Borat benefit glorious nation of Kazakhstan

By Gustavo Vieira - Tuesday, May 8, 2012 at 2:16 PM - 0 Comments

Vince Bucci/Getty Images

When the movie Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan came out in 2006, officials in the Asian republic quickly banned the film about an outrageous, and fictitious, Kazakh journalist’s travels in the U.S., and threatened to sue its creator, Sacha Baron Cohen.

Then, in March, the organizers of the Arab Shooting Championship in Kuwait downloaded the Borat theme song by mistake and played it in place of the national anthem as Kazakh athlete Maria Dmitrienko stood with her hand on her heart.

Despite all this, Kazakhstan is changing its tune on the hit comedy, which depicted the country as backward, overtly sexist, anti-Semitic and homophobic.

In the capital of Astana last week, the country’s foreign minister, Yerzhan Kazykhanov, announced that Kazakhstan had issued 10 times more tourist visas since the film’s release. Indeed, Kazykhanov admitted he was “very grateful to Borat” for attracting visitors to the remote republic. He even hinted at possible “Borat tours,” targeting the rush of new tourists.

The Taliban’s revenge

By Adnan R. Khan - Tuesday, May 8, 2012 at 9:38 AM - 0 Comments

Bryan Denton/Corbis

There is nothing suggesting violence in the Taliban fighter quietly sipping tea in a corner of the room. In any case, the police headquarters for Afghanistan’s Sarobi district sit next to the safe house we’re in. He knows the building well. Not long ago, he was a member of the security forces, charged with protecting Afghans from the Taliban fighters he now calls his “brothers.”

Jawad speaks animatedly, between cautious sips from his teacup. “When the foreigners first came here, I thought, why not work with them?” says the 28-year-old, a native of Uzbin, northeast of Kabul, the Afghan capital. “I never felt animosity for foreigners,” he adds. That, however, was then.

Jawad joined the Afghan security services a decade ago, as a teenager newly returned from Pakistan’s dilapidated refugee camps, where he’d spent much of his life. It was an exciting time. Finally, his family would reclaim their land. There was the promise of a new future, of prosperity guaranteed by the money the outside world brought with it.

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French voters rush for the ballot box

By Gustavo Vieira - Friday, May 4, 2012 at 11:46 AM - 0 Comments

Christine Poujoulat/AFP/Getty Images

As Sunday’s final round of presidential voting approaches in France, only one thing seems certain: turnout will be high. With incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy polling in a dead heat with his socialist challenger, François Hollande, it may even surpass the first round of voting two weeks ago, when more than 80 per cent of registered voters cast ballots. Few Western elections see anywhere near this degree of enthusiasm: in Canada, barely 60 per cent of eligible voters cast ballots in last year’s federal election, while the U.K. saw a slightly better turnout of 65 per cent in 2010.

The fact that it’s a tight race certainly helps, says Lawrence LeDuc, a University of Toronto expert on voter behaviour, but that’s just part of the story. “Presidential elections are a big deal in France,” he says, because citizens vote directly for a president, whereas Brits and Canadians don’t cast ballots for a prime minister. LeDuc also credits proportional representation, which, during parliamentary elections, gives voters the sense every vote counts. And the French, LeDuc adds, simply have a strong culture of political participation—a revolutionary holdover. There, it seems, the principle of citizenship still manages to excite.

Around the world: the Taliban’s finest

By Richard Warnica - Thursday, May 3, 2012 at 10:20 AM - 0 Comments

Afghanistan: A mid-level Taliban commander hoping to collect the bounty on his own head turned himself in to police. Mohamad Ashan was wanted for planning IED attacks on Afghan soldiers. Officials had offered a US$100 reward for his capture. But Ashan, evidently confused about how these things work, walked up to a police checkpoint, waved his wanted poster and demanded the cash prize, according to the Washington Post. The officers arrested him.

Japan: A Tokyo zoo has called off the search for a baby penguin who flew—or more accurately climbed out of—the coop. The bird is thought to have scrambled its way up a large rock to escape its enclosure. Zoo workers scoured a nearby river with no luck. They hope to start again in a few months when the penguin will have moulted and grown into its more distinctive, adult plumage.

