Gohier vs. Patriquin on the splintering of Quebec’s sovereigntist movement

By Martin Patriquin - Friday, August 19, 2011 at 3:08 PM - 0 Comments

“The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” to go on despite star’s suicide

By macleans.ca - Friday, August 19, 2011 at 3:01 PM - 1 Comment

The producers of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” will proceed with the upcoming second season despite the suicide of one of the participants. Russell Armstrong, husband of one of the real housewives, killed himself after the season was filmed, telling his mother that he expected to be “crucified” through his portrayal on the show. His death has sparked controversy over the emotional toll that reality shows take on the people who appear in them. However, the network will not cancel the show, and instead plans to salvage the season through editing. It’s considered likely that Armstrong’s storyline will be downplayed in the re-cutting.

Entertainment Weekly

Kenney vs. Amnesty: And introducing a very special Amnesty critic

By Paul Wells - Friday, August 19, 2011 at 1:57 PM - 18 Comments

Whenever Jason Kenney picks a fight with an organization, it is helpful to ask, among several other questions, this one: “Hey, has the organization in question recently found itself on the wrong side of Israel’s most vocal defenders?” And indeed, in the case of Amnesty International, the answer is yes.

Meet Gerald Steinberg. Longtime readers of this blog will be familiar with him. Steinberg is a professor of political studies at Bar Ilan University and president of NGO monitor, an organization devoted to rebutting international human-rights NGOs when they criticize the Israeli government. When the Harper government decided to stack the Rights and Democracy board with people who would brook no critique of Israel’s security operations in Gaza and the West Bank, Steinberg was an early supporter and, former insiders say, he closely co-operated with the new Rights and Democracy board chairman, Aurel Braun.

Steinberg, it turns out, has been an active and forceful critic of Amnesty International for the positions it’s take in the Middle East. Here’s a blog post and video from a debate he had with an Amnesty official in the U.S. And here’s an op-ed he co-wrote only six weeks before Jason Kenney wrote his letter to Amnesty.

Now, as I spent the entire year of 2010 writing in dozens of instalments, I thought the government’s handling of Rights and Democracy was despicable. But I don’t think its handling of the Section 35 fugitives, and Jason Kenney’s response to Amnesty’s critique of the Section 35 file, is invalidated just because Kenney’s letter often seems to echo Steinberg’s op-ed. But since I’ve spent the day giving context and background, here’s some more.

Kenney vs. Amnesty: The case against Amnesty International

By Paul Wells - Friday, August 19, 2011 at 1:32 PM - 30 Comments

My latest column points out that a lot of people are just generally fed up with Amnesty International and that a lot of them are political conservatives. Here’s what that’s about, since it will be news to many readers.

Christopher Hitchens, hard to pin down on any left-right spectrum and widely admired for that, is the earliest Amnesty critic I found in a quick search. In 2005 Amnesty called Guantanamo Bay “the gulag of our times.” I think Guantanamo Bay is pretty bad today, was far worse when Dick Cheney was running it, and has never been as bad as the gulag was. Hitchens’ line is pretty close to that, but his overriding argument was that these qualitative judgments should never have been Amnesty’s business:

The founding statutes were quite clear: An Amnesty local was to adopt three “prisoners of conscience,” one from either side of the Cold War and one from a “neutral” state. Letters were to be written to the relevant governments and to newspapers in free countries. Though physical torture and capital punishment were opposed in all cases, no overt political position was to be taken. Continue…

Squandering Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess ‘One Day’ at a time

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, August 19, 2011 at 1:00 PM - 2 Comments

Jim Sturgess and Anne Hathaway chase unrequited love in 'One Day'

Sometimes, one day can last forever. One Day is a bittersweet romantic comedy that lasts about two hours and feels interminable. This tale of  unrequited love is more like an unrequited film. Set in mostly England, the story is stretched over two decades. Dexter (Jim Sturgess) and Emma (Anne Hathaway) meet cute’n'drunk on their graduation day, then hook up again on the same date (July 15) each year, morphing into sexless best friends—obvious soulmates who routinely fail to nail the romantic destiny that is staring them in the face. It’s a Groundhog Day of the heart. I came out of the cinema sad and frustrated, not by the lovers’ missed opportunities for romance, but by the missed opportunity of the movie. It’s a crying shame. Continue…

