A bad night for the GOP frontrunners

By John Parisella - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 7:16 PM - 0 Comments

Mitt Romney’s win in his native Michigan was supposed to be a given just a few weeks ago. But yesterday’s close call reinforces the perception that Romney is not yet connecting with the party base. His observation that he’d gotten “just enough” support was accurate, but his closing speech did nothing to stir the base as we near Super Tuesday on March 6.

The tightly fought contest with Rick Santorum has been costly to the Romney camp. Financial resources were spent in what should have been an easy win in Michigan and Romney’s explanations regarding his opposition to the auto bailout failed to resonate with the state’s voters. Barack Obama, seizing on the opportunity that Romney gave him on the auto bailout, visited Michigan and actually made gains in voter approval, with Michigan appearing likely to remain Democratic in November. Continue…

The Commons: Let us debate that which is unsubstantiated

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 6:32 PM - 0 Comments

The Scene. After tracing the necessarily circuitous route to her question, Nycole Turmel was as straightforward as she can be.

“Mr. Speaker, yesterday on CBC, the Prime Minister’s parliamentary secretary said the Conservative party was investigating the allegations of election fraud. An hour later, on Sun TV, he said the Conservatives were not conducting an investigation,” the interim leader of the opposition recounted. “Could the Prime Minister tell us which it is? Are the Conservatives investigating, yes or no?”

Could the Prime Minister? Theoretically speaking, yes. Would he? Practically speaking, no.

“Mr. Speaker, the Conservative party has made available, from the beginning, all information to Elections Canada,” Mr. Harper said. “The Conservative party can say absolutely, definitively, it has no role in any of this.”

On what basis can the government say this? It is difficult to say.

Continue…

Sixties heartthrob Davy Jones dies of heart attack

By Anne Kingston - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 5:19 PM - 0 Comments

Davy Jones, the former lead singer of the Monkees and first-crush fodder for a generation, died of a heart attack today at age 66 in Indiantown, Florida. The diminutive Manchester native appeared on “Coronation Street” and trained as a jockey before being selected to join the prefabricated rock group assembled in Los Angeles in 1965.

Despite its artificial origins, The Monkees, comprised of Jones, Mickey Dolenz, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork, became a phenomenon—spawning a hit TV show that ran for two seasons and experienced a revival in the ‘80s in syndication. During the ‘60s and ‘70s, the manic Beatles-lite ensemble, churned out number-one singles, including “Daydream Believer” and “I’m a Believer.” Jones, known as the “cute” Monkee, achieved such celebrity during the 1960s that David Bowie, born David Robert Jones, changed his name to avoid confusion. In his later years, Jones, who was married and had four daughters, traveled the congested former-pop-idol circuit, both as part of Monkees’ reunions and solo, last performing in Oklahoma earlier this month. He was scheduled to appear with former fellow heartthrob David Cassidy, of “Partridge Family” fame, on April 14 in Miami.

Week in Pictures: February 25 – March 2, 2012

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 4:58 PM - 0 Comments

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Week in Pictures: February 25 – March 2, 2012

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India's National Security Guards participate in a drill in Mumbai, India, on Feb. 23. (Rafiq Maqbool/AP Photo)

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Truly ‘mature’ video games needed for aging gamers

By Peter Nowak - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 4:41 PM - 0 Comments

erin m/Flickr

Will there ever be a Call of Duty: Seniors’ Edition? It’s a question I found myself asking after speaking with a CTV reporter the other day.

The reporter was working on a story about a recent study that involved World of Warcraft and senior citizens. According to the study’s co-author, Jason Allaire at North Carolina State University,  “People who played ‘World of Warcraft’ versus those who did not play experienced an increase in cognitive ability, particularly older adults who performed very poorly in our first testing session.” In other words, World of Warcraft–and video games in general—may be good for older people. Continue…

Bill Clinton embraces Keystone XL – but did he ask Hillary?

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 4:40 PM - 0 Comments

When President Barack Obama first named  Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State, there was a lot of concern about what role her husband would play behind the scenes or whether his work at his charitable foundation would lead to any conflict of interest. The Clintons have seemed to have succeeded in keeping their roles comfortably separate. So it is notable that the former president would weigh in on the Keystone XL pipeline issue at a time when the federal review process that leads to a recommendation of a presidential permit for the cross-border pipeline is run by his wife’s department.