U.S.: The State of California cancelled an annual report on Australia’s kangaroo harvest. Governor Jerry Brown highlighted the marsupial check-in as one of more than 700 unnecessary and expensive reports state bureaucrats file every year. Among others scheduled to be dropped is one on crocodiles and another on the Loma Prieta earthquake, which happened in 1989.

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Bringing hockey to the desert

By Richard Warnica - Thursday, May 3, 2012 at 9:38 AM - 0 Comments

AP

Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, the president of Turkmenistan, would make a great NHL general manager. He’s a dictator with a history of extravagant, illogical spending. And despite great wealth, mostly from oil and gas, he has failed to lift his country (read team) up the UN standings for health and human achievement.

It is fitting then that hockey appears to be Berdymukhamedov’s newest obsession. The Central Asian autocrat has ordered his government ministries to start their own hockey teams. He appeared recently at a youth hockey tournament in the capital of Ashgabat, decked out in full gear, flaunting his 54-year-old vigour.

The apparent goal is to make Turkmenistan—a largely desert state where summertime temperatures top 45° C—a hockey power. Critics might suggest the country, where poverty remains endemic, could find better uses for its money than pricey indoor rinks. But great hockey minds never listen to the critics. Just ask Brian Burke.

The China crisis

By Charlie Gillis and Chris Sorensen - Thursday, May 3, 2012 at 9:33 AM - 0 Comments

HeyItsWilliam/Flickr

Stringer/Reuters

Of the 80 or more television shows Chinese authorities have banned in recent years, the most devoutly missed may be a soap opera called Wo Ju, whose popularity was eclipsed only by its underwear-bunching effect on Beijing’s censors. Its central plot featured a senior government official named Song, who accepts sexual favours from a property-hungry young woman while he brazenly manipulates his city’s real estate market. Song gets his mistress pregnant, is arrested for corruption and ultimately dies in a car accident. But his comeuppance wasn’t enough for China’s State Administration of Radio, Film and Television. The broadcasting gatekeeper cancelled Wo Ju, saying its “sex, dirty jokes and corruption stories” had a “serious negative influence” on society.

Dissolute behaviour among Communist Party potentates has long been a taboo subject in China. Yet these days, for sheer sensationalism, Wo Ju could scarcely compete with the evening news. For more than a month, China has been transfixed by the downfall of Bo Xilai, a once-formidable party figure whose career has crashed amid accusations of corruption, influence peddling and—most sensationally—an attempt to cover up murder. At the centre of the saga: Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai, who is under investigation in the poisoning death of a British businessman. Desperate to discredit Bo, party leaders announced they’d stripped him of his prestigious position as party chief in Chongqing, while state media dredged up long-suppressed reports of influence peddling and self-enrichment on the part of the powerful couple.

The result, says Cheng Li, a veteran China watcher with the Washington-based Brookings Institute, has been “the greatest challenge to the Communist Party since Tiananmen Square.” For decades, Chinese leaders have dealt with allegations of misconduct behind closed doors, while projecting an air of fatherly control. Now, having acknowledged murder plots and corruption at such a high level, they’ve stirred doubts about stability within the leadership of the regime, says Cheng. “There is a lot of cynicism about the party. In my view, it has lost the moral high ground.” Worse, Bo’s undoing has ignited age-old rivalries within the politburo, between reform-minded liberals represented by Premier Wen Jiabao, and a growing legion of neo-Maoist conservatives led by Bo. Prior to his spectacular downfall, the 62-year-old chieftain was seen by many as a future president of China. Since the party announced his removal on March 15, he has not been seen in public.

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The Vatican is reining in America’s radical nuns

By Brian Bethune - Tuesday, May 1, 2012 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

The mills of the Vatican grind slowly. So when the Roman Catholic Church delivered a critical assessment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious—an umbrella group whose 1,500 members represent 80 per cent of the 55,000 nuns in America—after considering it for two years, nuns said they felt blindsided. Some, like Sister Simone Campbell, thought the Vatican was miffed over “our health care letter.” She was referring to the standoff between the U.S. government and Catholic bishops over Barack Obama’s health care regulation requiring Catholic institutions to provide employee insurance that covered contraceptives. Dozens of nuns, many of them LCWR members, had signed a letter in support of the measure.

