Promoting religious freedom is complicated: extreme caution advised

By Janet Keeping - Wednesday, February 22, 2012 at 12:36 PM - 0 Comments

Protesters demonstrate in Los Angeles in 2008 against the Mormon Church's financial support of a bill banning gay marriage. (Damian Dovarganes/AP)

The New Missionaries is a joint project between Maclean’s and OpenCanada.org, the Canadian International Council’s (CIC) hub for international affairs. Click here to learn more about the CIC. To read Clifford Orwin’s defense of the Office of Religious Freedom, click here.

The promotion of freedom globally, if done peacefully—without invading armies, bombs, and the resulting carnage—can be a fine thing. But creating an Office of Religious Freedom, as the Canadian federal government is in the process of doing, may not be such a good idea. To test whether it is, there are three questions Canadians should insist be answered before the office starts its work.

First, is there a strategy in place for dealing with conflicts between religious freedom and the protection of other human rights? In Canada, we are quite clear: the oppression of women or vulnerable minorities will not be tolerated in the name of religious freedom. But how will the new Office of Religious Freedom respond when other human rights interfere with the rights claimed by religious groups in other countries, for example, to marry young girls off long before adulthood, or to impose rules that blatantly discriminate against women in religious courts, or to ban gays from places of worship? Continue…

Religious freedom does not mean freedom to practice illiberal religion

By Clifford Orwin - Wednesday, February 22, 2012 at 12:36 PM - 0 Comments

Indonesian Christians protest violence by Islamic hard-liners in Jakarta, Aug. 15, 2010. (Dita Alangkara/AP)

The New Missionaries is a joint project between Maclean’s and OpenCanada.org, the Canadian International Council’s (CIC) hub for international affairs. Click here to learn more about the CIC. To read Janet Keeping on why there’s reason to question the government’s motives for establishing the Office of Religious Freedom, click here.

In establishing an Office of Religious Freedom, the present government is not placing religious freedom above other human rights, for the simple reason that to do so is impossible. To think that religious freedom is liable to being placed above other human rights is to misunderstand what is meant by religious freedom (and therefore to misunderstand its relationship to these other rights).

To defend religious freedom no more implies its superiority to other human rights than to defend any such right implies its superiority to others. Properly understood (and there’s no reason to conclude that the present government understands it improperly) freedom of religion implies the other basic human rights. All are aspects of the autonomy of the individual, so to defend any is to defend that autonomy, and therefore (in principle) all the others. To establish an Office of Religious Freedom is therefore wholly without prejudice to any other human freedom.

Here the crucial point to grasp is that religious freedom has never meant freedom to practice illiberal religion (i.e. any religion that seeks to employ coercion, whether of its own adherents or others). You can’t persecute under the mantle of freedom from persecution, and it’s precisely freedom from religious persecution for which “religious freedom” is shorthand. In a clash of dogmatic and intolerant sects (of which there are still many in the world today), neither party can invoke the protection of the principle of religious freedom.

Nor, however, can any sect claim protection for practices that violate any human right, for any such violation amounts to illegitimate coercion on behalf of religion. The best way to understand religious freedom is precisely as freedom from such coercion.

From this, it follows that religious freedom equally protects the religious and the non-religious. The believer can no more coerce the atheist than the atheist can coerce the believer. I don’t fault the Harper government for not billing its new entity as the office for the Equal Protection of Believers and Non-Believers. However, to defend religious freedom is, in fact, to vindicate such equal protection. Who benefits from the purging of all coercion from the realm of religion? Obviously not only the religious.

There is, of course, one sense in which the establishment of an Office of Religious Freedom does “place religious freedom above other human rights,” but that sense is neither improper nor sinister. All governments choose their fights, and then their fights within their fights. For the Harper government to create such an office is not to turn its back on other human rights. It’s merely to indicate that it will focus a portion of its limited resources for international human rights promotion on issues of religious freedom.

