Week in Pictures: August 22nd – 28th 2011

By macleans.ca - Friday, August 26, 2011 at 10:50 AM - 0 Comments

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Week in Pictures: August 22nd – 28th 2011

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Anti-corruption protests in India

A Hindu holy man loyal to India's anti-corruption activist Anna Hazare shows his support at the site of Hazare's hunger strike in New Delhi, India, on August 20, 2011. Hazare said Saturday he was feeling physically weak but resolved in his demand that the government adopt his version of a bill setting up an anti-graft watchdog. (AP Photo/Kevin Frayer)

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Why Emily Brontë will never be as popular as Jane Austen

By Flannery Dean - Friday, August 26, 2011 at 10:42 AM - 14 Comments

I’ve read Wuthering Heights so many times that it no longer exists as a wholly absorbing fiction for me; it’s more like a memory. Emily Brontë’s first and only novel, an indecorous riot of emotion and event conducted across the windswept Yorkshire moors, occupies a pivotal moment in the history of literature that’s worth remembering.

Brontë, a writer both raw and refined, is as rough on reader expectation as her characters are on each other. With Wuthering Heights, she turns the romance novel—a genre exemplified, albeit in a comic vein, by that other vicar’s daughter Jane Austen—upside down and grinds its cheerful conventions into the muddy heath with the heel of her little black boot. Continue…

Pest control for vegans. (It’s complicated.)

By Julia McKinnell - Friday, August 26, 2011 at 10:37 AM - 7 Comments

Getty Images/Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

Veganism is all about animal rights, but where do you draw the line if you’re a restaurant owner with a mouse problem, or a cook with cockroaches in the kitchen? According to Martin Mersereau, director of emergency response for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in Washington, “Any vegan restaurant than kills rodents is absolutely hypocritical. If you’re going to exercise such conscientiousness in the cuisine that you prepare, then why not bring that same heart and soul to managing your little unwanted visitors?” Glue traps and poison, he says, “should be avoided like the plague.”

In Toronto, a vegan restaurant owner (who doesn’t want his name used) says, “You’re a vegan as much as you can be. Adequate pest control is a requirement of the Toronto Board of Health. We’re in Kensington Market. There are mice everywhere, so we have a service that comes by, and they put out a lot of glue traps. But I’ve actually caught a mouse on a glue trap and you can release them from the trap using oil. You put oil on the parts the mouse is stuck to, any kind of cooking oil, and it loosens the adhesive. You take him outside. It takes five minutes. The tricky part is, if their head is stuck to the glue trap you have to make sure you don’t drown the little guy in oil.”

In Victoria, at the Lotus Pond, a Buddhist restaurant serving vegan food, chef and part-owner Charles Cai says, “I’m Buddhist. I’ve never killed anything. Never, never, never. How do we solve it when we have a mouse? The best way is to block the holes,” he says. “The old buildings always have problems with holes. We’ve found over 10 holes in the last couple of years, but there’s not any mice now.” Occasionally, when customers enter, a bee flies in the door, in which case Cai traps the insect with a small homemade net and releases it back outside.
Continue…

Swimming, biking, recycling and Pride

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, August 26, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 8 Comments

Tom Johnson remembers Jack Layton the swimmer.

“He was tough,” said Tom Johnson. “He was a guy who when he got the bit between his teeth and he wanted to do something, he could be pretty determined. I think that whole characteristic and personality trait that showed up in his political career was developed in his swimming career to a certain extent.

“The playing fields of Eton kind of thing. You learn those behaviours and you learn to persevere and you learn the tenacity and relentlessness you need to succeed. When you do a sport like swimming, you’re looking at a freakin’ black line most of the time but you’re workin’ inside your own head to try to work things out to make yourself better.”

Edward Keenan lists five ways Jack Layton changed Toronto.

We’ll call you

By Kate Lunau - Friday, August 26, 2011 at 9:30 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Andrew Tolson

Everybody knows what it’s like to dial a company’s customer service line and get stuck on hold, waiting for a human representative to come on while tinny music plays through the phone. For those who can’t face another interminable wait, there’s some good news: an app can now do the waiting for you.

