Amy Winehouse’s 33 perfect minutes

By Stephen Marche - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 17 Comments

Hedi Slimane/Trunk Archive

Nobody was surprised that Amy Winehouse died last week at age 27 in her north London home. Only a month before, she had been caught on YouTube at a concert in Belgrade, so slurring-drunk and forgetting-the-lyrics-high that she was booed off the stage. The performance was alarming enough that the organizers cancelled the European tour she had just started. They had been optimistic even to try. In 2007, at the cusp of her rise to prominence, Winehouse’s in-laws had begged her fans to stop buying her records because the proceeds were being poured directly into self-destruction. Her father publicly worried that his daughter was smoking so much crack she was developing emphysema in her mid-twenties.

If her death was not surprising, it was nonetheless shocking. Creatively, she was like a bullfighter sidestepping phoniness at the last possible moment, dodging the prefabricated sound or image while allowing the familiar and comforting to suffuse her being, letting the clichéd ride as close to her as possible and then suddenly pulling away. The horn section, the backup singers, the beehive, the Cleopatra makeup, the pin-up girl tattoos—we had seen them all before, but her way of wearing them was so personal they became brand new. But in the end, despite her freshness, she lived out the old, old story, another entrant into the 27 club, the exclusive arrangement for rock ’n’ roll stars who die at the standard age: Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain. Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse, blah, blah, blah.

She has left us with Back to Black, one of the greatest albums of all time. Or rather, I shouldn’t say “greatest” because that’s to say it exists on a spectrum or in a hierarchy, when really Back to Black does that nearly impossible thing in art: it is what it is and it is not something else. Music critics who described the album’s sound as “retro” after its release were wrong. (Many have had the good sense to recant.) Soul cannot be appropriated and remain soul; that’s Starbucks soul. Back to Black is just soul.

Unfortunately, the death of Amy Winehouse has transformed the meaning of Back to Black. It’s hard to remember this, now, but the opening track, Rehab, when released in 2006, was a joke song, something like Katy Perry’s I Kissed a Girl. A witty play on tabloid culture and on the drama of addiction captured in shows like Celebrity Rehab and Intervention, it teased itself about the rock ’n’ roll cliché of wild living: “They tried to make me go to rehab / but I said no, no, no.” The first thing Amy Winehouse gave her audience was a laugh. The joke is all too real now.

The self-consciousness of the lyrics in Back to Black make Winehouse’s death all the more pathetic. Her humour, her knowingness, seemed like such obvious escape hatches from the operas she lured herself into. Billie Holiday stared down into the abyss of her addiction and depression as she plummeted through it. Even Nina Simone, incredibly wise about her own suffering and its meaning, could not look away from her passion long enough to see its folly. Amy Winehouse was forever looking over her shoulder, winking at the paparazzi and at herself in the mirror. With sparkling clarity, she understood the silliness of her antics. In Tears Dry on Their Own, she gives herself a good talking to: “We could have never had it all / We had to hit a wall / So this is inevitable withdrawal.” Then she gives herself exactly the right advice: “I cannot play myself again / I should just be my own best friend.” She seemed too intelligent, too familiar with the by-now-established pitfalls of hedonism, to walk into such obvious traps. She seemed too darkly clever to die so stupidly.

Not that Back to Black doesn’t revel in the glamour of its own melodrama. Her breakup and then reunion with Blake Fielder-Civil, Winehouse’s muse, is always the “five-storey fire” described in Love is a Losing Game. But what is so attractive about Back to Black, so refreshing, is the intimacy of the portrait of self-obsession and collapse, the unglamorous details of the narcotic dream and nightmare. Her most memorable and idiomatic songs are like Mary Pratt paintings accompanied by doo-wop backup singers, as in You Know I’m No Good: “I’m in the tub, you on the seat / Lick your lips as I soak my feet.” A portrait of the domesticity of self-abuse, the album glows with authenticity, with little in-jokes and pop culture references and other bits and pieces of conversation.