Consider this decision as analogous to one to create an Office of Freedom of the Press or of Freedom of Assembly. Would either such decision have aroused such animus? Neither of these freedoms is less fundamental than freedom of religion, but neither is either of them more so. All belong in the bundle, as necessary aspects of the human autonomy that we mentioned at the beginning. All three freedoms, moreover, are subject to massive violation in many parts of the world today. All are in sore need of white knights to ride to their defence. All, indeed, are in need of far larger squadrons of these than Canadian diplomacy (and the new office with its limited budget) have to deploy. Is the Harper government then to be faulted for choosing to employ its few drops of influence in one bucket rather than many? Or for choosing the issue that is most likely to command the enthusiasm of a large fraction of its supporters? Not by me it isn’t.

Clifford Orwin is a professor of political science, classic and Jewish studies at the University of Toronto, as well as a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford.

A year later, Egypt still dreaming of change

By Sally Armstrong - Wednesday, February 22, 2012 at 10:50 AM - 0 Comments

Amel Pain/EPA/Keystone Press

It has all the trappings of a circus—tents with guy wires, wagons of fast food, green tea, trinkets and Egyptian flags being hawked to families with small children. The only item missing is the crowd at Tahrir Square on Feb. 11, the anniversary of the fall of former president Hosni Mubarak and the day the protesters have called for a national public strike. A year ago, more than a million Egyptians massed at the square and accomplished what everyone in the world thought impossible: they tossed out the bully who’d been controlling them for 30 years. But now, with Mubarak in a sickbed in jail, and after the first free elections in Egypt’s history and just months before a presidential election, the sun is setting on Tahrir Square and its famous 18-day protest.

Egyptians may well be biding their time, poised to come together again, but like the players in a chess game they are waiting for the government, a.k.a. the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, to make the next move. The military had gained their adoration for seemingly supporting the people during the uprising a year ago, but are now the hated remnants of the old regime that continue to rule the country. Still, it’s the diehards and the discontents who are here on Tahrir Square on this anniversary, punching their placards into the air, shouting their slogans, leading the sparse crowd in the old battle cries: “Those who chant will never die,” and, “We will not be quiet.”

Marchers arrive and hoist a leader onto young shoulders, who demands the military get out of the business of governing (even though the rulers have promised to step down after the June presidential elections). Then, like a travelling road show, the marchers move on.

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Decorating with the rich and famous

By Barbara Amiel - Wednesday, February 22, 2012 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

Allan Grant/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

You have to be as rich as Giorgio Armani to house a stuffed polar bear a good 10 feet tall in your living room and proudly display it in the March issue of Architectural Digest. A beautiful, white, once-alive polar bear behind the chocolate leather cube chair. Clearly this is not in the same league as Jeffrey Dahmer and his longed-for altar of human heads, but it is unusual these days. The bear is explained as a gift “from someone I am very fond of.” Seven pages on is a photo of his bedroom where, the caption notes, “a fur coverlet is draped over the designer’s Armani/Casa bed.”

Look, I’m not going to howl animal rights just before I slip into my Manolos and eat my roast biff, but that “coverlet” appears to be made of lots of little skinned furry animals with their tails hanging as trim on the coverlet’s edges. Clearly Brigitte Bardot is not coming to visit Chalet Armani unless of course Armani’s animal interests extend to a private pool swimming with baby seals.

AD magazine has had a symbiotic relationship with movie stars and celebrities for more than seven decades, giving telling glimpses of changing cultural attitudes: a real leopard-skin rug complete with head in 1950s photo shoots compared with the leopard-print rug on Diane von Furstenberg’s 2012 feature. At-home photos are offered up with excruciating little quotes about the inner person behind the public facade. This is a perfectly acceptable fantasy, an extension of the star’s movie persona structured to fit the roles they act and the self-image they or yesteryear’s studio think will please their public best. I’m obviously a bitch of a reader because I find most of the images utterly cloying.

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Vic Toews, meet Fake Ann Cavoukian

By Luke Simcoe - Tuesday, February 21, 2012 at 3:24 PM - 0 Comments

Luke Simcoe is a guest technology blogger. He will be contributing the occasional post on the Internet and the various kooks and cranks who inhabit it.

As Public Safety Minister Vic Toews watches the sordid details of his divorce get published online by an anonymous critic, he might find an unlikely shoulder to cry on.