FastCustomer (available for iPhones and Android phones) offers a list of over 2,500 companies, including customer service lines for Amazon, WestJet, and Canada Post. Those who’ve downloaded the app select which company they’d like to contact; FastCustomer then puts in an automated call, contacting the user when a real-life representative becomes available. This app, which claims it’s already saved people from spending over 280,000 minutes on hold, “keeps me from being subjected to creative versions of Lady Gaga songs in muzak format,” one enthusiastic user wrote on the FastCustomer blog. For some, that’s priceless, even if the app is now available for free.

Idea alert

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, August 26, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 15 Comments

While rejecting a Liberal-NDP merger, Rob Silver wonders if a new party might make sense.

But why not start a discussion between Liberals, New Democrats, Red Tories, and young people who have never been a member of a political party in their lives about a new vehicle – a new party. Consider it a blank slate. If we were starting from scratch, what would we fight for? How would we organize ourselves? So while there would still by definition be trade-offs (unless you start a new party by yourself, it’s impossible for there not to be in politics), hopefully by starting something new, instead of squishing together two organizations with existing rules and structures, you could avoid the easy-to-imagine analysis of “who’s taking over who,” “who won and who lost” that permeates so much Ottawa groupthink. Instead you’d create a new party for the next century. Naive potentially, I know.

REVIEW: Wendy and the Lost Boys

By Anne Kingston - Friday, August 26, 2011 at 8:45 AM - 0 Comments

During the 1980s, Wendy Wasserstein became famous writing plays about women like herself—Ivy League-educated, smart, funny, conflicted urbanites grappling with love, career and motherhood who were affluent enough to pay $60 to watch themselves on Broadway. The Pulitzer Prize winner, who died of cancer in 2006 at age 55, blazed trails as the first female playwright to win a Tony. But, as Julie Salamon reveals in her doggedly researched biography, the popular, warm, never-married celebrity was also a complex enigma who surprised even close friends when she gave birth at age 48 to daughter Lucy Jane and then successfully hid her deadly disease. Salamon deftly chronicles Wasserstein’s complicated relationships within her upwardly mobile Polish immigrant family, her time at the Yale School of Drama, where classmates included Meryl Streep, her rise in New York theatre and society, abetted by brilliant networking skills and gravitation to power (Frank Rich, then the New York Times’ theatre critic, became a close friend). There’s plenty of dish, though the intrepid Salamon never cracks the mystery of Lucy Jane’s paternity. Like many women, Wasserstein had mother and weight issues. Her relationships with men were complicated, to put it mildly: she was unusually close to her billionaire financier brother Bruce (after Lucy Jane’s premature birth, he claimed he was the father to see his sister in the hospital); she discovered she had a half-brother institutionalized as a child; she routinely fell in love with unattainable men, often gay ones. She was a bundle of contradictions—stunningly selfish yet a loyal friend, vulnerable yet calculating. The narrative is packed with pathos and drama, along with insight into incestuous Broadway politics, so it’s unfortunate Salamon tries to shoehorn it all into a trite Peter Pan theatrical trope (Wasserstein was named for the J.M. Barrie character). But she nails one shrewd truth about the playwright who became synonymous with a generation of privileged women: fittingly, Wasserstein’s most expertly crafted creation was herself.

REVIEW: Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden

By Brian Bethune - Friday, August 26, 2011 at 8:15 AM - 0 Comments

This charming exploration of the enduring place in the Western imagination held by the story of our Edenic origins is all about the searchers, not the search. To that end, it opens with an eye-popping world map of the many and varied places enthusiasts have located the Biblical garden. The Iraqi desert, in the ancient Middle East, sure—Genesis does say that two of the four rivers surrounding Eden were the Tigris and Euphrates. But a Sri Lankan mountain, along a Venezuelan river, Serpent Mound in Ohio, the North Pole?

In fact, as the author makes clear, the more religiously orthodox an Eden devotee was, the more likely he was to consider the garden a mystical place or, if a real-world site, to necessarily have been located close to Iraq’s two famed rivers. It was only after Darwin and modern archaeology began to undermine the idea of literal Biblical truth that the true wild-eyed Eden seekers emerged. Most were determined, at least at first, to bridge the increasing chasm between faith and reason.

Take William Warren, president of Boston University from 1873 to 1903, both a Methodist minister and a champion of science. Well aware that the entire planet was once much warmer than it is now, Warren was also enthralled by electricity and, even more so, by the aurora borealis, which featured frequently in explorers’ accounts in his polar-obsessed era and which he believed was imbued with life-giving energy. Ergo, what could be more self-evident than Eden’s true location at the North Pole, where the ice now hides evidence of God’s creation of man through some kind of electrical action?

