Newsmakers: August 4-11, 2011

By Kate Lunau, Richard Warnica, Alex Ballingall and Emma Teitel - Thursday, August 18, 2011 at 8:15 AM - 0 Comments

Stan Behal/Toronto Sun/QMI Agency

All grown up

Brian Mulroney’s youngest son, 25-year-old Nicolas, who was born while the Mulroneys lived at 24 Sussex, tied the knot this week at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church on McCaul Street in downtown Toronto. Nicolas and Katy Carlyle Brebner, 26, are both bankers at RBC, where they met. The former prime minister told reporters the service was “very, very nice” and his son’s new bride is “a beauty.” Three hundred guests attended the afternoon service, including Nicolas’s brothers Ben and Mark, who served as best men; Mila, with Brian close behind, walked her youngest child down the aisle.

The guidettes take Italy

The bronzed, undereducated, ever-intoxicated cast of Jersey Shore returned to the small screen this week for a fourth season, this time in Italy—you know, the country with the peso for its currency, according to Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi. Although her “Italian” was limited to ciao and gracias—yes, really—Deena Cortese was in her element in the homeland, though she hates the pizza’s “thin, thin crust.” The food, in fact, was a miss for the gang from Jersey. “They didn’t even have bagels!” complained Mike “the Situation” Sorrentino, now calling himself “The Situatione.”

Not a braid out of place

Ukrainian folk hero Yulia Tymoshenko appeared in court last week, trademark braids neatly coiffed, despite having spent the previous three nights in prison. Tymoshenko was arrested for contempt of court after refusing to stand before the judge and repeatedly mocking him on Twitter. She’s made her feelings clear about the trial, which she views as an attempt to block her from running in future elections. Tymoshenko, the darling of the 2004 pro-Western Orange Revolution and currently a fierce opponent of President Viktor Yanukovych, faces charges of abuse of power over gas deals with Russia. Apparently unbowed after her weekend behind bars, she refused, once again, to stand before the judge on her return to court, yelling, “Glory to Ukraine!”

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Good news, bad news: August 4-11, 2011

By macleans.ca - Thursday, August 18, 2011 at 8:10 AM - 0 Comments

Good news

Thailand elected its first female prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra

Clearing the way

The apparent defeat of the Islamist group al-Shabaab in central Mogadishu offers a glimmer of hope to those trying to get food into famine-stricken Somalia. With the country’s wobbly central government in control of key districts of the capital, workers can now fan aid out to other parts of the country. With luck, they can prevent at least some of the hungry from attempting deadly treks into neighbouring Kenya or Ethiopia. The next challenge: keeping the aid out of the hands of insurgents, while persuading the rest of the world to give.

Grade ‘A’ idea

The U.S. grocer Whole Foods introduced a meat-labelling system in its Canadian stores that outlines how various producers treat livestock on a scale of one to five. It is an enlightened approach to animal welfare, both educating consumers and offering them a choice while forgoing preachy attacks on the meat industry or the livelihood of farmers. It also offers a nice rebuttal to a wave of bad press set off by a disgruntled former Toronto employee who claimed the organic-food-focused company didn’t put its money where its mouth was. Other retailers should be so transparent.

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Bestsellers – Week of August 15th, 2011

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, August 18, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Top-selling fiction and non-fiction titles

Fiction

Non-fiction

LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)

Monopolistically, my dear Watson

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, August 18, 2011 at 7:26 AM - 54 Comments

Today’s front page of the National Post features an amusing column by William Watson about an “access problem” that Canada Post has very suddenly discovered at the Montreal domicile he has occupied for two decades. Watson’s entryway has a few wide, shallow steps with no railing. It’s a situation that would not challenge an infant above the age of twenty months, and no particular carrier has filed a complaint, but a safety officer doing a “preventative” check of Watson’s premises has decided that he must either renovate or cease receiving his mail at home.

