Is Canada ready for human trials on stem cell therapy?

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Colin O'Connor

Before his accident, Mike Kowalski loved fast motorcycles. At 26, he rode his bike from his home in Markham, Ont., three hours north to Haliburton—it has “nice roads and less cops,” he says—when he took a turn too fast. Hitting a gravel patch, Kowalski lost control. His first and only motorcycle crash left him paralyzed from the chest down. Devastated, he tried to be optimistic: rapid advances in stem cells seemed to suggest powerful new treatments on the horizon. “I was mentally prepared for five years,” Kowalski says. “Not to be back where I was, but that I’d be using a cane instead of a wheelchair.”

Kowalski kept up with the latest research, attending conferences and chatting with scientists about their work in stem cells. As time went by, and treatments failed to materialize in North America, he got increasingly frustrated. Two years after his accident, he went to Taiwan, where an experimental “nerve cocktail” was injected into his spine. Five years later, he went to Beijing and received an embryonic stem cell transplant. Neither treatment, which cost about $20,000 each, made much of a difference, he says. He kept waiting. “Five years came and went, and then 10.” It’s now been 11 years, and Kowalski still uses a wheelchair. “It seems incomprehensible that we can fix rats in a lab and fly rovers to Mars,” he says, “but we can’t regenerate some nerves in my spine.”

Stem cells, which can grow into any cell type in the body, have been touted as a potential cure for everything from type 1 diabetes to stroke. They aren’t without controversy—embryonic stem cells come from discarded human embryos—but they hold huge promise, too. This is certainly true when it comes to spinal cord injury, a devastating condition that affects about 86,000 Canadians. Unlike muscles, organs, skin and blood, the central nervous system can’t repair itself; despite huge advances in treatment and rehabilitation for this type of injury, the damage is often permanent. In theory, stem cells could be injected into a damaged spinal cord to promote repair. Now one influential Toronto neurosurgeon says it’s time to take stem cells out of the lab and into the clinic.

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Bye Bye Bloomberg

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 0 Comments

I wonder if Occupy Wall Street has finally put an end to the talk of Michael Bloomberg as a U.S. Presidential candidate. It’s unbelievable how much talk there’s been about him over the last few years. Not among voters, who don’t care, but among U.S. pundits, who every few months would get together to talk about the need for a Bloomberg independent run, or how he could siphon off voters from both parties, or how he could be the vanguard of a new era of bipartisan compromise. The last few weeks have shown, if nothing else, that his image is not that of a bipartisan compromiser but of someone who isn’t much liked by anybody. With the result that a Keith Olbermann “Special Comment” has some of its most truly bipartisan appeal: disliking Bloomberg cuts across all lines of party and ideology.

Who will advocate for euthanasia?

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Neither the government nor the official opposition seem interested in pursuing the recommendations of yesterday’s Royal Society report.

But despite the ambitious proposals, there are no signs Ottawa wants to have a debate. “We have no plans to propose any reforms to this area of the law,” Justice Minister Rob Nicholson said. And the opposition echoed that reluctance: “We don’t want to go down that road,” NDP MP Jack Harris said.

Of the 57 MPs who supported Francine Lalonde’s motion last year, most, owing to the Bloc’s collapse, were defeated this spring. In all, by my count, 10 members who voted for C-384 at second reading remain in the House: Mauril Belanger, Olivia Chow, Denis Coderre, Jean Crowder, Libby Davies, Megan Leslie, John McCallum, Maria Mourani, Massimo Pacetti and Louis Plamondon.

How much is an MP worth?

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

The Liberals have apparently decided that 308 MPs is enough.

“It doesn’t make any sense in these days of financial restraint,” Liberal MP Marc Garneau said Tuesday at a Commons committee studying the legislation that would give 15 extra seats to Ontario, six seats each to B.C. and Alberta, and three seats to Quebec … “Canadians are concerned about the added cost of such an inflationary measure,” Garneau said. “The government’s new proposal sends the wrong message to Canadians: that it wants to increase the number of politicians, while it slashes the public services that are provided.”