The album is also riddled with a wonderful confusion about what’s important and what’s not. Winehouse uses her voice, a deliriously thrilling instrument that raspingly conjures the most organic passion at will, in counterintuitive ways. She can be amazingly blasé and de-emphasize lines like, “I cheated myself / like I knew I would,” while unfurling the whole of her soulfulness in Me and Mr. Jones for the line: “Who’s playing Saturday?” Her heart shrinks and expands in the most unlikely places. Before her death, this variability was merely a superb piece of vocal technique; now it’s something darker, evidence of the spiritual confusion and the lived chaos of the confirmed addict.

Most terribly, the meaning of the title track has changed since Winehouse’s death, changed painfully and completely. The video for the song shows Winehouse attending a funeral, which turns out to be for “the heart of Amy Winehouse.” Before she actually died, this tired iconography was a piece of kitchen-sink romanticism, a cheap but lovely rip-off of Keats being “half in love with easeful death.” In the middle of the song, chimes ring out—a strange and powerful moment, unlike anything in popular music, dull resonances over which Winehouse croons the word “black.” In hindsight, the chimes were her death knell. Right in the middle of Back to Black she rings the bells in her own memory. Back to Black was a funeral elegy to herself that 11 million people have so far purchased. How else to interpret these lines: “I love you much / It’s not enough / you love blow and I love puff / And life is like a pipe / And I’m a tiny penny rolling up the walls inside.”

Amy Winehouse was an extreme example of the singer who attains in song what she can’t manage in reality: in her case, self-awareness. In her music, she knew exactly who she was and where she was going. Not in her life. In a 2007 interview with Rolling Stone magazine, at the end of her North American tour for Back to Black, she said she didn’t care whether she had a future career. “I don’t want to be ungrateful,” she said. “I know I’m talented, but I wasn’t put here to sing. I was put here to be a wife and a mom and look after my family.” What self-conception could be more in error? What statement could be further from the truth?

With talent, as with everything else, those who have too much throw away what they have. The very luxuriousness of Winehouse’s abilities made them so easy to waste. But we still have Back to Black, which is perfect. The dream of pop music has always been that you could capture the urgency of life lived, the proverbial lightning in a bottle. That’s exactly what Back to Black is, an album of such intensely vivid expression that it feels live while also being so perfectly articulated that you wouldn’t change a single line of phrasing.

It’s only 33 minutes long. Other than a pretty decent but forgettable first album and a couple of covers, that’s all we have of Amy Winehouse. Sometimes 33 minutes can be worth more than 27 years.

Denis Lebel and the sovereignists

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 64 Comments

Denis Lebel’s dalliance with the Bloc Quebecois is now being detailed.

In a statement to Radio Canada he said he took out the membership in part to ingratiate himself with Michel Gauthier, a former Bloc leader who served as the area’s MP. SRC reported that Mr. Lebel was a member of the Bloc from July 1993 to April 2001 and that he also donated hundreds of dollars to the party during the 1990s.

Less than a week ago, Stephen Harper described Nycole Turmel’s similar run with the Bloc as “very disappointing.”

The benefits of mental illness

By Brian Bethune - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 18 Comments

Photographs by Jodi Hilton/Getty Images

NASSIR GHAEMI is a physician and professor of psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston. In A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Health, he argues that in times of crisis, a lifetime of sanity can be a serious liability for political and military leaders, while the lessons and legacy of madness have proven invaluable.

Q: To put your counterintuitive thesis in a nutshell, would it be that too much of anything, including normality, is a bad thing?

A: You could put it that way. I would add that mentally normal leaders, who often have enormous success in normal times, often do not have the personal resources to cope with crisis change. But those who have struggled with mental illness—not outright psychosis or delusions, but the common mental illnesses of bipolarism or depression—have often developed just the traits that crisis leaders need and demonstrate: realism, resilience, creativity and empathy.

