REVIEW: Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life

By Anne Kingston - Tuesday, November 22, 2011 at 8:10 AM - 0 Comments

Just who was Pat Nixon, the proper, self-contained wife of America’s most reviled and disgraced president? Of her inner life—her hopes, her regrets, what was running through her head as her family boarded that plane to California in ignominy—there is scant knowledge. Born Thelma Ryan in 1912, Nixon was one of the few first ladies never to pen a memoir; the closest we get is Pat Nixon: The Untold Story, a chirpy biography written by her daughter Julie Nixon Eisenhower.

Now Beattie, famed for chronicling the cynical post-Nixon generation in fiction, unwraps the hermetically sealed “generic president’s wife” in an intriguing, playful piece of literary performance art that melds fact with fiction to explore her own creative process.

Anyone seeking a fully fleshed “reimagining” of Pat Nixon in the style of American Wife, Curtis Sittenfeld’s portrait of Laura Bush, will be disappointed—and perplexed by such chapter titles as “Mrs. Nixon Reads The Glass Menagerie” and “Mrs. Nixon Gets the Giggles.” Beattie, who teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Virginia, explores Pat Nixon less as a person than as a textual conundrum: “Writing fiction about a real person tests my unexamined assumptions,” she explains. She ascribes thoughts and opinions to her subject, offers alternative scenarios to actual events, and even injects herself into a story that may or may not be fiction.

More, she cleverly reveals writers’ habits (poets sleep most, she claims) and her own writerly bag of tricks. Metatextual references abound. One chapter depicts Richard Nixon’s marriage proposal in the style of an F. Scott Fitzgerald story. Another echoes James Joyce’s “The Dead,” rendering Halloween circa 1990 at the Nixons’, where the ex-president greets trick-or-treaters wearing Richard Nixon masks.

A writer of less stature and skill would be branded self-indulgent for eclipsing her subject so boldly. But expect Beattie to be lauded for rescuing Mrs. Nixon from her fate as a Watergate footnote. And she has, in this genre-bending memoir-novel-biography hybrid: now the still-enigmatic Mrs. Nixon is a literary footnote as well.

REVIEW: Seriously…I’m kidding

By Joanne Latimer - Tuesday, November 22, 2011 at 8:05 AM - 0 Comments

Since her last book, The Funny Thing Is, in 2003, much has happened to Ellen DeGeneres. She hosted the Oscars, married Portia de Rossi, started a record label, debuted on Broadway, became a talk-show host and a spokeswoman for Covergirl—a 50-year-old cover girl and an openly gay cover girl, at that. Most readers of her new book will be fans of the show, hoping for more of Ellen’s loopy charm.

As an extension of her talk-show personality, Seriously . . . I’m Kidding is a success. It has funny rants about meditating, gambling, Portia’s addiction to hand lotion, their pets and punctuality. As a book about the last eight years of DeGeneres’s life, it’s an artful dodge. She tries too hard to entertain readers, and forgoes thoughtful reflection. The substance of the book is supposed to be advice from DeGeneres about how to be happy. She throws out predictable chestnuts like enjoy every day, accept yourself, get a mammogram and colonoscopy and think positively. What are missing are personal stories. The result feels less intimate than an episode of her show. Some chapters are so empty generous readers will suspect they’re satirical—Ellen’s spoof on the genre of comedy autobiography.

Still, a few chapters nearly redeem the entire project. Her “Letter to Mall Security” is priceless, as is her riff on endorphins. She speaks honestly about the difficulty of hosting a daily talk show and being a gay role model. “[When I came out], there were extreme groups that didn’t think I was gay enough. There were other groups of people who thought I was too gay. It didn’t occur to me that when I announced I was gay I would have to clarify just how gay I was.” DeGeneres also speaks openly about her and Portia’s decision not to have children. These candid moments are too few. Ironically, Ellen could take a page from Portia’s book, The Unbearable Lightness, which is more accomplished, personal and entertaining.

Some enchanted evening

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Tuesday, November 22, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

In her new political memoir, No Higher Honor, Condoleezza Rice devotes little ink to her dealings with Canada. There are fleeting, subclause-length mentions of Canada’s role in Haiti and Afghanistan. Former prime minister Jean Chrétien rates a full sentence for blasting a speech in which George W. Bush called for the ouster of Yasser Arafat.