We presently have 308 MPs for 34.6 million people (one MP for approximately 112,000 people). For the sake of comparing Westminster systems, the United Kingdom has 650 MPs for 62.2 million people (one MP for approximately 96,000 people), while Australia has 150 MPs for 22.3 million people (one MP for approximately 149,000 people).

But if the concern is “cost,” then perhaps the Liberals should propose reducing the number of MPs. Never mind, how many we need, how few could we get away with? That, if the Liberals want to get into it, makes for an interesting debate about what exactly our MPs do to justify their respective existences.

A young Stephen Harper, for instance, advocated for a ten percent reduction in MPs. That would’ve reduced a 295-member House to a 265-member House. So instead of adding 30 seats, perhaps we could get away with 43 fewer than we already have.

Hamed Shafia: The good son

By Michael Friscolanti - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 at 11:16 PM - 0 Comments

Michael Friscolanti is covering the honour killing trial for Maclean’s, filing regular reports from the Kingston, Ont. courtroom to Macleans.ca and weekly dispatches for the magazine. The reports will continue for the duration of the trial, which is expected to run into December.

Hamed Shafia wants to look at the photographs of his dead sisters, their drowned bodies freshly extracted from an underwater car. Sgt. Michael Boyles tries to convince him otherwise, but Hamed is nothing if not determined. He wants to see the corpses. “Please,” he says quietly.

“Alright,” Boyles answers. Continue…

Build the pipeline or Granny suffers

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 at 4:16 PM - 0 Comments

As Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver explained to reporters after QP, the Conservatives are appalled that NDP MPs would express a dissenting opinion about the Keystone pipeline within earshot of Americans. In other news, the Keystone pipeline is now an initiative to provide health care for seniors.

I was appalled when I heard the NDP intends to go down to the United States to talk negatively about the Keystone XL project.  This is a project which will generate hundreds of thousands of jobs for Canadians, billions of dollars of economic activity and it will fund important social services like education for our children, health care for the elderly. Frankly, I think what they’re doing is a disgrace.

On the question of the NDP MPs and their trip to Washington, at least one voice in the scrum noted the example of a former opposition leader who went on American television to express his concern for Canada’s refusal to go to war in Iraq.

Democratic rights

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 at 3:51 PM - 0 Comments

Elizabeth May is joining an attempt to challenge the first-past-the-post electoral system as a violation of the Charter.

The case would argue that the Constitution protects the right of Canadians to have “effective representation,” which goes beyond having the right to cast a ballot. The two groups, the Association for the Advancement of Democratic Rights and Fair Vote Canada, have also earned an endorsement from Green Party leader Elizabeth May.

“The key issue is not that it’s unfair to the Green Party,” May said Tuesday at a news conference with representatives from the two groups. ”It’s unfair to democracy. It’s unfair to voters, and I think it’s a big reason for the decline in voter turnout.”

Ms. May argues that voter turnout is higher in countries with proportional representation. Going back to some numbers I posted last year, that’s somewhat true: all of the countries listed there, with the exception of Canada and France, use some kind of proportional representation. So while proportional representation is present in Denmark, Sweden, Italy and the Netherlands (all with turnout over 80%), it is also present in Portugal (under 60%) and Switzerland (under 50%).

The real federalism problem with crime legislation

By Brendan van Niejenhuis - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 at 2:18 PM - 0 Comments

Pawel Dwulit/Canadian Press

In November 1983, Elijah Askov and three others were charged in connection with a plot to extort money from a man who ran a business supplying exotic dancers to Ontario strip clubs. Their case was plagued by delays from the start; nearly three years after the men’s arrest, and two years after their preliminary hearing, Askov and his co-defendants had not yet had their day in court. The Supreme Court of Canada was eventually asked to interpret the Charter guarantee to “be tried within a reasonable time.” And in its then-controversial Askov decision, the Court put a stop to the proceedings, giving birth to the modern and frequently employed practice of throwing out criminal charges based on unreasonable delay.