Kenney vs. Amnesty: the downside of neighbourhood watches

By Paul Wells - Friday, August 19, 2011 at 12:47 PM - 10 Comments

Further to my column on Jason Kenney’s exchange with Amnesty International:

I was reminded, while writing the column, of a really disturbing moment in the aftermath of 9/11. Shortly after the horrible day, the FBI released photos of the 19 dead perpetrators of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And a day or so later, the Toronto Sun ran a Page 1 story asserting that some of the murderers had recently been kicking around Toronto. Here’s the top of that story, from Sept. 28, 2001:

Living in Fear: Apartment Tenants Recognize Hijackers, Fear Reprisals

As police sifted through evidence, residents of a Toronto apartment complex were stricken with fear over claims at least two of the suspected suicide hijackers had roamed their halls in the months leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.

Some tenants in a Jameson Ave. complex suggested they saw at least two men in their building — Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi — who were later accused of hijacking two of the U.S. airliners in the Sept. 11 attacks….

“Many of the residents have been picking out the same man when they looked at the photos of the (suspected) hijackers,” said Donna Dunphy, the superintendent of the Jameson Ave. building — one of four sites raided late Wednesday by police collecting information on a suspected terrorist cell.

“People are petrified,” Dunphy said. “The tenants are scared” there could be reprisals.

There was, of course, not a spot of truth to the story. Continue…

Flaherty hints at new stimulus spending should a recession take hold

By macleans.ca - Friday, August 19, 2011 at 12:37 PM - 7 Comments

Federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty says Ottawa is willing to engage in another round of stimulus spending if the world economy faces a double-dip recession. During a special meeting of the Commons finance committee, Flaherty said the government would do what is needed if American and European economies deteriorate further. However, Flaherty also said that despite the current financial climate, Canada will not immediately change its budget plan, which calls for spending cuts of $4 billion annually to federal deficit.

Toronto Star

iPhone reportedly coming to China

By macleans.ca - Friday, August 19, 2011 at 12:27 PM - 0 Comments

Apple is reportedly in talks with China Mobile to offer the iPhone to the Chinese market. While no deal has been struck, China Mobile Chairman Wang Jianzhou confirmed he had met with Apple CEO Steve Jobs. “All I can say is, it’s a common wish of China Mobile and Apple to come to an agreement as soon as possible,” he said. Apple would have to customize iPhone hardware to operate in China, which has a special network. The China Mobile network is three times the size of AT&T and Verizon in the U.S. Nothing is official yet, but it’s expected that the iPhone 5 will launch in China in October, alongside with the launch of Apple’s iCloud service.

Cnet

Detained potato farmer may go free

By macleans.ca - Friday, August 19, 2011 at 12:26 PM - 0 Comments

Friday marks New Brunswick farmer Henk Tepper’s 149th day in the Beirut Palace of Justice Prison, where he has been detained since March 23 after Algeria called in Interpol over an allegedly infected shipment of potatoes. The farmer claims his potatoes were bacteria-free, but the Algerian family with whom he was doing business refused to believe him, leading to his subsequent arrest and imprisonment. Friday may also be his last day in prison, however, as the Lebanese prosecutor handling the case announced that he would decide at the end of the week whether or not to release Tepper on house arrest. Meanwhile, Tepper’s family and lawyers continue to put pressure on the Canadian government to negotiate with the Lebanese authorities for the farmer’s freedom.

National Post

Study finds black scientists less likely to get grants

By macleans.ca - Friday, August 19, 2011 at 12:20 PM - 4 Comments

Black scientists applying for research grant applications from the American National Institutes of Health are far less likely to get a positive response than white scientists, according to a new study reported in the New York Times. Researchers from the University of Kansas made statistical adjustments to ensure they were comparing scientists at similar institutions, with similar academic credentials, and found that a black scientist was still one-third less likely to get financing than a white peer. A total of 83,000 grant applications were reviewed from 2000 to 2006. The N.I.H. commissioned the study, and a task force will follow up on the study results.