And then there is Peter MacKay. He gets almost a page.

It turns out their evening together in Nova Scotia, in 2006, was more than just grist for the gossip mill—Rice credits it with helping her decide not to quit her job.

In 2006, the secretary of state was embroiled in “intense” internal White House confrontations over detainee policies, while externally defending the administration’s actions to reporters and foreign governments. By Sept. 11, 2006, she felt ready to leave: “I have been doing this too long, I thought. Tomorrow I am going to tell the President that I want to leave at the end of the year. I can’t do this anymore.”

Continue…

Local darwinism in the Czech Republic

By Alex Ballingall - Monday, November 21, 2011 at 11:10 PM - 0 Comments

Evolution, as it is popularly conceived, is a snail’s-pace process in which each genetic tweak can take thousands of years. But a recent study from Prague’s Institute of Experimental Medicine has put that concept to the test. Scientists there found evidence that residents of the Czech city of Ostrava have built up a genetic resistance to the damaging effects of air pollution. Ostrava is one of Europe’s smoggiest urban centres, known for posting pollution levels four times higher than EU limits.

The study compared residents of Ostrava and Prague. Geneticist Pavel Rossner told the Telegraph that Ostrava residents had “higher expressions” of XRCC5, a gene that helps repair DNA that is damaged due to exposure to air pollution. “They are more able to repair the breaks in the DNA than people in Prague,” Rossner explained. That means, since the Industrial Revolution brought smokestacks and steel manufacturers to the area 150 years ago, people there have begun to adapt to their polluted environment. Their genes started to behave differently in a matter of decades, suggesting evolutionary developments don’t always move at a glacial pace.

REVIEW: King

By Brian Bethune - Monday, November 21, 2011 at 9:15 PM - 0 Comments

Once upon a time, Canadians objected to the notion that William Lyon Mackenzie King, our longest-serving prime minister, was the embodiment of the nation—“the Canadian as he was first formed in the mind of God,” to adapt a phrase from poet Frank Scott—in his po-faced blandness and fearful caution. (A man who “did nothing by halves that he could do by quarters,” as Scott actually did write of King.) Since then, of course, it has emerged, the real reason for Canadians to recoil from the idea was that in his interior life King was flat-out crazy, a mother-obsessed bachelor who scrutinized his shaving cream for omens and communed with the dead, including Sir Wilfrid Laurier, via mediums.

But until now no one has ever done as magisterial a job as Levine in fusing King’s many parts into a complex but comprehensible whole, and thereby demonstrating—however much we might cringe from the thought—that King may well be us personified after all. He did have his share of good fortune, in his enemies—one unappealing or hare-brained Tory leader after another—and in a quiescent press culture. He wasn’t that secretive about his spiritualism: at a 1945 Christmas party King told the startled governor general about a conversation he recently had with FDR, dead the past seven months. Many people were aware of the PM’s beliefs, but none outed him during his lifetime.

But he was also a politician of genius, as Levine convincingly argues. He was unafraid to appoint strong ministers and broker between them. He was instinctively attuned to Canadian fears, hopes and ambitions. King was as obsessed with national unity as he was with communicating with his dead dogs. He understood Canada’s simmering regional tensions better than any other prime minister—his only possible rivals in that regard, Laurier and Sir John A. Macdonald, had less complex Canadas to govern. And if his own deep-rooted insecurities helped keep him to the maddening maybe-yes, maybe-no approach that saw the country safely through the Second World War’s conscription crisis, well then, he was the right crazy prime minister at the right time.

REVIEW: The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas

By Brian Bethune - Monday, November 21, 2011 at 9:00 PM - 0 Comments

This eye-popping manuscript represents an attempt by a 17th-century French Jesuit, Louis Nicolas, to capture the life of the New World—flora, fauna and human—in writings and 180 pen illustrations (often watercoloured) of plants, fish, birds and 15 individuals, mostly tattooed and pipe-smoking, from woodland First Nations communities. Most of the illustrations are identifiably realistic, especially the birds and plants, and some—notably the unicorn—are not, but they are all part of a pre-modern European’s attempt to come to grips with the strangeness of North America.

