How the Conservatives are gutting tobacco control

By Geoffrey Lansdell - Friday, May 18, 2012 at 9:41 AM - 0 Comments

Trevor Haldenby/Flickr

About a month ago, Ottawa quietly announced it was slashing $15 million from Canada’s Federal Tobacco Control Strategy, one of the many cuts to the federal budget. Haven’t seen it in the headlines much? It might be because this is far from the first time the federal Conservatives have swung the axe at the national tobacco control budget. Over the last six years, funding for the FTCS has shrunk by nearly 60 per cent, down to $28 million in fiscal 2012 from $68 million in 2006.

This year’s cuts include $16 million in grants and contributions that used to help fund over 70 national and regional anti-smoking NGOs. As a result, the government is now planning to spend only 0.9 per cent of the $3 billion in annual tax revenues it collects from tobacco sales on measures to educate Canadians about its health hazards and monitor the industry. That works out to roughly $0.81 for every Canadian. To put that in perspective, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends government spending of $12 per capita to sustain a comprehensive tobacco control program.

Health groups and tobacco control advocates, naturally, are appalled. “Consider who wins by this decision: the only winner—and they are big winners—is Big Tobacco,” says Garfield Mahood, founding executive director of the Non-Smokers’ Rights Association. “By slashing funding to health groups, the Harper government has virtually assured that tobacco companies will have the upper hand in influencing federal policy decisions.”

Unperturbed, Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq noted in a press release about the forthcoming cuts that “Canada is a world leader in tobacco control,” adding, “our government is proud of the work we have done.” Most of the country, the document continued, seems to have kicked the habit: Time to spend our money on other things. (Aglukkaq did, however, concede that smoking rates are out of control among aboriginal populations. The government’s efforts, she promised, would zero in on them. Perhaps the minister meant the government will finally issue that new strategy it promised in 2006 after it “suspended” $10 million in annual funding for the First Nations and Inuit Tobacco Control Strategy.)

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Will Facebook and its stock live up to the hype?

By Angelina Chapin - Thursday, May 17, 2012 at 7:00 PM - 0 Comments

Paul Sakuma/AP Photo

Eduardo Munoz/Reuters

After convincing more than 900 million people to post photos of themselves or gush about their personal lives, Facebook wants something more from its users and admirers: money. The company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, set out on a coast-to-coast tour pitching money managers before Facebook’s initial public offering (IPO) this week. With shares expected to be priced between $34 and $38, it is being heralded as the most anticipated tech IPO since Google’s in 2004. If the lineups during Zuckerberg’s road show are any indication, many think this is a can’t-miss opportunity.

But what happens after the initial IPO euphoria (and likely stock price jump) wears off? Despite an anticipated company valuation of up to $96 billion, there is no guarantee Facebook and its stock will live up to the hype. To the contrary, there’s growing skepticism among some analysts about Facebook’s future—and not only because Zuckerberg donned a grey hoodie during his presentations rather than more serious attire. “When you have this crowd mentality or hype over one stock, usually people get hurt,” says Greg Newman, a senior wealth adviser at ScotiaMcLeod Inc. “It’s an infectious product, but people don’t understand it has to be a good investment, too.”

There are concerns that 27-year-old Zuckerberg, who will own about 28 per cent of Facebook and a majority of voting shares under the dual class structure, might make a brash move that could take the company in the wrong direction. But a bigger fear is that Facebook lacks a game plan in a tech world that is fast changing. The Internet has entered a new phase—mobile—and Facebook is no longer king. “Facebook is built for PC,” says Eric Jackson, the founder and managing member of the technology-focused hedge fund Ironfire Capital LLC. “Things like the Timeline [a feature on the site]—that’s really something you need a big screen in front of you to look at.” This means the company is being challenged by start-ups like Instagram, a mobile photo-sharing app, which Facebook plans to acquire for $1 billion. But it can’t just keep swallowing the competition. Two other once-popular networking sites succumbed to rivals (Friendster and MySpace), and other former tech darlings, like Yahoo, have failed to live up to once-lofty ambitions and have hit hard times. What makes Facebook different?

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Avant-Garde choreographer Dana Gingras is big on ticks, kicks and shakes

By Elio Iannacci - Thursday, May 17, 2012 at 5:50 PM - 0 Comments

Yannick Grandmont

When choreographer Dana Gingras was six years old, she started dreaming of ways to escape ballet lessons. Unlike many of her friends, most of whom aspired to be prima ballerinas, Gingras was drawn to a dance style that was far less dainty. “One of my earliest memories is waiting for a class to start and watching a bunch of beautiful flamenco dancers finish their practice and exit the studio,” recalls Gingras in an interview from her home in Montreal. “I remember being very envious. These flamenco girls had better shoes, better costumes and better moves. I swore that at some point I would find a way to ditch the tutu and run off with them.”