Continue…

The making of a monster

By Colby Cosh - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 3 Comments

Rex Features/CP

Even the neo-Nazis are fleeing from Anders Breivik, the Norwegian assassin who killed 77 people in a July 22 rampage from downtown Oslo to the resort island of Utøya. In his horribly mesmerizing, 1,500-page manifesto, Breivik wrote boyishly about his deep attachment to the music of Saga, a Swedish singer who performs race-hate classics and pro-Nazi originals. But in an official statement, Saga called Breivik’s mass killing “one of the most vile and criminal acts in recent history,” and promised, “I have never sought to encourage or promote violence and I never shall.” Harsh words, coming from a master interpreter of Skrewdriver’s stirring The Snow Fell—a song in praise of Hitler’s invasion of Russia. (“They fought as a force, as a light / Against the darkness in a holy war.”)

Breivik’s massacre has left the world scrambling to make sense of a “revolutionary conservative” philosophy that defies tidy categorization. At about 3:20 on the afternoon of July 22, Breivik parked a rented Volkswagen van containing a half-ton of explosives at the doorway to the office of Norway’s Labour Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg. The bomb contained a mixture of fertilizer and fuel oil, materials painstakingly acquired by Breivik through a hobby farm he set up for the purpose. Disguised as a policeman, Breivik went unchallenged by security officers as he left the van and ducked round a corner, climbing into another rented vehicle he had stashed earlier for his getaway.

The bomb detonated at 3:25 p.m., killing eight. Breivik then drove west to the shore of the fjord Tyrifjorden, and took the ferry across the 1,200-m channel to Utøya, an island belonging to the Labour party’s youth organization. Claiming to be a police officer doing a “security check” in the aftermath of the Oslo bombing, he called together attendees at a Labour summer camp and opened fire with a semi-automatic Ruger Mini-14 rifle and a 9-mm Glock pistol.

Continue…

Premiers’ ‘life-saving’ pact

By Ken MacQueen - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment

Garrett Shakespeare, a North Vancouver swim instructor and nightclub DJ, turned 23 on July 22. When you have lived more than a decade with paroxysmal nocturnal haemoglobinuria (PNH), a rare and fatal blood disease, you don’t take such events for granted. But this birthday was special: he got back his life. Thanks to a joint purchase agreement reached among Canada’s premiers, announced coincidentally on his birthday, Shakespeare and other PNH sufferers have started treatment with Soliris, one of the world’s most expensive drugs, but one shown to restore health and longevity in those with the disorder.

“I’m so happy,” says Shakespeare, who has lived with debilitating pain, frequent hospitalization and the threat of organ failure or a fatal blood clot because the B.C. drug plan had deemed Soliris not “cost effective.” The drug costs about $500,000 a year, and patients require treatment for the rest of their lives. In June, Maclean’s wrote about Shakespeare’s plight in a story about the inequities caused by the lack of a national pharmacare strategy. There are fewer than 90 Canadians with PNH. Some had treatment paid through private health plans, some in Ontario and Quebec were treated on compassionate grounds, others did without. About 30 other countries provide the drug free for PNH patients.

Shakespeare and his mother, Rita, learned he’d get the drug in a meeting with provincial Health Minister Mike de Jong. “She started crying right away,” Garrett said of his mother’s joyous reaction, “and didn’t stop the whole way home.” He praises the lobbying efforts of Barry Katsof, a fellow sufferer and the founder of the Montreal-based Canadian Association of PNH Patients. Katsof, a 63-year-old retired businessman, receives Soliris under a Quebec program. He calls it “a miracle drug” that restored his health. Katsof said the provinces negotiated an unspecified price reduction, something he hopes will inspire greater co-operation and an equitable, cost-effective national drug strategy. “This is truly life-saving and life-altering for people.”

Yes, that is a snake in your soup

By Sarah Elton - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 4 Comments

Reuters

There’s a joke in Hong Kong that pokes fun at the cultural gulf between those who eat snake and those who don’t: “How do you know that Adam and Eve were not Chinese? Because they ate the apple and not the snake.” Snake as a meal hasn’t travelled well, unlike other Cantonese dishes that are staples at Chinese restaurants in Canada. And to the North American palate, snake soup especially is unappetizing. While one can find the dish, made from frozen imported snake meat, in upscale restaurants catering to Chinese-Canadians, it doesn’t have the ubiquity of chow mein or sweet and sour pork.