The history of the manuscript is as mysterious as its author’s imagination. It was already 250 years old when it first emerged in 1930, entirely without provenance, in the possession of a Parisian bookseller. Within four years it disappeared again, not to re-emerge until 1949 when it was bought by Thomas Gilcrease, an eccentric Oklahoma oilman with a mania for collecting Americana. (And that is why one of the most beautiful and informative of Canadian artifacts resides in a museum in, of all places, Tulsa, Okla.)

It was not until the 1960s that Canadian scholars were able to tie the work to Nicolas, who travelled widely in New France between 1664 and 1675. He was not, as Gagnon dryly remarks, “your ordinary Jesuit.” He got into trouble with his brother priests for training two bears to perform circus tricks on the grounds of the Jesuit compound near Quebec City, and he seems more interested in the manners and customs of native peoples than in their souls.

Nicolas lived at a moment in Western history poised between old learning and modern science. He could believe in unicorns precisely because of the new emphasis on direct observation. Which was to be preferred, Nicolas wrote: the reports of brave travellers “who have seen rare things” or the scoffing of savants who had “never lost sight of their parish church tower”? The former, for a man who thought anything was possible after the marvels he himself had seen and so wondrously recorded.

Parliamentarians of the Year (lifetime achievement): Jack Layton

By John Geddes - Monday, November 21, 2011 at 7:31 PM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Jenna Marie Wakani

After he led the NDP to its breakthrough in the election last May 2, Jack Layton returned to Ottawa vowing to set a new tone. “One thing that we’re going to be doing is having no heckling,” said the new leader of the official Opposition. “It is difficult to speak in the House of Commons when you have boorish comments being yelled in your ear at top volume by people a few feet away.”

But Layton would have only the briefest chance to watch his marching orders be put into effect. In July, his fragile health took a terrible turn, and on Aug. 22, he died of cancer at just 61. In the national mourning that followed, Layton’s personal qualities and campaigning abilities were celebrated. But his parliamentary style and strategy were less frequently remembered, even though he established himself over his mere eight years on the federal stage as an uncommonly talented—and unusually shrewd—performer inside the House.

It wasn’t always obvious that Layton would put such emphasis on the Commons. When he was running for the NDP leadership in 2002, his background as a Toronto municipal politician made him a Parliament Hill outsider. His main rival, Bill Blaikie, was a veteran MP and acknowledged expert on the House. Blaikie says Layton used the 18 months he spent as the party’s leader before finally winning a seat in the 2004 election to study the place. “He certainly claimed at the time,” Blaikie recalls, “to be learning the art of asking a question by watching me and others as well.” It paid off. Layton proved himself a probing question period inquisitor and a stirring speech-maker.

CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL LIST OF WINNERS OF MACLEAN’S PARLIAMENTARIANS OF THE YEAR AWARDS

And he didn’t hesitate to aggressively leverage his NDP votes when it mattered. In 2005, he extracted $4.6 billion for NDP priorities like affordable housing in return for temporarily propping up Paul Martin’s minority Liberal government. In 2008, he tried to forge a coalition with the Liberals—a controversial move he had quietly studied for years—to oust Stephen Harper’s Conservative minority. It nearly worked.

How he would have fared facing a Harper majority is, sadly, now a matter only for conjecture, as we pay tribute to the late Jack Layton’s rare achievements as a parliamentarian.

Parliamentarian of the Year: Bob Rae

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, November 21, 2011 at 7:30 PM - 0 Comments

Andrew Tolson/Maclean's

Shortly after Bob Rae was first elected in 1978, John Diefenbaker, the former prime minister who remained an MP until his death in 1979 at the age of 83, imparted two pieces of advice: “Don’t take any s–t from anybody” and “Go for the throat every time.”