Instead of devoting herself to Cinderella and Swan Lake, the B.C.-born talent learned modern dance through intensive summer courses at Simon Fraser University and École de danse contemporaine de Montréal. In 1993, she co-founded the Holy Body Tattoo, one of the most avant-garde dance companies in Canadian history. And in 2006, she founded her current troupe, Animals of Distinction, which often works with artists outside the field of dance. Gingras has built her reputation on projects that flirt with pop culture. Her CV includes a cinematic fan letter to Winnipeg artist Marcel Dzama—a short film called Dances for Dzama—and Smash Up, a tribute, through gesture, to musical remixes and mashups. When Montreal’s Arcade Fire asked her to choreograph the video for their song Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains), Gingras created a zombie-like dance that suited the online version, where viewers can change the characters’ moves via webcam or mouse.

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How to find your whey in the kitchen

By Cinda Chavich - Thursday, May 17, 2012 at 5:40 PM - 0 Comments

Cinda Chavich

Ella Kinloch passes me a large lump of steaming cheese curd and instructs me to start kneading. It’s seriously hot—straight out of the pot of simmering whey—and I toss it like a hot potato, my hands turning as red as boiled lobsters as I quickly twist and fold the gooey white mass. First it breaks apart like a ball of soft clay but soon it’s stretching more like Plasticine. And then it happens. “Yes, you have mozzarella,” says Kinloch, grinning. From this handful of coagulated milk, I have created my very own almost perfect, nearly shiny, ball of fresh mozzarella.

Kinloch is an amateur cheese maker. She has no dairy, no commercial cheese-making facility, no aging room. But she’s studied cheese making, apprenticed with an expert from New Jersey, took courses in Vermont and British Columbia, and, with her new Calgary-based business Make Cheese, she’s teaching foodies about making cheese at home and offering her Lotsa Motsa kits online. She’ll even come to your house for a cheese-making party.

“The cheese nights really work. There’s something about making cheese, people are just fascinated by the process,” says Kinloch, who started selling her mozzarella-making kits online before Christmas. She was staggered when 500 flew out the door in December alone. She’s since created a kit for brie and plans to add blue, Gouda and cream cheese.

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Conrad Black’s return: a Maclean’s exclusive

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 17, 2012 at 4:39 PM - 0 Comments

(Nathan Denette/CP images)

“My brave sweet duck, the night is over.” Those were the first words Conrad Black said to his wife after being released from serving a three-and-a-half year prison sentence.

In an exclusive, candid five-page essay in Maclean’s this week, Barbara Amiel tells the intimate story of the arduous years the two spent apart and the tense and tumultuous countdown to his final release.

The last week of his imprisonment—not knowing his exact release date or if he could indeed settle in Canada—was its own particular kind of torture, she says, revealing for the first time the uncertainty that went down to the wire about where the former media baron would be allowed to settle.

“On May 1, I was choosing clothes for Conrad. . . I packed a suitcase to take with me: a suit if we had to go to the U.K., a jacket for Canada, lighter clothing for Bermuda, a couple of ties and underwear. Now that ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) had decreed I couldn’t meet him at the prison, I gave up on the pretty dress thing and opted for jeans comfort and getting my hair done.”

Black returned home to Toronto on May 4 after being released from prison in Miami, where he had been serving a 42-month sentence for fraud and obstruction of justice.
As Amiel writes in the Maclean’s piece, Black began to worry that the government would rescind the Temporary Resident Permit he had been granted because of the fuss caused by opposition leader Thomas Mulcair and the ensuing storm in the media that occurred in the days before his release.

“Now wound up by the emails he had received, a frantic Conrad managed to get to the prison telephone at 6:05 a.m. and called my dedicated black Samsung whose number is programmed into the prison computer. ‘I haven’t slept at all. The government will fold,’ he said. ‘They are going to withdraw my (Temporary Resident Permit). . . . ‘I’m taking my blood pressure pills but I don’t know how much more of this I can take before I have a stroke.’ I’m the drama queen in this family.,” Amiel writes. “When Conrad worries about a stroke you know he is in difficulty.”

Now at home in Toronto, Amiel writes of cooking for her husband as he regains his health and gets accustomed once more to life outside. “He hasn’t got back enough strength in his leg yet to easily walk the dogs any length of time but that will come. I had to remind him how to use a Toronto telephone and how to drive a keyless car. It’s all new.”

The full exclusive account from Barbara Amiel is in the latest issue of Maclean’s.