Although the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Church’s chief doctrinal enforcement body, did not specify the health care issue, many observers read it into the “major areas of concern” the CDF identified. Those included various LCWR stances “not in agreement with the Church’s teaching on human sexuality, and LCWR members criticizing male-only priesthood. The rebuke to the LCWR may be only the Vatican’s first move in reining in American nuns. A much wider ranging Church examination into all women’s religious orders in the U.S., which began in 2006, delivered its report to the pope in December, but the results haven’t yet been made public.

Sarkozy is slipping away

By Leah McLaren - Monday, April 30, 2012 at 10:46 AM - 0 Comments

Mehdi Fedouach/AFP/Getty Images

Last Sunday evening in Paris the mood outside François Hollande’s Socialist party headquarters was prematurely jubilant. A crowd of 2,000 mostly young, ethnically mixed urbanites, looking like a giant Bennetton ad with their jaunty scarves and European and rainbow flags, gathered in the Rue de Solférino, just up from the Musée d’Orsay in the city’s leafy Left Bank, to watch the results come in from France’s first round of voting in its presidential election.

For Hollande supporters, the news was good. Well, sort of. After months of campaigning, the Socialist leader secured nearly 29 per cent of the vote, beating out reigning President Nicolas Sarkozy, who got 27 per cent. As expected, the final runoff vote on May 6 will be a tight race for the middle ground between Sarkozy and Hollande. On closer look, there are more complicated political forces at work here. As with so much about this race, the final result will, in large part, be determined by the voting behaviour of extremists.

When the beaming, ice-blond Marine Le Pen, leader of the far right National Front, appeared on the jumbo screen for her concession speech, the Socialist crowd’s mood turned dark. The happy Benetton models began to boo and hiss. Le Pen is now out of the race but you’d never have known it from her smiling declaration, “My friends, dear French people, nothing will ever be the same!” In a sense she’s right. With nearly 18 per cent of the vote, Le Pen has scored a historic victory for her party and the hard right in France—even better than her father’s second-place finish of 17 per cent in the 2002 election. Hollande supporters might loathe Le Pen, but it’s believed her votes will determine the final outcome of the presidential election. If Sarkozy fails to woo LePen’s followers by swerving hard to the right (as he’s expected to do) it will be good for Hollande. However, if they line up behind Sarkozy for lack of a better right wing candidate, the opposite is true.

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A Vegas for Europe?

By Gabriela Perdomo - Thursday, April 26, 2012 at 10:40 PM - 0 Comments

Jerome Favre/Getty Images

If  Sheldon Adelson gets his way, the U.S. magnate who has made his fortune developing hotels and casinos in Nevada will make his mark in Spain, where he wants to build “Eurovegas,” a “sin city” for the continent. Madrid and Barcelona are currently bidding for the $23-billion project, which includes six casinos, three golf courses, a convention centre and 12 hotels with a total 36,000 rooms. “The project will generate employment and wealth—which we’re lacking,” says José Luis Villena, a spokesman for the Madrid government.

His enthusiasm clashes with evidence that the Las Vegas economic model has collapsed. The city was one of the hardest hit by the global downturn. Between 2008 and 2012, 100,000 jobs were lost, most of them in the construction industry; unemployment is 12 per cent, four percentage points above the national rate; one in 16 properties are in foreclosure. But these tales of woe are not deterring cash-strapped politicians in Spain; the country is being touted as the next Greece as its economy continues to sag and its debt grows. Politicians appear in desperate need of a quick, and flashy, shortcut to money and jobs.

Europe pushes back against the pope

By Jane Switzer - Thursday, April 26, 2012 at 1:30 PM - 0 Comments

Timm Schamberger/AFP/Getty Images

Irish Catholics may embrace the idea of a more progressive church, but Pope Benedict isn’t willing to budge. Almost nine in 10 believers, 87 per cent, think priests should be allowed to marry, according to a new survey by Ireland’s Association of Catholic Priests, and 77 per cent say women should be ordained. The survey results came on the heels of a rare rebuke by the pontiff of priests who question the church’s hard-line stance.

Earlier this month, Benedict denounced the “call to disobedience” by a dissident group of Austrian priests known as the Pfarrer Initiative. The group, led by the Reverend Helmut Schüller, advocates for the abolition of priestly celibacy and the ordination of women. Speaking from the altar at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, the Pope asked rhetorically, “Is disobedience a path of renewal for the church?” Apparently it depends on whom you ask. The Catholic Church “has changed time and again over the centuries,” says Rev. Schüller. “It is our hope that that can happen again.”

