in Syria

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 18, 2011 at 10:55 AM - 0 Comments

After a violent weekend in Syria, 50 protesters arrested over the past few weeks were released from prisons in the city of Hama, reports say. In the city of Homs, pro-regime militia killed 30 people on Saturday and Sunday in what appeared to be retribution for the deaths of three regime supporters. Residents told the Observatory for Human Rights that the militia rampaged through Sunni areas of the city, firing indiscriminately. Human rights groups estimate that about 1,400 civilians and 350 security personnel have been killed during the past four months of anti-government demonstrations in the country.

BBC News

Good news, bad news: July 8 – July 14, 2011

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 18, 2011 at 10:50 AM - 0 Comments

Good news

Citizens wave the flag of the newly formed Republic of South Sudan. (Barbara Davidson/Los Angeles Times/Polaris)

Tough love

The U.S. finally took a firm stand on Pakistan by suspending $800 million of the more than $2 billion in aid it offers the country each year. Pakistan has been, at best, an unreliable ally in the war on terror. It recently arrested a number of CIA informants who helped locate Osama bin Laden within its borders and cut visas for U.S. personnel operating near the Afghan border. Pakistan may not always see eye to eye with the U.S., but the fact is that American aid is what keeps its military and, lately, economy afloat. This warning shot should provide a crucial dose of reality.

Happy days, here again

A new quarterly Bank of Canada survey suggests a record 57 per cent of businesses “across all regions and sectors” will hire new employees over the next year (the highest level reported since 2005), while only four per cent expect to reduce staff. This coincides with a Statistics Canada report showing solid job growth for the third straight month, with a net gain of 28,000 jobs in June. That’s in sharp contrast to the U.S., where only 18,000 jobs were gained last month.

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Tooth units grown with mouse stem cells

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 18, 2011 at 10:46 AM - 0 Comments

Japanese scientists have managed to create teeth from mouse stem cells, and transplant them into the lower jaws of mice, Reuters reports. Entire tooth units (with connective fibres and bone) were attached so that they could chew normally. The teeth were grown from stem cells taken from the mice’s molar teeth, and grown in a mold so they kept the right shape. These took 40 days to fuse with tissues and jaw bones in the mouse who received the transplant. This could be an important step towards growing human organs from a patient’s cells, which could help treat everything from diabetes to spinal cord injuries.

Reuters

Cows that ate contaminated feed already shipped

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 18, 2011 at 10:33 AM - 0 Comments

Over 500 beef cattle that ate feed contaminated by the Fukushima nuclear disaster were shipped to 10 different prefectures in Japan, farm inspections showed, according to a Reuters report. On-site inspections began after radioactive cesium measuring three to six times higher than safety standards was detected in beef cattle shipped to Tokyo from a farmer north of the Fukushima Daiichi plant, which experienced the world’s worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl in March. All of Fukushima’s cattle farms, which number 4,000, should be inspected by Aug. 3.

Reuters

The forgotten members of the mission in Afghanistan

By Andrew Potter - Monday, July 18, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 5 Comments

Photo courtesy of Renée Filiatrault

The big story in Canadian foreign affairs for the past month has been the end of our “combat mission” in Afghanistan. Lost amid the narratives of firefights past and memories of dead soldiers has been much recognition that what has come to a close is not just combat, but our complete whole-of-government approach to aid, economic development, and governance in Kandahar. The civilians have all pulled out as well, and their return to life in Canada, professionally and personally, is in some ways going to be far more difficult than it will be for their comrades in the military. Their great fear is that they will be just as ignored by their managers back in Ottawa as they have been by the Canadian media.

Two things everyone always noticed about the Canadian civilian contingent in Afghanistan is how young they all were, and how many of them were women. They were drawn from all branches of the bureaucracy, early- to mid-career public servants attracted by adventure and the promise that the skills and experience they acquired abroad would be a golden ticket to promotions and choice assignments back home. It hasn’t always worked out that way, and a great number of returning civilians are suffering, both personally and professionally. Anger and disillusionment is growing within the Afghanistan cohort, with many people—some still serving in theatre—saying that they feel they were sold a bill of goods.