These might be words to live by, but Rae looked elsewhere for inspiration—to Allan MacEachen, the legendary Liberal, and Tommy Douglas, the patron saint of the NDP. MacEachen was a commanding presence who taught Rae you couldn’t be yelling all the time, that you had to have “more than one gear.” Douglas was disciplined and practical. He cracked jokes and didn’t hold grudges. And it was Douglas who told him to eschew notes when speaking in the House. “Because as soon as you start to do it, he says, you lose all the spontaneity and all the effect,” Rae recalls. Continue…

Parliamentarians of the Year (hardest working): Jason Kenney

By Richard Warnica - Monday, November 21, 2011 at 7:29 PM - 0 Comments

Peter Bregg/Maclean's

Jason Kenney works frenetically and snatches rest when he can. For the Calgary MP, sleep is less something that happens in blocks than in patches. On planes, between events, any free moment can become a catnap for the Conservative heavyweight. “I can sleep anywhere,” he says—which is good, because anywhere, other than his bed, is where he spends a good 20 hours most days.

“He seems to be everywhere at once,” Paul Wells wrote of Kenney last year. He’s at the cabinet table, in committee meetings or just as often jetting off to any one of the dozens of community dinners and other meetings he attends every year as part of his outreach to ethnic and religious groups. Continue…

Parliamentarians of the Year (best orator): John Baird

By Nicholas Köhler - Monday, November 21, 2011 at 7:28 PM - 0 Comments

Recently in the House, when, at the end of question period, the Bloc Québécois’s André Bellavance asked the government about its plans for spending cuts, it wasn’t immediately clear who among the Tories would take the question—so ensued five or 10 seconds of awkwardness, until Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird, despite having no responsibility in this regard, and without benefit of script, leapt up and spun a vague but applicable response: “Mr. Speaker, we are obviously seeking to ensure that every dollar of taxpayer money is spent wisely,” he intoned. Continue…

Parliamentarians of the Year (most collegial): Peter Stoffer

By Alex Ballingall - Monday, November 21, 2011 at 7:27 PM - 0 Comments

Peter Bregg/Maclean's

Peter Stoffer has laugh lines etched deep in his cheeks, earned from a lifetime of smiling. “Even his enemies like him,” Conservative MP Randy Kamp tells Maclean’s. Indeed, the Dutch-born NDP member from Nova Scotia—who’s known to tip off opposing members on what he will ask them during question period—has been voted most collegial every year Maclean’s has offered the award. Stoffer, to the frustration of NDP brass, eschews a BlackBerry but personally responds to all inquiries he receives from veterans and Nova Scotians. “I take the job seriously, but I never take myself seriously,” says Stoffer. And he doesn’t have a lot of time for divisions polarizing the House. “Like Bob Dylan said in a song, we just sell it from a different point of view. That’s all.”

CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL LIST OF WINNERS OF MACLEAN’S PARLIAMENTARIANS OF THE YEAR AWARDS

RUNNER UP: Rodger Cuzner

Parliamentarians of the Year (most knowledgeable): Joe Comartin

By Emma Teitel - Monday, November 21, 2011 at 7:26 PM - 0 Comments

Peter Bregg/Maclean's

Joe Comartin reads for roughly two hours each day—often 10 minutes squeezed “here and there”—but he says he longs to read more. There’s always more to know. “I think I read only about half what I’d like to,” the NDP MP for Windsor-Tecumseh tells Maclean’s. The former criminal lawyer is up by 6 a.m. and on the Hill by 7:30 every morning. “I begin my day with preparatory work,” says Comartin, “and paperwork—which accumulates constantly.” Comartin, an expert on House procedure, intelligence services and criminal law, says he prepares extensively for speeches, debates and procedural motions, but often feels unfulfilled when they’re over. “I never feel comfortable we’ve covered enough,” he says. His love of learning makes him an obvious choice for “Most Knowledgeable MP,” and his perspective isn’t limited to politics. Continue…

Parliamentarians of the Year (best rookie): Chris Alexander

By John Geddes - Monday, November 21, 2011 at 7:25 PM - 0 Comments

Peter Bregg/Maclean's

For most rookie MPs, the move to Parliament Hill marks the most exciting job they’ve ever had, and the most media attention they’ve ever drawn. Not Chris Alexander. Before running for the Conservatives in Ajax-Pickering, just east of Toronto, Alexander was Canada’s most celebrated diplomat of recent times—the country’s first resident ambassador in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, then a special UN representative in Kabul. Six high-profile years in the war-torn country ended in 2009, when he came home and soon announced he was entering politics as a Tory. Continue…

Parliamentarians of the Year (best represents constituents): Michael Chong

By Jen Cutts - Monday, November 21, 2011 at 7:24 PM - 0 Comments

Peter Bregg/Maclean's

Michael Chong’s guiding political rule is: always pay attention to your constituents. “The least we can do for people who have disagreements with the government is to relay those concerns to Ottawa,” he tells Maclean’s. “They want to know that, at the very least, they’re being listened to.”