That Askov didn’t mean an end to unreasonable delays makes it hard for the provinces to mount a credible case against the federal government as it proposes sweeping changes to the Criminal Code. The Conservatives’ controversial omnibus crime bill has sparked a flurry of attacks for its substance, including its introduction of American-style mandatory-minimum sentencing. Quebec, Ontario and now Newfoundland have also introduced a new ground of opposition—the impact the federal government’s “tough new measures” will have on provincial balance sheets. It’s not clear, though, why voters should believe Ottawa is doing anything worse than adding to a problem the provinces had a hand in creating. Continue…

Cain slips on Libya

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 at 2:03 PM - 0 Comments

U.S. Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain pulled off what commentators have already dubbed a “Rick Perry moment,” referring to the Texas governor’s recent stumble during a televised debate. On Monday Cain gave an interview to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, whose video later went viral on the Internet. It shows a flustered Cain struggling to provide an answer when confronted with the question of how he’d assess President Barack Obama’s handling of Libya. Cain eventually said, “I’ve got to go back and see,” adding, “I’ve got all this stuff twirling around in my head.”

The New York Times

Budget woes may kill U.S. F-35 plans

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 at 1:59 PM - 0 Comments

The U.S. Government may cancel plans to purchase F-35 jets if a bipartisan congressional committee can’t agree on a deficit reduction plan by next week. In letters to congressional leaders, U.S. Defence Secretary Leon Panetta warns of severe defence cuts ahead if the super committee fails. “Decisions related to major programs could include: Terminate Joint Strike Fighter; minimal life extensions and upgrades to existing forces,” the letter says, according to the Globe and Mail. For now the threat remains remote. Even if the committee avoids a decision on cuts, Congress could vote to spare Defence or simply cancel their earlier across-the-board cuts entirely. On the off chance the F-35 is scrapped, it could be bad news for Canada, which plans to purchase 65 of the jets between 2016 and 2022. Without the massive U.S. order, the average price-per-plane could soar out of Canada’s range.

Globe and Mail

Ottawa on free trade push

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 at 1:26 PM - 0 Comments

The Harper government is in a flurry of activity signing up Canada for trade negotiations with a number of countries in a bid to diversify the economy away from the U.S. On Monday, the CBC reports, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced that Canada intends to participate in the Trans-Pacific Partnership talks to pursue a broad preferential trade agreement with Asia-Pacific countries including Australia, Chile, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. The announcement follows a veiled warning from Harper to U.S. President Barack Obama last week that Canada would seek to step up energy exports to Asia. The remark was seen as a diplomatic jab in response to Washington’s flip-flopping on the Keystone XL pipeline. Also, on Tuesday the Globe and Mail reports that the federal government tabled bills seeking to boost trade with Panama and Jordan. The Globe suggested the move means the government has an “every-bit-counts approach” to trade liberalization and diversification.

CBC
The Globe and Mail

A novice bureaucrat (and future PM) on supply management

By John Geddes - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 at 1:11 PM - 0 Comments

Here’s a stray bit of commentary from the distant past to mull over along with the news that the Harper government just might be willing to consider reforming Canada’s politically sacrosanct, economically dubious protection of poultry and dairy farmers:

“Price support is only a means; the end we seek should be a livable income for every citizen. And as a means, price support cannot be used systematically; for it naturally tends to prevent equilibrium of demand and supply.”

That’s from the six-page memo “On Price Support for Commodity Surpluses,” written by very junior civil servant named Pierre Trudeau in 1949, when he was briefly assistant to Gordon Robertson, the head of the Privy Council Office’s economics division. His sensible advice on the economics of agricultural and fisheries is quoted in the new biography Trudeau Transformed: The Shaping of a Statesman, 1944-1965 by Max and Monique Nemni.

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Ladies and trolls of the Internet

By Jesse Brown - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 at 1:06 PM - 0 Comments

The Internet is sexist. Virulently so.

The everyday misogyny expressed on virtually every open forum is so common that it has become expected. It shouldn’t be though, and Helen Lewis-Hasteley of the New Statesman has done a fine thing by asking nine bloggers to write about the violent and hateful messages they receive daily, and how if affects them (spoiler: it’s not banal when you’re the target of it).