Good news, bad news: May 11-17, 2012

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 17, 2012 at 4:00 PM - 0 Comments

Good news

Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah/Reuters

Take it from us

It’s not polite to gloat, but we’ll still point out that Canada is the only country in the Americas—and one of the few in the world—that still has its triple-A bond rating. It was from this perch that Finance Minister Jim Flaherty took the opportunity to scold Europe this week, saying it needs to “show courage” to tackle its banking crisis and use taxpayer money to rescue weaker eurozone countries. He’s right, of course. Failure in Europe would slam the global economy, and after years of little progress, it’s time for bold, decisive action.

Bag it and tag it

Toronto’s embattled Mayor Rob Ford has a new cause: scrapping Toronto’s five-cent plastic bag fee. Retailers collect more than $5 million a year charging for bags and the money simply goes to the companies—it is not earmarked for green initiatives. The Retail Council of Canada says consumers “like doing their part.” But plastic bags are themselves easily recycled—more than 75 per cent of shoppers reuse their bags two or more times, according to Decima Research. The real effect of the fee is to hike grocery bills, and in these uncertain economic times, who likes that?

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Newsmakers: May 11-17, 2012

By Jonathon Gatehouse, Alex Ballingall, Nicholas Köhler, Martin Patriquin and Michael Friscolanti - Thursday, May 17, 2012 at 4:00 PM - 0 Comments

Andrew Testa/Rex Features

Students: 1, government: 0

In the first major political casualty of Quebec’s three-month standoff between students and the provincial government, education minister Line Beauchamp has resigned. Beauchamp, who also resigned as vice-premier and MNA, was the incarnation of government intransigence in the face of the strike, which students have waged over proposed university tuition increases. In April, after reaching a tentative agreement with the student associations, Beauchamp boasted how her government hadn’t backed down from its demands during negotiations—a move many saw as the reason the deal fell through. Perhaps more embarrassing, however, was La Presse’s recent revelation that mobster Domenico Arcuri had attended a Liberal fundraiser hosted by Beauchamp in 2009. Michelle Courchesne, who Beauchamp replaced as education minister in 2010, is now back in the hot seat.

Aging baller

Long before he was named general manager of the Toronto Blue Jays, Alex Anthopoulos was in charge of something else: opening fan mail for the Montreal Expos. On weekends. For no pay. Back in those days, most of the adoring envelopes were addressed to Vladimir Guerrero, an all-star outfielder entering the prime of a Hall of Fame career that would peak during his years as an Anaheim Angel. Today, a decade after being promoted from the mailroom, Anthopoulos is in charge of Canada’s other baseball team—and Guerrero is heading back to Canada. Hoping to inject some veteran wallop into the Jays’ lineup, Anthopoulos signed the aging superstar to a US$1.3-million deal. Now 37, Guerrero will spend a few weeks getting into game shape at the team’s minor league training complex in Florida. If all goes well he should be in the Rogers Centre batter’s box by June. No word yet on who will open his fan mail.

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Week in pictures May 9 – 15, 2012

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 17, 2012 at 3:48 PM - 0 Comments

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Week in pictures May 9 – 15, 2012

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Waltham, Massachusetts

Women stand on a performer, who calls himself 'The Human Floor,' as he lays on a bed of broken glass at the Watch City Festival celebrating Steampunk--a movement that explores the notion of what the world might look like had modern technology been available at the turn of the 20th century--on May 13, 2012. (Jessica Rinaldi/Reuters)

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Charest invokes ‘special law’ to suspend semesters in Quebec’s boycotted schools

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, May 16, 2012 at 9:14 PM - 0 Comments

Quebec premier Jean Charest announced a law on Wednesday night to suspend classes 11 universities and 14 CEGEPS across the province currently affected by student boycotts.

CTV reports:

In a bid to end a 14-week conflict with students, Charest stood alongside Education Minister Michelle Courchesne as he announced that the school’s impacted by student boycotts would be closed until August. Students would be able to finish their winter semesters by September.

The time to take action on Toronto G20 summit security was 2009

By Alan Parker - Wednesday, May 16, 2012 at 5:13 PM - 0 Comments

Darren Calabrese/CP Images

The various reports now blasting police crowd control measures and violations of civil rights during the G20 fiasco in Toronto in 2010 are a classic case of closing the barn door after the horse has left.

Any I-told-you-sos now are a day late and a dollar short — actually two years too late and tens of millions of dollars off the mark.

The time to take action for any person holding a relevant responsible position — Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair, then-Mayor David Miller, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty and Jim Flaherty, the federal cabinet minister with responsibility for Toronto — was in 2009, a year before the June 2010 summit ravaged the city’s core.

It should have been obvious to the planners of the event then that middle of Canada’s largest city, the financial heart of the nation, was not the place to hold a gathering of world leaders that was guaranteed to attract swarms of violent protesters bent on mayhem and confrontation.

