This is my best Facebook birthday ever

By Rebecca Eckler - Wednesday, September 21, 2011 at 6:50 AM - 1 Comment

Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Lauren Cattermole

Facebook has changed one really important date in people’s lives—maybe, for some, the most important date of the year. Thanks to the option of being able to wish people happy birthday on Facebook (your page shows reminders of the birthdays of “friends”), many users now receive hundreds upon hundreds of greetings on their big day. Granted, they may be from practical strangers, but Facebook users are basking in the glory of all the attention.

“Prior to birthdays being ‘pimped out’ on Facebook, which was after I graduated university, there were years and years where I didn’t receive many happy birthday wishes,” says Mindy Blackstien, founder and chief ambassador at BodyPROUD and creator of the Facebook group “It’s Time: Love Your Body! Be Body Proud.” Blackstien this year received “pages and pages and pages” of birthday greetings, some 400 or 500 notes on her wall.

“Because I did not often bring up my birthday in conversation, new people in my life didn’t know about it and others did not necessarily remember, except my family, and even that may have been primarily because my mom called to remind everyone,” Blackstien says. “So when Facebook started marketing it for me, a new energy was created.” The day of her birthday, March 16, and that whole week, became, she says, “meaningful in a different way. I found myself eagerly anticipating my birthday for Facebook reasons.”

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REVIEW: Measure of the Earth: The Enlightenment Expedition That Reshaped Our World

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, September 21, 2011 at 6:45 AM - 0 Comments

Science is science, and politics is politics, but anyone who thinks the twain never meet should consider the climate change debate. Or read Ferreiro’s detailed account of the first international (France-Spain) scientific expedition, which set out in 1735 to measure a degree of latitude at the equator (in today’s Ecuador) to see if it was the same length as one near Paris. The answer would determine which theory was correct: René Descartes’, that the Earth was elongated at the poles, or Isaac Newton’s, that the force of gravity had flattened the poles. If the Frenchman was right, degrees at the equator should be longer than those further north; if the Englishman had the better model, then the degrees would be shorter. The gentlemen scholars could have aimlessly debated the question for another century if the politicians hadn’t become interested—the answer mattered for ocean navigation and thus for Europeans’ imperialist ambitions.

So the French sprung for the costs and provided the scientists, while the Spanish offered guides and an equatorial proving ground in their South American colony. The men thought they’d be home in three years, but the actual task took three times as long. There wasn’t enough money (the expedition leader, astronomer Louis Godin, lavished a lot of it on his paramour); malaria struck; team members were forced to climb extinct volcanoes inconveniently located where they wanted to measure; suspicious locals thought they were smugglers and Jews, and reported them to the local inquisitor, who was only pacified by an invitation to a pork dinner.

And once the measurement was done, the troubles really began. One scientist had married a local woman, who became separated from him. Portuguese authorities in Brazil refused him entry to pick her up and the couple spent 21 years apart at opposite ends of the Amazon River. They didn’t make it back to France until 1773. Ferreiro dutifully records the scientific advance—Newton, as it turned out, was correct—but rightly stresses the adventure.

Why these shoes matter more than an M.B.A.

By Anne Kingston - Wednesday, September 21, 2011 at 6:30 AM - 7 Comments

David Selman/Corbis

The British sociologist Catherine Hakim is no academic wallflower. More than a decade ago, her “preference” theory positing that personal choices, not gender discrimination, governed women’s involvement and advancement in the labour market, won praise, sneers and influenced social policy. Now she’s back tweaking nipples with her new book, Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital, which argues that “erotic capital” can be as professionally useful as a university degree, that women have been conditioned not to exploit their attractiveness for economic benefit and that prostitution is a rational, lucrative female career choice.

Predictably, a book published in 2011 by a respected scholar (a senior lecturer at the London School of Economics no less!) that contains such sentences as “Becoming an ‘idle’ full-time housewife is a modern utopian dream for most women” and bills itself “a truly feminist manifesto” has hit a cultural nerve: debated on the BBC, discussed in the Wall Street Journal, and pilloried by female columnists with attractive head shots.

Hakim is brashly wading into contentious terrain on several fronts: the ongoing intellectual war questioning the sexual revolution’s benefit to women; the continuing puzzling out of workplace gender inequity; and the new academic focus on the “beauty premium,” as explored by economist Daniel Hamermesh in Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful, which reveals tall men are paid the most, fat women the least.