For readers, there’s something darkly exciting about a bunch of bloggers sharing the worst hate mail they’ve received with you—at first, that is. Reading the piece, any excitement dissolves pretty quickly: sexist trolls are repetitive, stupid, and boring. Their put-downs and sexual insults, even their threats of gang rape—all of them are terribly uncreative and tedious. The intended menace rarely registers—all that comes across is how pathetic the trolls are, how sad it is that their default reaction to disagreeing with a woman (about politics, video games, anything) is to attack her appearance and suggest that what she really needs is… Continue…

The right to die

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 at 12:59 PM - 0 Comments

A report from the Royal Society of Canada recommends changing current laws to allow physician-assisted suicide.

“We are recommending that the Criminal Code be changed in such a way as to permit physician-assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia,” said Udo Schuklenk, a bioethicist from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., who chaired the six-person panel that completed Tuesday’s report. Schuklenk said the basis for the recommendation was centred on the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The executive summary is here. The full report is here.

A private member’s bill—proposed by former Bloc MP Francine Lalonde—that would have amended the Criminal Code to allow for euthanasia was defeated in April 2010 by a count of 230-57.

Why won’t they eat their vegetables?

By Julia McKinnell - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 at 11:40 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Andrew Tolson

If cookies are all your child wants for lunch, then author Elizabeth Pantley may be able to reverse the situation. In her new advice book for parents, The No-Cry Picky Eater Solution: Gentle Ways to Encourage Your Child to Eat, Pantley explains the biology and science behind picky eating, and what to do about it.

Picky eating is normal, she notes, affecting about 85 per cent of kids. After interviewing hundreds of parents in Canada, China, Zaire and India, Pantley, a mother of four from Seattle, concludes that picky eating is not the fault of “weak, indulgent parents and stubborn, power-seeking kids.” Biology and genetics are at work. “Studies tell us that if one or both parents were picky eaters as children, chances are their child will be a picky eater, too . . . If you disliked broccoli, fish, or fuzzy foods such as peaches and kiwis, chances are your child will dislike the same sort of foods.”

As for why kids can’t get enough candy, Pantley notes, “a link has been found between the preference for sweet foods and the rate of bone growth. When children are in high-growth periods, their preference for sweet foods is elevated.”

Continue…

A Turkish smackdown

By Jen Cutts - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 0 Comments

Turkey’s prime minister wasn’t in the mood to make nice. Hours before he would be flashing a thin smile at a photo op with German Chancellor Angela Merkel last Wednesday, Recep Tayyip Erdogan dropped by the offices of Germany’s Bild newspaper to boldly criticize her in an interview. Erdogan blasted Merkel for her government’s immigration policies in a well-timed attack: the pair met at a ceremony marking 50 years since 650,000 Turkish “guest workers” arrived in Germany as part of a labour pact. Today, 2.5 million people in Germany have Turkish roots, though barely a third are citizens.

“German politicians do not give enough recognition to the integration” of these Turks, Erdogan told Bild, pointing to Germany’s resistance to dual citizenship, and saying it is failing to recognize Turks’ contributions. “The guest workers of yesterday are slowly becoming employers, academics, artists,” he said. This despite the fact that Turks, who make up the largest German minority, come last in measures of literacy, education and employment.

Erdogan also criticized Germany for giving only lukewarm support to Turkey’s bid to join the EU. With Turkey’s surging economy and Erdogan’s own growing influence, he can perhaps afford to ruffle a few feathers.

Is the ‘Estonian miracle’ just smart management?

By Richard Warnica - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

Miracles are always more complicated than they first appear. Even the word itself—miracle—is a kind of hedge. It’s a guard against deeper scrutiny, a way of pointing to the wonderful without probing too deeply into the details. Such is the case with the economic miracle in Estonia. The tiny tiger of the Baltic is being hailed as the anti-Greece, both for its fiscal austerity and stoic acceptance of such. But the story of how this nation of 1.3 million crawled out of the 2008 crash, gained entrance to the eurozone and set itself on the path to, fingers crossed, prosperity is both messier and more pragmatic than “miracle” implies.

Beginning in 2009, the Estonian government undertook a policy of “fiscal retrenchment”—it tanked its own economy, basically, cutting spending and raising taxes even as the rest of the West indulged in a binge of Keynesian excess. Between 2000 and 2007, Estonian GDP climbed an average of eight per cent per year. In 2009, it tumbled 14 per cent. Unemployment hit 19 per cent that year, and wages, in the private and public sectors, were slashed, in some cases by as much as 40 per cent.