And if the bureaucratic party planners were too cowed by the demands of an overbearing prime minister to nay-say his commands, then those aforementioned responsible, representative leaders should have stood up and said ‘No’ to a surefire disaster-in-the-making.

Originally the G20 summit was supposed to be held in locked-down Muskoka with the G8 summit — until the big brains in Ottawa suddenly realized Huntsville wasn’t going to be able to handle the tens of thousands of G20 summiteers, hangers-on and observers.

Thus the switch to Toronto for the G20 portion of the combined billion-dollar photo op.

That was the first time — and almost certainly will be the only time — the G8 and G20 summits were held in conjunction.

This year’s G8 gathering will be held in the fortified presidential compound of Camp David outside Washington, D.C., this weekend. The summit had been originally slated for Chicago but far wiser heads than those attached to the bodies of the Toronto G20 planners prevailed.

And the 2012 G20 summit will be hosted by Mexico in mid-June on the isolated, defensible Baja California peninsula. It will be a quiet, peaceful, safe venue for world leaders to meet and discuss important affairs of state — even in a country torn apart by violence, crime, corruption and mass murder.

But it’s not as if the U.S. and Mexico are learning the right way to do things from Toronto’s bitter experience. Everyone involved in the planning of Toronto 2010 knew — or should have known — that mass demonstrations and outbreaks of violence have plagued every G8 and G20 gathering in the 21st Century. They had a decade to see the pattern and avoid repeating it.

But they didn’t.

Whether it was misplaced national pride or overweening personal willfulness, the decision was made to forge ahead toward a known, anticipated disaster. General Custer, meet the Titanic.

There is more than enough blame to be handed out in post-mortem reports and debates.

But the real blame — the real shame — should be attached to those politicians, bureaucrats and civic leaders who knew better than to let the G20 summit go ahead in Toronto, but allowed it to happen anyway.

Virgin Atlantic to allow passengers to use cell phones in flight

By Alan Parker - Wednesday, May 16, 2012 at 3:58 PM - 0 Comments

Wayan Vota/Flickr

Virgin Atlantic has announced it will soon allow passengers to make in-flight phone calls on their personal mobile devices. The service will initially be available only on Virgin Atlantic’s A330 service between London and New York, but will be offered on at least 10 of its routes by the end of 2012. Other airlines won’t be far behind.

And that will be the end of the last refuge on earth — or 30,000 feet above it — from the tentacled control of telephones over our lives.

It used to be — in the good old days — that even the most hardened business traveller and tech junkie was forced to switch off his or her cell phone at the boarding gate and spend the next six or 10 or 16 hours cut off from that constantly pumping umbilical connection with the rest of the world.

Whether they would admit it or not, most of them found the enforced abstinence a blessed relief.

As for the rest of us without a telephone addiction, there has always been a special letting-go feeling of being cocooned  in that metal tube hurtling through time and space with only the most tenuous connection to the earthly  concerns of our daily lives.

Of course there were always the wailing babies and expansive seat mates, but that’s a different form of encroachment — almost a life-affirming intimacy — than the telephonic intrusiveness that now pervades coffee shops, elevators, restaurants and most public spaces, even theatre performances.

I do not want to be trapped on a seven-hour flight from Heathrow to Pearson with the person beside me droning endlessly into his cellphone about his chihuahua’s scabies and the person in front of me engaging in a loud, soul-destroying argument about technical specifications with a colleague on the other side of the world.

I want my seven-hour cocoon trajectory back. And that’s just for an Atlantic crossing. I simply can’t image how noisesomely awful a flight across the Pacific will be a year or two from now when everyone is allowed to chatter incessantly on their iPhones and BlackBerries all the way from Vancouver to Hong Kong.

If long-distance airline flights are now a form of moving purgatory, the addition of cell phone cacophony will make them a living hell.

Augusten Borroughs’ anti-self-help book

By Julia McKinnell - Wednesday, May 16, 2012 at 11:55 AM - 0 Comments

Raincoast Books

Repeating positive affirmations such as “I’m a loveable person” may boost the spirits of already happy people, but it can leave sad people feeling worse, according to research by psychologists at the University of Waterloo and the University of New Brunswick. It made perfect sense to American memoirist Augusten Burroughs when he read about the study in 2009.

In an interview last week, Burroughs said the Canadian findings went “right into what I instinctively felt, which was that affirmations are completely absurd.” The research is the starting point for Burroughs’s new book, a truly different self-help guide called This is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More.

“The truth is, it is not going to help to stand in front of a mirror, look into your own eyes, and lie to yourself,” he writes. Burroughs would know. His 2002 bestseller Running With Scissors is a fearlessly honest account of a bizarre childhood with a mother who sent him to live with her psychiatrist; its follow-up, Dry, is a squirmingly detailed account of his near fatal addiction to alcohol.