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Is America in a depression?

By Jason Kirby - Wednesday, September 21, 2011 at 6:20 AM - 12 Comments

Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

Everywhere Darren Enns looks these days he sees the devastation wrought by America’s grinding employment crisis. As the treasurer of a construction union in southern Nevada, the state with the highest unemployment in the country, Enns has watched as friends and colleagues—the bricklayers, electricians and drywallers who thrived during Las Vegas’s housing boom—struggle to move on to other careers. Few succeed. Many have simply given up hope. “When you look at the unemployment rate during the Great Depression, we’re beyond that in the construction industry here in Las Vegas,” he says. “We’ve got close to 70 per cent unemployment, so for us, the economy is extremely depressed.”

When the financial crisis tipped America into a deep recession in 2007, it was tempting to draw comparisons to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Those fears subsided once the stock market pulled out of its nosedive and America’s economy began to grow again, albeit at a crawl. It was a brief respite. Four years later, American towns and cities remain overrun with millions of unemployed workers even as the economy risks slipping back into reverse. It raises the question whether the U.S. ever really emerged from recession in the first place. Instead, some are suggesting those early fears may have been justified after all: the United States appears to be in the throes of an outright jobs depression.

Earlier this month, Robert Reich, a professor of public policy at Berkeley and the secretary of labour in the Clinton administration, said the current crisis is an extension of the “depression” that began in December 2007. Meanwhile, Richard Posner, a high-profile judge in the United States Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and regular political and economic commentator, said it’s time for America to give up any false hopes that the economy is on a path to recovery. “If we were being honest with ourselves, we would call this a depression,” he wrote in the New Republic. “That would certainly better convey both the severity of our problems, and the fact that those problems have no evident solutions.”

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The future of manufacturing in Canada

By Erica Alini - Wednesday, September 21, 2011 at 6:20 AM - 4 Comments

Photography by Andrew Tolson

When the assembly line at Ford’s plant in St. Thomas, Ont., came to a halt on Sept. 15, it wasn’t just one factory that shut down. The closure could bring the death of an entire industrial ecosystem, experts warned. More than 300 suppliers feed into the St. Thomas plant—35 of them in Canada. Job losses are likely to extend far beyond the 1,100 workers directly employed at the southern Ontario plant that had been churning out Ford Crown Victorias, Mercury Grand Marquises and Lincoln Town Cars for the past 44 years.

The story of St. Thomas and its displaced workers follows a script well-known to this and most other rich countries. Between 2004 and 2008, Canada shed nearly 322,000 manufacturing jobs, according to Statistics Canada, and this was before the economic downturn took hold. In the U.S., the hemorrhage, driven, as elsewhere, by cheaper foreign competition and a general shift toward the service sector, amounts to eight million jobs lost since 1979. And workers transitioning to a job outside the factory often have to accept a painful pay cut—in Canada it averages around $10,000 less a year, according to a 2008 report by Toronto-Dominion Bank—driving up the divide between rich and poor. Yet the loss of industrial jobs has simply been assumed to be the price of advanced development.

There are signs, though, that the factory era may not be over in Canada just yet. Some manufacturers in niche markets are flourishing. Others are showing how the production plant, with a high-tech spin on it, could even be the future of the Canadian economy—or at least an integral part of it.

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Blood, sweat and fears

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Wednesday, September 21, 2011 at 6:20 AM - 1 Comment

Darren Brown/QMI; Courtesy of Devon Nicholson

His large bald head is covered with scars. The deep vertical grooves on top were self-inflicted—or at least, consensual, by the sure, drive-my-head-into-the-ring-post standards of his profession. Others testify to the passions Larry Shreve, a.k.a. Abdullah the Butcher, a.k.a. the Madman from the Sudan, a.k.a. Kuroi Jujutsushi (the Black Wizard), was able to arouse outside the squared circle. Like the pink line linking his temple to his left ear, courtesy of a folding metal chair thrown by a fan of one of his opponents. Just don’t ask to see where the little old lady once stabbed the blubbery 400-lb. behemoth with a hatpin.