One is mindful, reading of Watson’s experience, that the Canadian Union of Postal Workers is still bitter about being sent back to work by statute with a poorer-than-expected wage deal. His tale sounds like the outcome of a work-to-rule effort, and that is certainly what one would anticipate after a strike lockout that had been ended by fiat. Canada Post’s customers want to put a Conservative government in Ottawa?—Very well! Let’s see how they like the results! How happy for CUPW, really, that one of the suckers to whom it’s applying random abuse turns out to be a loathsome, venomous right-wing pundit of the sort that’s forever agitating for privatizations and competitiveness and the rest of the gore-grimed apparatus of capitalism. Continue…

Roll call

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 8:50 PM - 1 Comment

Things will be quiet around here for the next few days on account of a short vacation.

In the meantime, some shout outs. The design on the Maclean’s blogs doesn’t allow for a regularly maintained blogroll, so here, in one post, are most of the blogs (minus co-workers and sports blogs) I check with on at least a semi-regular basis. Go read all of them and we’ll meet back here next Wednesday. Drop me an email (aaron.wherry@macleans.rogers.com) with suggestions for other stuff I should be reading. Continue…

How we really beat the deficit: or, revisionism revisited

By Andrew Coyne - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 5:26 PM - 82 Comments

Once again my colleague John Geddes has written a sensible, sober reminder that not all is as we imagine it to be, that things are not as simple as they appear. And once again it falls to me to point out that, actually, they are.

Last time out, John convincingly demonstrated that cutting spending is not as easy as certain ideologues would have you believe. Except, as I later showed, it is in fact quite easy.

This time, John’s point is not that spending can’t be cut, but that it wasn’t cut. Or not as much as people say. Contrary to the received wisdom, much repeated these days by our admirers in other countries, that Canada balanced its books in the late 1990s through deep spending cuts, John argues that in fact economic growth did most of the job. To be sure, “spending was restrained,” but “by far the main reason the red ink evaporated… is that the Canadian economy grew smartly year after year during that period, and tax revenues more than kept pace.”

“The real history of the Canadian fiscal reversal,” he summarizes, “is that firm but hardly harsh spending restraint proved sufficient because the economy cooperated by expanding steadily and rendering up taxes.”

Okay. But this formula — moderate restraint, coupled with steady growth and rising revenues — why wasn’t it tried before? Continue…

Where are the Network TV Kids?

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 5:04 PM - 0 Comments

The new President of ABC, Paul Lee, has said that he wants to revive the old “TGIF” Friday lineup if he can get enough inexpensive, sitcoms started up, particularly sitcoms that the network owns itself. (The low budget, and the prospect of making money in syndication, would make up for the lower Friday ratings.) To that end, there have been some stories lately about ABC developing sitcoms with established sitcom stars: Kirstie Alley is doing a pilot for them, and so – amazingly – is Jim Belushi. This is part of a larger trend of networks trying to lure back the sitcom stars who helped them out in years past: Sean Hayes is doing a new pilot for NBC, Roseanne is setting up a new sitcom and this season, ABC is betting a lot on the idea that people still want to see Tim Allen. But in ABC’s case it’s starting to seem like if they do launch that dreamed-of TGIF lineup, it’ll be something like TV Land’s original sitcom lineup – a showcase for aging or aged sitcom stars.

Nothing wrong with giving older stars another shot, of course. But it seems odd that at least so far, very few networks seem to be developing shows where kids are a major presence. It sometimes seems like you’re more likely to find a show with a baby – this year’s entry is Up All Night – than one with kids who are old enough to do anything. Fox has a poorly-reviewed comedy called I Hate My Teenage Daughter, but it’s told entirely from the point of view of the adults (which is only one of its problems). Fox had some of its biggest hits with shows like That ’70s Show and Malcolm in the Middle, or even The Simpsons (where many episodes focused on the kids getting into mischief or having personal dilemmas), and more recently it’s done well with the frequently kid-centric stories on Bob’s Burgers, but it’s been slow to get back to that kind of thing in live action comedy.

