The long road home

By Erica Alini - Thursday, February 10, 2011 - 1 Comment

Whether it takes two days of queuing up, using a mannequin to keep your…

Whether it takes two days of queuing up, using a mannequin to keep your place in line, or stripping naked in the middle of the train station to protest the wait, the Chinese are determined to get home. A record 230 million people, almost seven times Canada’s population, were expected to board trains, buses and airplanes during the two weeks before the Chinese New Year, which this year falls on Feb. 3—a total of 2.85 billion trips over a 40-day period. It is the world’s largest annual human migration, and a yearly odyssey for people trying to reunite with their families for what is China’s most important festivity.

Scenes of mayhem included people waiting hours for tickets in -10° C weather, police stopping a bus designed for 48 passengers packed with 68 and, tragically, another vehicle in northwestern China slipping on icy roads and plunging into a ravine, killing 11 and injuring 22. Still, for those who got a ticket, the mood was festive, even if the trip involved a 10-hour ride and no place to sit.

Under Attack

By Malcolm Gray - Thursday, April 8, 2010 at 10:20 AM - 0 Comments

Suicide bombers bring the North Caucasus conflict to Moscow’s doorstep

Photograph by Tatyana Makeyeva/ Reuters

They struck during Moscow’s morning rush hour. On Monday, two female suicide bombers—members of a team police say may have included as many as 30 people—ignited belts of explosives in two of the city’s subway stations, killing 39 and wounding at least 70 more. The double bombings amounted to the worst terrorist attack in the Russian capital in six years. And they raised fears that the blasts could be followed by similar attacks across the country by insurgents from Russia’s south.

Agents of the Federal Security Bureau (FSB) had an uncomfortably close perspective; the first explosion, at 7:52 a.m., occurred at Lubyanka station, underneath FSB headquarters. Another detonation, three stops further south along the same line, occurred 40 minutes later. Both underscored the intelligence failures of the bureau, the successor agency to the KGB. Earlier in March, the FSB did manage to find and kill Said Buryatsky, a Muslim convert who had rapidly become the chief ideologue of the persistent Islamic insurgency in Russia’s turbulent North Caucasus. But these bombings showed that the rebels could hit back, and that armed resistance to Moscow’s rule had now spread across five republics—Ingushetia, Dagestan, North Ossetia and Kabardino-Balkaria, as well as Chechnya.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who built his enduring popularity in part through a military win in Chechnya, had characteristically tough words following the attacks—he promised to destroy those responsible. President Dmitry Medvedev took just as hard a line. “We’ll find them and we’ll eliminate them all—to dust,” he said. Medvedev had wanted to bring economic modernization and a campaign against corruption to the impoverished region. But those goals are now threatened by Kremlin hard-liners favouring a military solution. Also holding such views is Ramzan Kadyrov, the Moscow-backed Chechen strongman who has imposed a repressive regime on his republic, and called it peace. Writing in Izvestia after the bombs went off, he said: “Terrorists must be hunted down and found in their lairs; they must be poisoned like rats, crushed and destroyed.”

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He'll teach you how to train your cat

By Julia McKinnell - Monday, November 2, 2009 at 11:31 AM - 16 Comments

The really important thing, according to this professional, is to ‘get inside a cat’s mind’

Training a cat to walk a tightrope sounds preposterous to the average cat owner who can’t get their cat to come when called. Yet getting cats to jump through hoops and push dogs in buggies in front of thousands of people has earned Ukrainian-born juggler Gregory Popovich a fortune in North America and fame on Letterman and Leno.

Popovich admits that at first the notion of training house cats seemed nearly impossible “given their famously independent streak that knows no rival in the world of domestic animals.” But now, having trained dozens of stray cats to perform in six circus shows a week in Vegas, Popovich is able to share for the first time his techniques for teaching a cat everything from circus stunts to how to stop pooping outside the litter box. Continue…
Unnecessary at any speed

By Andrew Coyne - Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 1:50 PM - 84 Comments

The dream never dies, writes Andrew Coyne, because those pushing high-speed rail are impervious to reality

It is a special kind of boondoggle that even a politician can resist. People who spend other people’s money for a living aren’t in the habit of asking too many questions at the best of times, still less when even the most colossal waste of funds can be justiﬁed as “stimulus.” But when a project promises not only the usual thousands of jobs and billions in spinoff beneﬁts, but to save the earth in the bargain, you’d think they’d be falling over themselves to sign on. But some ideas, it seems, are just too insane.

Hence the latest act in the ongoing, 30-year farce known as high-speed rail. The setting this time is Alberta, but the action is always the same. A consulting ﬁrm reports, after many months and millions of dollars, that the latest scheme to link city A to city B by high-speed rail—in this case, Calgary and Edmonton—will cost billions of dollars, in fact billions more than was previously estimated. The politicians take a look at the numbers, blanch, and thank the consultants for their work. The project does not proceed. It never does. Continue…