REVIEW: Leningrad: Tragedy of a city under siege, 1941-44

By macleans.ca - Monday, September 19, 2011 at 10:15 AM - 0 Comments

The 900-day encirclement of Leningrad, the cradle of the Russian Revolution, by Nazi armies is one of the most famous events of the Second World War. And one of the least understood, according to Reid’s sweeping and appalling narrative. Just 11 weeks after Hitler’s surprise attack on the U.S.S.R, the Germans were on the city’s doorstep. A fatal mix of factors then came into play: the Soviets’ desperate struggle on other fronts and Stalin’s indifference to the city’s fate on one side; on the other, the strong German preference that Leningrad starve rather than be conquered at any cost in casualties or even surrendered (in the latter case, the Wehrmacht would have been responsible for feeding the inhabitants). By September 1941, the stalemate was complete, and remained in place for 2½ years—Leningrad left to itself, cut off except for a tenuous ice road in the winter months, with the Germans dug in around it. And then the city began to die.

By January the death toll was running at 100,000 a month; by the end of what was a savage winter even by Russian standards, with frequent days of -30° C, the total was already half a million. In later winters, the pace slowed, mostly because there were fewer mouths to feed. In the end, one in three of the population, 750,000 civilians, perished before the Wehrmacht left in January 1944. How they lived and died was long obscured by Communist mythmaking, but with the end of the Soviet Union, elderly blokadniki, as survivors of the blockade are known, rushed their diaries into print. The stories they tell—of moments of bravery and self-sacrifice punctuating a nightmare of an endless quest for food, withered emotions and collapsed family life, looting, murder and cannibalism—are far from heroic, but intensely human. Read’s dispassionate recreation of one of the war’s worst catastrophes is a moving memorial for Leningrad’s victims.

Who should teach our teenagers about drinking at university?

By the editors - Monday, September 19, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 0 Comments

Dave Chidley/CP

Some predictions can be made with absolute certainty. The tides will shift. The sun will rise. And young university students will drink to excess.

From Tom Brown’s Schooldays to Animal House, exuberant drinking by underage students has long been a part of the experience of going away to school. Realistically, there is little society can do to change this fact of life. But what can we all do to cut down on the harm it may cause?

Last week, Canada’s university community was shocked by an orientation-week death at Acadia University in Wolfville, N.S. A first-year student from Calgary, just 19 years old, was found unconscious in a basement dorm room at the school suffering from severe alcohol poisoning. He later died in hospital. Fellow students told reporters he’d been playing a competitive drinking game called “flip cup” and had consumed an estimated 40 ounces of alcohol during the night.

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The high school football player who didn’t believe in private property

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, September 19, 2011 at 9:50 AM - 0 Comments

Matthew Pearson profiles Paul Dewar.

“I go back to, ultimately, what is politics about?” he says. “It’s about people and making a difference in people’s lives and obviously using all of the tools within Parliament, but also by engaging people to help you with that. And the day you give up on the possibility for change is the day I think it’s time for you to get out of politics.

“I say to friends often, ‘If you ever see me getting to the point where I’m always commenting in a cynical tone about what’s happening, tap me on the shoulder and tell me it’s time to go.’ “

Libby Davies’s French and angry New Brunswickers

By Mitchel Raphael - Monday, September 19, 2011 at 9:30 AM - 0 Comments

Photographed by Mitchel Raphael

Uncle Sam leans on New Brunswickers

John Williamson, a rookie Tory MP and Stephen Harper’s former director of communications, heard an earful this summer about American taxes. Many of the constituents in his large riding of New Brunswick Southwest (which shares a border with the U.S.) have been affected by Uncle Sam’s new zeal for enforcing overseas tax-reporting rules. For some, it’s easier to cut through Maine than to tackle the seasonal, inter-island ferry service; pregnant women sometimes go to Maine hospitals, which results in many dual citizens. Williamson says many of these constituents are being forced to pay accountants thousands of dollars to file years’ worth of returns, even though they will end up paying nothing to the U.S. government. It’s a crisis for those who do not have that kind of spare income. The border is something constituents have to deal with frequently. When Williamson himself recently attended a BBQ fundraiser to support volunteer firefighters on Campobello Island in his riding, he had to drive through the States to get there.

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‘Incredibly stupid’

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, September 19, 2011 at 8:45 AM - 13 Comments

CSIS officials both exonerate and ridicule Bob Dechert.