New York Times

Turkish PM visits Mogadishu

By macleans.ca - Friday, August 19, 2011 at 12:17 PM - 0 Comments

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is touring Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, Friday. It is the first time a non-African leader has visited the Somali capital in nearly two decades. Erdogan is also scheduled to tour a camp for people displaced by violence and drought in the Horn of Africa country. More than 100,000 people have flocked to the capital as an estimated 12 million people in the region face starvation. Al Jazeera reports Erdogan hs said he’s there to help a fellow Muslim country. On Wednesday, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation met in Istanbul and pledged to donate $350 million in assistance to Somalia. Mogadishu has long been a hotbed of violence between the Western-backed government and al-Shabaab, a radical Islamic group with purported links to al Qaeda. Earlier this month, al-Shabaab militants withdrew from the capital in what they called a tactical move. The group has blocked humanitarian aid from being delivered to displaced people hit by the country’s famine. The U.N. World Food Program says it is still unable to deliver assistance to 2.2 million people in southern Somalia.

Al Jazeera English

Gaza militants injure 7 Israelis in rocket attacks

By macleans.ca - Friday, August 19, 2011 at 11:45 AM - 1 Comment

One person was critically injured and several others hurt following a Palestinian rocket attack on the Israeli town of Ashdod. Israeli officials say the missile launched from Gaza was one of 12 fired at Southern Israeli towns on Friday. The rocket attacks come after Israeli forces carried out airstrikes in Gaza, targeting the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) militants believed to be responsible for a terrorist attack that killed eight Israelis. Palestinians say at least seven people and a senior militant leader died in the Israeli airstrikes.

BBC News

U.S. successfully tests new explosive material

By macleans.ca - Friday, August 19, 2011 at 11:42 AM - 0 Comments

The U.S. Office of Naval Research has successfully tested a new type of explosive material that researchers say will dramatically increase the power of its weapons. Missiles made with the material can explode with up to five times the impact of existing armaments. The substance is made from mixed metals and polymers, and scientists say it has the density of steel and the strength of aluminum. The researchers also contend that weapons made with the new explosive material are less likely to kill innocent bystanders because they will only explode upon contact with a target. Upon impact, the material “liberates chemical energy, and this chemical and kinetic energy combined gives you the enhanced effect,” researcher Clifford Bedford told the BBC. The material has been in development for more than five years. Bedford says the material will likely first be used in projectiles used in missile defense systems.

BBC News

Police clash with protesters ahead of papal visit in Spain

By macleans.ca - Friday, August 19, 2011 at 11:37 AM - 0 Comments

Seven people were arrested and 11 injured in Madrid on Wednesday amidst overnight clashes that erupted at the start of a four-day papal visit to Spain. An estimated 20,000 atheists and liberal Catholics took to the streets to protest the perceived influence of the Roman Catholic Church on the secular Spanish state. The demonstrators were confronted by police and thousands of Catholic pilgrims that had swarmed to Spain from as far as Brazil and the Philippines to greet Pope Benedict XVI and celebrate World Youth Day, which is held every three years in a different city. On Thursday, Pope Benedict was received by cheering crowds and a delegation including King Juan Carlos and Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, whose government introduced laws legalizing same-sex marriage and making abortion more accessible, measures strongly criticized by the Church.

Financial Times

Taliban storms British Council in Kabul

By macleans.ca - Friday, August 19, 2011 at 11:34 AM - 0 Comments

Taliban militants stormed the British Council in Kabul on Friday morning, leaving at least eight people dead, including one foreign soldier. The attack, which has been confirmed by the British Embassy, came on the anniversary of the day Afghanistan gained independence from Britain in 1919. The British Council is a government-funded British agency that promotes education and cultural initiatives in 110 countries. The raid comes shortly after international forces transferred security responsibility for several Afghan provinces, including the Kabul province, to the Afghan army and police in July. Terror attacks in the Afghan capital are rare, and this one, several experts suggested, seems aimed at undermining confidence that local Afghan forces can guarantee security.

Christian Science Monitor

Woolly mammoth calf discovered in Russian Arctic

By macleans.ca - Friday, August 19, 2011 at 11:32 AM - 2 Comments

A woolly mammoth calf carcass was recently discovered by a reindeer herder in the Russian Arctic. The 40,000-year-old calf carcass was protruding from the permafrost in Arctic Yamalo-Nentsk region. Though the mammoth’s coat is gone, its skin and internal organs are intact, making the find an exceptional one. Woolly mammoths have been extinct since the Earth’s last ice age, between 1.8 million and 11,500 years ago. At one time they walked alongside the humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans.

