Newsmakers of the week

Seal of approval

Inuit leaders are delighted by the positive publicity that Governor General Michaëlle Jean has attracted to the seal hunt ever since she appeared on camera last week snacking on a freshly slaughtered pup. During a visit to Nunavut, Jean partook in the skinning of a seal with a traditional ulu blade, and sampled a piece of its heart, calling it “fresh” and “delicious.” (According to Jean, this delicacy has the texture of sushi, but with a meatier taste.) One restaurant in Montreal told the CBC that sales of its seal appetizer have doubled since the video emerged. Adrienne Clarkson—in Nunavut last week, like Jean, for a symposium hosted by her husband John Raulston Saul—doesn’t see what the big deal is. She’s been eating raw food in the region for almost 40 years, and it never made headline news. “It’s nothing new to me, okay?” she told reporters. “I have a lovely sealskin coat . . . I’ve eaten raw food since 1971—and there you are.”

She said she wanted a revolution

For the first time since Sara Jane Moore, 77, was imprisoned for attempting to assassinate president Gerald Ford in 1975, she admitted last week that her actions were “a serious error.” Back in the mid-’70s, Moore, then a 45-year-old single mother, says she became caught up in the anti-Vietnam War protest movement in California. “I became immersed in it,” she told Matt Lauer, the host of NBC’s Today Show. “We were saying the country needed change. I genuinely thought that [shooting Ford] might trigger that new revolution in this country.” It was on Sept. 22, 1975, that Moore fired on Ford as he greeted a crowd in San Francisco. She missed his head by mere feet. After serving 32 years in jail, six of which she spent in solitary confinement, Moore was released on parole in 2007. Over time, she said, she “began to realize that I had let myself be used.” When host Lauer asked her why she was speaking out now, she said, “I think that one gets tired of being thought of as a kook, a monster, an alien.”

Girl power

In a bid to appeal to reformists and women voters, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, hoping to take the Iranian presidency from current title-holder Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has vowed to disband the “morality police” and reform laws that discriminate against women if he wins the June 12 election. “We should empower women financially,” he told an all-female crowd of supporters. “Women should be able to choose their professions according to their merits.” Most notable of all to observers is that Mousavi is campaigning with his wife, Dr. Zahra Rahnavard, who was, until recently, the chancellor of Alzahra University in Tehran. “No prime minister or president of the Islamic Republic has ever done that,” a prominent Iranian women’s rights activist told the Guardian.

Kim Jong-who?

Newspapers in South Korea are reporting that Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s dictatorial leader, has officially chosen a successor: his youngest son, Kim Jong Un, said to be the son who most resembles the Dear Leader himself. Little is known of the younger Kim, except that he was born in 1983 or 1984, he enjoys skiing, and he studied English, German and French at a Swiss school. His perspective on his country’s controversial nuclear program remains, like his father, a total mystery.

Jon & Kate plus spite

Rumours of adultery and discord swirling around TLC’s Jon & Kate Plus 8 stars Jon and Kate Gosselin may not be great for the family, but they’ve provided a welcome boost for the tabloid magazine Us Weekly, according to its editor Janice Min. Min, who has put the Gosselins on the cover for the past six weeks straight, told the New York Post that the story has given their newsstand sales a huge boost: “The thing I loved about it is that it introduced new celebrities to the world of celebrity journalism.” But not all of the attention the Gosselins are attracting is career-friendly. Last week, the Pennsylvania Department of Labour reported that, following a complaint it received, it is investigating the show to ensure that it complies with the state’s child labour laws.

Titanic screw-up

Canadian director James Cameron, 54, has reportedly been named in a lawsuit after a member of his staff, Oscar Escalante, allegedly crashed a car belonging to Cameron into an electricity pole, causing a three-day power outage and costing the U.S.-based Western General Insurance Company US$125,000 in lost income. According to gossip peddlers TMZ.com, both Cameron and Escalante are being sued for negligence. The Oscar-winning director’s long-awaited follow-up to Titanic—a 3D film called Avatar, four years in the making—is widely held to be the most anticipated film of 2009.