ABC is the same way; it seems to want to bring back family-friendly comedy, and the kids are some of the best things about The Middle and Modern Family. (If Manny isn’t the breakout character of Modern Family, he probably should be.) But they’ve been very slow to greenlight shows with younger characters, even though the kids were often the key to the success of the TGIF lineup they’re so anxious to bring back. Full House and Family Matters are examples of shows with large numbers of kids, which soon became primarily about the kids. And Boy Meets World and Sabrina were star vehicles for younger actors. Except for the bright idea of casting Kaitlyn Dever, fresh from her success on Justified, as Tim Allen’s teen daughter, this year’s comedies don’t seem to have many kid actors, let alone kid actors with breakout potential.

There are reasons why you can’t do an iCarly type of show, where kids dominate the world, on a broadcast network: adults must watch, so there must be strong adult characters. And kids are hard to cast because they’re not bankable stars (by the time they’re bankable stars, they’re no longer kids), so the casting mostly has to be done based on the producers’ own judgment. That terrifies network executives. But it does seem like there are a lot of stories about kids and teenagers that half-hour comedies are not telling. For adult viewers, these stories would at least have the benefit of seeming marginally fresher than observational humour about adult relationships.

Do the health benefits of cycling outweigh the safety risks?

By Julia Belluz - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 2:58 PM - 13 Comments

Photo by helter-skelter/Flickr

The Statement:  “To be sure, cycling provides good exercise, but there are safer ways to get it. [...] Second, bike riding here is not as environmentally virtuous as it’s cracked up to be.”—Montreal Gazette, 08/11/2011

This Gazette story was prompted by a series of five very sad cycling fatalities in Montreal this year, “an unusually high death toll,” the writer lamented, before going on to list myriad downsides related to cycling in the urban environment. The Winnipeg Free Press published a similarly disturbing article, which noted that in the last 18 months, 29 people have died on Winnipeg streets in car crashes, and 18 of them were pedestrians or cyclists. The Winnipeg Free Press article’s message was as clear and pedantic as its title: “Walking, cycling can be deadly.”

Ontario doctors have likewise called for safer cycling. They note that while biking is good exercise, the government needs to invest in cycling infrastructure, such as purpose-built bike lanes, to make commuting on two wheels safer. The provincial NDP in Ontario offered another (seemingly unlikely and impossible to enforce) solution to the problem of cars and bikes mingling dangerously on the road: they suggested changing the Highway Traffic Act so motorists can be fined for crossing a one-metre buffer with cyclists.

But what is the evidence behind these proposed cycling policies? And if cycling is as dangerous as these news articles purport, do the health benefits of cycling outweigh the risks? Or should people refrain from biking on city streets altogether? Continue…

Stephen Harper ranked second-best and worst PM

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 2:27 PM - 12 Comments

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been ranked both the second-best and worst Prime Minister in a new Angus Reid Public Opinion survey. 19 per cent of respondents said Harper was the best head of government since 1968, while the same percentage of those surveyed called him the worst. But the percentage of people voting for Harper as the best PM rose eight points from last year’s 11 per cent, while those calling him the worst only rose by one per cent. “The reality is you have these two groups of people who either love Harper or hate him,” said Angus Reid vice-president Mario Canseco. Pierre Trudeau remains Canadians most favourite prime minister at 36 per cent, and has topped the list since the survey began in 2007.

Ottawa Citizen

Man arrested on terrorism charges in Madrid

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 1:52 PM - 0 Comments

Jose Perez Bautista, A 24-year-old Mexican chemistry student working as a volunteer in preparation for the Pope’s visit to Madrid, was arrested Tuesday for allegedly planning a gas attack targeting anti-papal protestors. Pope Benedict XVI will arrive in Madrid Thursday for a four-day visit in celebration of World Youth Day. A protest against his visit is scheduled for Wednesday. Bautista was arrested at a Madrid convention centre where hundreds of thousands of pilgrims were picking up their accreditation. Police say he planned to attack protestors with “suffocating gases”—information they found on a computer hard drive and notebooks seized from his apartment in Madrid. Mexican Embassy spokesman, Bernardo Graue, says consular officials have visited Bautista in prison, and say he is “relaxed” and in good physical condition.