Reuters

H-P considers leaving the computer business

By macleans.ca - Friday, August 19, 2011 at 11:31 AM - 0 Comments

Hewlett-Packard, the world’s largest personal-computer maker, may be getting ready to drop out of the PC business altogether. The news comes as a result of sluggish computer sales in recent years, as customers increasingly turn to smart-phones and tablets. The company is also planning to quit selling its own tablets and smart-phones, a market space where it was struggling to compete with giants like Apple and Google. At the same time, H-P agreed to buy British database-search firm Autonomy Corp., seeking to expand its activities in the more profitable software business. The move comes after months of turmoil at H-P, where several executive-level re-shufflings have followed the ouster a year ago of the company’s chief executive over ethics concerns. Investors showed little enthusiasm for H-P’s about-face, with company shares declining 6 per cent to $29.51 amid a broader market selloff on Thursday.

Wall Street Journal

Republican endorses science, stuns field

By macleans.ca - Friday, August 19, 2011 at 11:28 AM - 3 Comments

Jon Huntsman became every liberal’s favourite Republican Thursday when he announced on Twitter that he believes in evolution and trusts the science on global warming. Huntsman, a former Utah governor and U.S. Ambassador to Beijing, continues to trail the pack in the fight to take on Barack Obama in 2012. A recent poll revealed that most Republicans—61 per cent—don’t even recognize his name. But a recent New York magazine profile suggests he may be poised to make a charge as Republicans look for an electable candidate who isn’t Mitt Romney.

Twitter

Politico

New York

Goodwill game turns violent as Hoyas battle Chinese pros in Beijing

By macleans.ca - Friday, August 19, 2011 at 11:26 AM - 0 Comments

An exhibition basketball game between the Georgetown Hoyas and a Chinese professional team erupted into a bizarre melee Thursday, with players wrestling violently and trading punches while the Beijing crowd peppered the Americans with full water bottles and debris. With spectators flooding the court, the Georgetown coach pulled his team from the game with nine minutes still on the clock. The brawl came at an awkward time for U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, who is in the middle of a five-day bridge-building trip in China. Economic tensions between the two giants are running high, with the Chinese, America’s largest foreign creditors, calling on the U.S. to get its fiscal house in order.

Washington Post

Reuters

Libyan rebels claim U.S. embassy

By macleans.ca - Friday, August 19, 2011 at 11:24 AM - 0 Comments

Officials from the Libyan Transitional National Council took control of the country’s U.S. embassy Wednesday, while rebel fighters from the same group seized a key oil refinery from soldiers loyal to Moamar Gadhafi. Most Western countries, including Canada and the U.S., recognize the TNC as Libya’s official government. But the group remains mired in combat back home and is struggling to pry loose billions in Gadhafi assets frozen by international sanctions. By claiming the refinery, which sits in the port town of Zawiyah, 50 kilometers from Tripoli, the rebels hope to move closer to an end game in the six-month conflict, either by forcing Gaddafi into exile of completely routing his forces.

Foreign Policy

New York Times

Is Googorola anti-competitive? Not at all.

By Peter Nowak - Friday, August 19, 2011 at 10:16 AM - 0 Comments

Photo by laihiu/Flickr

Google kicked this week off with a bang with a surprise announcement that it was acquiring cellphone maker Motorola for $12.5 billion, a huge move that will boost the search engine company’s employee headcount by 60%. As Google CEO Larry Page explained in a blog post, it’s a defensive move to acquire patents, a particular problem area for the company that I wrote about earlier.

Patent issues aside, one of the other main aspects many have focused on is that the deal is likely to alienate Google’s other mobile partners. HTC, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and a few others who use Google’s free Android operating system will now find themselves competing directly against the maker of that software. Some are even speculating that the acquisition could become an antitrust issue. Continue…

Hey look: Minister Kenney’s letters (UPDATED)

By Paul Wells - Friday, August 19, 2011 at 9:07 AM - 2 Comments

From the print edition, my column revisits the letter exchange between Jason Kenney and Amnesty International.

In part I’m still just marvelling at how little coverage the whole thing received — my friend Tabatha Southey’s Saturday column in the Globe, four days after Kenney’s letter appeared, appears to be the only coverage that paper has given the whole business. Which I find odd.