In a career that has stretched 50 years, the Windsor, Ont., native became a superstar in professional wrestling, frightening crowds from Truro to Tokyo with his predictably unpredictable behaviour. Wild-eyed and gibbering in pidgin English, he’d eat paper, bite the heads off of snakes and chickens, and stab opponents with his trademark fork. But mostly Abdullah—Abby to his friends—would bleed. Copious amounts of what wrestlers call “the juice,” set free by surreptitious razor nicks to his head. By the end of a match, Shreve was almost guaranteed to be a gory mess, slick and glistening under the TV lights. So too his grappling partners. Now 70, he can’t really remember the first occasion—or even guess how many times—he cut himself for an audience. He just knows his entire career was based upon such mutilations. “I did it because I wanted to draw people. To give them a good match,” he says from his Atlanta home. “Violence: that’s what they want.”

Lately, however, blood has come to represent something else to the Butcher—an all-too-real threat to his finances and faux-sporting legacy. This past spring, just before his induction to the WWE Hall of Fame, an Ottawa wrestler alleged that he contracted hepatitis C during a 2007 match against Abdullah. Devon Nicholson, who had been building a following as another madman, “Hannibal,” claimed Shreve had cut him without permission, transmitting the disease via a razor blade he had already used on himself. In June, Nicholson filed a $6.5-million negligence suit in Ontario Superior Court, saying the illness cost him a shot at the World Wrestling Entertainment big time, and prematurely ended his career. This past week, Shreve’s Ontario lawyer filed a defence denying the claims and countering that Nicholson, who staged the bouts, not only consented to his injuries, but is himself responsible for the illness through his own negligence.

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Why not trust judges on “house arrest” sentences?

By John Geddes - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 6:25 PM - 29 Comments

Back in the fall of 2007, two very drunk men, who had previously been romantically involved, were arguing outside a Winnipeg bar. One shoved the other, who fell and hit his head on the pavement. Lyle Walker, 35, was reportedly able to stand up, but died a few days later from the injury. When the man who had pushed him went to trial, his lawyer and the Crown prosecutor agreed he shouldn’t go to prison. The judge accepted their joint recommendation, and Jeffrey James Bear, then 33, pleaded guilty to manslaughter and received a 15-month conditional sentence.

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Quebec’s back. And, apparently, surprised

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 6:24 PM - 48 Comments

Chantal Hébert’s column in L’actualité points out what, to her, is a paradox: “In total, Quebec has never occupied as little place as it does today in the places of power in the federal capital.”

Let me summarize Hébert’s argument before gently trying to critique it.

Quebec’s five Conservative MPs, she writes, give it the seventh-largest provincial sub-caucus in that party’s national (well, Canada-wide) caucus. Ontario has 14 times as many Conservative MPs as Quebec does. Saskatchewan and Manitoba together have about 5 times as many Conservative MPs as Quebec does.

As for the NDP, despite those 59 MPs from Quebec, 58 of them newly-elected, only 2% of all the card-holding NDP members in the country are Quebecers.

“We’re swimming in paradox,” Hébert writes. “In 20 years, Quebec has never been so cool toward sovereignty and the parties that advocate it. But it has also never been so absent from the places of power and political influence of a Canada to which it nonetheless seems destined to continue belonging. Find the error!”

Okay. I’m pretty sure the error lay in expecting any other result.

If I left my house for 20 years and then came back, I should reasonably expect the house to be in shoddy repair, or occupied by strangers. I might really be looking forward to coming back. I might have all kinds of fun ideas for decorating and entertaining. But my decision to neglect that house for 20 years would have easily predictable consequences. We can phrase this more generally: Actions have consequences. Continue…

The Commons: Jim Flaherty against the world

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 6:18 PM - 13 Comments

The Scene. Once more Jim Flaherty finds himself with so much to answer for.

“Mr. Speaker, more bad economic news,” lamented Nycole Turmel this afternoon. “The Conference Board of Canada dropped Canada’s rating on income equality. The middle class is falling further behind. Inequality has increased in the past 10 years. Surprise, surprise. It is the same 10 years of the big tax cuts for the big corporations. Is this not another example of the Conservatives’ economic inaction plan?”

She drew out this bit about it being an inaction plan, lest anyone miss the wordplay.

“Mr. Speaker,” Mr. Flaherty responded, “our Conservative government is focused on what actually matters to Canadians, creating jobs and economic growth.”

For sure, Canadian families are likely not meeting around the dinner table each night to discuss inequality coefficients and peruse the latest line graphs. But surely those at the poorer end of the equation are at least vaguely aware of this issue.