CTV News

Toronto Imam charged with 13 sexual offenses

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 1:42 PM - 9 Comments

A Toronto imam has been charged with multiple sexual offenses against his students, the Toronto Sun reports. 48-year-old Mohammad Masroor was arrested August 10 on charges involving five people, both male and female. Masroor is the imam of the Baitul Mukarram Islamic Society in Toronto’s east end. Police say he faces up to 13 charges, many of which involve sexual related acts and death threats. Masroor—who taught the Koran at the local mosque and privately in homes—has traveled extensively throughout the world, raising questions about potential cases outside the country as well. He has been in Canada since 2008.

The Toronto Sun

South Sudan’s central banker fired

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 1:37 PM - 0 Comments

South Sudan’s president has fired the country’s chief banker as the new nation’s currency continues to slide against the U.S. dollar. Elijah Malok lost his job about a month after launching the South Sudanese pound. He will be replaced by his deputy, Kornelio Koryom Mayiik. South Sudan declared independence on July 9. The country faces a host of security and development challenges as it battles for stability. The president, Salva Kir, has yet to name a cabinet.

BBC News

‘It always gives you more than one opportunity to prevail’

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 1:28 PM - 4 Comments

Stephane Dion accepts the 2011 Couchiching Award for Leadership in Public Policy.

Reading Couchiching President Gwen Burrows’s good-news letter, the first thought that crossed my mind was how fortunate we are, in a democracy such as Canada, to be allowed to fight for our convictions, safe from any political system threat to our freedom and wellbeing.

How fortunate to be free to accept an award from an independent and non-partisan institution, an institution shaped by a diversity of people – Liberals like me, but also others – Conservatives, New Democrats, Greens…!  Men and women who might not have voted for me or supported my policies, but who give me credit for having fought for my ideas, my ideals and my fellow human beings. It is institutions like this that make Canada a better democracy.

Democracy.  That is the theme that underlies my address today.  You have been kind enough to say that I have showed leadership.  What I know for sure is that whatever leadership I might have shown was inspired by the democratic ideal, an ideal that pushed me to fight for a united Canada, a better Canada. 

Anti-corruption protests continue in India

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 1:26 PM - 0 Comments

Protests in India continued for a second day on Wednesday with political parties holding rallies across the country to press for stronger anti-corruption legislation. Many people took to the streets to demonstrate against the arrest of Anna Hazare, the 73-year-old who was taken into custody by Delhi police after he tried to start a hunger strike against perceived government corruption. The Indian government agreed to release Hazare Tuesday evening, but he refuses to leave jail until he’s given the unconditional right to publicly fast. Hundreds reportedly demonstrated outside the Tihar Jail that houses Hazare, while others marched in areas of New Delhi, Mumbai and in the southern states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. India’s central government has been dogged by a series of recent corruption cases, leading to increasing demands to create an independent body that would observe and investigate the activities of politicians.

The New York Times

Canada looks to ink investor protection pact with China

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 1:08 PM - 0 Comments

Canadian trade negotiators are in talks with their Chinese counterparts as the two nations seek common ground on investor protection, Trade Minister Ed Fast told Bloomberg on Wednesday. Fast said the two countries “are not presently negotiating a free-trade agreement” but are looking to sign a deal that spells out “a clearly established set of rules, under which people invest in another country.”

Bloomberg

Do you agree with Warren Buffett that the rich should pay more taxes?

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 12:56 PM - 19 Comments

Layton to miss NDP summer caucus retreat

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 12:52 PM - 0 Comments

Jack Layton will not make an appearance at the NDP’s caucus retreat in September. Members of the party will discuss policy and strategy at the meeting in Quebec City just one week ahead of the resumption of Parliament on September 19, the day Layton has previously pledged to return as NDP leader. Party spokesperson Kathleen Monk confirmed Wednesday that interim leader Nycole Turmel will lead the meetings. Layton announced in July that he would temporarily be stepping down as leader of the Official Opposition to battle a new type of cancer. He had already been battling prostate cancer for over a year.