Sweden takes gender neutrality seriously

By Emma Teitel - Wednesday, April 25, 2012 at 3:35 PM - 0 Comments

Olicity

In Sweden the phrase “his and hers” isn’t just archaic or politically incorrect, it’s grammatically incorrect too. The country’s online National Encyclopedia was recently updated to include a third pronoun to accommodate the rising trend of gender neutrality in Sweden. The pronouns for “he” and “she” (in Swedish “han” and “hon”) are now joined by the genderless pronoun “hen.”

But the change isn’t just linguistic. In 2010, the World Economic Forum declared Sweden the most gender-neutral country in the world, and gender neutrality is changing Swedish culture in profound ways. A children’s department store has dissolved its “girls” and “boys” sections, and a number of Swedish activists are lobbying for the right of parents to name their children across gender lines. “The idea,” writes author Nathalie Rothschild, “is that names should not be at all tied to gender, so it would be acceptable for parents to name a girl Jack or a boy Lisa.”

So far, the most jarring (or liberating) development in the gender-neutral cultural war is a photo in a popular Swedish toy catalogue depicting a little boy in a Spiderman costume posing daintily while he pushes a bright-pink pram. The poster child, perhaps, for the “hen” generation.

Is Argentina becoming the next Venezuela?

By Gabriela Perdomo - Wednesday, April 25, 2012 at 3:10 PM - 0 Comments

In a shocking move, Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner announced the government would seize control of the country’s leading oil and gas producer, YPF. Its parent firm, Repsol, is based in Spain; the country expressed outrage at the takeover and offered its full support to the conglomerate. Kirchner, who announced the nationalization on live TV, will grant Argentina a 51 per cent controlling share in the company; she also dumped CEO Sebastián Eskenazi, installing two of her top aides, Julio de Vido and Axel Kicillof, in his place. The populist move is sure to win Kirchner points on the homefront, where there is a widespread sense that oil profits are being shipped elsewhere, but it comes at a steep cost internationally.

Repsol’s president, Antonio Brufau, claims the takeover was an excuse to cover up Argentina’s “social and economic crisis.” Spain’s industry minister is warning of “diplomatic, commercial and energy” consequences. Even Argentina’s two main newspapers were sharply critical: Clarin, the country’s largest daily, claimed Argentina risks scaring off investors. “The price,” it wrote, “is not just the court cases but the risk of ending up a little further away from the rest of the world.”

The perils of being LGBT in Italy

By Michelle Tarnopolsky - Wednesday, April 25, 2012 at 10:04 AM - 0 Comments

Gay activist Vladimir Luxuria at a 2009 protest in Rome. The sign reads, "We want rights." (Alessandra Tarantino/AP)

After being punched in the nose and called a “f—ing faggot” outside a bar in Reggio Calabria, Italy on April 13, Claudio Toscano must have assumed his ordeal was over once he got to the hospital. But as he told Il Quotidiano della Calabria newspaper, that’s when the psychological attacks began: “Are you gay?” asked a paramedic in the emergency room. “I can recommend a psychologist. Hormonal treatments can heal you.”

Welcome to the world of LGBT in Italy, where the legal and cultural progress felt elsewhere in the Western world is all but absent. In February, the popular satirical TV news program Le Iene (“The Hyenas”) helped bring to justice Sicilian “magician” Alfio Sciacca, who claimed to heal people from the “sickness” of homosexuality. Le Iene learned of Sciacca after receiving complaints from a number of his fraud victims.

“It’s a great shame, but from this point of view, our country is still in the Middle Ages,” says lesbian activist and parliamentarian Anna Paola Concia. In April 2011 she and her partner were walking hand-in-hand down a crowded street in Rome when a man shouted, “F—ing lesbians. They should have sent you to the ovens!” No one came to their defense; some even reproached Concia for responding angrily. And they were lucky to be downtown—such encounters usually escalate to physical violence on the outskirts of Rome.

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Berlusconi, remember him?