My own association with snakes was something different. When I asked for a kitten as a child, my dad gave me a pet snake. (My mother was allergic to fur.) He popped over to a ravine at lunch and came home from work with a baby garter snake in his breast pocket. Before dinner, we put a rock, a water bowl and some newspaper in a terrarium and welcomed Corey to her new home.

So on a recent trip to Hong Kong, a city known for its cuisine, I tried to hide my alarm when my cousin, who lives there, informed me we were heading out for snake soup. In Hong Kong, as in many parts of China, snake is considered as delicious as its ocean-bound cousin, the eel. It’s also said to be healthy. According to traditional beliefs, snake has heating properties. You eat it during the winter to warm your blood and encourage your qi, your energy, to move around. It’s also purportedly an aphrodisiac and increases male “potency.” There are little shops that open only in the colder months to serve snake soup to those who still believe in the old ways.

Continue…

Hugo’s government-by-Twitter

By Richard Warnica - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Reuters

During a recent stay in Cuba, Hugo Chávez took to Twitter to stay in touch with his people. The president of Venezuela has cancer and was in Havana to have a tumour removed, but he took time out to tweet to his more than 1.8 million followers. “We’re moving along here, brother! With God and the Virgin!” read one post, according to a translation by the Associated Press. “In my modest opinion…THEY ROBBED US OF THE VICTORY GOAL,” said another, a reference to a soccer match between his country and Paraguay.

Chávez’s Twitter campaign earned wry headlines abroad. But back home, it was his choice of medical locale that was causing a stir. The Venezuelan health system has been a shambles for decades; under Chávez, opponents say, things have grown dramatically worse. By seeking treatment abroad, critics charge, Chávez has tacitly acknowledged that the Venezuelan system is not up to snuff. What does the president think? At this point, he has yet to express himself on the issue, on Twitter or anywhere else.

An 84-year-old artist gets her first show

By Nicholas Köhler - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Laura Mills

A few years ago, Ross and Barb Smith, both in their early 70s, set up a yard sale in front of their Fredericton, N.B., home, just down from one of the city’s several cemeteries, and waited to see if there was a market for any of their junk. Before long, an elderly woman had shuffled onto the scene and began buying up the yard. She wanted the wooden blocks Ross had used to raise the car during fix-it jobs, and a collection of metal odds and ends. “Oh, she liked that, she could use that,” they recall her saying. Ross, sensing an opportunity, invited the woman down to the basement to see if there might be anything else she could use. There below, she snapped up a mouldering grand piano.

“What could she want with it all?” the Smiths wondered. As they befriended her (the couple has now made a hobby of bringing the woman discarded bric-a-brac dragged from the local dump), they came to learn she was busy slapping the detritus together into sculptures—“objects of art,” as Ross, who worked for years for the provincial power utility, puts it. That was interesting, they thought, but also a bit mysterious. Nevertheless, upon receiving a handwritten invitation, last month the Smiths headed for the prestigious Beaverbrook Art Gallery, where the woman, Catherine Hale, is now having her first major solo art show, at the age of 84. “I stressed all day,” says Barb. “I thought, ‘What do I wear to something so special?’ ”

As it turned out, much of what she saw that day—a collection of eerie tapestries made from discarded lace and face veils, dismantled knick-knacks screwed together in incongruous ways and painted black—“looked familiar,” says Barb. Hale had caked their old piano in black paint and converted it into something like a motorcycle sidecar, a piece she calls Earhart—Amelia-style aviator shades and a leather flight cap are tacked up in the area of the cockpit—a nod, perhaps, to Hale’s great inspiration, Emily Dickinson, and her poem “Because I could not stop for death” (“The Carriage held but just Ourselves—And Immortality”). So close does Hale feel to Dickinson that Terry Graff, the Beaverbrook’s chief curator, subtitled her show Between the Spirit and the Dust, another Dickinson allusion.