Ontario Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian has been one of the most outspoken opponents of the Toews-sponsored Bill C-30, which would grant police warantless access to Internet users’ private records. She’s called the bill a “a major intrusion into our personal lives” and a “gold mine for hackers.” But once this whole “Lawful Access” dust-up is over, Toews and Cavoukian might well be able to sit down, grab a drink and bond over being ridiculed on the Internet.

For the past two years, Cavoukian has been dogged by a satiric doppelganger on Twitter. Dubbed the Fake Ann Cavoukian, the account frequently lampoons the privacy commissioner’s policies. The real Cavoukian’s website says she “encourages the combination of privacy and security in a proactive, positive sum manner when developing new technologies.” In contrast, the counterfeit Cavoukian boasts that she has been “faking concern for privacy since 1997” and dismisses her detractors as “privacytards.”

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Syria: ‘Now this is a war’

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, February 21, 2012 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

AFP/Getty Images

With scores of people seemingly dying by the day, the situation in Syria appears to be spiralling even more out of control as the repressive regime of Bashar al-Assad tries to hang on to power. But the brutality of the government’s response to pro-democracy protesters has been ongoing for almost a year—and the victims will bear lifelong scars from their experiences. Yahya Hawash, 27, is among them. When he joined the peaceful demonstrations in Damascus last April, he was filled with hopes for the future. Marching with the crowds through the city streets brought an unprecedented exhilaration, and a fleeting taste of freedom. Almost a year on, paralyzed from the waist down and hiding from the “shabiha”—government thugs—Hawash spoke to Maclean’s about the innocence of those first days, his ensuing ordeal, and the fears he holds for his country that is now plunged deep into civil war.

“We were at the demonstration in al-Midan in central Damascus in April last year—thousands of people had gathered,” he says. “We were unarmed, just calling for freedom. We didn’t imagine in those days that the security forces would shoot.” The first rounds came within minutes of the demonstration beginning. Panicked demonstrators tried to flee, scrambling over the wounded, pushing into side alleys and back streets to get out of the “kill zone.” Hawash saw a friend hit the ground as a bullet smacked into his head. He was trying to drag the body from the street when he felt a searing pain as a bullet entered his back. Then everything went dark.

“There were six of us taken to hospital,” recalls Hawash, where the staff treated them like traitors. “They handled us roughly, they pushed injections in in painful ways, and spat insults at us. If someone threw up from the pain, they would beat him.” But nothing could have prepared Hawash for what happened next. Three armed security officers in leather jackets, with moustaches emulating the small one sported by Bashar al-Assad, stopped at the bed beside his. “I overheard a security man say, ‘He was injured in the protest. Let him die,’ ” says Hawash. Hospital staff then wheeled the sedated man to a nearby operating theatre. Then, says Hawash, “We heard gunshots. They killed him there in the operation room. There is no question.”

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Greece: When democracy is denied, people take to the streets

By the editors - Tuesday, February 21, 2012 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Yannis Behrakis/Reuters

Ancient Athenians made no distinction between themselves and their government. Official pronouncements attributed decisions to “the citizens of Athens” and left it at that. Such an inclusive sense of democracy is sadly absent in the modern city.

This week in Athens tens of thousands of protesters, angered by severe new austerity measures proposed by the unelected caretaker government of Prime Minister Lucas Papademos, set fire to scores of buildings and rampaged throughout town. They were met by riot police lobbing tear gas and stun grenades. And after the package passed, Papademos quickly expelled members of his government who voted against it. This is apparently no time for dissent or debate.

The turmoil in Greece is well earned. Many decades of lavish but unsupportable welfare state spending have left Greece impossibly burdened; its sovereign debt stands at 160 per cent of GDP. And yet the new austerity package could accelerate the already precipitous fall in living standards. The economy shrank by seven per cent last year and unemployment among the volatile 16-24 age group is 46 per cent.

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Teaching an old prof new licks

By Julia McKinnell - Monday, February 20, 2012 at 11:40 AM - 0 Comments

Josh Haner/The New York Times/Redux

Like a lot of academics in his field, New York University psychology professor Gary Marcus believed the brain acquires certain skills such as language during early critical periods and, after that, the window of opportunity shuts. Children immersed in a new language learn more quickly than adults, according to some studies, but Marcus was beginning to have some doubts about the “critical period” theory.