By Erica Alini - Wednesday, April 25, 2012 at 2:15 AM - 0 Comments

Andreas Solaro/AFP/Getty Images

For Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s disgraced former prime minister, staying under the radar is proving a challenge. The humbling experience of having to relinquish power—amid boos—as his country teetered on the brink of financial disaster may have rendered him unusually media shy, but Berlusconi has by no means disappeared. Whenever a new detail or allegation of wrongdoing emerges, the combative septuagenarian is back to defend his honour. According to one recent revelation, he reportedly hired strippers dressed as nuns and soccer stars for his so-called “bunga bunga” sex parties. He has admitted to having wired, last June, roughly $130,000 to three women who participated in the parties; the trio is currently testifying in a trial in which he stands accused of paying for sex with an underage prostitute, and of abuse of power.

The media mogul had a quick response. Of course, the money transfer wasn’t an attempt to corrupt witnesses, he raged in an interview with Il Giornale, a newspaper owned by his brother Paolo. Rather, it was an act of “generosity.” In fact, he’d used a bank transfer, he added, “because the money is transparent, totally traceable.”

To those who have been following him since he first launched his political career in the early 1990s, it is increasingly clear Berlusconi hasn’t been defeated yet. “The man has been up to something ever since he was fired,” quips Italian columnist Beppe Severgnini, author of Mamma Mia! Berlusconi’s Italy Explained For Posterity and Friends Abroad. Although it is unlikely Berlusconi will ever be prime minister again, says Severgnini, he continues to lead his People of Liberty party; the party’s support in parliament is essential for the unelected government of current PM Mario Monti. “The moment the government mentioned two things Berlusconi didn’t quite like”—a plan to sell digital television frequencies and an anti-graft law—“his party was up in arms,” says Severgnini. Both measures could pose a threat to Berlusconi, who owns the country’s three biggest private TV stations and has faced a string of legal cases involving accusations of corruption, embezzlement and bribery.

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A radical transformation for the president of Peru

By Gabriela Perdomo - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 at 11:47 AM - 0 Comments

Timm Schamberger/Getty Images

His name means “the warrior who sees it all” in Quechua, the native South American language of the Incans. Ollanta Humala, Peru’s president since 2011, is indeed a fighter, a former army officer who crushed the Shining Path, a Maoist insurgent group, in the 1990s and later helped lead an army revolt against the corrupt presidency of Alberto Fujimori.

His new battle is more subtle: he must steer one of Latin America’s fastest-growing economies and prove that his transition from radical nationalist to moderate politician is genuine.

Humala, 49, grabbed the spotlight in 2006 when he won a surprise slot in the second round of the presidential election as leader of Peru’s Nationalist Party. The conservative Alan García beat him, but Humala used the loss as a chance to reinvent himself. He replaced the more incendiary rhetoric against free trade and U.S. relations with a moderate discourse, embraced Western economic orthodoxy and distanced himself from former ally Hugo Chávez. Brazilian consultants and Humala’s wife, Nadine Heredia, a communications expert and his closest political aide, helped with the transformation.

Humala was elected president with 51 per cent of the vote last June, heading a coalition of left-leaning parties named “Peru Wins.” But the win wasn’t exactly an endorsement of Humala. His main opponent was Keiko Fujimori, daughter of the former president—now in jail for misuse of public funds, kidnapping and murder. As she climbed in the polls with little more to offer than a pardon for her father, terrified voters turned to Humala, the wild card. To Peru’s Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, the choice facing voters was like one “between AIDS and cancer.”

So far, Humala has kept his word. He has surrounded himself with technocrats from previous governments and maintained an amicable tone toward Washington. But to some he remains a mystery. He continues to call himself a nationalist rather than a leftist, but how much is window dressing is uncertain.

His outspoken family is a constant distraction. His father, Isaac, is an Incan supremacist who preaches the superiority of “copper-skinned” natives; his brother Antauro was jailed for leading an anti-government revolt; his mother, Elena Tasso, an activist, accuses him of betraying the family’s ideals.

And yet Humala’s popularity remains steady above 50 per cent, and even some in the media have begun to back off. “His transformation is genuine,” says Augusto Álvarez Rodrich, a Peruvian journalist and political analyst. “The media made a caricature of him, but he’s not nearly as radical as he’s depicted.” Others, however, think he’s gone too far. Native groups in regions touted for mining projects decry Humala’s change in favour of resource extraction. During his campaign, he had promised to stop some projects, asking locals to “choose between water or gold.”