Bill Clinton said to an energy conference this afternoon:

“One of the most amazing things to me about this Keystone pipeline deal is that they ever filed that route in the first place since they could’ve gone around the Nebraska Sandhills and avoided most of the dangers, no matter how imagined, to the Ogallala [aquifer] with a different route, which I presume we’ll get now, because the extra cost of running is infinitesimal compared to the revenue that will be generated over a long period of time,” he said.

“So, I think we should embrace it and develop a stakeholder-driven system of high standards for doing the work,” Clinton added.

Like President Clinton, I have wondered why the proposed route went through the Sandhills of  Nebraska. In a recent interview, I posed that question to TransCanada. Spokesman Shawn Howard told me:

“There were 14 different route configurations examined. The original route was determined to have least environmental impact.” As for the Sandhills concerns:  ”We knew we could build pipeline safely and we could put features that would give additional protections. It was the shortest route through the area and affected the fewest landowners.”

I also wondered why they didn’t simply amend the route once it became clear that there was a lot of opposition to building through the Sandhills. Here was Howard’s response:

“When you are in a legal process, you are allowed to move the route a couple of miles. That would be permissible. But we’re talking about having to re-route 100 miles of a new route, that’s not a minor change.  For all the groups and activists that were running around saying ‘Move the route!’ —  they didn’t understand the process. If we had made a major change like that, we would have had to start [the permit application] from the beginning because then you’re applying for a different route.”

Do we need more Vikileaks?

By Jesse Brown - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 4:39 PM - 0 Comments

How very boring that Vikileaks has turned out to be just a sleazy partisan attack from a Liberal staffer. It’s already being absorbed into the system: politics as usual. Rae is sheepish, Toews indignant, Trudeau tap-dances and the NDP are vindicated and can enjoy the show from a comfy distance. Oh well.

As an inside volley, the Twitter-smears were indeed foul play. I found them ugly, but effective. They violated the acceptable codes and norms of Parliament Hill. They used personal details to fight public policy. Adam Carroll, the staffer behind the account, needed to go.

But what if Vikileaks had indeed been the lunchtime project of a random, anonymous Canadian? Continue…

James Murdoch loses British post

By Richard Warnica - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 4:37 PM - 0 Comments

James Murdoch, son of Rupert and executive chairman of beleaguered News International, is getting the boot. The one-time News Corporation heir apparent is stepping down from his European post and moving to the United States. From the New York Times:

A statement from News Corporation depicted the step as part of James Murdoch’s move to the company’s headquarters in New York, announced a year ago. But many media analysts said the move seemed to reflect the more recent travails of News International, whose newspapers include The Sun, The Times of London and The Sunday Times of London.

In July, Rupert and James Murdoch sat side by side at a British parliamentary inquiry as legislators demanded to know the full extent of a phone-hacking scandal at The News of the World, a weekly tabloid newspaper that News International shut down last year. The company had initially claimed the hacking was the work of a single rogue reporter.

But since then the scandal has spread and News International has begun paying settlement money to scores of celebrities whose voice-mail accounts were broken into.

Romney hangs in, but Super Tuesday could keep rivals alive

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 4:13 PM - 0 Comments

Imagine if Mitt Romney had lost the primary in his native state of Michigan last night, rather than beating Rick Santorum by 3 points. (Santorum is calling the results a “tie” because they picked up the same number of delegates.) There would be feverish calls for a new white knight candidate to enter the race. Instead, there is a growing chorus of voices  bemoaning the long, negative primary and calling for it to be over so Republicans can go back to attacking President Obama instead of each other.

But Santorum, Newt Gingrich, and Ron Paul are hanging in because Super Tuesday offers a delegate rich smorgasboard of states with the possibility of delegates for everyone, thanks to the system of proportional representation Republicans adopted in many states this year.

On March 6 “Super Tuesday” 10 states vote and 437 delegates are at stake out of the 1,144 needed to win. Romney will face a challenge in conservative Southern states (Oklahoma, Tennessee, Georgia) where Newt Gingrich hopes to repeat his South Carolina surge, as well as in the battleground state of Ohio, where Santorum enjoyed an 11-point lead in recent polls. Romney is expected to do well in Massachusetts, Idaho, Vermont, North Dakota, and in Virginia — a state in which only he and Ron Paul are on the ballot. Because of the proportional system, all the candidates rivals can pick up delegates on a county-by-county basis, even if they don’t win a particular state. So there is still a good chance that the drama will continue into the spring — especially if big donors keep writing big checks to keep the show on the road.