Senior CSIS and RCMP officers confirmed to CTV that the Chinese news agency functions as an intelligence arm of China. Officials say Rong was on their radar, but the Chinese news agency is involved in a different type of espionage than spying on political figures…

One senior security officer told CTV News that Dechert displayed a “colossal lack of judgment. He was incredibly stupid to get involved with her.” The official said Dechert should “have known better.”

Emmys: No Backlash, No Turns

By Jaime Weinman - Sunday, September 18, 2011 at 11:44 PM - 5 Comments

The Emmy choices were going okay, despite the excision of Alec Baldwin’s Rupert Murdoch jokes and further proof that a contrite Charlie Sheen is a boring Charlie Sheen. There were some surprises, including pleasant ones like Kyle Chandler and Jason Katims winning for Friday Night Lights, leading to a glimmer of false hope that that show could pull off some kind of upset. (Also, Margo Martindale’s victory was one of the few predictions I got right.) And then came this big clump of movie and mini-series awards. It seemed to take away some of the momentum, especially since those awards were followed by two repeat winners for best series (Mad Men and Modern Family). I’m not saying MOTWs and mini-series shouldn’t be part of the main show, but I don’t think they should all be scheduled together. It just seems to create this strange effect where one group of shows is replaced by a totally different, and frequently more British, group. If those awards were shortened, there could be some room again for the technical awards. Those may not go to people the audience has heard of, but they do go to the same shows as the other awards in the evening, and therefore increase dramatic tension, the feeling of competition among particular shows. Right now the movie/miniseries stuff is like a separate show.

About the awards, there was a certain revenge-of-broadcast-TV narrative going on here, at least until Mad Men won again. With comedy dominated by broadcast shows across the board, and the drama acting awards going to a broadcast series and a used-to-be-broadcast series, the dominance of cable was not as pronounced as it’s sometimes been. (This is another reason why the movie/miniseries stuff seemed like a weird interlude, since the broadcast networks mostly abandoned that business. If they don’t want to turn part of the show into advertising for HBO and PBS, maybe the broadcast networks should get back into trying to find the next Roots? Because that would be the best thing that could come from this.) But Mad Men still won in the end: backlashes are hard to come by.

But Mad Men had a legitimately excellent season, and the shows that HBO unveiled to try and take on Mad Men did not quite have what it took to unseat it. (Boardwalk Empire couldn’t make it because it wasn’t as good as it could have been; Game of Thrones is better than Boardwalk, but it’s in a genre that’s not an easy sell to Continue…

The coming fall

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, September 18, 2011 at 4:15 PM - 2 Comments

The Canadian Press, CBC and CTV preview the fall sitting. I’ll have my own scene-setter in the next print edition. In short, it promises to be a busy few months.

In addition to an ambiguous vow to focus on “jobs and the economy” and a promise to be “flexible” if necessary, the government has set out four legislative goals: the elimination of the long-gun registry, Canadian Wheat Board reform, passage of an omnibus crime bill and the rebalancing of representation in the House of Commons. When the House returns to business tomorrow it is set to resume second-reading debate on human smuggling and Senate reform legislation.

Beyond that there will be some or all of: a security perimeter deal with Obama administration, legislation to extend the parliamentary mandate for the military mission in Libya, the continuation of trade talks with the European Union, committee proceedings to fill two Supreme Court vacancies, an economic update from the Finance Minister, legislation to reinstate of two anti-terrorism provisions, legislation to institute copyright reform and decisions on shipbuilding procurement.

And beyond Ottawa, between October 1 and November 7, there will be seven provincial or territorial elections (Newfoundland and Labrador, PEI, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, the Northwest Territories and Yukon) and the selection of a new premier in Alberta.

An Arab Spring of talent triumphs at TIFF Awards

By Brian D. Johnson - Sunday, September 18, 2011 at 4:11 PM - 0 Comments

A scene from Nadine Labaki's 'Where Do We Go Now?', winner of TIFF's audience award

It’s a wrap. The 36th annual  Toronto International Film Festival climaxed today with an awards brunch that saw films rooted in Arab cultures win the two most prominent prizes. The $15,000 Cadillac People’s Choice Award, voted by festival audiences, went to Where Do We Go Now? by Lebanese director Nadine Labaki, a rousing tale of sisterhood solidarity about women of different faiths who band together to save their war-torn community from sectarian strife. And the $30,000 City of Toronto Award for Best Canadian Feature went to Quebec director Philippe Falardeau for his sensitive and stirring Monsieur Lazhar, about an Algerian refugee who navigates culture shock after landing a job in a Montreal elementary school.  “Very rarely does a film come along that does everything perfectly,” jury member Liane Balaban said of Monsieur Lazhar. “At the end of this movie, my jury members looked at each other, with tears in our eyes. We came to a unanimous decision.”  The $15,000 SKYY Vodka Award for Best Canadian First Feature was awarded to Edwin Boyd, Nathan Morlando’s stylish drama about a Second World War veteran became a Toronto legend by robbing banks  after failing to make a career as an actor.