CTV News

Libyan rebels fight to control oil refinery

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 12:21 PM - 0 Comments

Libyan rebels are battling to control a key coastal oil refinery in Zawiya, just 50 kilometres east of Tripoli, the BBC reports. Heavy gunfire and rocket attacks took place in a sixth day of fighting on Wednesday, as Gadhafi’s forces continue to hold the refinery with snipers, while rebels say they control the gate of the complex. Zawiya is a key town for the rebels, as it lies on the route between Tripoli and Tunisia, and its capture by rebels would mean Tripoli would be surrounded by land, with NATO forces blocking sea access.

BBC News

Will the questions be answered?

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 11:46 AM - 2 Comments

While debate continues over who knew what about the G8 Legacy Fund and when (or at least who said what about who knew then), opposition members of the government operations committee hold out hope that Conservative MPs won’t block further investigation.

“The problem is a majority government can control what happens at committee, but I think if we can apply enough pressure and get strong media coverage, the government might agree to it because I think it is an important issue,” McCallum said in an interview..

Martin said he would like the committee to hear from Clement, from mayors of towns that received money from the fund, and from public servants who participated in the process. If Conservative MPs block the hearings they will leave the government open to accusations they are trying to cover up the affair, Martin said. ”We’ll be talking serious, serious coverup — the likes of which we haven’t seen since the sponsorship scandal.”

Death in Costa Rica’s rainforest

By Anthony A. Davis and Nicholas Köhler - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 8 Comments

Anthony A. Davis

The body of 53-year-old Canadian Kimberley Ann Blackwell was discovered on the morning of Feb. 2, high in the lush, hot, tropical rainforests of Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula, where she had lived for almost 20 years. She had been shot the night before, execution-style, and lay sprawled on blood-soaked dirt near the gate to her home and cocoa farm. Maurico Valerin Jimenez, a 25-year-old warden with the Ministry of Environment and Energy, found her. “It was the first time I’d ever seen a body,” says Jimenez, who had arrived on Blackwell’s remote jungle property with several other wardens to begin a 15-km patrol of adjacent Corcovado National Park, a wonderland preserve of jaguars, monkeys, parrots and pumas.

Many locals here—especially campesinos, Costa Rica’s poor subsistence farmers—loathe the wardens, who interfere in a rural tradition of poaching and eating bush meat. “It’s Deliverance out there,” an expat friend of Blackwell’s says of the area, a densely treed, hilly region strung together by badly rutted roads and dotted with cattle, coffee and cocoa farms. For wardens like Jimenez, Blackwell’s property was a sanctuary. The animal lover had moved to the Osa, located just above Panama in southwest Costa Rica, 18 years earlier from the Yukon, and regularly let the wardens camp on her land, serving them coffee and soups. “It was like going to a restaurant,” says Jimenez.

Almost seven months after Blackwell’s death, authorities have still laid no charges in the slaying, even as rumours about why she was murdered and by whom multiply. The mystery of her death only deepens Blackwell’s mystique as a maverick among mavericks in the Osa, a gathering place for off-the-grid nonconformists who scrape refuge out of the untamed jungle and wild surf. Sir Francis Drake, the 16th-century privateer, once buried treasure here. Among locals, Blackwell is every bit as much a legend—a fiery, uncompromising hippie who inspired deep loyalty in her friends despite a penchant for decking them during fits of rage.

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Tweets v. Ideas

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 9:49 AM - 9 Comments

Neal Gabler sketches the demise of ideas.

To paraphrase the famous dictum, often attributed to Yogi Berra, that you can’t think and hit at the same time, you can’t think and tweet at the same time either, not because it is impossible to multitask but because tweeting, which is largely a burst of either brief, unsupported opinions or brief descriptions of your own prosaic activities, is a form of distraction or anti-thinking.

The implications of a society that no longer thinks big are enormous. Ideas aren’t just intellectual playthings. They have practical effects.