Given a moment to think about it, Mr. Flaherty decided he might at least venture an answer to this concern. ”Mr. Speaker,” he said in response to a question from the NDP’s Peggy Nash, “the most important equality plan for Canadians is a job.”

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‘I have some bones to pick with Stephen Harper’

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 3:44 PM - 18 Comments

With Roy Romanow in tow, Brian Topp outlines his differences with Stephen Harper (including the Keystone pipeline, the Canadian Wheat Board, pensions, health care and the corporate tax rate).

In everything Mr. Harper does, in everything he believes in, he is working to make Canada a more unequal society. I think it’s time to go in the other direction. It’s time, in everything we do, to work to make Canada more EQUAL. A Canada that leaves no one behind.

How’s “reconciliation” with the Taliban working out?

By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 2:03 PM - 10 Comments

Burhanuddin Rabbani, former Afghan president and chair of the body tasked with making peace with the Taliban, has been assassinated.  Continue…

A brief word on Tony Clement’s arse

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 2:00 PM - 1 Comment

Charlie Angus laments for the fact that John Baird continues to take questions directed at Tony Clement.

He’s accountable to the Canadian people through the House of Commons. They have turned his role in the House of Commons into some kind of private joke with him and John Baird.  I’ve got great respect for John Baird. This guy’s dealing with UN resolutions. This guy’s dealing with Libya.  That he’s got to take time out of his busy function to cover up Tony Clement’s arse is staggering.

Photo gallery: NYC Fashion Week

By Zoran Milich - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 1:29 PM - 0 Comments

Omnibus toughness

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 12:27 PM - 5 Comments

The government has announced details of its omnibus crime bill: The Safe Streets and Communities Act, which will bundle together nine separate bills.

A quick scan of the backgrounder shows no mention of “lawful access,” nor any mention of the two anti-terrorism provisions the Prime Minister has vowed to reinstate.

“Don’t ask, don’t tell” officially ends

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 12:18 PM - 0 Comments

The U.S. military’s controversial ban on openly gay men and women serving their country was officially lifted Tuesday, ending the 18-year-old “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, introduced by the Clinton administration, which prevented many service members from being honest about their sexuality. “As of today,” said U.S. President Barack Obama, “patriotic Americans will no longer have to lie about who they are in order to serve the country they love.” While the ban officially ended on Tuesday, Pentagon spokesman George Little said that the army has been accepting applications from gay recruits for a number of weeks, and that 97 per cent of personnel had already received training on the new law. The Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Repeal Act was passed by Congress in December 2010, following testimony by top defence officials who said that allowing openly gay service members would not undermine military cohesion or effectiveness.

Fine art for the masses

By Simona Rabinovitch - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 12:03 PM - 0 Comments

Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld (left) and Andy Valmorbida (Billy Farrell Agency)

Last weekend in Manhattan, an eclectic international crowd of 2,000 poured into upscale auction house and gallery Phillips de Pury & Company for the opening of Richard Hambleton: A Retrospective. The three-day show featured 50 works by the pioneering street artist, from 1982 to present. Presented in collaboration with Giorgio Armani, the “pop-up” gallery was the latest of those put together by Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld and Andy Valmorbida.

Working with just a few artists (such as Los Angeles graffiti artist RETNA, French painter Nicolas Pol and Ivory Coast ex-pat Ouattara Watts), the international duo function as curators, dealers, managers and party-throwers. Since their first show in 2009, their openings around the globe have become can’t-miss events for uptown collectors and downtown skateboarders alike. Rocking nice tans and good hair, the friends turned business partners are part of a trend making quality contemporary art more accessible—and more fun. Continue…

Chronic disease will cost $47 trillion by 2030

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 11:47 AM - 1 Comment

The five leading chronic diseases may have a global economic impact of $47 trillion over the next two decades, says a study from the World Economic Forum conducted with the Harvard School of Public Health. The five diseases are cancer, diabetes, mental illness, respiratory disease and heart disease, and already kill over 36 million people a year. The cumulative output loss they are expected to cost makes up about 4 per cent of annual global GDP over the next two decades. These diseases are often linked to diet, tobacco, alcohol and exercise.