Now, in a semantic about-face, Humala says he wants communities to have “water and gold.” He has little choice: Peru’s six per cent growth owes much to mining. The Humala mystery may be little more than pragmatism.

London mayoral election: Boris vs. Ken, Round II

By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 at 11:04 AM - 0 Comments

Toby Melville/Reuters

During the closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, London Mayor Boris Johnson stood somewhere off-camera and prepared for his moment in the spotlight, when the Olympic flag would be thrust in his hands to be waved in front of some 90,000 people in the stadium, and another 1.5 billion watching on televisions around the world.

Before he could stride into view, two Chinese officials jabbed their fingers at his ample stomach and told him to button up his jacket.

“I instinctively reached for my middle button, and then thought, sod it,” he later recalled. “I was going to do it my way, and on the matter of jacket buttons I was going to follow a policy of openness, transparency and individual freedom.”

So “Boris” (nobody refers to him by his family name) appeared before a quarter of the world’s population as he usually does: looking like an overgrown schoolboy who hasn’t quite got the hang of wearing his uniform. Some Chinese media were offended, but he seemed relaxed and exuberant, a little like London itself.

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Charles Manson still casts a long shadow

By Charlie Gillis - Monday, April 23, 2012 at 10:39 AM - 0 Comments

AP/ Photo Illustration by Lauren Cattermole

Even from his corner cell in the collective consciousness, sealed away and stripped of mystique, the man could press our buttons. Those regularly scheduled parole bids were painful enough. But to watch Charles Manson in his TV interviews—mawkish, snarling and often incomprehensible—was a hallucinatory trip back to the events of August 1969 and the atavistic fears they triggered.

In the years after the Tate and LaBianca bloodbaths, and after the surreal trials of the killers, some of the most influential minds of the 1960s came to regard Manson as the bitter fruit of their permissive time. “This sense that it was possible to go ‘too far,’ and that many people were doing it—was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969,” the essayist Joan Didion later wrote. “I also remember this and I wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.” Manson, after all, had been at Haight-Ashbury for the Summer of Love. He had recruited his so-called “Family” from its free-loving, free-living young denizens, then sold them on his vision of an apocalyptic race war. Thus did the Manson Family become the bookend to an era—murderers not just of people but of idealism itself.

Today, the husk that is Charles Manson seems unequal to such notoriety. A mug shot released last week, on the occasion of his latest parole hearing, showed once-sharp features snowed in by white whiskers. The burning eyes had clouded; the swastika tattoo had faded into the wrinkles of his forehead. More telling still was his non-appearance at the hearing: Manson’s state-appointed lawyer, DeJon Lewis, said the 77-year-old refused even to meet with him to discuss the review, while parole officials released statements indicating Manson is resigned to living out his life in prison. “I’m not like the average inmate,” he reportedly told psychologists. “I have spent my life in prison. I have put five people in the grave. I am a very dangerous man.”

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Brazil’s World Cup beer battle

By Gustavo Vieira - Thursday, April 19, 2012 at 10:34 AM - 0 Comments

Pedro Silveira/AP

Brazil has been giving FIFA, soccer’s governing body, quite a headache over beer. The South American country known for its raucous Mardi Gras and its uninhibited beaches has, surprisingly, a ban on alcohol during soccer matches.

With just two years to go before the country will host soccer’s biggest party, the World Cup, Brasilia has yet to alter its strict ban on alcohol in soccer stadiums. FIFA’s secretary general, Jérôme Valcke, recently went as far as to say Brazil needed a “kick in the pants.” (President Dilma Rousseff later received an apology for the slight from FIFA president Joseph Blatter.) Far from being the kick-start Valcke intended, the move gave Brazilian senators another reason to continue stalling last week, demanding Blatter appear at a hearing before a bill to allow alcohol sales goes to the Senate.

FIFA wants the ban lifted. It has promised its long-term partner, the beer behemoth Anheuser-Busch InBev, that Budweiser will be the World Cup’s official beer in 2014.

The Gandhis’ dynastic dilemma

By Adnan R. Khan - Wednesday, April 18, 2012 at 10:43 AM - 0 Comments

AP Photo

It was 1999 when, in the midst of a heated election campaign, the granddaughter of India’s beloved late prime minister Indira Gandhi told international media, “I am very clear in my mind. Politics is not a strong pull. I have said it a thousand times: I am not interested in joining politics.” At the time, Priyanka Gandhi was adamant her presence on the campaign trail was not an introduction to political life. She simply wanted to help the Indian National Congress, then run by her mother, Sonia, regain control of the Lok Sabha, India’s lower house of parliament.

