Newsmakers of the week

Dame tracking

Elizabeth Taylor, 77, who was in the hospital last week for a routine visit, has “fallen in love” with Twitter according to her spokesman Dick Guttman. From her bed, using the moniker Dame Elizabeth, Taylor told her followers (22,500 and counting) that she was “counting the days” until the opening of Michael Jackson’s concert series in London, that she recently enjoyed “delicious tomatoes” grown in her garden, and that she watched the movie Twilight on DVD and “wants more!” On Friday, in a personal tweet to her good friend, former Sports Illustrated model Kathy Ireland, she thanked her for the beautiful flowers and the prayers, and requested that Ireland find a way to sneak her puppy past hospital security. “It’s not true that I love animals more than people,” she wrote earlier that day of her famous love of animals. “They are a very close second.”

Of swastikas and good parenting

A couple in Winnipeg who drew international attention after their young daughter turned up at school last year with white supremacist symbols, including Nazi swastikas, drawn on her body, began their legal battle for custody of their children this week. The couple, who can’t be named under provincial law, will argue that Manitoba Child and Family Services had no right to seize their daughter and son from their home. “I believe there is no legal basis for the children having been apprehended,” the boy’s father (and the girl’s stepfather) wrote in an affidavit. But the government agency is seeking guardianship of the siblings, alleging that the girl told authorities that her mother had taught her that “black people just need to die because this is a white world,” and that if she ever made any non-white friends, her mother would disown her. Social workers also allege that the couple abuse drugs and alcohol and are physically abusive toward the children. But the father insists he and his wife are model guardians and that the seizure of his kids over the swastika incident is a violation of his freedom of conscience, belief and association under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. “In my opinion,” he wrote, “both [their mother] and I were excellent parents.”

Idol threat

Clay Aiken, American Idol’s season two runner-up, landed in hot water for slamming eyeliner-worshipping Adam Lambert, this season’s runner-up, on the subscription-only section of his website, which he charges his fans US$29.95 per year to access. “Now that it’s all over, and for the record,” Aiken wrote, “I couldn’t be happier about the way AI ended this year.” When he saw Lambert performing his rendition of Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire earlier in the season, he wrote, he “thought his ears would bleed,” adding that the song was “contrived, awful, and slightly frightening!” Aiken’s post was reproduced on the gossip site Gawker and on message boards: hard-core Lambert fans quickly smelled professional jealousy. Vigorous Clay-bashing ensued. The next day, Aiken posted a lengthy explanation and an apology for his “colourful choice of words.” “I obviously meant it as a colourful statement to imply that I did not enjoy what I heard,” he wrote, adding that it wasn’t intended as “a ‘slam’ on Adam as a person.”

Pipe dreams

Philippe Lucas, a Victoria city councillor, put forth the suggestion last week that the city should distribute free crack pipes to addicts, arguing that the kits could go a long way in reducing the spread of hepatitis C. Lucas, who himself contracted the infectious disease 27 years ago through a blood transfusion, says that roughly 70 per cent of the city’s drug users have it, and that it’s spreading quickly through shared, makeshift pipes. “I hate the idea of anyone at all having to deal with the hepatitis C that I’ve dealt with when the spread is entirely preventable in terms of drug use,” he told his colleagues. Council will debate the matter in June.

Shatner wars

Canadian William Shatner, Star Trek’s original Captain James T. Kirk, is the star of a new book by Jeff Burk called Shatnerquake, a fictional tale about a fan-rigged device that brings all of Shatner’s dramatic alter egos to life—Kirk, T.J. Hooker, Boston Legal’s Denny Crane, Priceline Shatner and even Singing Shatner—and sees them pitted against each other in a bloody battle to the death. In his opening remarks, author Burk praises Shatner for being the “quintessential postmodern man” for making his entire life “an elaborate work of performance art.” He ends with: “P.S. Please don’t sue me.”

No hiding in Canada

In a landmark decision on Friday, Désiré Munyaneza, 42, became the first person to be convicted under Canada’s updated Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act, which allows residents to be tried for war crimes committed in other nations. Quebec Judge André Denis found Munyaneza, an ethnic Hutu who came to Canada in 1997, guilty of seven counts related to crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes against Tutsi civilians during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. “Désiré Munyaneza specifically intended to destroy the Tutsi ethnic group in Butare and in the surrounding communes,” the judge said. “To that end, he intentionally killed Tutsi, seriously wounded others, caused them serious physical and mental harm, sexually assaulted many Tutsi women and generally treated Tutsi inhumanely and degradingly.” Rwandan genocide survivors in Canada, who have paid close attention to the case, expressed great relief. “We have been waiting for this,” César Gashabizi, a survivor, told the CBC. “Nobody comes to Canada to hide.”