Still, Romney is in a good position. The former Massachusetts governor has doggedly amassed more delegates than all the other candidates combined. Though they haven’t come cheap. The Romney campaign and the pro-Romney PAC have also vastly outspent everyone else in the field. Pro-Romney forces outspent Santorum 2 to 2 in Michigan ($4.2 million to $2.1 million, according to Politico.) And the $38.5 million he has spent so far is more than all his challengers combined.

And his rivals look chastened. The leading non-Romney alternative candidate, Santorum fumbled his chance to upset the race last night. Earlier this month he was leading Romney by double-digits in the state where Romney had been born and raised, and where his father had been governor. While Romney was boasting about his wife driving “a couple of Cadillacs” and his friendships with the owners of NASCAR teams, Santorum was able to connect with the kind of voters who Romney and Obama both have trouble courting — blue collar workers, less-educated and less-affluent voters.

Now even some Republicans are accusing Santorum of blowing it by pushing his populist culture-warrior persona too far: calling Obama a “snob” for championing post-secondary education, doubling down on a past comment that John F. Kennedy’s speech on the separation of church and state made him “want to throw up“, and allowing his views on contraception to became a focus of debates.

Exit polls suggest that Santorum lost the women’s vote in Michigan by 5 percentage points to Romney in Michigan, and lost the Catholic vote as well. He seemed to recognize that he over-reached. He said he’d like to take back his JFK remark.  The opening minutes of his speech last night were striking for its focus on his mother as a working woman who at once out-earned his father — presumably a belated attempt to reassure female voters. He’s trying to undo the damage, but the clock is ticking.

The list

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 4:05 PM - 0 Comments

For the sake of compilation, here are the 21 ridings tallied so far in which there are allegations or reports of suspicious calls related to polling stations.

Windsor-Tecumseh, Mount Royal, Lac-Saint-Louis, Edmonton Centre, Kingston and the Islands, Hamilton East-Stoney Creek, Windsor West, Sarnia-Lambton, Prince George-Peace River, Guelph, Kitchener Centre, Kitchener-Conestoga, Kitchener-Waterloo, London West, Parkdale-High Park, Nipissing-Timiskaming, Elmwood-Transcona, Winnipeg South Centre, Sydney-Victoria, Saanich-Gulf Islands and Pierrefonds-Dollard

Sourcing for this list can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Add Pierrefonds-Dollard to the list

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 1:20 PM - 0 Comments

The CBC finds another riding with allegations of phone calls about polling stations.

Bernard Patry, a fellow Liberal candidate and former MP, said he was approached by two voters from his riding of Pierrefonds-Dollard who said they’d received calls and been directed to the wrong polling station. ”I would like first of all to get an inquiry about this,” Patry said. “There’s too many things that went wrong during this campaign.”

The endorsements

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 12:25 PM - 0 Comments

Thomas Mulcair announces the support of former leadership candidate Robert Chisholm.

Paul Dewar says he’ll have an endorsement to announce tomorrow.

Until then, here are the updated standings. Continue…

Are we over-sharing lost pregnancies?

By Anne Kingston - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 11:40 AM - 0 Comments

Jacopo Raule/Getty Images

Last month, Jay-Z released Glory, a song dedicated to his newborn daughter that triggered a gossip maelstrom. In it, the privacy-obsessed rapper revealed intimate details of a previous pregnancy with his wife, Beyoncé Knowles: “Last time the miscarriage was so tragic / We was afraid you’d disappear / But nah baby you magic.” Lyrical merit aside, the verse signals a watershed as the first rap song to lament a miscarriage—and yet another marker of the evolving openness, even militancy, surrounding perinatal loss.

Miscarriages (legally defined as the death of a fetus of less than 20 weeks) or stillbirths (the death of fetuses over 20 weeks) are a sad reality in at least 20 per cent of pregnancies. In 2002, singer Tori Amos discussed the “emptiness” she felt after her multiple miscarriages, on the U.K.’s Channel 4: “There’s no coffin, there’s no outward symbology, there’s no ritual. There’s just you and your partner. It’s not a reality for anyone else.” A decade later, that landscape has shifted radically. Miscarriage news is splashed in tabloids, as on last month’s OK! cover: “Leah’s heartbreak: she suffers a miscarriage,” about Teen Mom 2 star Leah Messer. Parents express their grief via T-shirts that read, “An angel watches over me.” The Internet hosts myriad “miscarriage” blogs and “stillbirth” tribute pages. One woman in the U.K. even used a photograph of her stillborn child as her Facebook avatar.