Continue…

Short, but meaningful

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 3:48 PM - 1 Comment

Conservative MP Mark Strahl recalls a fleeting moment with Jack Layton.

I only had the opportunity to speak with Jack once during the spring session of Parliament, before his revelation that he would need to step aside to deal with cancer once again. I happened to be leaving the House of Commons at the same time as he was after some late night votes. He was at the members’ entrance-with his signature cane and signature moustache- and I took the opportunity to introduce myself. Even at that time it was clear that he wasn’t feeling too well, but he flashed his signature smile, gave me a strong handshake and welcomed me as a new MP. He shared with me his fondness for my dad, wished me the best and asked me to pass along his regards to Chuck. I said that I would, wished him well and we parted ways. It was a short, but meaningful personal encounter and I think that’s what made Jack successful as a politician. He no doubt had many meaningful, personal encounters with hundreds of thousands of Canadians from coast to coast, and like me, they probably were left with a positive impression.

Further thoughts from Stephen Lewis, Rev. Brent Hawkes, Perrin Beatty, Martin Deschamps and Gerald Hannon. The Star asks readers to suggest how Toronto might honour Mr. Layton’s memory.

Reza Badiyi

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 2:44 PM - 1 Comment

I wanted to note one recent TV-related death: Reza Badiyi, the Iranian-American director whose name you can see on so many TV shows from the last season of Get Smart to the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He was a very common presence on action and crime dramas of the ’70s and ’80s, and was one of those directors whose name on the credits indicated you were going to get some interesting angles or unusual compositions – an episodic TV director works within a lot of stylistic and time constraints, but the good ones would find something fun to do with the shots. And Badiyi was one of those guys who seemed to know the right place to try a low angle, or a mirror shot, or something like that, without calling attention to it or taking us out of the story. (Another TV drama director of the same era who was good at this was Jeannot Szwarc, who is still working.) But of course his most enduring and innovative contribution to TV direction was the title sequence of Hawaii 5-0, where he used all the techniques that TV – and even a lot of mainstream feature film – hadn’t yet come to terms with: sudden changes in speed, time jumps, lens flare, disorienting angles. Plus his great, iconic close-up of Elizabeth Logue. It’s still a great sequence.

Badiyi’s other great title sequence was for the first season of Mary Tyler Moore, though as the series went on most of it was replaced by new footage shot by David Davis. The one shot they never thought of replacing, though, was Mary throwing her hat in the air, something that Badiyi thought up to make it seem like Mary was “graduating” to a new life, throwing the hat as if she were a graduate throwing her cap. It’s a great match-up of a visual idea with the theme of the show. Badiyi talked about that and much more in his his Archive of American television interview,

King of the Hill Revisited: Season 2, Episodes 7 & 8

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 2:21 PM - 1 Comment

Season 2, Episode 7: “The Man Who Shot Cane Skretteburg”
Written by Johnny Hardwick
Directed by Monte Young

It’s hard to believe that the “paintball episode” was ever a new thing, but of course the game itself is relatively new as games go, and this was one of the earliest examples of a TV episode built around it. It’s such a perfect game for television comedy, because the game is inherently a parody: it’s extreme violence, played very seriously with a lot of rules (not to mention a lot of guns) but with paint instead of bullets. The most reliable basis for a half-hour comedy plot is having the characters take something very seriously when it isn’t serious at all. So having them go onto a paintball field and play at fighting and dying – and get really upset about the consequences of losing – is irresistible.

So that’s how we got this episode, which is about Hank and his friends trying to use the game of paintball to re-assert themselves and come to terms with the Continue…

A musical salute

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 1:52 PM - 8 Comments

When Jack Layton’s casket leaves Parliament Hill momentarily, the Peace Tower carillon will ring O Canada, Imagine (by John Lennon) and the Dominion March. The Dominion March was composed in 1898 by Phillip Layton, Mr. Layton’s grandfather. Phillip is noted in this piece by John Geddes and this entry from the Canadian Encyclopedia.

Those who are passed the torch

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 12:58 PM - 0 Comments

Shortly before Jack Layton’s passing, Karim Bardeesy profiled Rathika Sitsabaiesan: one of those MPs who may help define the NDP’s future.

