Newsmakers

The Bill comes due
For US$5 you can spend a day in New York with Bill Clinton. The former president is raffling himself off in a bid to clear “a few vestiges of debt” left over from his wife Hillary Clinton’s failed 2008 presidential bid. The vestige is US$771,000 in unpaid bills. The innovative idea has drawn much interest and, it being the Clintons, much rebuke. Critics point to another big number: US$109 million, the estimated amount the two have earned since leaving the White House.

A wrinkle in time
Portuguese film director Manoel de Oliveira, a hale 101-year-old, cut a dashing figure at the Cannes Film Festival last week as he plugged his latest work, The Strange Case of Angelica, about a young Jewish photographer. De Oliveira made his first film in 1931, and has grown more productive as he ages. He’s set a high standard for 74-year-old Woody Allen, at the festival to promote You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. Allen laments it’s “frustrating” he’s too old to get the girl in his movies, in this case Naomi Watts. Still, he’d happily work at 101, if he’s fit, he said. “My relationship with death remains the same. I’m strongly against it.”

A foul most foul
The World Cup match between Germany and Ghana in Johannesburg on June 23 could get ugly. Michael Ballack, the captain of the German national soccer team and a star midfielder for Chelsea, suffered a serious ankle injury in a match Saturday, after he was fouled by Kevin-Prince Boateng of Portsmouth. Boateng will play for Ghana in the World Cup, and some are sensing a conspiracy. “It looked intentional,” said Ballack, who will miss the World Cup. Boateng, who was born in Germany but whose father is Ghanian, is now Public Enemy No. 1 in German sports pages. Bild called the hit a “nasty revenge foul.”

Target: cougars
The all-knowing Google search engine apparently has a hang-up with the idea of older women on the hunt for younger men. Claudia Opdenkelder, the 39-year-old founder and president of the Toronto-based online dating service Cougarlife.com, accuses Google of a double standard. She says it censors the placement of ads for the service. The ads contain no sexual content but are deemed unsafe for family audiences—unlike sites like Dateamillionaire.com, catering to men trolling for younger women. “It’s age and gender discrimination,” Opdenkelder told the New York Times. “Some of the men sites, they are borderline prostitution, and Google has no problem having them advertise.”

Robin gets his Irish up
Russell Crowe doesn’t play well with others, so it’s wise he had long-time buddies cast in the role of his Merry Men in Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood. Among them were two Canadians: actor Kevin Durand plays Little John and Alan Doyle, the rollicking front man for Newfoundland’s Celtic rock group Great Big Sea, plays the equally raucous minstrel Allan A’Dayle. “Maybe I was born to play this part,” said Doyle of the similarity in their names. Nor was his acting debut a stretch. “Music, mead and oily wenches,” said Doyle. “What else do you want?” As for Crowe, he bailed on a BBC interviewer who said his Robin sounded Irish. “You’ve got dead ears, mate,” said Crowe, a naturalized Australian, born in New Zealand.

The dumbest catch
Before Joshua Tell Warner headed to sea to fish crab in 2007, he hit a Washington Mutual Bank in Eugene, Ore. It was one of three Oregon banks he robbed while “strung out” on OxyContin. He then set sail on a boat featured in the Deadliest Catch, the Discovery Channel’s crab fishing reality series. Bad idea. Viewers spotted Warner as the robber. He was sentenced last week to 9½ years. Meantime, Matthew Sch­neider, a production assistant on the show, faces unrelated drug charges, allegedly after delivering cocaine to an undercover officer in Alaska and bragging he could deliver plenty more.

Bats in the belfry
A behavioural scientist’s decision to show a female colleague a peer-reviewed research paper on the sex lives of the fruit bat landed him on academic probation at the University College Cork in Ireland. Professor Dylan Evans told the London Times that he showed the paper, “Fellatio by fruit bats prolongs copulation time,” as part of a discussion on the evolutionary origins of human and animal behaviour. The woman accused him of sexual harassment, adding he’d previously complimented her appearance and kissed her on both cheeks. University president Michael Murphy placed Evans on two years of “monitoring and appraisal.” Fellow scientists, including Harvard’s Steven Pinker and philosopher Daniel Dennett, said the punishment offends academic freedom. The Canadian-born Pinker called it “absurd and shameful.”