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China’s awkward position: on both sides of the Sudanese civil war

By Jared Ferrie - Wednesday, May 16, 2012 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

Kazuhiro Ibuki/Getty Images

The missile fired by a Sudanese fighter jet on April 15 slammed harmlessly into the earth on the outskirts of the South Sudanese town of Bentiu. The air strike was just one of many that have landed in South Sudan in recent weeks, and it would have been relatively insignificant except for one thing—rocket fragments showed Chinese characters. That’s hardly a surprise. China, after all, has long supplied arms to Sudan. But as the border clashes in April brought Sudan and the newly independent South Sudan to the brink of all-out war, the rocket highlighted China’s increasingly awkward position.

Beijing has poured billions into the oil industry in Sudan. Its stake in Sudanese oil is forcing China to move from its long-standing policy of staying out of the affairs of faraway lands. China doesn’t have much of a choice in the matter. If war erupts, it risks having to walk away from its sizable investment in the countries’ oil fields.

China is the largest buyer of oil from the two Sudans, the former civil war foes turned troubled neighbours, and Beijing now finds itself with substantial investments on both sides of a volatile border, trying to make peace between the two. For China, non-interference is “still is one of the bedrocks of their foreign policy,” said Zach Vertin, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group.

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Where do you stand on Quebec student strikes?

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 at 5:27 PM - 0 Comments

Leonard Cohen honoured as ninth laureate of the Glenn Gould Prize

By Marni Jackson - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 at 2:30 PM - 0 Comments

Chris Young/CP Image

A slight figure in a grey suit with one hand clasped to his chest came on stage last night to greet a full house at Massey Hall, where he was receiving the $50,000 Glenn Gould Prize for a lifetime of achievement in the arts.

“My remarks will be mercifully short,” Leonard Cohen began, “because I want to hear the music.” And no wonder: the line-up waiting to honour Cohen included John Prine, the Cowboy Junkies, Serena Ryder, Blue Rodeo’s Greg Keelor, and Cohen’s son Adam, with spoken tributes by Michael Ondaatje, Adrienne Clarkson, Melissa Auf Der Maur and Alan Rickman. Closing Time was a long ways off.

Then Cohen described one of his own encounters with the world’s greatest classical pianist.

Early in his career, he managed to wangle a magazine  interview with Glenn Gould. The two met, started to talk, and Cohen “began scribbling away”. The conversation deepened, Cohen abandoned his notes, and several intricate, rich hours went by. “I felt the words were embedded in my soul,” said Cohen.

“Then I got back to my little room on Mountain St. in Montreal, ready to write the story, and I couldn’t remember a thing.” He spent the next few weeks avoiding phone calls from the editor. The article never appeared.

Leonard Cohen, Failed Journalist. Who knew?

One of the many things we can thank Leonard for (we’re all on a first name basis with him) is the tone he establishes at events like these.  It could have been a stuffy evening of long-winded speeches. But Leonard always cuts to the chase, keeping his remarks personal, lighthearted and modest. He is also generous, donating his prize money to the Canada Council for the Arts.

That set the tone for an evening that, apart from a few musical dips, was magical, brimming with affection for the man, the poet and the musician.  Sitting in the balcony behind a funny little swag of blue bunting like royalty, Leonard gave every appearance of enjoying himself, doffing his fedora to the performers. Early on, he also let the musicians off the hook, saying “Please don’t be nervous  about playing for me— I tend to go into paroxysms of gratitude whenever I hear anyone singing a song of mine.”

Greg Keelor of Blue Rodeo took him at his word, and immediately fluffed a few lines in his otherwise wonderful version, backed by Travis Good of The Sadies, of “Famous Blue Raincoat”.

Other musical highlights included Cohen’s musical collaborater Anjani Thomas. In a blush-coloured silk blouse, still and slim as a flute of wine, Anjani brought a poet’s economy to the way she sang “Crazy to Love You”, from the new album “Old Ideas”. At the opposite end of the spectrum was the rough, true timbre of John Prine who did himself proud on the hard-to-sing “Bird on a Wire”.  Author Michael Ondaatje spoke about how important Cohen’s first novel, “The Favourite Game” was to him as a writer.  Newly arrived from England, Ondaatje noticed that books and films were always set elsewhere, never in Canada.  “But that book, and its main characters Breavman and Krantz, mapped Montreal for me”, he said, going on to read a hilarious passage from the 1963 novel about the dullness of the Canadian prime minister. (A timeless theme, evidently.)

The musical highlight of the evening for me was Serena Ryder.  Her big, joyful voice and her attack on the guitar turned the normally delicate composition “Sisters of Mercy” into a full-blooded raunchy version of the song.  It was about time in the evening for something sexy, too.