Such images are increasingly common. Since 2005, the Colorado-based charity Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep has provided volunteer photographers around the world who record gentle images of stillborn children for parents. Hospitals also provide “memory boxes” with footprints and handprints, and remembrance cards. “Mementoes help parents grieve openly,” says Glenn Breen, an ecumenical chaplain at Halifax’s IWK Health Centre: “For them to go home without any way of honouring the lost child isn’t emotionally healthy.” Naming ceremonies also offer solace, Breen says: “Parents haven’t had the chance to parent that child. So the ability to spiritually parent by naming is important.” When the fetus’s sex is indeterminate, a gender-neutral name like Taylor is chosen, he explains. The annual Walk to Remember across North America recognizes perinatal deaths, as do yearly memorials like one held at Toronto’s Mount Sinai, says Rebecca Purdie, a social worker in the hospital: “Ritual legitimizes the magnitude of the loss; it gives families permission to start grieving.” Tangible touchstones help parents cope with the abstract nature of the loss, she says: “It’s not just grieving a baby but a lifetime—who that child would have been.”

Continue…

Get a ‘wife’

By Leah McLaren - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 11:30 AM - 0 Comments

Suki Dhanda

If there is one dilemma that confounds working mothers more than any other, it’s the issue of priorities. What is more important, the exhausting fulfillment of a serious career or the exhausting fulfillment of raising a baby? Is it possible to have both, and if so, at what cost?

Gaby Hinsliff is familiar with this modern conundrum’s pincer grip. As the political editor of the U.K.’s respected Sunday broadsheet the Observer, and the new mother of a young son, Hinsliff found herself, at the age of 37, in a classic double-bind. On the one hand she loved her job, on the other she loved her son. Both were fascinating, fulfilling and unapologetically demanding. Both required ample amounts of her best and brightest self every day—day in, day out, without fail. Both were slowly, but inexorably, driving her insane.

For a couple of years after maternity leave she stuck it out; working the Tuesday to Saturday schedule her paper required, employing a full-time nanny, juggling bedtime duties with her PR executive husband depending who was working late, pulling in favours from family and friends during party conference season, and so on. “I loved my job, it was the best job in the world, but I began to feel more and more torn, more and more sleep deprived,” she said in a recent phone interview from her home in Oxfordshire. “If you’re happy doing that kind of job with small children, either your partner is doing something much more low-key than mine was or you must be very comfortable with the idea that you can delegate the child-care side to someone else.” In the end, she quit and moved out of the city to the leafy, pastoral “Shires” (also known as London’s “gin and tonic belt”) where her husband had been offered a good job and the cost of living was significantly lower. In other words, she joined the ranks of self-employed, part-time, stay-at-home parents. Or, to use her term, Hinsliff became the “half a wife” her family—and every virtually working family—so desperately needs.

Continue…

From Israel to Iran, with love

By Alex Ballingall - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

Dan Balilty/AP

They’ve received threatening phone calls directly from authorities in Iran, berating them for the work they do. And in the wake of bombings targeting Israelis in India and Thailand, they’ve been warned to “lower their profile.” But in a general meeting last week, the employees of Tel Aviv-based Radio RadisIN pledged to continue broadcasting their Farsi-language music, spoken word and news programming into Iran—despite threats of danger from agents of Tehran. “All we do is transmit a message of love and brotherhood,” says Parviz Barkhordar, the host of a weekly political and social issues program called Connection. “We believe we are doing the right thing.”

Radio RadisIN went on the air on March 24, 2009. Since then, it has started streaming its programming to Farsi-speaking audiences all over the world. Barkhordar says RadisIN has more than 200,000 listeners in places as far-reaching as Los Angeles and Malaysia.

But the radio station’s main purpose is to broadcast to the people of Iran and counter the escalating tension between that country and Israel—not to mention a wide swath of the international community—with messages of peace. “We love our brothers and sisters in Iran,” says Barkhordar, who is originally from Iran but emigrated to the U.S. before the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and moved to Israel in 1995. RadisIN takes anonymous calls from people living in Iran to discuss issues in the country and create a “bridge to unite all Persians, no matter where they live,” says Barkhordar. The station also regularly attempts to call authorities in Iran while on the air. In response, they receive nothing but “bad words and hatred,” says Barkhordar.

Continue…

Rights and Democracy: The enemy of my enemy is a listed terrorist organization

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 10:45 AM - 0 Comments

This one starts slow and will take you through some unfamiliar territory, but I think it’s the most intriguing foreign-policy story I’ve seen this week. Near the end, it features murdered nuclear scientists. Bear with me.