The two Canadian awards are both well-deserved and came as no great surprise. But Labaki’s win came out of the blue. The titles most commonly bandied about for the audience award were The Artist, The Descendants and Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. And though Where Do We Go Now? is now a proven crowd pleaser, this film, which premiered in Cannes, is not much of a critic pleaser. Like Labaki’s previous feature, Caramel, it’s a broadly earnest drama that wears its feminist heart on its sleeve. But Labaki, who also stars in the film, is a vivacious and dynamic personality, and when you combine her presence on stage at a gala premiere with the film’s triumphant populist narrative, the audience vote begins to compute. Still, unlike  previous People’s Choice winners like Slumdog Millionaire and The King’s Speech, this choice is unlikely to be a precursor for Oscar success, at least outside the foreign film category. The first-runner up for the audience award was Asghar Faradi’s  A Separation, a sly critique of Iranian patriarchy. It was the big winner at the Berlin Film Festival, is one of those rare films that’s both a crowd pleaser and a critical darling. And the third most popular film was Ken Scott’s Starbuck, a Quebec comedy about a sperm donor who learns he has 533 children. Continue…

Dinner with Jason Reitman and the Duplass brothers

By Brian D. Johnson - Sunday, September 18, 2011 at 1:08 AM - 0 Comments

Jason Segal (left) and Jeff Helms in 'Jeff, Who Lives at Home'

As the last of the films fly by, and summer turns to fall, I look back and wonder, what the hell was all that about. While on the treadmill of the TIFF industrial complex, you keep looking for the meaningful moment, that grail of any festival quest. Most of them were in the movies, and it’s been a rich harvest, as my ever expanding list of favorites suggests. But at a festival on the scale of TIFF, no matter how assiduously you apply yourself, there’s always a nagging feeling that you’re missing out on a more essential experience  taking place somewhere you’re not. TIFF is a many-forked maze of roads not taken. Especially if your goal is to crack the party scene. (Just ask our ingenue glitz correspondent, Jessica Allen.) The TIFF industrial complex kept me so busy this year that I’ve had a virtually party-free festival. Maybe just as well. But a few nights ago, I was invited to a small Paramount dinner in a lovely Italian restaurant to celebrate the premiere of Jeff, Who Lives at Home, directed by the brothers Jay and Mark Duplass (Cyrus). And for once I had that remarkably rare feeling that I was in the right place at the right time. At the table with the cool kids.

There were place cards. I was seated across from director Jason Reitman (Juno, Up in the Air), who is one of the producers on Jeff. I’d bumped into him earlier, as we both came out of  50/50, the cancer comedy starring Seth Rogen and Joseph-Gordon Levitt. He’d told me he was trying to keep a low profile. Such a low profile that he didn’t bring his latest film to TIFF, even though it was ready in time. Over dinner, I asked why. He didn’t really have answer. He conceded he’d had great success premiering his first three features at the festival. (And his family, after all, is a major benefactor of the TIFF Bell Lightbox.) But for reasons he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, explain, he said it “just felt right” to keep his fourth feature, Young Adult, under wraps until its December opening. Scripted by Juno writer Diablo Cody, Young Adult stars Charlize Theron as a fiction writer who goes home to Minnesota to rekindle a romance with her married ex-boyfriend. Or at least that’s what it says on IMDB. I sensed Jason wasn’t super-keen to talk about it yet. It only occurred to me later (doh!) that Reitman may have felt the buzz around Up in the Air‘s—which was the hottest film at TIFF in 2009— peaked too early. It received zero Oscars. Continue…