Matching Cohen in the voices-from-the-bottom-of-the-sea department was actor Alan Rickman, who delivered the most gorgeous reading of the evening. The bite, the wit and the unflinchingness of Cohen’s poetry was all there in Rickman’s exquisite rendering.

The night ended with Cohen’s 39 year old son Adam playing guitar, singing – and coaxing the audience to sing along too – on “So Long Marianne”.  Several decades back, when many considered Leonard Cohen’s voice a joke and his writing too gloomy, the Montreal folksinger wrote this little break-up song with its strangely cheerful chorus, urging us to laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again.

Now here was his grown son and a concert hall full of fans, singing it back to him.

I hope he still likes the song!

All of this unfolded in the aging but still resonant Massey Hall – the Leonard Cohen of venues. As another Canadian songwriter might put it, long may they both run

REVIEW: Sacré bleu: a comedy d’art

By Mike Doherty - Monday, May 14, 2012 at 11:38 AM - 0 Comments

What if Vincent van Gogh didn’t commit suicide, but was murdered by a little old man with a cane and a bowler hat? And what if this murderer—known as the Colorman—were in some nefarious way associated with the history of art and the production of the Old Masters’ paint? Sacré Bleu starts with this oddball premise and gets progressively weirder: it’s a supernatural detective story, an art-historical tribute to the colour blue, and a ribald romp through belle époque Paris—with sidetrips to Michelangelo’s Italy, the building of Hadrian’s Wall, and the Stone Age.

The Ohio-born Moore, known for his bestselling series of “yuppie vampire” books such as You Suck and Bite Me, also rewrites literature and history from the point of view of made-up, or reimagined, minor characters. His novel Lamb introduces us to Christ’s “childhood pal” Biff; Fool is told by King Lear’s Blackadder-like jester, Pocket; and Sacré Bleu shows us the lives of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters as seen through the lens of young baker and aspiring painter Lucien Lessard.

Lucien, an idealist in a decadent era, joins forces with Henri de Toulouse Lautrec—in Moore’s hands, a marvellously dissolute comic creation—to look into van Gogh’s murder. While moving through the realms of high art and the dinginess of the demimonde, Lucien and Henri encounter a number of suspiciously perfect muses and explore the sources of artistic inspiration—both aesthetic and priapic. The bleu in the title is both Monet’s ultramarine and the raciness of a blue movie.

Granted, Moore’s enterprise is somewhat silly, but he finds the right mix of homage and off-the-wall irreverence, bringing to earthy life a group of painters whose work is often derided as crowd-pleasing and pretty. But who exactly is the Colorman? We’re not telling. Zut alors!

Pull that wedding dress out of the closet

By Joanne Latimer - Monday, May 14, 2012 at 10:44 AM - 0 Comments

Carmine Marinelli/QMI Agency

Alyssa Fraser is getting married in June, but she’s already planning her second big day, when she wears her wedding dress again just for the hell of it. Fraser will be surrounded by friends wearing their wedding dresses, too. “We’re having a brunch in August, in the Distillery District, with cupcakes and that wine with the stiletto on the label,” said Fraser, 25, a Toronto public relations professional and proud owner of a $3,400 organza and silk dress by Canadian designer Lea-Ann Belter. “Four of my girlfriends are getting married this summer and we’re all obsessed with the idea of wearing our dresses again. We’re even hiring a photographer for the brunch.”

Teacher Elizabeth Anne Crisolago is organizing a Wear Your Wedding Dress Again party in October. “Why would you spend so much money on something and only wear it once?” said Crisolago, 25, an Italian-Canadian from Toronto who is appalled by the trash-your-dress movement, where brides wreck their wedding dresses during photo sessions. “I could never destroy something so special.” She chose her $1,400 dream dress from the Disney Fairy Tale Weddings & Honeymoons bridal collection by Alfred Angelo. Even though she’s only 4 foot 11, she likes dramatic things, so she decided on Belle’s dress from Beauty and the Beast. “I wanted a big gown,” she says. “I’ve been dreaming about my dress since I was seven years old.”

The dress, sheathed in a hand-sewn gauze cocoon for protection, hangs in its own room at her grandmother’s house, where it will stay until the September ceremony. The details for its second debut are not set, but she wants a party at a hall with every other bride she can muster, along with champagne and hors d’oeuvres. “It’s not just a way to re-enact your princess moment,” she explained. “It’s a way to enjoy the dress without the stress of the real wedding day. The pressure’s off.”

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Good news, bad news: May. 3-10, 2012

By macleans.ca - Monday, May 14, 2012 at 10:22 AM - 0 Comments

Good news

David J. Phillip/AP

Never bin better

One year after a special-forces mission killed Osama bin Laden, his al-Qaeda network is looking downright defeated. In Guantánamo Bay, military prosecutors opened their landmark case—2,973 counts of capital murder—against the 9/11 ringleaders, including the brains of the operation, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. In Yemen, an air strike killed Fahd al-Quso, one of the terrorists behind the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole. And in Washington, intelligence officials are patting themselves on the backs after thwarting yet another “underwear bomber” who planned to target an American passenger jet.