Continue…

A stranger in Deutsche land

By Erica Alini - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Deutsche Bank, that most treasured of German national institutions, has picked an Indian executive to be its new CEO. Last week, the bank revealed that Anshu Jain, currently working for Deutsche Bank in London, will be filling the shoes of outgoing chief executive Josef Ackermann, who is scheduled to step down in May. Jain currently heads the bank’s investment banking operations, which accounted for nearly 90 per cent of its pre-tax first-quarter profits this year. But the 48-year-old Indian native speaks little German and doesn’t know his way around the corridors of corporate and political power in Frankfurt and Berlin. That’s why the bank also appointed Jürgen Fitschen, a German who currently oversees Deutsche Bank’s national operation, as a co-CEO. In addition, the duo might get some tips from current CEO Ackermann, who is slated to head the bank’s supervisory board.

The complex succession scheme has received mixed reviews from investors, many of whom fear a triumvirate at the top will lead to leadership struggles and slow down decision-making. But, as others suggested, an Indian alone at the helm of Germany’s financial crown jewel might have been too much of a cultural shock for many Germans.

Photo gallery: Riots break out in north London

By macleans.ca - Monday, August 8, 2011 at 6:19 PM - 0 Comments

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Photo gallery: Riots break out in north London

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Looters detained

Police detain looters found inside JD Sports at Tottenham Retail Park. Riots spread from Tottenham High Road and looters raided shops on August 7 2011. Looters continued to rob from the store, even after sunrise. Looters struggled to escape, even after they were cuffed and police had to keep other people back as they arrested the looters. (London News Pictures / Rex Features)

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S&P sends U.S. political leaders a message

By John Parisella - Monday, August 8, 2011 at 5:59 PM - 34 Comments

Last Friday, the Standard & Poor’s rating agency made history by ratcheting the U.S. credit rating down a notch from AAA to AA+. (The two other major rating agencies, Moody’s and Fitch, kept the U.S. at AAA.) The Obama administration argued S&P overestimated the U.S. debt by over $2 trillion. And though S&P recognized the error, it argued the debt ceiling deal was inadequate to maintain an impeccable credit rating.

Politicians from both the Democratic and Republican parties have blamed one another for the decision by S&P. GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann attributed the downgrade to President Obama, while Obama advisor David Axelrod blamed the Tea Party for toying with a default to force spending cuts. Continue…

‘A slow process’

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, August 8, 2011 at 4:25 PM - 7 Comments

The Canadian general overseeing NATO’s operations in Libya quibbles with the suggestion that the conflict has reached a stalemate.

“I disagree with the term stalemate,” Lt.-Gen. Charles Bouchard told Postmedia News on a busy day Friday as NATO dealt with conflicting reports about the possible death of Gadhafi’s son and fended off criticism from Italy on the handling of fleeing migrants … ”How do we define stalemate? If we judge it against perhaps the operation in Iraq one would say, ‘Well, it’s certainly not as fast,’ but from my perspective, and I know that of (NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen), is that this is not a stalemate but rather a slow process.”

Young People Watch Cartoons

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, August 8, 2011 at 2:32 PM - 0 Comments

Speaking of TV shows that skew young, if you want to know why NBC is trying to get into the prime time animated cartoon game (NBC president Bob Greenblatt said that this is one of the things they want Greg Daniels to concentrate on as part of his new deal with the network), check out this list of the broadcast network shows with the most youth appeal. Outside of the CW, which makes shows almost exclusively for people in the 18-34 range, the “youngest” shows are all Fox cartoons. Even The Simpsons, a 20 year-old show that has experienced a normal amount of ratings erosion in most other categories, has a median viewer almost as young as the Seth MacFarlane cartoons and Bob’s Burgers. Most of the Fox cartoons look only about average in the Coveted 18-49 category, but explode among 18-34 viewers, and might look even better if people under 18 counted in the ratings.

If cable shows were included in the list, of course, Jersey Shore would be on there, and so would other reality shows. But on broadcast, cartoons are the prime destination for the younger viewer (broadcast reality shows tend to be “older” than the MTV type of reality show). The only live-action, non-CW shows that even make the list are The Office and Parks & Recreation, though Community might be close. One reason NBC can afford to stick with Parks and Community on Thursdays is that the ads on Thursdays incline toward movie promos, aimed at getting young people out to the theatres on Friday. With a very young, male viewership, NBC can sell some ad time on Community to advertisers who have young male viewers in mind.