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Pitchmen with pitchforks

By Jessica Allen - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 9:45 AM - 0 Comments

Using the qualifier “natural” to sell food to a hungry public is nothing new. But mass-market food advertisers have recently taken the strategy to new heights by getting the people that actually grow the food to sell it, too. A new McDonald’s television ad, which opens with a farmer carrying a bushel of potatoes, drives home the idea that their fries are made with the same potatoes you mash at home. Wendy’s new TV ads show farmer Jim Carter eating the strawberries he grows that end up in the fast-food chain’s new salad. And the latest Lay’s ad campaign features the potato farmers who provide the produce for the company’s chips. (They also include a “chip tracker” on their website, where customers can enter a product code found on bags in order to find out exactly where the potatoes inside were harvested.) The underlying message seems to be, “Our food is made with food. And it’s grown by real farmers.” Continue…

Online gaming funds North Korean nukes

By Alex Ballingall - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 9:44 AM - 0 Comments

Cash-strapped North Korea has found a unique way to stock its dwindling foreign reserves. The famously isolated Communist country is allegedly training an army of hackers in Pyongyang’s IT institutes, with some taking to South Korean gaming websites to rake in millions of dollars, according to U.S. and South Korean officials.

Police in South Korea revealed last week that they arrested five people in connection with one such operation. North Korean hackers, working for Chinese programmers, were reportedly creating automated software that allowed unmanned computers to amass points in online games like Lineage and Dungeon and Fighter, investigators said. The hackers then traded the points for cash with human players who wanted to use them to upgrade their in-game personas. Over the past year and a half, they made about US$6 million, say police, much of it funnelled to a multi-purpose slush fund in Pyongyang believed to be worth billions.

Despite widespread reports of starvation and malnutrition in the country, money from the fund, managed by an obscure agency called Office 39, is allegedly used to fund North Korea’s nuclear program, buy the support of high-ranking officials, and to smuggle in luxury goods for Pyongyang’s elite, who favour Hennessy cognac, Armani accessories and Rolex watches. Last year, the regime tried to purchase two luxury yachts that were built at Italy’s famed Azimut-Benetti shipyard, but at the last minute, Rome blocked the sale, according to Reuters. Thanks to the hacking scheme, Kim Jong Il might have another go at procuring a luxury boat.

On the need to restart the debate on assisted suicide

By Ken MacQueen - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 9:33 AM - 4 Comments

Photographs by Simon Hayter

On Jab. 15, 2010, Kathleen (Kay) Carter of North Vancouver had a date with death, an event she’d been seeking for months. She was 89 years old and nearly paralyzed by spinal stenosis. She made a last journey to Dignitas, a Swiss clinic devoted to assisted dying, accompanied by her daughter Lee Carter, Lee’s husband, Hollis Johnson, and other family. There, she drank a lethal drug, nibbled on a Swiss chocolate and drifted off to death. Her legacy is a renewed debate on the right to die. Carter and Johnson are now part of a challenge to the law prohibiting assisted suicide. It will be heard in the B.C. Supreme Court in November.

Q: Lee, tell me about Kay Carter, your mother.

LC: She was a fiercely independent person. She was well-read. She was interested in politics, social issues. She went to university and spent one year teaching elementary school in White Rock, B.C. And then she started having children, and had seven. There was no room for a job. She was married to my dad, Ron Carter, until he died in his mid-60s.

Q: In 2008, she was diagnosed with spinal stenosis. What did it mean to her quality of life?

LC: Basically, it’s to do with the [degenerating] spinal cord. You begin to lose your extremities, the ability to use your hands, your feet and eventually your legs. When she was diagnosed, it was hard to use her arms. She knew something was wrong. She would have been around 86 or 87.
HJ: I think the prognosis was particularly horrifying for her. The doctor said at some point, “You’ll be completely paralyzed, and just be on a gurney, and all of your needs will have to be attended to by others.” For her to lose that mobility was really terrifying.

Q: At what point did she decide she wanted to end her life?

LC: She woke up in the middle of the night [in July 2009] and said, “I’ve got it. I know what I want to do. I want to go overseas. Over there they can allow me to die with dignity.”
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