Today we’re going to give Aurel Braun the benefit of the doubt. Longtime Inkless readers (Hi, Mr. Braun!) will know this takes an effort of will.

Braun, as you know, is the chairman of the board of Rights and Democracy, who spent 2009 and 2010 very nearly running that organization into tatters; click on the “Rights and Democracy” tag at the bottom of this post if you’re free to spend the rest of the day catching up. (Here’s one small part of that copious file.)

But now, here’s the indefatigable Graeme Hamilton at the National Post noting that Braun, along with his fellow R&D board member David Matas, has been in Ottawa urging the government — which is, inexplicably, chock full of big big Aurel Braun fans — to consider the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK) as a potential replacement government for Iran.

This is interesting because Canada, like the United States, has long included MEK on its list of banned terrorist organizations for “assassinations, armed attacks, hostage-taking, mortar attacks and hit-and-run raids.” Continue…

World breathes sigh of relief as Romney wins Arizona, Michigan

By Richard Warnica - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 10:23 AM - 0 Comments

Mitt Romney didn’t exactly dominate in Michigan, but he did win on Tuesday, and at this point, you have to imagine that’s good enough for him. The Republican frontrunner eked out a victory in the state where he was raised, securing 41 per cent of the vote and beating back Rick Santorum, who came in a close second with 38 per cent. Romney also captured a crucial Arizona primary by a much wider 47 to 27 per cent margin. Romney admitted in the lead up to Tuesday’s vote that his penchant for talking about his own wealth was probably hurting him. Couple that with his opposition to the auto bailout, credited with saving GM and thousands of Michigan jobs, and a win, even a tight one, in the Wolverine State looks more impressive.

“For a politician who often comes across as an out-of-touch rich weenie, he has shown an ability to take some blows that will serve him well later on,” the New Yorker’s John Cassidy wrote on Tuesday night. But the real winner, Cassidy believes, was Barack Obama. Had Romney lost, the odds of a Jeb Bush or Chris Christie entering the race would only have grown.

This year, OAS cost $410 million less than the government thought

By Richard Warnica - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 10:14 AM - 0 Comments

The federal government overestimated old age security costs by hundreds of millions of dollars last year, the third time in four years the toll for the contentious program was lower than expected. From Postmedia:

A government report tabled in the House of Commons on Tuesday shows that while the government had anticipated paying out $29 billion in OAS during this fiscal year, the actual amount was $410 million less.

The report says the difference is because there were fewer beneficiaries than expected and the average payout per person was lower than projected. In addition, more beneficiaries paid back their benefits than anticipated.

The government also overestimated in 2010-11, doling out $356 million less than the initial projection of $28 billion, and in 2008-09, when it was off by $368 million.

With most of the commentariat consumed by the ongoing Robocon scandal, the National Post‘s Andrew Coyne took a break to opine on OAS on Tuesday. Exactly what he said is a bit hard to sum up. The gist, I think, is that OAS is a problem, but not a catastrophic one, and there are a number of ways in which the government could solve it.

What it takes

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 10:09 AM - 0 Comments

Roy Romanow explains why he’s supporting Brian Topp.

The Topp campaign has also released videos from Chris Charlton and Alexandre Boulerice (en francais here).

Top al-Qaeda official arrested in Cairo, maybe

By Richard Warnica - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 10:09 AM - 0 Comments

Police in Egypt arrested a man who may or may not be a leading al-Qaeda operative, depending on who you ask. From the Washington Post:

The person arrested was Egyptian-born Mohammed Ibrahim Makkawi, who authorities identified as the senior al-Qaeda leader known as Saif al-Adel (the “sword of justice” in Arabic). Makkawi was arrested at Cairo International Airport, where he was traveling on an Emirates Airline flight from Pakistan via Dubai, airport officials said.

Makkawi, however, says he cut ties with al-Qaeda decades ago, according to Reuters:

He said he had been wrongly identified as Saif al-Adel because his name had been used as an alias, but said he had severed any links to the group in 1989, shortly after the organization was set up and several years before it declared its drive against the West and those it deemed foes of Islam.

“I did not carry out any operation against any installation or individual,” said Makkawi, a former army officer in Egypt’s special forces.

The actual Saif al-Adel is thought to be one of al Qaeda’s top officials and is wanted in connection with embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya.

Billionaire Bodog founder, the son of Saskatchewan farmers, indicted in the U.S.