50/50

By Brian D. Johnson - Saturday, September 17, 2011 at 11:28 PM - 0 Comments

50/50

The buddy movie, a formula that thrives on novelty, conquers fresh terrain in this emotional comedy about a sweet 27-year-old guy named Adam (Joseph-Gordon Levitt) who discovers he has a large and rare cancer on his spine. His bad-beside-manner doctor  places Adam’s odds of survival at about  . . . well, the title gives that much away. Seth Rogen is his inimitable self as the best friend, coaching Adam through the ordeal with a raw candour, a profane sense of humour, a vicarious desire to get him laid—exploiting the C-card after Adam’s girlfriend quickly proves to be an unsympathetic bitch. Insofar as 5o/50 is a romantic comedy, not just a cancer comedy, Anna Kendrick (Up in the Air) provides the spark. As his therapist, a rookie who hasn’t yet learned how to draw boundaries, she makes for a cutely inappropriate love interest. Although the buddy rituals of 50/50 are familiar, I can’t think of a comedy that has explored cancer in such clinical detail, and much of the humour is about the ineptitude of friends and family in knowing how to behave—Angelica Huston is priceless as the mother who manages to make her trauma more dramatic than her son’s. The laughing and crying balance out fairly evenly at 50/50, with lots of medicinal pot easing the pain. As Rogen might say, this is one cancer movie that’s not a bummer.

This is the week that was

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, September 17, 2011 at 6:06 PM - 0 Comments

Brian Topp entered the race to be the next leader of the NDP. The Conservatives duly mocked. Mr. Topp went to British Columbia. Romeo Saganash counted himself in. Anne McGrath counted herself out. NDP MPs picked sides. Stephen Harper loomed large. And the press gallery anxiously awaited the NDP’s dysfunction.

Stephen Harper, David Johnston and John Baird marked the tenth anniversary of 9/11.

Continue…

A note from the enforcer factory

By Colby Cosh - Saturday, September 17, 2011 at 2:55 PM - 10 Comments

Boogaard, Rypien, and Belak, too, were each well liked and respected. They will be unfairly lumped together because of their deaths rather than their lives — they were different players in different circumstances — but the common theme after their departures was how much each of them was loved.

…There, the three lost fighters can be more truly linked. They shared the same geography. Boogaard and Belak were from Saskatoon, with its wide streets and bronze statue of Gordie Howe, his elbows up. Rypien was born and died in tiny Crowsnest Pass, Alberta. (Grimson is from British Columbia, played his junior hockey in Regina, and began his education at the University of Manitoba.) They were all Big Sky kids.

As sentimental as it might sound, Westerners really are shaped by their landscape. The expanses of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and eastern Alberta, giving way first to folds, then hills, then mountains …

“Living there makes you humble,” Grimson says. “You spend every day of your life humbled by nature.”

That’s why Western Canada is an enforcer factory, why it continues to produce these men so well versed in the lost farm-boy arts. Being a hockey fighter requires bravery and balance and fast hands and a strong chin. But perhaps more than anything else, it requires humility. It requires reconciliation, an understanding of the limits placed on every one of us.

-Chris Jones, “The Survivor”, Grantland.com

Percentage of Canadian NHL players born in Ontario in 2010-11: 40%

Percentage born in Alberta, Saskatchewan, or Manitoba: 33%

Origins of the 38 NHL players with 10 or more fighting majors in 2010-11: Ontario 21, USA 7, Prairie Provinces 7, B.C., Newfoundland, and P.E.I. 1 apiece

Busiest fighter in the NHL in 2010-11: George Parros

Parros’s hometown: Scenery Hill, Pennsylvania

Parros’ major at Princeton University, where he played NCAA hockey for four years: farm-boy arts (just kidding: it was economics)

Of 530 total fights by NHL players with 10 or more fighting majors in 2010-11, number conducted by Ontarians: 291 (58%)

Number conducted by Americans: 115 (23%)

Number conducted by Prairie boys: 87 (17%)

Number conducted by Alberta-born players: 0 (0%)

O Romeo, Romeo

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 4:15 PM - 2 Comments

Contrary to yesterday’s reports that he’d be throwing his support to Brian Topp, Romeo Saganash has announced today that he’ll be seeking leadership of the NDP. The Crees of Eeyou Istchee, Megan Leslie and Mr. Topp send their regards.

Alec Castonguay reports Mr. Saganash may have been persuaded by some of his fellow MPs to make a bid.

Whipping it up at the Butter soirée

By Jessica Allen - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 4:03 PM - 0 Comments

Jerod Harris/Getty images for vitaminwater

What sort of food do you serve at a cocktail party before the gala TIFF premiere of a movie called Butter? Why, buttered shrimp and butter chicken, of course (and a little foie gras on itty-bitty pancakes too!). And to wash it all down? Cocktails featuring Vitamin Water, since the soirée was hosted at the VitaminWater rooftop on Queen Street West.