To some, Ms. Sitsabaiesan was a surprise winner in that election, in which she beat Conservative Marlene Gallyot by 5,000 votes, with the incumbent Liberals (represented by new candidate Rana Sarkar) relegated to third place. But her victory isn’t just a story of the federal Liberals’ receding political fortunes. It’s a story of a coming of age for an ambitious politician, her community and possibly her party.

For Ms. Sitsabaiesan might be the most compelling of the new crop of young NDP MPs. She’s the first Tamil-Canadian MP, and so has become the de facto standard-bearer for thousands of Canadians who have felt defeated – militarily, in their country of birth, and politically, in their new home. As a 29-year-old woman from political cultures – both Canadian and Sri Lankan – in which older men make most of the decisions, she exudes the poise, organizing skills and confidence of an old-school political veteran.

REVIEW: Father of Money: Buying Peace in Baghdad

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 12:50 PM - 0 Comments

Almost from the moment it began in 2003, the American-led invasion of Iraq has spawned a flood of books on its causes and its course, but few have been as enlightening as this one. In March 2004, then-U.S. Army captain Whiteley was appointed governance officer for al-Dora, one of the most volatile districts in the violent Iraqi capital. His job was to establish and foster a local Iraqi-staffed council, one of the dozens expected to become the seeds that would blossom into functioning institutions in a self-governing state. The key problem facing Whiteley was that he represented one of the most hidebound bureaucracies (the Pentagon) ever known in a district with an imminent need for money and jobs, in a culture that functions by personal word of honour and exchange of favours, legal or otherwise.

Whiteley thought he got the message. Two months into his year-long posting, and finding his council was fast losing authority, unable to tap into any of the quasi-legal economic opportunities in its neighbourhood, he led a convoy of three Humvees of troops to a local scrapyard. There, his men seized a dozen drivers about to take a load of shattered Iraqi military equipment off to Turkey, while Whiteley personally tasered the foreman. When the boss arrived, Whiteley hit him up for an ongoing “tax” of $20,000 per shipment (payable to the council). Thus began Whiteley’s brief career as a player in the Iraqi system: known as “Abu Floos” (Father of Money), the captain was considered a man who kept his word and got things done.

It was exhilarating, Whiteley writes, but also a moral swamp. His quick fixes inevitably alienated one group or another, especially in the face of the larger American failure to establish basic order. When he returned stateside at the end of his tour, it was with the same feeling of personal failure and the same desire to leave it all behind that seems to mark the entire occupation.

Liberation therapy: the ‘wave of complications’ breaks

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 12:20 PM - 101 Comments

A group of Calgary neurologists has published a report on foreseeable complications faced by locals who have returned from going abroad and receiving trendy “liberation therapy” for multiple sclerosis. It is not clear whether the casefiles include the woman who was inadvertently liberated from the world by the treatment, but their contents sound troubling enough. “These five cases,” the authors note in their abstract, “represent the beginning of a wave of complications for which standardized care guidelines do not exist.”

They sound somewhat nervous, don’t they? It is almost as if they had not heeded the repeated reassurances of journalists and “liberation” enthusiasts that venous angioplasty and stent installation in major neck veins are routine procedures, of about as much clinical concern as having one’s shoe size measured. That tricky little distinction between veins and arteries turns out to be fairly important to the discussion: as an April letter in Clinical Neuroradiology pointed out, “Balloon dilatation and stent implantation have not primarily been developed for the venous system and are associated with a substantial risk for complications…with possible fatal outcomes.” [Emphasis mine]

Since the butcher’s bill is beginning to be drawn up, and not just in Calgary, it may be worth examining how well the “chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency” theory has fared over a full year of research. In April, SUNY Buffalo researcher Robert Zivadinov, a close colleague of CCSVI theorist Paolo Zamboni, delivered a controlled study of 500 patients that offered, at best, feeble confirmation of Zamboni’s original results. Zivadinov’s findings, as Colleague Anne Kingston pointed out at the time, could conceivably provide some comfort to both sides of the debate. But the one thing one could not possibly do with Zivadinov’s figures was to reconcile them with Zamboni’s original study, which claimed a perfectly sensitive, perfectly specific link between indicia of CCSVI and the presence of MS.