In his new book, Guitar Zero: the New Musician and the Science of Learning, he decided to test whether an adult with clumsy fingers and no sense of rhythm like himself could pick up the guitar at age 38.

On a sabbatical, Marcus retreated to his in-laws’ cottage near Magog, Que., where he was delighted to discover after a few weeks of daily practice he was capable of playing “faintly musical” scales. Within a year, he was on stage in a summer-camp rock band, performing original tunes with the kids.

None of this was easy, he explains in the book. The first two weeks were brutal. “The beginner has little choice but to memorize an obscure series of shapes. And even once one memorizes where one’s fingers are supposed to go, there is the by no means trivial matter of holding them all down at the same time, each perfectly aligned, without creating a foul noise known as fret buzz. For the first several weeks, that challenge alone seemed almost insurmountable: the idea of shifting my hand from one chord to the next in time with a song seemed almost comical.”

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A red card for England’s coach

By Leah McLaren - Monday, February 20, 2012 at 11:10 AM - 0 Comments

Rex Features

Apart from the country’s highest elected office, there may be no British job so heavily scrutinized and culturally significant as that of manager of England’s football team. Britain, like the rest of Europe, is obsessed by football. And while its domestic leagues attract the best international players, making it one of the richest and most powerful sports franchises on earth, its national team has failed to win a major championship since 1966. To say fans here are a tad bummed out about this is like saying Charlie Sheen has a bit of an ego problem. Indeed, when it comes to football, Britain is as much a nation defined by bitter disappointment and nostalgia for past victories as it is by an enduring love for its national game.

This swell of collective emotion is why, when Fabio Capello abruptly quit his position as team manager last week, England responded with a heavily qualified hip-hip-hurrah! Qualified, because the surprise resignation plunges the team even deeper into an ongoing leadership crisis just months before the next European championship in June. Hurrah, however, because Capello had long been criticized by fans and commentators alike on two counts: 1) he failed to take the team further than the second round at the last World Cup, and 2) after four years of earning $9.5 million per annum for coaching just a dozen or so games a year, his command of the English language showed little, if any, improvement.

To his credit, Capello resigned on principle. His dispute with the Football Association, over whether team captain John Terry should be stripped of his arm band pending a trial set for July over allegations of racist remarks, was a matter of professional integrity (though it didn’t make British fans any sorrier to see him go). Earlier this month, Capello gave a candid interview on Italian state television in which he declared he “absolutely” disagreed with his bosses’ decision to strip Terry of his captaincy pending his trial for racial abuse of another player, the Queens Park Rangers’ Anton Ferdinand. “I have spoken to the [FA] chairman and I have said that in my opinion one cannot be punished until it is official and the court—a non-sport court, a civil court—had made a decision to decide if John Terry has done what he is accused of.”

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Introducing The Charles Taylor Prize finalists

By macleans.ca - Friday, February 17, 2012 at 3:46 PM - 0 Comments

Week in Pictures: February 13th – 19th 2012

By macleans.ca - Friday, February 17, 2012 at 11:26 AM - 0 Comments

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Week in Pictures: February 13th – 19th 2012

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India

A Tamil Hindu priest pushes lemons into a female worshipper's mouth as she is in trance during a ritual for the festival of Thaipusam in a temple in New Delhi, India, on Friday, Feb. 10, 2012. Thaipusam marks the day when goddess Parvati presented a weapon to Murugan, her son with Hindu god Shiva, to vanquish a demon army. (Kevin Frayer/AP Photo)

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Should police be allowed to access an Internet user’s records without a warrant?

By macleans.ca - Friday, February 17, 2012 at 11:15 AM - 0 Comments

Gothamatic 15.2.2012

By Zoran Milich - Thursday, February 16, 2012 at 5:51 PM - 0 Comments

Normally, Zoran Milich spends his days walking the streets of New York City, camera in hand. But this week’s special edition of Gothamatic comes straight from the streets of Hogtown. Call it Torontomatic.