So while no broadcast network other than Fox has been able to make prime time animation work (Fox is even taking over the original prime-time cartoon, The Flintstones), and even Fox hasn’t been able to do it outside of Sundays, you can see why other networks would want to keep trying.

The Harper bootlegs

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, August 8, 2011 at 2:03 PM - 5 Comments

Toronto Life tries to figure out the political calculations at play in the case of Stephen Harper and Rob Ford appearing on camera together. Since the original video disappeared and a six-minute compilation was blocked, at least three copies have been posted to YouTube.

Environment Canada readies for massive job cuts

By macleans.ca - Monday, August 8, 2011 at 12:45 PM - 6 Comments

Employees at Environment Canada are said to be in “complete and utter turmoil” after the government announced last week that hundreds of staffers will be let go in coming months. Three hundred positions are expected to be eliminated at the ministry and 776 staffers have been put on notice that their jobs are at risk. “I’ve never seen cuts like this in my 15 years as president of the Union of Environmental Workers, said Bill Pynn, who represents 476 of the affected workers. Since May’s election, the Conservative government has announced more than 1,500 public service job cuts. Thousands more are expected in coming years as the Tories try to close a $32 billion budget deficit.

The Hill Times

Harper touches down in Brazil

By macleans.ca - Monday, August 8, 2011 at 12:37 PM - 1 Comment

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and a cadre of senior cabinet ministers arrived in Brazil Monday to kick-off high-level trade talks with the emerging South American giant. The visit is the first in a week-long Latin American swing for Harper and it comes as economic turmoil in the United States and Europe continues to swirl. Securing a bilateral trade agreement with Brazil may be difficult. Trade relations between the two countries have been strained at times and Brazil needs the support of trade partners Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay to sign-off on any free trade pact. Brazil, the world’s seventh largest economy, is already Canada’s tenth largest trading partner. Harper, along with cabinet ministers John Baird, Rona Ambrose, Diane Ablonczy and Ed Fast, will touch down in Columbia, Costa Rica and Honduras later in the week.

CBC

Gulf Arab states put pressure on Syria

By macleans.ca - Monday, August 8, 2011 at 12:34 PM - 1 Comment

Syria is under fire for its five-month-old brutal crackdown on protesters from Arab neighbours Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, after the countries recalled their ambassadors and called for President Bashar al-Assad to stop the violence. The criticism indicates that support for Assad’s regime is waning among previously loyal neighbours. The king of Saudi Arabia read a statement on state television calling for Assad to stop “the killing machine and end the bloodshed,” while Kuwait’s foreign minister said “the military option must be halted.”

New York Times

London riots spread

By macleans.ca - Monday, August 8, 2011 at 12:32 PM - 3 Comments

Copycat rioting and looting broke out across north, south and east London Sunday after riots took place in Tottenham on Saturday. Thousands of extra police officers were brought in from neighbouring forces to help Metropolitan police handle the violence that erupted after a 29-year-old man was shot dead by police Thursday evening. People in masks have been throwing stones and bottles at police, while others have ransacked electronics stores, McDonald’s franchises and more. Officials have been accused of failing to provide leadership as rioting took over the capital over the weekend, as many have been out of the country. Prime Minister David Cameron is on vacation in Italy, while London mayor Boris Johnson is also on holiday. Both have issued statements condemning the violence.

The Guardian

Ukrainian prime minister denied bail

By macleans.ca - Monday, August 8, 2011 at 12:24 PM - 0 Comments

Former Ukrainian prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, has been denied bail requests by a Ukrainian court. She was arrested Friday for contempt of court and violation of procedures and she has been on trial since June for signing an allegedly illegal gas deal with Russia in 2009. Tymoshenko argues that the deal was perfectly legal, and that she has been falsely accused by Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, in an attempt to make her unfit for future elections. Activists and supporters of the official opposition rallied for her release outside a Kiev courtroom on Friday.