Perhaps best known for resigning from the Harper cabinet after refusing to support a government motion recognizing the Québécois as a nation, the Tory backbencher remains a hometown hero in Wellington-Halton Hills, the riding in which he grew up, and now represents. This past spring, the self-described “Wellington County boy” took nearly 64 per cent of the vote in his fourth straight electoral win; few of his opponents bothered putting up signs, or showing up for all-candidates’ meetings. Continue…

The Commons: James Moore’s audition

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, November 21, 2011 at 6:39 PM - 0 Comments

The Scene. Today, it was James Moore’s turn to pretend to be prime minister.

Unlike most of his recent predecessors, Mr. Harper has never seen fit to name a deputy. He stands alone. And so when he cannot stand or when he chooses not to (at some point he stopped showing up on Mondays), it had typically been the duty of John Baird or Peter Van Loan to stand and mouth the official bromides. Of late though Mr. Harper has chosen to disperse the burden of parliamentary accountability upon no less than five pairs of shoulders: Messrs Baird and Van Loan, Peter MacKay, Jason Kenney and James Moore. Each day the Prime Minister is away, no matter what has been asked or what actually relevant minister might be around to handle the question, it is one of these sturdy men who rises to handle the first questions of the NDP and Liberals.

So today, for instance, it was Mr. Moore’s job to stand and explain the government’s policy on the treatment of water sewage. Continue…

Is Obama the winner so far of the GOP nomination race?

By John Parisella - Monday, November 21, 2011 at 5:12 PM - 0 Comments

Once again, a new anybody-but-Mitt-Romney candidate has surged in the Republican polls. This time, it is former Speaker Newt Gingrich. After surviving onslaughts from Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Herman Cain, you would think Mitt Romney might start seeing some daylight and begin to build the support he’ll need to capture the nomination. He is the candidate with the best match-up numbers against Obama, so you would expect the Republican base to begin to see the advantages of Romney as the nominee. Instead, it is becoming evident that while Romney’s support may be steady, his candidacy is not catching fire. He remains the unloved frontrunner.

As with the others before him, Gingrich will now enter the phase of close scrutiny. Can he survive and emerge as the permanent anybody-but-Romney candidate? Or will he fail, as the others did before him, to maintain his momentum?  Continue…

Pop quiz

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, November 21, 2011 at 4:58 PM - 0 Comments

The Environment Minister was asked this afternoon to explain the contradiction reported in this story about government cuts to ozone monitoring. Twice, Peter Kent claimed the report had taken comments out of context. And then Justin Trudeau stood and declared that he was ditching his prepared question on the topic to make a more straightforward appeal.

Can the minister explain to the House what “ozone” is and what is the difference between its impact at low altitude and high altitude? I just need to know that he understands the issues.

Mr. Kent responded as follows (with a brief interruption due to heckling from the Liberal side).

Mr. Speaker, if there are any shortcomings in this House it is in the quality of the questions from the Liberal opposition. This government would gladly compare our record on the environment, in all its dimensions to … Mr. Speaker, to complete my question, again the opposition is using a questionable media source quotation of one of my staff that has been taken out of context.

Speaking with reporters after QP, Mr. Trudeau explained himself. Continue…

Explaining Canada’s hurry to build pipelines in the U.S.

By Andrew Leach - Monday, November 21, 2011 at 4:20 PM - 0 Comments

Washington’s decision to temporarily shelve the Keystone XL project has Canadian companies rushing to redraw the pipeline map. Enbridge announced plans to reverse the direction in which crude oil flows in the Seaway pipeline connecting Oklahoma to Texas in order to send more oil from Midwestern refineries to those on the U.S. Gulf Coast. Keystone godfather TransCanada, on the other hand, wants to start building the southern leg of the pipeline, also linking Oklahoma to Texas. Both projects aim to reduce the pressure on a bottleneck of crude in the U.S. Midwest that’s been building up for a year. Why are Canada’s majors so eager to build pipelines to the Gulf? Andrew Leach, a professor of natural resources, energy, and environment at the University of Alberta’s Alberta School of Business, explains.  