Party-goers, who otherwise indulged in plenty of drinks, held back from sampling the tasty treats. Save for me, of course—and gossip maven extraordinaire Lainey Lui, who tweeted from the party that she may have eaten enough for five. “Hollywood people are so strange,” Lui tweeted about the non-noshing crowd. She looked every bit as gorgeous in person as Jennifer Garner, who stars in the movie about a quirky Midwestern community that goes bonkers over a butter sculpting competition.

A radiant—and pregnant—Mrs. Affleck wore a short, blush-coloured sparkly number that showed off her baby bump. Co-stars Ashley Greene and Alicia Silverstone were in attendence, too, and were also outfitted in glittery above-the-knee frocks. But taking the fashion cake was Olivia Wilde, who looked like a bone fide movie star and a Grecian goddess draped in a white floor-length gown with a Byzantine-looking bejewelled neckline.

The one-of-a-kind party featured an artist dressed like a sexy milk maid carving a giant block of butter into the shape of a Vitamin Water bottle and a photo booth, which nobody was more excited about than I. “Can I go again?,” I asked a security guard. “You can go as many times as you like,” he said. And the organizers even provided a table strewn with big glass bowls of colourful candy and little brown bags so guests, like me, could fill up a loot bag for home time. Garner apparently filled up her purse with goodies, presumably to snack on during the premiere.

I left right before the Butter stars did and saw those ubiquitous black TIFF SUVs on the street waiting for the ladies to take them to their red carpet. As I got on my slightly less glamourous two-wheeled ride, a flash went off from the crowd of eager fans waiting for Garner and the gang to come out. I looked up from underneath my bike helmet, grinned and posed. “Oh, sorry,” said a trigger-happy young lady, “that wasn’t for you.”

Pan Am For the ’70s

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 3:18 PM - 2 Comments

Pan Am is one of the shows I’m looking forward to this season – unlike The Playboy Club, which is just going to be ridiculous, Pan Am seems like a ’60s period piece with potential to be a good escapist “pop” show. Joe Adalian compares it to The Love Boat, which makes me hope that if Pan Am does succeed, someone will reboot the last show about airline stewardesses and their high-flyin’ adventures. In fact, ’60s setting be damned, maybe Pan Am should drop the Sinatra and use this disco theme, binding two eras into one.

But of course if you want to hear a genuinely memorable theme song for a TV show about flying high on an airline, there is only one real option. And that option involves Alan Cumming.

Everything Goes For the Visual

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 3:05 PM - 1 Comment

Todd VanDerWerff isn’t as obsessed as I with the live-audience sitcom format (thank God), but he’s much better at weighing the pros and cons of the form, and his thoughts on the live-audience sitcom’s future, written after attending a taping of 2 Broke Girls, are very much worth reading. There’s more to it than just this season’s sitcoms; there are kids’ sitcoms (including Mr. Young, the first Canadian sitcom in decades with a live-audience format) and the UK, where there’s something of a friendly cold war between between throwback studio-audience sitcoms and modern, post-Gervais sitcoms. Plus, of course, that this type of show continues to dominate in syndication to an astonishing extent: My Wife and Kids is still a top 10 syndication hit.

But none of that means you can still make a truly outstanding traditional sitcom in the U.S. If you don’t count How I Met Your Mother as a traditional sitcom, and the creators certainly don’t, then the last truly great four-camera U.S. sitcom to go off the air was probably Everybody Loves Raymond (maybe That ’70s Show, though it was a shadow of itself by the time it went away), and most shows in that vein since then are “yes, but…” shows. And at some point that falls into self-fulfilling prophecy territory: I don’t believe for a second that the three-camera format is incapable of producing a great modern show, but the longer it goes without producing a truly great modern show, the harder it is to argue that this is possible. And that in turn puts more pressure on every new show of that type. With several great single-camera sitcoms on the air already, there’s always room for a good-but-not-great, or even a not-so-good-but-has-potential, comedy (which describes most of the new comedies, of whatever type) in that format. It’s like when a team is doing badly, it puts more pressure on any player with potential.