The Guardian

Google graph too small to show S&P/TSX tumble this morning

By Erica Alini - Monday, August 8, 2011 at 12:09 PM - 33 Comments

The Canadian stock market took such a dive this morning it went–literally–through the bottom of a Google Graph of the S&P/TSX Composite, the Canuck benchmark index (see this screenshot we took at 10.14 AM). The drop was largely attributed to Standard and Poor’s downgrading of the US’s long-term creditworthiness from AAA to AA plus on Friday.  The S&P/TSX Composite tumbled over 3 per cent in early morning trading before rebounding slightly.

Markets tumble over recession fears

By macleans.ca - Monday, August 8, 2011 at 12:08 PM - 0 Comments

The historical downgrade of the United States’ creditworthiness and the deepening debt crisis in Europe roiled markets throughout the world on Monday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 1.9 per cent shortly after trading began in Wall Street, even as the New York Stock Exchange attempted to ease volatility by invoking a little-used rule that prohibits the dissemination of price indications before the opening bell. The Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index tumbled 2.4 per cent, and the Nasdaq Composite 2.8 per cent. The market’s early losses continued last week’s downward race, when the Dow posted its worst weekly point performance since 2008. European stocks were on a rollercoaster, as investors oscillated between anxiety about worsening debt woes in Italy and Spain, and optimism about recent, aggressive action by the European Central Bank to buy bonds from both countries. Asian and Middle Eastern markets also tumbled amidst pessimism about the prospects of the global economic recovery. Somewhat counter intuitively, US bonds remained a safe haven for investors, despite Standard and Poor’s downgrading of the US’s long-term credit rating from AAA to AA plus on Friday.

Wall Street Journal

Documents reveal CIA kept watch on Canada during Cold War

By macleans.ca - Monday, August 8, 2011 at 12:03 PM - 6 Comments

The CIA kept a close eye on the Canadian economy during the Cold War and conducted a secret analysis of then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, declassified records reveal. In January 1982, the CIA depicted Trudeau as a politician torn between wanting to be a leader of the Third World and an accepted member of the world’s industrialized countries, according to documents obtained by the Canadian Press under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. Beginning in the 1950s, the CIA scrutinized maps of Canada and kept a watchful eye on firms that were potentially exporting goods to Eastern Bloc countries. The agency was particularly interested in Canada’s mineral industries. In May 1972, the agency produced a study that concluded Canada was in a good position to further its standing as the world’s leading mineral exporter. The CIA also took a look at Alberta’s oil sands, recognizing in 1972 the “enormous amounts of oil” along the Athabasca River.

CTV News

Helicopter likely shot down by Taliban rocket, NATO says

By macleans.ca - Monday, August 8, 2011 at 12:02 PM - 0 Comments

NATO officials said Monday that Taliban forces in Afghanistan fired a rocket that downed a helicopter and killed 38 people last Friday. It was the worst single incident of the decade-long war for the U.S., with 30 American troops dead. Some of them belonged to the same Navy SEAL unit that killed Osama bin Laden in May, although none of the dead had actually participated in that operation. Seven Afghan commandos and an Afghan interpreter were also killed in the crash. The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force said the CH-47 Chinook helicopter was fired upon by a rocket-propelled grenade while the chopper was transporting the unit to “the scene of an ongoing engagement.” The troops were searching for a Taliban leader in the rugged terrain of the Tangi Valley, about 80 kilometres southwest of Kabul. The incident is one of the latest to underscore the escalating violence in the war-torn country. The first six months of 2011 has seen record levels of civilian casualties since a U.S.-led coalition invaded Afghanistan in 2001.

Reuters

From the magazine

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, August 8, 2011 at 11:52 AM - 0 Comments

From this week’s print edition, a behind-the-scenes look at Jack Layton’s announcement last month.

The story is primarily based on interviews with Mr. Layton’s chief of staff Anne McGrath, his press secretary Karl Belanger, his principal secretary Brad Lavigne and MPs Libby Davies, Thomas Mulcair, Joe Comartin and Paul Dewar. Martin Patriquin, our man in Montreal, spoke to Nycole Turmel (note: that conversation took place before her membership in the Bloc Quebecois and Quebec Solidaire were reported). Cathy Gulli in Toronto sought out medical advice. The result is something like 3,000 words that hopefully shed light on the month leading up to Mr. Layton’s announcement and the immediate aftermath.