Congress, one of the world’s largest and oldest political parties, had lost the house to its rival, the Bharatiya Janata Party, in the 1998 election. It was a chaotic period in Indian politics: from 1996 to 1999, the nation had gone through three general elections and three unstable governments characterized by fractious coalitions and alliances of convenience. For Congress, the 1999 vote was a chance to reclaim its political dominance: since India’s independence from British rule in 1947, it had governed the nation more or less uncontested for three decades. Priyanka Gandhi, then 27, was Congress’s secret weapon, seen as the future of the Gandhi political dynasty. But the strategy didn’t work. Congress lost and the BJP gained a near majority in a defeat that was a sign of things to come. Congress regained control, but only as part of a shaky alliance. Priyanka Gandhi left the public arena, opting instead to work behind the scenes.

Recent crises, though, have brought her back into the spotlight. During last month’s state assembly elections, she took to the campaign trail, joining her brother Rahul in key states like Uttar Pradesh. (Their mother, Sonia, is now chairman of Congress.) Priyanka’s return prompted frenzied speculation among India’s political pundits. Was this a sign of desperation? Internal tensions within Congress inspired talk of impending collapse and a last-ditch effort to bring unity to a party that had previously been the defining symbol of Indian democracy.

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Can David Cameron and his Tories overcome their elitist image?

By Leah McLaren - Tuesday, April 17, 2012 at 12:15 PM - 0 Comments

Stefan Wermuth/WPA Pool/Getty Images

T.S. Eliot said April is the cruellest month, but David Cameron might want to add March to the list too.

The British prime minister’s spring from hell began late last month. First there was the unveiling of a controversial budget in which the chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, cut the top rate of income tax, the corporate tax level, as well as the child benefit for upper-middle-class families and tax breaks for pensioners—a sort of take-from-the-young-and-old-and-give-to-the-rich kind of budget that did little to dispel the Tories’ reputation as Britain’s ruling-class party.

But the real heat began the following weekend, when the Sunday Times, in an old-fashioned undercover sting, recorded party co-treasurer Peter Cruddas crudely boasting to a prospective donor that one could obtain “premier league” access to the PM over dinner in his private apartment at Downing Street in exchange for a donation of $320,000 to $400,000. The billionaire fundraiser promptly resigned and Cameron tried to smooth the whole thing over (first by refusing to release details of whom he’d recently invited to dinner, and later capitulating), but it was too late. After that the class-related gaffes rained down on a starving, gleeful media.

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Günter Grass’s poem opens old wounds

By Michael Petrou - Monday, April 16, 2012 at 9:50 AM - 0 Comments

Michael Gottschalk/AFP/Getty Images

That Israel and Germany have forged such a close relationship within living memory of Auschwitz is a remarkable testament to reconciliation and forgiveness. And yet the shadow still cast by the Holocaust ensures that criticism of Israel by a prominent German will trigger an emotionally charged response in both countries.

Last week, the German author and Nobel laureate Günter Grass published a poem titled “What Must be Said” in which he claims, “The nuclear power Israel is endangering a world peace that is already fragile,” and condemns Germany for sending Israel submarines that could be used in a nuclear strike against Iran.

Grass is “one of the most important figures of German intellectual life,” says Jennifer Hosek, an associate professor of German studies at Queen’s University. He was part of a postwar group of Germans that urged their countrymen to take responsibility for Germany’s crimes during the Second World War. He has been called his nation’s conscience. But Grass also carried a wartime secret: he was drafted as a teenager into the Nazi Waffen SS during the war’s final months. Grass revealed this only in 2006.

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The origins of Florida’s “stand your ground” legislation and other self-defence laws

By Alex Ballingall - Monday, April 16, 2012 at 9:48 AM - 0 Comments

For much of its 39-year history, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has influenced U.S. politics from the shadows. It wasn’t until a public outcry over how so-called “stand your ground” legislation in Florida is being used to defend the man accused of killing 17-year-old Trayvon Martin that ALEC came to widespread attention. Now, the non-profit organization is taking heat for supporting a spate of similar, broad self-defence laws in other states.