Outswimming climate change

A ski resort in Aspen, Colo., hosted a race this week—minus the snow. The all-grass gimmick was one of hundreds of events around the world aimed at “connecting the dots” on global warming. “The main point is that climate change is already happening,” said one organizer. The good news? Polar bears are ready for the warm front. A new study has found that female polar bears are actually quite capable of swimming vast distances between ice floes; one animal, tracked with a GPS collar, swam an astonishing 354 km.

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Jury finds Michael Rafferty guilty on all counts

By macleans.ca - Friday, May 11, 2012 at 10:25 PM - 0 Comments

Michael Rafferty is no longer an alleged child killer. He is a convicted one.

After a marathon day of deliberations, a jury in London, Ont., reached a guilty verdict Friday night against the man who kidnapped, sexually assaulted and murdered eight-year-old Victoria (Tori) Stafford more than three years ago. The verdict, which carries an automatic sentence of life behind bars with no chance of parole for 25 years, was the climax of a dramatic trial that began on March 5—but did not actually include some of the most damning evidence collected by police.

Because of a faulty search warrant, the judge did not allow prosecutors to show the jury what investigators found on Rafferty’s laptop, including reams of heinous child pornography and Google searches for things like “real underage rape.” In the end, though, the evidence the jury did see proved more than enough. As the jury foreman read the first verdict—”Guilty”—Rafferty closed his eyes.

Behind him, some of Tori’s relatives sobbed uncontrollably.
Sources:
The Globe

The Star

Au revoir, austerity

By Michael Petrou with Stavroula Logothettis - Friday, May 11, 2012 at 2:05 PM - 0 Comments

Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images

Among the casualties of national elections in France and Greece last weekend, Nicolas Sarkozy’s now-finished career is a comparatively insignificant footnote. The outgoing French president suffered a historic defeat, becoming only the second incumbent presidential candidate to lose in half a century when he fell to the Socialists’ François Hollande. But the election wasn’t really about the two men—or at least it wasn’t about Hollande, the bland and modest lifelong politician who possesses little of Sarkozy’s flair and mercurial arrogance.

What is really at stake in France, and across Europe, are competing visions about how the continent might recover from a crushing financial crisis.

In December, 25 of 27 European Union states agreed to a “fiscal compact” to coordinate financial policies and enforce budgetary discipline. But these austerity measures are deeply unpopular in parts of Europe with soaring unemployment and sizzling social unrest. Greece is regularly rattled by strikes and protests. Millions of Spaniards have flooded public squares to protest public spending cuts and record levels of joblessness. In France, where unemployment hovers around 10 per cent, even modest pension reforms provoked massive demonstrations.

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Boris Johnson of London vs. Toronto’s Rob Ford: One bumbles, one fumbles

By Leah McLaren - Friday, May 11, 2012 at 2:05 PM - 0 Comments

Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP (left); Frank Gunn/CP (right)

Consider for a moment the improbable parallels between the newly re-elected mayor of London, Boris Johnson, and Toronto’s scandal-embroiled leader, Rob Ford. Both are outspoken, gaffe-prone conservatives with a clownish fallibility that is as appealing to voters as it is often appalling. Both have been underestimated to the ultimate detriment of their political opponents and are defined by their obsession with bikes. (Johnson rides his everywhere while Ford would like to see them more or less banned from the roads.) Both loathe unions and graffiti, love senior citizens and commuters and never saw a tax they didn’t want to cut. Even their names lend themselves to similar diminutives: BoJo and RoFo. Creepy, huh?

Their similarities even extend to their oddly distinctive looks. Zaftig, rumple-suited and childishly tow-headed, the two men share a squishable Pillsbury Doughboy quality that belies a deeper ambition and steel. To the unacquainted, both mayors appear vulnerable and as slow-moving as overfed lab rats, and yet each managed to storm city hall on his first attempt despite the cards being stacked against him. More remarkable still, both accomplished this feat in roughly the same way—by tirelessly courting the outlying edges of their respective cities rather than the downtown core. Here in London, political commentators described this effect as the “Boris doughnut,” while in downtown Toronto, they call it “revenge of the suburbs.” In both cases, appealing to the suburbs is a strategy that’s worked well—in Johnson’s case twice. Last week the London mayor was re-elected over his Labour rival Ken Livingstone by a narrow three percentage point margin, a crucial win for the British Tories who were otherwise humiliated in recent local elections across the country.