In the meantime, other results from preliminary studies of CCSVI and MS have been trickling out, to less fanfare. There is a cruel unrelentingness to them—a lamentable finality even to the titles of the articles. From Italy alone we have “No evidence of chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency at multiple sclerosis onset” (January); “Proposed chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency criteria do not predict multiple sclerosis risk or severity” (July); “Progressive multiple sclerosis is not associated with chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency” (last week).

A German team attracted some attention in January with a finding that “Intracranial venous pressure is normal in patients with multiple sclerosis”. A similar study from a VA hospital in Texas, using Zamboni’s own detection criteria to define the presence of CCSVI, was published earlier this month. The title: “No Cerebral or Cervical Venous Insufficiency in US Veterans With Multiple Sclerosis”. Meanwhile, the journal Neurology has a preprint from Greece which confirms the objectivity of the proposed CCSVI criteria—but also confirms the absence of any apparent link with MS. And for what it’s worth, a June study of animal models provides a smidgen of evidence against Zamboni’s speculation that vascular problems create autoimmune difficulties by causing localized deposits of iron to be left in the brain.

There is also the new study you might have read about which establishes that most of the gene markers statistically linked with MS are known to influence the immune system. For my money, that is actually an overhyped blow to the Zamboni hypothesis, in comparison with the lengthening train of papers finding no simple empirical connection between veins and MS at all. Most researchers agree that the CCSVI hypothesis is still worth following up with randomized controlled trials of larger size and longer duration. But they advocate this, not because there is any doubt that MS is fundamentally immunological, but because some far less radical variant of Zamboni’s idea might conceivably be, well, sort of true-ish. (See, for example, this note from neurologists in Erlangen: “…it certainly seems awkward to think of the complex disease MS solely as result of a simple venous outflow obstruction. Yet, the investigation of new vascular concepts as one variable in the pathophysiology of the autoimmune attack seems very worthwhile…”.)

Other researchers are frankly not so open to keeping up a chase that was, after all, set off by a study (Zamboni’s 100%-specific 100%-sensitive investigation) that almost certainly has to have been junk. The frustrations of a few scientists are discernible in the literature: one German group basically thumbed their noses at CCSVI by calling it the “perfect crime”—a supposed primary cause of MS that seems to leave no trace when sought in MS patients, using any means, by anyone but Zamboni or his very early supporters. Another comment in a senior journal asks whether CCSVI is “science fiction”. Either way, unfortunately, the premature enthusiasm for “liberation therapy” is cold inescapable fact.

(For those late to the party, some links to my previous discussions of CCSVI and “liberation”: I, II, III, IV. Bonus explanation of statistical specificity and sensitivity here.)

Steve Jobs put doing ahead of talking

By Peter Nowak - Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 12:08 PM - 4 Comments

Photo by shio/Flickr

And the big tech news just keeps on a’rolling. I’m on a mini-vacation in Quebec, but I couldn’t not write something about Steve Jobs’s resignation, which was as surprising as Google taking over Motorola or HP announcing its exit from the consumer business, both of which happened last week. Jobs has been battling illness for some time so the news isn’t that unexpected, but just like the company he built, the man himself seemed somewhat unstoppable so it’s shocking nonetheless.

There will be a lot of commentary extolling what Jobs has meant to the world of technology and not much of it will be overstated. Simply put, no company—probably not even Google—and certainly no individual has made as much of a difference or changed the way things work over the past 10 years as Apple has under Jobs. Continue…

Layton’s casket to make symbolic stop in Quebec

By macleans.ca - Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 12:02 PM - 1 Comment

The second day of public visitation for late NDP leader Jack Layton began Thursday morning at Parliament Hill in Ottawa. The visitation was to start at 9 a.m. EST, but doors opened at 8:30 a.m. as a crowd of up to 100 people arrived at the House of Commons, where Layton’s casket is lying in state. According to the CBC, approximately 4,000 people visited Layton’s casket Wednesday. At 2 p.m., RCMP pallbearers will carry the casket to an awaiting motorcade, which will make a symbolic visit to Gatineau, Que., to acknowledge Quebecers support for Layton and his roots in the province, before traveling to City Hall in Toronto, where it will lay until his state funeral at Roy Thomson Hall on Saturday.