But in the column I also consider the substance, and give the debate, on balance, to Kenney. Probably a lot of readers will be surprised. He’s a polarizing guy. To them I would say only this: I covered Jean Chrétien for a decade, half of it at the National Post, whose readers were, on the whole, predisposed to think the man an idiot. You should have seen the letters and emails I used to get in those days. I’m thoroughly familiar with what it looks like when people dismiss a politician’s intellect and political instincts, just because they don’t like his politics.

There is more to this Kenney-Amnesty debate that I couldn’t fit in the column. (This week’s double issue also includes new reporting by Michael Friscolanti on precisely what some of the men on Kenney’s wanted list are alleged to have done. I hope we put that story online at some point, and will let you know if we do.)  I hope to add to the story with more blog posts soon.

UDPATE: Those blog posts — three of them! — on different aspects of the Kenney vs. Amnesty story are now up. This one takes Amnesty’s side, to some extent, with a reminder that when you publish suspects’ names and photos, there’s the possiblity you’ll get false-positive identifications. This one explains in further detail why some people are angry at Amnesty, for substantive reasons having to do with the way the organization has changed its focus over the years. And this one comes up with a tenuous link to the Rights and Democracy schmozzle, in case you were feeling nostalgic.

Why people can’t help themselves

By Andrew Potter - Friday, August 19, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 29 Comments

Jess Hurd/Report Digital/ Redux

Anyone who has ever taken part in a riot, or even just hovered on the periphery of one, knows how exhilarating it can be. Windows smashed, cars torched, stores looted—it’s like being in the middle of a video game. Yet there is a tendency to try to psychoanalyze society and interpret the mob’s behaviour as a symptom of some great underlying malaise: hockey’s culture of macho violence in the case of June’s riot in Vancouver, racism or poverty or the welfare state in the case of the looting that hopscotched across England last week.

People are over-thinking things way too much. Any proper discussion of a riot and why it happens has to start with the recognition that rioting, especially for young men, is a huge amount of fun. At any given moment, there are far more people willing to riot and loot than we like to admit, and 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. But if you can get enough people to riot, you can all get away with it, which is why when it comes to getting one started, what the participants are faced with is essentially a coordination problem. The trick is getting a critical mass of people willing to do it, in the same place and at the same time.

Certain events, like game seven of the Stanley Cup final, have become reliable opportunities to riot—a bunch of people show up precisely because they know that a lot of other people will also be showing up to riot. Another reliable opportunity is any sort of anti-authority protest, such as a meeting of the G20 or—what sparked the events in Tottenham—a demonstration against police violence. No matter how peaceful the initial gathering is meant to be, it is easily overwhelmed by those who are there just to smash stuff.
Continue…

How Dutch women got to be the happiest in the world

By Claire Ward - Friday, August 19, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 73 Comments

Photo by: Thomas Schlijper

Like many Dutch women, Marie-Louise van Haeren views herself as liberated. “Every woman in Holland can do whatever she wants with her life,” says Van Haeren, 52, who lives just outside of Rotterdam and rides her bicycle or the train to work three days a week at a police academy, where she counsels students. She has worked part-time her entire career, as have almost all of her friends—married or unmarried, kids or no kids—save one or two who logged more hours out of financial necessity. Van Haeren, who wasn’t married until last year and has no children, says she’s worked part-time “to have time to do things that matter to me, live the way I want. To stay mentally and physically healthy and happy.”

Many women in the Netherlands seem to share similar views, valuing independence over success in the workplace. In 2001, nearly 60 per cent of working Dutch women were employed part-time, compared to just 20 per cent of Canadian women. Today, the number is even higher, hovering around 75 per cent. Some, like Van Haeren, view this as progress, evidence of personal freedom and a commitment to a balanced lifestyle.

Others, however, view it as an alarming signal that women are no longer seeking equality in the workplace. Writer and economist Heleen Mees, for example, argues that the stereotypical Dutch woman has become complacent. “Even at the University of Amsterdam—the most progressive university we have—I had a 22-year-old student say, ‘Why is it your business if my wife wants to bake cookies?’ and the female students agreed with him! I was like, what’s happening here?”

Continue…