Newsmakers

If they had a million dollars
Montreal rockers Arcade Fire will match donations up to $1 million to Kanpe, a charity rebuilding family life after the Haitian earthquake. “We’re all family in times like this,” said Régine Chassagne, whose parents were born in Haiti. “Please,” her husband Win Butler urged fans, “take our money.”

For better and worse, check
In 1984, Steve Fonyo ran across Canada, raising $13 million for cancer research, an epic achievement for a 19-year-old with a prosthetic leg. His life since, always in the shadow of the late Terry Fox who attempted a similar feat in 1981, has been a train wreck. He was stripped of the Order of Canada last year after a long battle with addictions and multiple criminal convictions. He’d hoped a planned Aug. 28 wedding would signal a turnaround, but that, too, went off the rails when it was revealed last week that his fiancée, Lisa Greenwood, is serving a jail sentence for theft and assault. Victoria-area business people, who had planned to underwrite the ceremony at the city’s Fonyo Beach, where he’d ended his run, rescinded their offer. John Vickers, executive director of the Victoria Truth Centre, who helped arrange the event, said the couple’s “lives are too complicated at this time for a supported wedding to occur.”

He’s waiting for the sequel
An elegantly attired George Clooney caused a stir in an Italian courtroom Friday as he testified in the fraud trial of three men accused of using the actor’s name and image to launch a fashion line of clothing. “Don’t crush my lawyers,” he joked as he pressed through a crowd of fans and into the Milan courtroom. “I came here because I believe in the judicial system and because there were people using my name to take advantage of people,” he told the court. Judge Pietro Caccialanza thanked Clooney for his 90 minutes on the stand, saying his testimony “has lasted as long as a movie,” the BBC reported.

Shall we assume there’s a moratorium on salaries, too?
A vote for Republicans should be a vote for doing nothing, suggests that party’s House minority leader John Boehner. The U.S. representative from Ohio has thrown his support behind a one-year moratorium on almost all new federal regulations as part of a mid-term election strategy—a move that would leave bureaucrat and politician alike twiddling their thumbs. The exception: emergencies like the Gulf oil rig disaster. The plan would effectively repeal the health-care overhaul and the financial regulation package, key initiatives by President Barack Obama. “It sends a wonderful signal to the private sector that they’ll have some breathing room,” Boehner said.

That ain’t hay
Fans of movie cowboy Roy Rogers and his wife and co-star Dale Evans shelled out almost US$3 million last week when Christie’s auction house sold the contents of the late couple’s defunct museum in Branson, Mo. Bullet, the couple’s German shepherd, sold for $35,000, and Roger’s heroic horse, Trigger, netted $266,000—not bad for two animals that were stuffed and mounted more than 40 years ago. Both were bought by Patrick Gottsch, owner of RFD-TV in Omaha, Neb. He’ll start airing old Roy Rogers movies this fall. The animals will serve as a backdrop while the couple’s son Roy Jr., himself a singing cowboy, introduces each film.

The pride of Chambly
Simon Bernier, 15, of Chambly, Que., had read the novel Hatchet, about surviving in the woods after a plane crash, but he drew on his own courage last Friday when fiction became reality. A fishing trip ended in a fiery plane crash in the Quebec woods near Chute-des-Passes. He pulled his father, Michel, and his badly burned great-uncle Pierre Bernier from the wreck. Simon’s brother Louis, 13, was thrown from the plane. He died in Simon’s arms. His father died moments later. The pilot and another uncle, Rejean, did not survive the crash. Simon, who’d performed CPR on his great-uncle, gave him his sweater, cut spruce boughs to make him comfortable and pounded on the plane with a paddle to direct the rescuers who ended his nine-hour ordeal. “Simon is my hero,” said Pierre’s wife, Marcelle Guay. “He accomplished a miracle.”