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Fantastical dreams of something for nothing

By From the editors - Friday, May 11, 2012 at 1:41 PM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Roger LeMoyne

Last week voters in France and Greece turned their backs on fiscal discipline, preferring the illusion that it’s not necessary to fix their own problems. As Senior Writer Michael Petrou explains in his story on the EU crisis (“Europe votes its troubles away,” page 26), austerity and responsibility are not always the most attractive ballot options.

This week, university students in Quebec will put their own grasp of reality to the test. After several months of often-violent protests against planned tuition fee increases, Quebec students are voting on the government’s latest proposal that maintains the hikes but creates a new and fairer system for student loan repayment. Early reaction from students opposing the plan suggests reality will once again be stymied. For now.

It is beyond debate that a university degree provides substantial economic benefits to the holder. The average after-tax income boost enjoyed by a university graduate is on the order of $15,000. Per year. Society at large may benefit from a well-educated workforce, but these gains are disproportionately weighted toward students themselves. It’s only proper students pay their fair share.

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REVIEW: Darwin’s devices: what evolving robots can teach us about the history of life and the future of technology

By Peter Shawn Taylor - Thursday, May 10, 2012 at 10:23 AM - 0 Comments

Why are blue marlin faster than tuna? This innocuous question sets Vassar College biologist Long off on a meandering investigation through evolution, robotics and, eventually, the future of warfare.

Long’s observations on the differing swimming speeds of marlin and tuna lead him to wonder how the characteristics of a species’ spinal column could affect their evolutionary prospects. Unfortunately, questions about evolution are easier to come by than answers: a single scientist is rarely able to compile enough data over a lifetime to make conclusive pronouncements. Long decides to speed up this process using robots.

Picking a species of tadpole larvae as their test subjects, Long and his research team construct a series of swimming machines called Tadros. These simple mechanical beings look like floating plastic pots with tails; a photo sensor and some circuitry directs the tail to swim toward light—behaviour that is meant to mimic the search for food. The scientists vary the characteristics of the Tadros’ tail and award points based on the ability to swim efficiently and move quickly toward a food source.

Calculations about the first generation allows the scientists to select the fittest Tadros. These characteristics are then “bred” into subsequent generations constructed in the lab. And so on. After several generations, Long figures the results should reveal the impact of evolution on spine length and stiffness. For added realism, predators are later added to the mix. Things are rarely simple or easy in Long’s quest, but he eventually comes to some intriguing conclusions about the efficacy of robotic discovery, and how the military could incorporate robots into the business of war. (His research is partly funded by the U.S. Navy.)

Long’s trials, errors and successes should prove enlightening to anyone interested in evolution or the future of robotics. Casual readers should be warned, however. The discussion can get quite technical (be prepared for terms such as cycloptic helical klinotaxis) and Long’s determination to name every colleague or grad student who ever helped slows down the narrative.

Can’t afford to own a race horse? Buy a share of it.

By Katie Lamb - Thursday, May 10, 2012 at 10:11 AM - 0 Comments

Charles Bertram/Herald-Leader

Ray Bouchard always loved horse races and for the past 37 years he’s watched his thoroughbreds run for small purses at Manitoba’s blue-collar raceway, Assiniboia Downs. But the farm equipment dealer from Winnipeg had every racing fan’s biggest dream come true when Animal Kingdom, a horse he part-owns, won the 2011 Kentucky Derby, which many consider “the most exciting two minutes in sport.” Along with the horse’s 19 other owners, Bouchard took home a piece of the US$2.1-million prize. “The experience of walking onto the infield of Churchill Downs and 170,000 people are cheering and looking at the winner’s circle and you’re sitting in it—it’s a surreal feeling,” recalls Bouchard. He is only the third Canadian to own a Derby winner.

Exactly how a Winnipeg tractor salesman found himself in such exalted company is the result of a fundamental shift in the world of international horse racing. A growing number of Wall Street-style investment partnerships have sprung up to allow investors to buy shares in horses and have a slice of a world once only accessible to sheiks and oil tycoons. It’s a booming industry that has attracted the likes of Canadian billionaire Frank Stronach. And while the investment stakes are high, for some horse racing enthusiasts, like Bouchard, the chance to own even a small share of a horse in the “run for the roses” in Kentucky is worth the risk.

There’s a reason it’s nicknamed the sport of kings: with training fees, vet bills, transportation and insurance, maintaining a racehorse adds up to roughly $40,000 a year. And that doesn’t include the horse’s purchase price. But the partnerships, which are set up like pooled investment funds for horses, are democratizing the sport similar to the way mutual funds brought stock investing to the masses. “It’s getting into the sport at the upper echelons in an affordable manner,” says Bouchard, who co-owns last year’s winner through an ownership syndicate called Team Valor International, which sells shares in some of its horses starting at $6,000.

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