CBC News

Bestsellers – Week of August 22nd, 2011

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 11:51 AM - 0 Comments

Top-selling fiction and non-fiction titles

Fiction

Non-fiction

LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)

North Korea looks to restart six-nation talks

By macleans.ca - Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 11:49 AM - 0 Comments

North Korea’s reclusive dictator has offered to pause his country’s nuclear and missile programs if six-nation talks resume. Kim Jong Il’s comments come as reports on the state of North Korea’s deteriorating economy continue to leak out. Tens of thousands of North Koreans could face starvation this year. South Korea and the United States have rejected the North Korean offer. The countries have insisted that North Korea put a stop to it’s nuclear program before any talks take place.

Voice of America

New fossil rewrites history of mammals

By macleans.ca - Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 11:47 AM - 3 Comments

Paleontologists have discovered the fossil of a mouse-like animal that is the earliest example of a mammal that fed its unborn young with its placenta. According to Nature magazine, the discovery of the 160-million-year-old specimen indicates that marsupial mammals and placental mammals took up separate lines earlier than scientists originally thought. Scientists say the discovery is important as 90 per cent of mammals today are placental, and knowing when the two types of mammals split is necessary to understanding the evolution of mammals. Paleontologists discovered the new specimen, called Juramaia sinensis, in China’s northeast Liaoning Province, the source of many recent important fossil discoveries.

BBC News

Indian PM offers more debate as protests continue

By macleans.ca - Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 11:40 AM - 0 Comments

India’s prime minister made a renewed bid to end days of anti-graft protests Thursday by offering to debate all versions a new anti-corruption bill. Talks to end the crisis broke down Wednesday night, with protest leader Anna Hazare vowing to continue his hunger strike until sweeping legislation is passed. Hazare wants India’s parliament to approve a new anti-corruption ombudsman with powers to oversee all sectors of society. The prime minister, Manmohan Singh, has introduced a less stringent bill. Hazare, who has lost 14 pounds during his strike, has given the government an August 30 deadline to meet his demands.

Washington Post

Commuters prefer cars: StatsCan

By macleans.ca - Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 15 Comments

A new Statistics Canada study suggests that the majority of Canadian commuters snub public transit, regardless of its environmental friendliness and cost benefits. The data, collected in 2010, shows that 82 per cent of commuters prefer cars to trains, buses, bicycles, and walking. 12 per cent favour public transit, and only 6 per cent walk or cycle. Commuters in Canada’s largest cities spend an average of 30 minutes getting to work. Overall, Canadians prefer their cars to public transit, because “on average, in 2010, public transport took twice as long as driving a car”.

The Montreal Gazette

Libyan rebels say they have Gadhafi surrounded

By macleans.ca - Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 11:10 AM - 0 Comments

Rebel forces in Libya say they are closing in on Moammar Gadhafi as they besiege a cluster of Tripoli apartment buildings where they believe he is hiding with several of his sons. “They are together. They are in a small hole,” said Muhammed Gomaa, a rebel fighter on the scene. “Today we will end that.” The rebels exchanged fire with Gadhafi loyalists who were inside the apartment buildings, which are situated near the leader’s Bab al-Aziziya compound that was captured and ransacked earlier this week. It remains unclear why the rebels believe Gadhafi to be in the apartment buildings. Meanwhile, a Canadian rebel fighter has reportedly been killed in Tripoli. Edmonton-born Nader Ben Raween, 24, was an information technology worker living in Ottawa, the CBC reports. In March, Raween quit his job and travelled to Libya to support the rebel forces in their fight against Gadhafi loyalists. Raween was shot dead by Gadhafi forces on Tuesday.

Toronto Star

CBC News

The asbestos shame

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 11:09 AM - 4 Comments

Last week, doctors wrote to Conservative MP Kellie Leitch, imploring her to uphold her obligation as a doctor. Yesterday, the Canadian Medical Association passed a motion condemning the government’s refusal to acknowledge asbestos as a hazardous substance.

“This is an important health care issue and a product that causes significant illness and even death,” outgoing CMA president Dr. Jeff Turnbull told reporters in St. John’s on Wednesday. “Canada should not be in the business of exporting such a dangerous product.”

The motion came from doctors in Quebec, where the province is currently weighing whether to provide a government loan guarantee to revive the mine in Asbestos, Que., which is one of only two remaining asbestos operation in Canada.