ALEC drafts ready-to-legislate bills for conservative-minded lawmakers. It has been criticized for drafting a bill that may have been the basis for Arizona’s divisive law giving police extra powers to search suspected illegal immigrants. Ramped-up voter-ID laws in states like Idaho and Oklahoma have reportedly been inspired by ALEC bills as well.

The group counts nearly 2,000 state legislators as members, and it is supported by a long list of corporations including Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil and AT&T. But the new-found public attention has been quick to make an impact. Last week, Coca-Cola, Kraft and software developer Intuit cut ties with ALEC. The businesses no doubt had their own legislative agenda—Coke said it was focused on beverage taxes—but getting dragged through the mud wasn’t part of it.

FARC releases last of their ‘political prisoners’

By Gabriela Perdomo - Friday, April 13, 2012 at 11:05 AM - 0 Comments

Fernando Vergara/AP

After spending 10 to 14 years captive in the jungle, 10 police and military officers were released by Colombia’s leftist FARC rebels on Apr. 2. They were the last “political prisoners” FARC had released as part of a prisoner swap with the government. Now, calls for the rebels to free their “economic prisoners”—civilians kidnapped for ransom—are rising, but there is one major difficulty: it’s not clear how many prisoners there are. While the NGO País Libre estimates 405 people remain in FARC’s hands, another, Nueva Esperanza, puts the number at 725. Fondelibertad, a government agency, said in 2011 that only 38 people remain. But estimating this number is next to impossible. Some families don’t report abductions, opting for direct negotiations instead. In 2008, Fondelibertad cut its count by deleting the oldest cases, further eroding the credibility of the numbers. And kidnapping proved lucrative enough—FARC collected ransoms as high as $1 million—that others took notice. Many victims could be in the hands of smaller groups claiming to be FARC. Meanwhile, FARC isn’t offering answers; just an observation that all the estimates are wrong.

Is the war on drugs over?

By Jamie Dettmer - Friday, April 13, 2012 at 10:42 AM - 0 Comments

Marco Ugarte/AP

The Obama administration has been criticized in the past for not paying enough attention to Latin America. That’s changed abruptly in recent weeks, with senior officials rushing to head off a rebellion that’s threatening to upend the war on drugs.

What has the administration spooked is the rising chorus in Latin America of politicians publicly questioning the sense of the prohibition on drugs. At this weekend’s Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, several Central American leaders will outline their views on what they say is a failed war. And the Obama administration has had no choice but to allow discussion of drug legalization at the summit for the first time, although it tried to forestall it. “We are ready to discuss the issue to express our opinion on why it is not the way to address the problem,” said Mike Hammer, acting U.S. assistant secretary of state for public affairs.

Calls for legalizing narcotics have been heard before in Latin America, but they previously came mostly from fringe or retired front-rank politicians. In 2009, the former presidents of Mexico, Brazil and Colombia blasted the war on drugs and demanded alternative approaches. But in recent months, for the first time, sitting presidents have been questioning the efficacy of continuing with full-scale prohibition, including the leaders of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Costa Rica.

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Theatre, amid the chaos, in Somalia

By Michael Barclay - Thursday, April 5, 2012 at 6:35 PM - 0 Comments

STRINGER/AFP/Getty Images

When the Somali National Theatre reopened on March 19, for the first time in 20 years, it signified more than just song and dance. Driven apart by regional warlords, militant Islamic insurgents and pirates, Somalia has topped Foreign Policy magazine’s “failed state index” for the past four years. Until an intervention last August by African Union forces, the capital city of Mogadishu had been controlled by the radical Islamist group al-Shabab, which forbade all forms of public entertainment.

More than 1,000 people—including all key government leaders—turned out for a nationally broadcast performance of theatre, music and comedy, despite the fact that six people were killed by an al-Shabab bomb the night before near the bullet-ridden theatre. Performers included expats who had fled the chaos, including members of the Waberi Band, who toured Europe and the U.S. with banned Somali singer Maryam Mursal in the late ’90s. Jabril Ibrahim Abdulle, who worked on reopening the theatre, told the BBC, “Life has to move on: 21 years [of war] is enough. People are saying if we can rebuild the theatre, we can rebuild our lives.”