Reuters

Ottawa hires $90,000-a-day firm for budget-trimming advice

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 11:35 AM - 34 Comments

The Harper Conservatives have decided to hire economic consultants to advise them on how to save money in Ottawa—and they’re paying them $90,000 a day. According to the Canadian Press, Deloitte, Inc. was hired on Aug. 15 to help the government with its austerity program. They received a $19.8 million contract to advise the Treasury Board headed by Conservative MP Tony Clement on how to balance the books in Ottawa by 2014. The contract runs until March 31, and includes an optional one-year extension. This summer, the government asked 20 “pre-qualified” consulting firms to bid on the work, foregoing the usual open-tendering process for such contracts. The results of the Clement’s committee’s findings will be included in next year’s budget.

Canadian Press

DSK calls accusers ‘liars’ during French TV appearance

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 11:17 AM - 1 Comment

One day after former IMF leader Dominique Strauss-Kahn appeared on French television to speak publicly about his alleged sexual assaults for the first time, one of his accusers made an appearance of her own, charging that it was a simple matter of luck that prevented her from being raped by him. Tristane Banon, a 32-year-old writer and journalist, told France’s Canal+ television that Strauss-Kahn had tried to rape her in an apartment during an interview in 2003. “Very quickly, we were fighting,” Banon said, describing how Strauss-Kahn allegedly double-locked the door after she entered. “If I had not been very lucky, it would have ended in rape.” Banon, who filed her case against Strauss-Kahn earlier this year, said she did not report the incident at the time because she would have “been on the verge of suicide.” Strauss-Kahn also faces accusations sexual assault from New York hotel maid Nafissatou Diallo. He maintains that his relations with Diallo were consensual and called both women “liars.”

Daily Mail

Dirty Jokes Are Forever

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 11:13 AM - 1 Comment

If 2 Broke Girls doesn’t last, it will be forever remembered as “That Coldplay Show.” Probably to the surprise of showrunner Michael Patrick King, who was all set to field questions about the ethnic stereotyping, the main online controversy yesterday was about an early joke where Kat Dennings’ character tells a hipster “I wear knit hats because it’s cold outside, you wear knit hats because of Coldplay.” What probably seemed to King like a typical combination of a topical reference with a bit of wordplay – the sort of joke he’s been doing on Sex and the City for years – set off alarm bells all over the internet: people pointed out that actual hipsters don’t like Coldplay, or that someone who likes Coldplay isn’t a hipster, and that anyway the reference is already dated. It won’t be what drags the show down if it doesn’t live up to expectations, but with one joke, the attempt to be a now, happening (like the kids say these days) show kind of evaporated. Instantly it revealed that it used music references the way most shows use them: pick a reference that’s well-known enough to the people who don’t follow contemporary music. The show has potential if they can improve the supporting characters – but hip it ain’t.

This rather minor joke fracas helped, in a roundabout way, to answer a question I sometimes have battling for space in my brain: Why is it that CBS, the network that aims at the broadest demographics, has the most sex jokes, while NBC, the most sophisticated comedy network, is also the cleanest? This is not inevitable. Sophisticated or smart comedy is often very dirty, and it wasn’t so long ago that the stereotype of mainstream or “safe” comedy was that it avoided dirty material that would shock the Little Old Lady In Dubuque. So what happened?

Well, I think part of what happened is that if you’re aiming to reach the largest audience possible – and last night’s Two and a Half Men premiere did huge numbers despite the slight handicap of being basically terrible – then sex jokes are reliably mainstream, among the few reliably mainstream jokes left. We all know about the rapidly changing technology, which TV has never been able to keep up with (remember Seinfeld in 1996 saying “I gotta get on that internet!”). More problematically for comedy writers, the fragmentation of popular culture has led to fragmented trends. A writer of a network comedy in 1966, even if he wasn’t doing topical references, knew that certain things were “in”: spies, superheroes, the Beatles. Today, most of TV doesn’t have the power to set trends (Mad Men is a trend setter among people who watch it, including network executives, but that’s a different thing), except reality TV, which is one of the reason Jersey Shore jokes are everywhere: it’s one of the few shows that seems to pull off the old TV trick of both influencing trends and reflecting them at the same time. Socially, too, the trends are not as clear-cut as they have been (or seemed) at other times, so writers latch on instead to made-up trends like the “man-cession.” For a TV comedy writer to write about what “people are interested in” has always been difficult, but it’s now as difficult as it’s ever been.