By Richard Warnica - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 10:03 AM - 0 Comments

Calvin Ayre, the Canadian founder of the billion-dollar Bodog brand, was indicted in the U.S. on Tuesday for allegedly running a massive Internet gambling operation. Along with three co-accused, Ayre, the son of pig farmers from Saskatchewan, was charged by prosecutors in Maryland. From the Globe:

While the U.S. has passed stiff laws against Internet gambling, a lack of comparable legislation in other jurisdictions has stifled bids to extradite out-of-country suspects to the United States for trial.

In response to the new allegations, Mr. Ayre posted his reaction on his personal website: “I see this as abuse of the U.S. criminal justice system,” he said in a statement. “….It is clear that the online gaming industry is legal under international law.”

Forbes profiled Ayre for a cover story in 2006:

From this tropical oasis [Costa Rica], Ayre has dodged and taunted those enemies, the main one being the U.S. Department of Justice. His Bodog Entertainment Group is in the not very kosher business of Web gambling. It takes bets from 16 million customers, most of them in the U.S. And that appears to violate the law–Title 18, Section 1084 of the U.S. Code–which forbids using telephones or other communication devices “in interstate or foreign commerce” in order to take bets. “Online gambling, whether it is located offshore or not, is illegal when it comes to the United States and its citizens,” says a Justice Department official who works on Internet gambling crimes.

But Bodog has no physical presence in the U.S., Ayre is not an American citizen, and the extraterritorial reach of U.S. law is not clear. Ayre, at any rate, has no assets in the U.S. for the G-men to seize.

Last year the privately held Bodog handled $7.3 billion in online wagers, triple the volume of 2004. Ayre says all this betting gave him sales of $210 million, and that he took 26% of the revenue to the bottom line. What’s his business worth? Two similar ventures that are publicly traded (in Europe) go for well over 18 times trailing earnings. At that multiple, Bodog, along with other assets, gives Ayre a net worth of at least $1 billion.

Lactose intolerant caveman had brown eyes, was predisposed to heart disease

By Richard Warnica - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 9:59 AM - 0 Comments

There are a lot of things to like about this story on the sequencing of a frozen caveman’s DNA. But nothing tops the revelation that somewhere in Europe there is an Institute for Mummies and the Iceman. If I worked there I would have my business card tattooed on my chest. “Oh that? That’s nothing, just proof I work at the INSTITUTE FOR MUMMIES AND THE ICEMAN.”

Anyway, on to the real news, from the BBC:

New clues have emerged in what could be described as the world’s oldest murder case: that of Oetzi the “Iceman”, whose 5,300-year-old body was discovered frozen in the Italian Alps in 1991.

Oetzi’s full genome has now been reported in Nature Communications.

It reveals that he had brown eyes, “O” blood type, was lactose intolerant, and was predisposed to heart disease.

They also show him to be the first documented case of infection by a Lyme disease bacterium.

He also looked like a terrifying uncle gone to seed, if this picture on the BBC is any guide.

What happened in Saanich

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 9:30 AM - 0 Comments

Global News finds that Elections Canada received 30 complaints about phone calls that conveyed false information about polling stations. The Toronto Star talks to one voter in Saanich-Gulf Islands.

It was a woman who claimed to be calling from the Conservative Party of Canada telling Hancock that his voting location had been changed from the usual location — a local school not far from his Pender Island, B.C., home — to the municipality of Saanich on Vancouver Island.

The supposed new location meant that Hancock would have to drive to the ferry dock at Otter Bay on the northwest side of Pender Island, take a 40-minute ferry ride south to Vancouver Island, and then drive another 30 kilometres to Saanich to cast his ballot. “It was very strange,” Hancock told the Star Tuesday. “When I started asking her questions, she shut me down pretty quickly and actually hung up.”

Add six more to the list

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 8:30 AM - 0 Comments

NDP MP Joe Comartin says his campaign reported four to six calls about polling station changes to the returning officer in Windsor-Tecumseh. And yesterday’s Postmedia report adds an interesting note in that regard.

There were also several complaints from New Democrats in Windsor-Tecumseh, Ont., including a call to the home of MP Joe Comartin, directing them that their polling station had moved. New Democrat volunteer Andrew McAvoy received a live call directing him to an address where there was no polling station.

Those calls came from the same number listed as the Poutine phone.

Windsor-Tecumseh isn’t referenced on Elections Canada’s list of ridings where polling station changes occurred.

Meanwhile, there are now reports of calls purporting to convey polling station changes in Mount Royal, Lac-Saint-Louis, Edmonton Centre, Kingston and the Islands and Hamilton East-Stoney Creek.