The Why We Broke Up Project

By Elio Iannacci - Thursday, February 16, 2012 at 8:30 AM - 0 Comments

Maira Kalman/HarperCollins Publishers

Burned by a bad romance? Scarred from a messy relationship? Need to unload after a Kardashian, Klum or Kutcher-type split? Instead of drowning your sorrows, author Daniel Handler asks that you post them online.

The man formerly known as Lemony Snicket has created a Tumblr page, the Why We Broke Up Project, which invites visitors to post romantic sob stories for digital publication. Handler’s request for submissions is simple: willing participants are asked to share the reason why they broke up with their respective exes. Blog tags such as “I can’t believe how disgusting you were” and “I can’t believe there was someone else” help over-sharers categorize their entries.

“For practical and therapeutic purposes, I’m glad the site is up,” says the 41-year-old San Francisco-born author, who has personally responded to entries that move him. “For selfish reasons, too.” That’s because it was created to promote his latest book, Why We Broke Up, an illustrated young adult novel. “When I tell people about the book’s premise—that it is about a dramatic teenage love affair that ends badly—it usually prompts them to launch into their own troubled story of a former boyfriend or girlfriend.”

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Jim Pattison, the Warren Buffett of B.C.

By Tamsin McMahon - Thursday, February 16, 2012 at 8:10 AM - 0 Comments

Norm Betts/Getty Images

Jim Pattison is not a man known for taking years to make a business decision. The head of the Jim Pattison Group, one of Canada’s largest private companies, didn’t build a sprawling $7-billion empire of grocery stores, magazine distributors, billboards and museums by making lengthy deliberations about his next move. But last month, more than 50 years after he opened his first car dealership in Vancouver, the 83-year-old billionaire finally decided to expand his auto business outside of British Columbia, buying a pair of dealerships in Winnipeg. Details of the purchase of Frontier Toyota, Frontier Subaru and a related autobody shop from the Thompson family weren’t made public, but auto industry insiders say the business likely went for between $5 million and $10 million and came with the condition that no employees be fired.

At 83, Pattison is long past the age when most CEOs would have retired for the golf course. As one of Canada’s richest men, with a personal fortune estimated by Forbes at $5.8 billion, he owns both a 150-foot yacht and Frank Sinatra’s Palm Springs estate. But friends and former colleagues say, if anything, Pattison is busier than ever these days running a company that has grown to more than 400 locations and 33,000 employees. “A lot of people talk about one foot in the grave. Jimmy will have both feet in the grave and he’ll still be looking for deals,” says Graeme Roberts, a long-time friend who served on the board of Pattison’s Air BC in the 1980s.

Pattison still travels regularly and is due in China this week for a business deal he won’t discuss. “If you like what you do, why change it?” he said in an interview. “I’ve been going to work for a long time now and I have no plans for changing that in the foreseeable future.”

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REVIEW: How It All Began

By Sarah Murdoch - Thursday, February 16, 2012 at 7:20 AM - 0 Comments

Charlotte, a retired English teacher, breaks her hip when she is knocked down by a mugger on her way home from the grocery store, and agrees to convalesce with Rose, her daughter, the personal assistant to Henry, which means Rose can’t accompany him to Manchester, where his lordship has been invited to speak, so Marion, his niece and an interior designer, agrees to go in Rose’s stead and leaves an affectionate voice mail to that effect on the cellphone of her lover Jeremy, which his wife, Stella, intercepts, resulting in Jeremy being summarily ejected from the marital home.

And that is just the beginning of How It All Began, Lively’s latest inquiry into the human heart. Here she explores how Charlotte’s fall sets in motion a cascade of unanticipated events for her characters. That one event leads to another, of course, is the bread and butter of storytelling (and life), but Lively wants to bring happenstance to the foreground, demanding that readers notice that chaos theory and the butterfly effect work their capricious magic even on everyday life.

Her characters’ stories are seamlessly interweaved as brief passages; the men and women are beautifully drawn, her rendering of contemporary London spot-on. This is Lively’s 17th novel for adults (she has written many more for children over her 40-year career). At this stage in her life (another great female British writer toiling late into old age), she seems to be drawn to her fictional contemporaries; certainly, her seventysomethings get the best parts.