From CIDA staffers working on development projects to communications officers for the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT), a lot of them spent more time travelling outside the wire than the vast majority of soldiers who booked their entire tours billeted at Kandahar Airfield; suicide bombings, IEDs, and other threats were part of their daily work life. As a result, at the end of their deployments they faced many of the same stress-related disorders as the soldiers. But the military learned the hard way that everything from burnout to full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has to be taken very seriously, and there are now cultural and institutional mechanisms in place to help returning veterans cope. If anything, there is far less stigma associated with PTSD within the military today than there is within the broader public service.

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From ordinary poker players to big-league pros

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Monday, July 18, 2011 at 10:20 AM - 0 Comments

Photo by Roman Cho/Getty Images

Jeffrey Pollack has a pithy way of describing his career: “I specialize in things that haven’t been done before.” Like starting the first trade paper devoted to the business of sports. Or creating the Emmy-winning pastiche of in-car cameras and onscreen telemetry that makes NASCAR watchable. Or transforming the World Series of Poker from a Vegas sideshow into an “anyone can enter, anyone can win” big business. And now, if things go his way, catapulting card sharks into the ranks of pampered sports celebrities.

Epic Poker, Pollack’s newly created professional poker league, will host its inaugural tournament at the Palms Casino in Las Vegas next month, promising to turn top players into a gaming elite. “In any other sport there are platforms, brands or associations that are focused on the best of the best. Poker doesn’t have that,” says the 47-year-old entrepreneur and half-brother of NHL commissioner Gary Bettman. (Joy, their late mother, married Pollack’s father Howard, an accountant, when Gary was 11.) “We’re going to celebrate skill and strategy above moments of luck.”

Players will be ranked by performance and earnings as in tennis, and awarded “cards” as in pro golf, providing them with entry to Epic’s events for three to five years. All of the US$20,000 entry fees will go into the prize pots (traditionally organizers take a 10 per cent “rake” off the top), which will be sweetened by the league with US$400,000 for regular tourneys, and $1 million for the annual championship featuring the season’s top 27 performers. And players, long used to paying their own way, will receive free food, drinks and hotel suites. “It’s elevating the service level that the pros are used to,” says Pollack.

Continue…

Maseratis and the Chinese Red Cross

By Alex Ballingall - Monday, July 18, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 0 Comments

AFP/Getty Images

A scandal involving a 20-year-old woman, fancy cars, luxurious handbags and the Chinese equivalent of Twitter has fuelled a groundswell of disquiet regarding the Red Cross Society of China. Guo Meimei Baby, as she’s called on the microblogging site Weibo, branded herself as a “commercial general manager” for the charity organization. Controversy sprang up after she posted a series of flashy photos that lent credence to the belief among an already suspicious public that the Chinese Red Cross had been using donation money to lavish executives with fancy toys. Among Guo’s photos were pictures of herself leaning on the hood of a white Maserati she labelled “little horse,” and an orange Lamborghini called “little bull.” She also sent out images of Hermès handbags and of herself enjoying fruity drinks in business class on an airplane.

A flurry of microblog posts has since appeared, lambasting both the Red Cross and Guo. At one point, the online furor garnered 600,000 posts a day on Weibo. Although both Guo and the Red Cross deny any affiliation, the latter issued a statement on July 1 saying it would allow auditors to scour its financial records for any wrongdoing.

A nation infected by scandal

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, July 18, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 13 Comments

Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images

Scandals used to be so simple. Power corrupts, we were taught, and scandals were the business of those few who held power. Teapot Dome, which before Watergate was what you thought of when you saw the words “American political scandal,” involved the payment of kickbacks to a single cabinet secretary. The Pacific Scandal was essentially a matter between Sir John A. Macdonald and Sir Hugh Allan.