And for all this, the government was praised. There were no mass protests, no legislative walkouts, no rioters tearing up the cobblestones in the streets of Tallinn. “If you look at what the [polls] said in spring of 2009, before they made the cuts, and what they were in October, November, they actually went up,” says Ringa Raudla, a senior researcher in public administration at the Tallinn University of Technology. In March 2011, the same parties that implemented the austerity plan were re-elected to another term. “People actually supported cutting the budget rather than taking out loans,” Raudla says. Continue…

Defend, reduce or scrap

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 at 11:17 AM - 0 Comments

The government was fairly adamant yesterday that it would defend supply management. Steven Chase imagines how they might reduce tariffs without abandoning the system entirely. Stephen Gordon considers how difficult it would be to scrap it.

The ideal solution to the problem would be to invent a time machine, go back to the 1970s, and tell policy makers what a terrible mistake they were about to make. Sadly, this is not possible. So how can we reduce dairy prices without ruining present-day dairy farmers who bought their quotas in good faith? One option — as described in this CD Howe proposal – would be to slowly increase the number of quotas over a long period of time, so that they gradually lose their value. When they are essentially worthless, there would be little loss in abolishing them.

Two stocks and $20

By Richard Warnica - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 at 11:10 AM - 0 Comments

Imagine you have $20 to invest and one of two stocks to spend it on. On the one hand, you have Company A, an established player with a significant, if shrinking, share of the lucrative smartphone market. On the other, you have Company B, an Internet darling with huge revenues but no profits.

So who do you buy? If you’re like most of the market last week, the answer is B, the online coupon giant Groupon. Last week, it raised US$700 million in an initial public offering—the biggest for a tech stock since Google’s in 2004. The offering was set at US$20 on Thursday; by Friday, its shares were trading above US$28, giving the company a US$13-billion valuation. Not bad for a firm facing questions over its accounting and skepticism about its potential for profitability. It’s the opposite story for Company A, Canada’s Research In Motion. As Groupon shares soared, those of the still-profitable BlackBerry manufacturer continued to slide. At some points recently, RIM stock was trading for less than the company’s book value of US$18.92 per share.

With service outages and the PlayBook struggling, it’s been a tough year for RIM. With a growing revolt from local business partners, Groupon, too, remains an iffy bet. Perhaps the smart move might be to put that $20 in the bank.

Occupy Toronto served eviction notice

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 at 11:10 AM - 0 Comments

According to reports, eviction notices are being served to Occupy Toronto protesters in St. James Park. The notice comes on a day when Occupy protesters in several cities are being cleared out; several Occupy Toronto protesters had spent the morning demonstrating against Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s order to remove the Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zuccotti Park in New York.

The Globe and Mail

REVIEW: 1Q84

By Brian Bethune - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 at 11:05 AM - 0 Comments

The Japanese novelist, a cult writer to some and a Nobel laureate in waiting for others, has surely shed the former label with this entrancing 900-page opus. In exquisite language the author moves seamlessly from the blackly surreal to the Wodehousian whimsical: in Prague, between the world wars, one character imagines, “people drank Pilsner beer in cafes and manufactured handsome light machine guns.” From the moment Aomame, full-time fitness instructor and part-time assassin of men who abuse women, exits her gridlocked cab to climb down from an elevated expressway, Murakami offers a look, literal and figurative, under the surface of Japan during George Orwell’s iconic year.

This huge stewpot of a novel is the full Murakami, with all his themes and obsessions on display. There are cats and birds (naturally), usually more than they seem, and dualities abound. There are two lovers seeking one another in an alien landscape, rather than the usual man wandering in search of a woman. And because Murakami, on occasion, jettisons subtlety to make a point, there are two moons in the parallel world—a character uncertain whether he or she is any longer in the Japanese equivalent of Kansas only has to look up. There are even two cults. The Eastern-style one, led by a Big Brother figure who understands people’s need for stories as well as any novelist, is reminiscent of Aum Shinrikyo—responsible for the 1995 Sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway system, about which Murakami wrote a non-fiction work, prophetically entitled Underground—and the author’s clearest nod to Orwell’s 1984.