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Chrysler: Detroit’s comeback kid

By Gustavo Vieira - Tuesday, February 14, 2012 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

When the U.S. auto industry collapsed, it seemed likely that the Detroit Big Three (Ford, General Motors and Chrysler) would become the Big Two—and even more likely that the automaker that wouldn’t survive the so-called “Carmageddon” would be Chrysler. But it is Chrysler that has staged the most miraculous comeback of all. Since emerging from bankruptcy and repaying its government loans in 2009, the smaller of the Detroit Three is now leading the pack. In January, Chrysler was the top-selling car brand in Canada, with sales up 22 per cent. In the U.S., sales jumped 44 per cent, the biggest rise among major automakers. Chrysler’s controlling company, Italy’s Fiat, recently reported it more than doubled its net income in 2011—all thanks to Chrysler’s performance. Chrysler achieved all of this without rolling out any revolutionary new vehicles, like the GM Volt. To the contrary, its sales went up thanks to its Jeep brand models, Ram trucks and its existing sedans, like the Chrysler 300 (assembled in Brampton, Ont.). Next up for Chrysler: an even better 2012, forecasts Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne, who is preparing the company for an initial public offering and the launch of an anticipated new line of vehicles based on Fiat models.

The ultimate Warrior?

By Gustavo Vieira - Tuesday, February 14, 2012 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

Michael Regan/Getty Images

Warrior Sports began in the early 1990s as a small niche producer of lacrosse equipment and uniforms. Its owner, David Morrow, was a former lacrosse champion and a co-founder of Major League Lacrosse. The Michigan-based firm soon expanded into hockey, where it’s had increasing success—NHL stars Alex Kovalev, Alex Burrows and Chris Pronger now use Warrior sticks and gloves. But Warrior has even bigger ambitions. Its next target? Big league soccer. Last month, Warrior announced it had signed a six-year contract to provide uniforms for the English Premier League soccer club Liverpool F.C.

It may seem like a big and especially risky leap to pursue such a high-profile deal in a sport it has no previous experience in. But Warrior does have at least one key advantage. In 2004, it was acquired by the Boston-based running shoe giant New Balance. New Balance also sponsors the Boston Red Sox baseball team, whose parent company, Fenway Sports Group, happens to own the Liverpool soccer club.

“There was a relationship there already and I think it’s sort of an extension of that,” says Matt Powell, an analyst with SportsOneSource, a sports market research firm. Powell says it wouldn’t be surprising to see New Balance introduce soccer boots under the Warrior name in the market as well. Warrior already produces lacrosse cleats.

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REVIEW: Worth fighting for: Love, Loss, and Moving Forward

By Joanne Latimer - Tuesday, February 14, 2012 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

When movie star Patrick Swayze was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2008, he and his wife of 32 years had already survived fame, failure, a miscarriage, his alcoholism, and rehab. “I felt finally beaten,” confesses Lisa Niemi Swayze in Worth Fighting For, a heartbreaking memoir about the battle to save her husband’s life. While this book follows shortly after Patrick’s autobiography, The Time of My Life (2009), co-written with Lisa, there is little overlap. A widow’s sequel about encroaching grief, loneliness and fear, it isn’t for sissies: don’t expect a “can-do” treatise on being a survivor.

Lisa bulldozed through her fear. She was determined to find an aggressive clinical trial for a new drug. She found the right oncologists. When, in the middle of scans, test results, chemo and blocked stents, Patrick shot a TV series, The Beast, in Chicago, Lisa was at his side every moment, handling logistics, transport, nutrition and meds. Her tireless contribution to his care threatens to capsize readers’ sympathy—especially when she convinces Patrick to force A&E to let her direct an episode of The Beast—but she wins us back when she forgets the scorekeeping and describes how Patrick’s illness made her intermittently angry, sad and guilty. This cycle is the same, no doubt, for celebrity spouses and civilians alike. Fame is not a factor when it comes to a “do not resuscitate” order for your spouse.

Patrick’s notoriety may be why readers pick up this book, but it isn’t what keeps them turning the pages. We get caught up in Lisa’s heartfelt contribution to a sad genre—the spouse’s procedural for terminal illness. Still, this particular reader has a note for the book’s editors: shame on you for allowing so many cringeworthy diary entries, ellipses, one-word paragraphs. And. One. Word. Sentences.