There are two ways to deal with that. One is for the writer to simply write what he or she is interested in, never mind the trends. This can lead, unexpectedly, to mainstream success, and it’s usually a better bet for artistic achievement. (Seinfeld is an example of a show where the writers just wrote what happened to them, never mind if anyone else would care, and somehow discovered that their experiences struck a universal chord. Though even there, much of what struck people as universal was that it talked about sexual matters with a frankness that most sitcoms had avoided.) But the other, especially if you’re consciously trying to construct a show that appeals across regional and national borders, is to go for the things that have not changed, and where the writers are least likely to be accused of being out of touch. Sex jokes. Sex changes, but not the way technology or pop culture changes. Anatomy jokes are anatomy jokes; flatulence jokes have been pretty much the same for all of human history. When you hear a sex joke, you’re almost hearing the relief of a writer in not having to worry who will get this, or if the joke won’t work now unless he somehow arranges for the characters’ cell phones to conk out.

Am I saying that TV humour is going to get even raunchier than it is now? It’s possible. It’s also possible that trends will become easier to spot or, best of all, a new scripted show will come along that is such a big hit that it makes the trends. Much of what we think of as “the ’80s” or “the ’90s,” after all, is the creation of popular culture. A show sometimes comes off looking better when it doesn’t try to keep up with the times; when it does, it just reveals (as with Coldplay) that the writers are not trendy folk. Or writers should focus intently on how life is lived in a particular part of our fragmented society. Maybe it’s not a good example because it wasn’t a big hit, but Friday Night Lights struck a chord even with people who don’t live in a town that revolves around high school football, because it was just interesting to see people who are interested in something and to see a society that feels somewhat authentic. The alternative is a hermetic TV world where the only topic is what Preston Sturges called “Topic A,” or an increased retreat into the past (hence all the period pieces: the writers can know what was popular at the time, and they know what references we’ll get). One way or another, I don’t think we’ll be getting a lot more Coldplay jokes on any show.

Tories prep back-to-work bill as Air Canada talks falter

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 11:06 AM - 10 Comments

The federal government is prepared to speed back-to-work legislation through Parliament should Air Canada flight attendants walk off the job this week. Talks between the workers and airline management broke down Monday night, and workers could go on strike as early as Wednesday. The flight attendants rejected a previous agreement last month. The Harper government plans to legislate an end to the dispute should it escalate into a work stoppage. The Tories hope to limit debate on the legislation while pushing it through in a single sitting.

National Post

Three killed in Turkish bomb attack

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 11:04 AM - 0 Comments

Three people were killed and at least 15 others injured in a bomb attack in the Turkish capital of Ankara Tuesday. Turkish officials blamed “terrorists” for the attack; Kurdish rebels affiliated with the banned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) are the most likely culprits. The Turkish military has stepped up aerial attacks against the PKK in Northern Iraq in recent months. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Monday the government is prepared to send in ground troops to clear out PKK bases in the region.

AFP

Japan defence firm victim of cyber attack

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 11:02 AM - 2 Comments

Japan’s top weapons manufacturer has been hit by a cyber attack. Officials at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) said that its computer systems were hacked last month, and that attackers attempted to obtain data on the companies submarines, missiles and nuclear power plants. Forty-five of MHI’s servers are confirmed to be infected with a computer virus. Japan’s defence ministry is demanding MHI conduct a full investigation into the matter. It is believed that the cyber attackers used the so-called “spear phishing” technique, where hackers send emails that trick people into visiting websites and entering their login information. Neither MHI nor the Japanese government has given any indication of who might be responsible for the attack. One Japanese newspaper, however, has reported that Chinese language script was detected in the attack. China, for its part, vehemently denied any involvement. MHI has said it is conducting an investigation alongside Tokyo police, and will publish its findings by the end of September.

BBC News

The right to strike

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 10:55 AM - 43 Comments

Labour Minister Lisa Raitt is promising back-to-work legislation if Air Canada and the union representing flight attendants are unable to reach a deal before Wednesday. This would be the fourth time the Harper government has introduced such legislation. Yvon Godin, the NDP labour critic, is unimpressed.

I know she said that she will vote to protect the Canadian economy. At the same time she is voting against the union’s right to have a strike. In this country we still have the right to have free bargaining and have the right to have a strike. The strike is even not started yet and she`s already telling Canadians in this country under the Conservative government there’s no strike. They’ve done it in the spring. They’re doing it again and I think it takes away the freedom of the negotiations, free negotiations by doing it.