In the end, as much as anything, 1Q84 is about time—Aomame even takes to reading Proust—how it traps, rules and destroys us. Or perhaps not, if you’re a Murakami character.

REVIEW: Blue Nights

By Sarah Murdoch - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Blue Nights is a continuation of Joan Didion’s rumination on grief that began with The Year of Magical Thinking, written following the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, eight years ago. The new book is an inquiry into her relationship with her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, who died less than two years later, at 39, following an avalanche of medical crises. Didion is now 76, and Blue Nights also stands as her interrogation into being old, frail and alone (“Whole days now spent on this one question, this question with no possible answer: who do I want notified in case of emergency?”). First the husband, then the daughter, soon the author herself—it could be a real downer. Yet Didion once again turns a gimlet eye on this latest biographical tranche—holding events up to the light, examining them this way and that, judging herself as a mother (and finding herself wanting), searching memory for meaning, occasionally engaging the reader head-on (“Let me again try to talk to you directly”).

She writes quietly, emphatically. And yet sorrow leaks from every page. “I can now afford to think about her. I no longer cry when I hear her name.” Perhaps out of delicacy, Didion offers little about her daughter’s death, but rather what we need to know about her life. We learn that Quintana Roo was adopted in 1966, named for the Mexican territory, now a state. A precocious child and a depressed, anxious adult, she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. For a time, she was the photography editor at Elle Decor. She was married shortly before her father’s death, shortly before she was comatose in the first of four ICUs she would visit in the last two years of her life. A more telling picture comes through the details—the imaginary Broken Man who frightened her as a child, the novel she wrote as a teenager “just to show you (how sad for an adopted child to feel she has to live up to the expectations of accomplished parents).” The title, Blue Nights, is a reference to those days in late spring when the lengthy twilights of the coming solstice signal that the days are growing longer, writes Didion. Blue nights carry their own warning: “I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days, the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness.”

Who’s suing whom?

By Alex Ballingall - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

British Columbia: A farmer sued a local fish habitat conservation agency, claiming its criticism of his plan to dump 100,000 truckloads of dirt was eroding the value of his property. He sought $13 million in damages. Dismissing the case, a judge called his claims “greatly exaggerated” and “fabricated.”

Alberta: A denture-wearing Edmonton woman is suing a candy company for $100,000, arguing their brand of chewing gum threw her into temporary depression. She claims the gum broke apart and got stuck in her dentures. Her depression lasted 10 minutes, while she scrubbed the gum from the crevices in her false teeth.

Saskatchewan: A Regina family is suing their provincial energy company after a gas leak explosion knocked their house off its foundation last Boxing Day. They allege the company neglected to perform regular checks on an underground gas line that was apparently seeping into their basement. The blast occurred when their clothes dryer ignited the leaked gas, injuring four people.

Continue…

Welcome to prison email, hot chick

By Barbara Amiel - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

FAME Pictures/KEYSTONE PRESS

The very moment Dr. Conrad Murray was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the death of Michael Jackson, an eager bailiff with an eye for camera angles and posterity handcuffed him while sitting down, in a move that required almost Busby Berkeley choreography to pull off gracefully. There was no reason to handcuff him, but this is a Barnum & Bailey world.

Dr. Murray has had some difficulty with child support payments, but this could be explained by the high cost of wives, seven children (I think) by six mums and the price of a defence team. Television shows him to be a handsome Afro-American man with sombre bearing. His new address will be a local jail and then probably a state prison, which is definitely not a happy address. State prisons are the stepchildren of the American carceral state and rarely have the benefit of extras such as email as in the federal correctional institutions.

Email allows inmates who have never written much more than a bad cheque or dodgy prescription to keep in touch with the outside world, thus maintaining the great tradition of prison belles lettres—and not so belle letters. The current system has dedicated email with no Web access or attachments and limited computer time. Lengthy communications are written on lined paper from the commissary and then typed in frantically. Pulling off The Gulag Archipelago would require a 20-years-to-life sentence.

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