Lessons from Woody Harrelson’s ‘epic fail’ on Reddit

By Luke Simcoe - Monday, February 13, 2012 at 5:31 PM - 0 Comments

Please welcome Luke Simcoe to the blog. He’ll be contributing the occasional guest post on the Internet and the various kooks and cranks who inhabit it.

memegenerator.net

Woody Harrelson knows what it’s like to be famous in real life, but after a failed attempt to promote his latest film on Reddit, he’s learning what it’s like to be infamous on the Internet.

As part of the press junket for the upcoming Rampart, Harrelson participated in one of the social news site’s popular “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) threads. Almost immediately, one user asked the former Cheers star about a time he supposedly crashed a high school prom and slept with a female student:

“I swear this is a true story. I went to a high school in LA and you crashed our prom after party (Universal Hilton). You ended up taking the virginity of a girl named Roseanna. You didn’t call her afterwards. She cried a lot. Do you remember any of this and can confirm or have you been so knee deep in hollywood pooty for so long that this qualifies as a mere blip?”

Harrelson denied the allegation, but things only got worse from there, as he refused to answer questions that didn’t pertain to the film and left the conversation shortly thereafter.

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Queen Elizabeth II: our inexhaustible, inspirational monarch

By the editors - Monday, February 13, 2012 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

(Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP Photo)

Queen Elizabeth II is the only head of state the vast majority of Canadians have ever known. Through all the political, social and technological upheavals of the past 60 years, she has been the one constant in our lives. Her image graces our stamps, coins and bills; she has been to visit us 23 times. And her impact has been felt in the very nature of our political system.

The Queen has performed her role as monarch of Great Britain, Canada and 14 other realms, as well as head of the Commonwealth, for so long that it is difficult to imagine anyone else ever sitting on her throne. And yet there is more to her remarkable success than mere longevity. She has reigned long, but she has also reigned very well.

As she begins her Diamond Jubilee celebrations with the anniversary of her accession to the throne on Feb. 6, 1952, it is worth reflecting on how and why the Queen has been so successful. Today, even avowed anti-monarchists in Canada and elsewhere grudgingly admit her years of service represent the pinnacle of achievement for any head of state—elected or hereditary—in any realm.

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Is Canada doing enough on the issue of human rights violations in China?

By macleans.ca - Friday, February 10, 2012 at 12:16 PM - 0 Comments

Week in Pictures: February 6th – 12th 2012

By macleans.ca - Friday, February 10, 2012 at 12:01 PM - 0 Comments

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Week in Pictures: February 6th – 12th 2012

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A whale shark

Residents gather as a whale shark is pulled from the water by cranes after it was found dead at Karachi's fish harbor February 7, 2012. A giant whale shark washed ashore near Karachi fisheries harbor on Tuesday and was sold for 1.7 million PKR ($18,758), local media reported. (Akhtar Soomro/Reuters)

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Good news, bad news: Feb. 3-9, 2011

By macleans.ca - Friday, February 10, 2012 at 8:10 AM - 0 Comments

Good news

Mellisa Hollingsworth takes gold at the skeleton World Cup in Whistler. (Andy Clark/Reuters)

Drilling down for good

Ottawa and Alberta are establishing a new, “world-class” monitoring system for the Alberta oil sands. The beefed-up plan, which will cost the industry $50 million a year for the first three years, requires that water, air and habitat around oil sands facilities be tested regularly. The news comes after the Alberta Environmental Monitoring Panel called for rigorous, independent surveillance of the industry. While the monitoring system so far is under the purview of federal and provincial governments, it is proof that concerns are being taken seriously.

Taking off

Canadian airlines enjoyed a mini-boom in January, a month in which, historically, business travel drops. But this year, major carriers experienced record passenger numbers: WestJet, Air Canada and Porter enjoyed significant growth, partly due to a boost in trips to Mont Tremblant and Vermont. Meanwhile, the surging job market in the U.S. has analysts in Canada optimistic that higher employment south of the border will mean more demand for Canadian goods and services.

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