To Todd’s point that live-audience sitcoms grew out of theatre (and also, as discussed in the comments section, radio) I would add that one of the things the Continue…

RIM shares plunge

By macleans.ca - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 2:46 PM - 2 Comments

Shares in Research in Motion took a massive dive on Friday after an investor sell-off, prompting renewed calls for the smartphone maker to make major changes to senior management. RIM stocks fell 19 per cent after the company released an investor report on Thursday described by one analyst as “another nail in the coffin of management.” The market plunge confirms the doubts some company shareholders have in co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, who each own more than 5 per cent of RIM and who some say prevent the board from acting independently. RIMs troubles began with the release of the BlackBerry Playbook tablet, which has shipped one-third of the expected number of units in the second quarter.

Reuters

In praise of VAT

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 2:32 PM - 27 Comments

Stephen Gordon tries to reconcile progressives with sales taxes.

Outside Canada, it is generally accepted that high VAT rates are an essential component of social policy: see the accompanying graph. Of the 21 OECD countries that spend more on social programs than does Canada, 19 have higher VAT rates. There are no rich countries that have pulled off the trick of sustaining high levels of social spending with low VAT rates … One of the more convenient features of the GST/HST is that it has already set up the infrastructure for transferring income to low-income households. The GST/HST tax credit can be used as a basis for an even more ambitious system of transfers at almost no additional administrative cost. All that is required is the political will to use it.

Arrivederci, Silvio (and the Italians who elect him)

By Erica Alini - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 2:30 PM - 13 Comments

I usually avoid writing editorials about Silvio Berlusconi. I also avoid reading them. I get tired of the usual arsenal of witty turns of phrase about “Italy’s gaffe-prone prime minister,” “the flamboyant media tycoon,” “the scandal-hit Casanova”…he’s just too easy a target.

And yet, the latest, spectacular verbal slip of the septuagenarian, who heads the country I was born and grew up in made me want to type away. He allegedly called Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel a culona inchiavabile, which roughly translates to—pardon my French—“unf–kable big-ass.”

The comment brought back memories of growing up in Italy. Continue…

The Harper factor

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 12:34 PM - 9 Comments

Marc-Andre Morin, a supporter of Thomas Mulcair, explains what the NDP should be looking for in a leader.

“If we don’t have someone who is combative, Harper will just eat him up,” Mr. Morin said.

Top soldier racks up million-dollar private flight bill

By macleans.ca - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 12:14 PM - 5 Comments

Canada’s Chief of Defence Staff, Gen. Walt Natynczyk, has used government airplanes to fly to sporting events, galas and a family holiday in the Caribbean, according to CTV news. The media organization reported Natynczyk’s travels—on which the government spent more than $1 million—after filing an Access to Information request. In January 2010, Natynczyk took a government Challenger jet to meet up with his family in the Antilles after a ceremony at CFB Trenton caused him to miss an earlier flight. The cost was more than $92,000. He and his wife also flew in the same jet to-and-from the Calgary Stampede that year, at a cost of $200,000 before spending more than $120,000 in public money flying to the Grey Cup. The top soldier’s office told CTV that he tries to use commercial flights whenever he can, and that the private flights paid for by the government often take him to events where he is representing the Canadian Forces. Earlier this month, Natynczyk came out in support of former-General Andrew Leslie’s cost-saving report that aims to trim $1 billion from the defence budget.

CTV News

CBC News

Newfoundland braces for Hurricane Maria

By macleans.ca - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 11:48 AM - 0 Comments

Hurricane Maria was expected to hit parts of Newfoundland Friday. Forecasters expect winds of up to 120 km/h to whip through the southern part of the province. Schools across the area have been closed in anticipation of the storm.

Globe and Mail

EU police move to secure disputed border posts in Kosovo

By macleans.ca - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 11:46 AM - 0 Comments

EU police moved to secure two border crossings in North Kosovo Friday amid new threats of protest and violence in the region. Kosovo police initially seized the crossings in July. Ethnic Serbs in the area reacted with fury. Roads were blocked and a policeman was shot before international forces moved in to restore the status quo. Kosovo’s government had been scheduled to retake the crossings Friday, but protests may have stopped them. Forces from the EU mission in the area were helicoptered in to avoid new blockades.Reporters in the area do not know if Kosovar officials were with them. Parts of north Kosovo, home to much of the country’s large Serb minority, remain under de facto Serbian control three years after Kosovo declared itself independent in 2008.

BBC

No charges for Mounties who tased B.C. preteen

By macleans.ca - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 11:37 AM - 0 Comments

B.C. Mounties who used a Taser an 11-year-old boy should not face criminal charges, an outside police force has recommended. The West Vancouver Police were called in to investigate the incident after the boy was zapped with the weapon in April. Investigators from the department determined the officers involved did not violate the criminal code.

Vancouver Sun