Why is there a buildup of crude oil, including Canadian crude, at refineries in the U.S. Midwest?

It’s a simple case of supply and demand in a local market. We’re often told the market for oil is global, but in truth it’s more of an integrated web of regional markets and the U.S. Midwest is one of those regions (in the graphs, you’ll see it referred to as PADD 2). This regional market has pipelines running both in and out of it, and oil is used by refineries within the region to produce gasoline, diesel fuel and other products. There are essentially two ways in which crude oil gets out of the Midwest–either it’s refined or it’s transported to another region by pipeline, rail, barge, or truck. On the demand side, use of crude oil by Midwest refineries has been decreasing since the year 2000, as shown in the figure below: Continue…

So many people to say nothing

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, November 21, 2011 at 2:34 PM - 0 Comments

The Hill Times tallies the number of people employed by the government for the purposes of “communications.”

The Hill Times went through the government electronic directory service to get a rough idea of how many communications staffers—people paid to help craft and disseminate any given government message—currently work in the public service, ministerial offices, the PMO and the PCO. In all, there are currently around 1,500 communications staffers working in government offices and departments across Canada, including 87 in the PMO and PCO.

That’s roughly five for every MP. And if that total doesn’t include staff employed by opposition MPs and leaders’ offices, the ratio is even higher.

MacKay: after Libya, ready for Syria

By macleans.ca - Monday, November 21, 2011 at 1:38 PM - 0 Comments

Speaking on CTV’s Question Period, Defence Minister Peter MacKay said on Sunday that Canada’s armed forces stand ready to offer assistance in Syria, if needed. Though the minister carefully noted that any intervention in the troubled country would come after a “cascading number of sanctions” imposed by the United Nations, he added that Canada’s armed forces headquarters have “prepared for all inevitabilities.”

CTVNews

Occupy Toronto evicted

By macleans.ca - Monday, November 21, 2011 at 1:22 PM - 0 Comments

An Ontario superior court judge upheld Toronto’s eviction order against protesters occupying the city’s downtown St. James Park on Monday. Justice David Brown found that authorities were imposing a “reasonable limit” of the freedom of speech of demonstrators of the Occupy Toronto movement when asking them to clear the encampment at the park, the National Post reports. Protesters have been told to pack up the site where they have been camping out for over a month between 5.30 p.m. and midnight today, although the Toronto Police Service told the Post that no decisions have been taken yet on how to enforce the city’s order.

The National Post

Third world

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, November 21, 2011 at 12:38 PM - 0 Comments

NDP MP Charlie Angus recorded video of a visit to Attawapiskat.

Mr. Angus has written about what he saw for the Huffington Post.

Kids in prison

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, November 21, 2011 at 12:18 PM - 0 Comments

Chris Cobb looks at one of the implications of the government’s crime legislation.

“It is badly drafted legislation,” says University of Toronto criminologist Anthony Doob. “The government has a role to make good laws and this isn’t good law. We should penalize according to the harm caused and I don’t think that the 18-year-old who gives his 17-year-old friend marijuana deserves a penitentiary sentence. How did kids sharing marijuana suddenly become organized criminals?”

To the list of those with concerns about the government’s direction, you can the Canadian Association of Crown Counsel, who see a looming crisis in the justice system.

Egypt vote in doubt as Cairo clashes continue

By macleans.ca - Monday, November 21, 2011 at 11:05 AM - 0 Comments

Protesters demanding that Egypt’s military hand over power show no sign of leaving Cairo’s Tahrir Square after over two days of demonstrations and violence. Security forces sought to disperse the crowds by firing tear gas, while protesters hurled broken up pieces of pavement at the police. A makeshift hospital set up by the demonstrators was also raided on Monday morning, according to Al Jazeera. The clashes, which started on Saturday, are the worst since former president Hosni Mubarak stepped down in Februaury after an 18-day uprising. The latest wave of violence has reportedly left at least 22 people killed and 1,500 wounded in Cairo and other cities, casting a shadow over parliamentary elections due later this month.

Al Jazeera