In this democratic age, however, the locus of corruption has shifted. Now, scandals belong to everybody. The corruption more typical of our times—perhaps Watergate marked the transition—infects an organization generally, an “everybody does it” mentality in which large numbers of people who never thought of themselves as criminals become ensnared. Think of the huge numbers of people who participated in or at least knew about the various exchanges that went into the sponsorship scandal. The phrase popularized in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, social epidemic, seems apt. The culture of corruption spreads from person to person, encouraging each to adopt a standard of behaviour that, as individuals, they might otherwise find repulsive.

And so we come to the phone-hacking scandal—the second epidemic of corruption to strike the United Kingdom in recent years, after the parliamentary expenses scandal that led to charges being laid against more than half a dozen MPs and ended the careers of dozens more. It is by now well established that the hacking of personal phone messages by journalists at the News of the World was not, as was maintained for several years, a matter of a rogue reporter and his private investigator accomplice. Nor was it confined to the peccadillos of celebrities or royals.

It extended, as we now know, to literally thousands of people, including the widows of dead soldiers, the victims of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, and, most infamously, a missing 13-year-old girl, later found murdered, whose voice messages were not only intercepted but, when her mailbox became full, deleted, thus leading her family to believe she was still alive.

The invasions of privacy went beyond voice mail to include personnel records, bank accounts, and medical files—lawful in certain circumstances, but only where a public interest can be shown, as in cases of corruption. That would not appear to cover, for example, the news that the infant son of Gordon Brown, then the chancellor of the exchequer, had cystic fibrosis, discovered and splashed across the front page within days of the Browns learning it themselves.

This behaviour involved not only reporters at the News of the World, but at least in the Brown example, also the Sun and Sunday Times, sister papers in Rupert Murdoch’s News International empire. (The Sun denies it used Brown’s son’s medical records for its story.) In the fullness of time we shall learn whether it extended to other news organizations, though it is already established that some have hired the same private investigators.

If that were all, it would be shocking enough: the famously slipshod ethics of the British tabloid press spilling over into outright criminality. But it is the intersection with other pillars of British society that takes this story to the outer limits. Much of the confidential material sought by Murdoch’s spooks was supplied to them by police officers, often on the payment of bribes. Other police officers turned a blind eye to the News of the World’s phone-hacking activities, including those explicitly assigned the task of investigating how widespread the practice was, after the first cases came to light—in part, it seems, because their own phones had been hacked, and the evidence of professional and personal misconduct thus obtained. Even after it was revealed that News International had paid huge sums of money to other victims to settle their claims out of court, Scotland Yard somehow concluded there was no story here.

And overseeing all this, the political class of Britain: all of it, it seems, or nearly so. Since the days of Margaret Thatcher, leaders of both major parties have courted Murdoch with lickspittle zeal, in hopes of his papers’ endorsement. The current prime minister, David Cameron, employed one former editor of the News of the World as his communications director, and is close friends with another.

It wasn’t only political or personal connections that moved so many politicians to play nice with Murdoch. It was, as we are now learning, fear. Politicians who crossed him or his minions were openly threatened with the publication of embarrassing personal information. Only now that he is on the run, so to speak, are many daring to speak up. This was not so much a news organization as a bribery and blackmail racket.

The culture of corruption, then, did not just infect the Murdoch empire, but much of the British establishment. To be sure, it had its roots in power, as of old: the kind that comes with owning four national newspapers with a combined 40 per cent of total circulation. The reporters who stole people’s private information could not have done so without the approval of their editors, who in turn would have taken their cues from those higher up. All of them must have come to believe they could get away with anything. Who would dare stand in their way?

But it required also the acquiescence of hundreds of others, outside the News International ranks. Yes, they may have been acting, or failing to act, out of fear, or at least a sense of helplessness. But that is debauching in its own way. Power may corrupt, but so, it seems, does impotence.