A royal honour? Thanks, but no thanks.

By Leah Mclaren - Wednesday, February 8, 2012 at 10:10 AM - 0 Comments

Getty Images

Snubbing the Queen is a time-honoured tradition in Britain, a fading world power as well known for producing legendary iconoclasts as it is for knights and nobles. But the names of the modest luminaries who have, over the years, discreetly refused the Queen’s accolades and a chance to publicly be called “sir” by someone other than a maitre d’ has remained a closely guarded government secret for decades. Until now.

Last week, the much-anticipated list of dead Britons who’ve declined honours between 1951 and 1999 was made public. Thanks to a hard-fought Freedom of Information request by the BBC, Britain’s Cabinet Office was forced, after a year of resistance in the courts, to release the list of nearly 300 notable refuseniks.

Most striking among them was the Manchester artist L.S. Lowry, who currently holds the record for abnegation, having passed over no fewer than five awards, including one to be an OBE (officer of the Order of the British Empire) in 1955 and a knighthood in 1968. His friend and fellow artist Harold Riley told the BBC last week that Lowry’s aversion to accolades was not political but born of a deep modesty. “A person who is private in their own life has got the entitlement to remain like that,” he said. “If some public body decides to honour them, that is one thing, but if somebody feels that by them doing that, they change your status in the eyes of the public, well, that wouldn’t have suited him.”

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Mr. Harper goes to Beijing

By Richard Warnica - Tuesday, February 7, 2012 at 4:34 PM - 0 Comments

China is home to the world’s second-largest economy. It grew by 9.2 per cent in 2001, even as its chief rivals, the United States and the European Union, continued to struggle. As a country that sells things—oil, natural gas, uranium—Canada needs access to Chinese money and markets if it wants to thrive going forward.

That is fact one.

China is run by an undemocratic regime. It spends billions of dollars controlling its own people, often violently, every year and it uses its influence to prop up some of the world’s most violent and unstable dictatorships.

That is fact two. Continue…

How super PACs are changing the U.S. presidential race

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Tuesday, February 7, 2012 at 10:50 AM - 0 Comments

Jason Henry/The New York Times

This year’s Republican presidential nomination race has not only been the most volatile in recent memory. It has also been the first to see the rise of parallel, shadow campaigns run by independent groups that have been outspending the candidates themselves. The airwaves in early primary states have been awash with foreboding ads warning of Newt Gingrich’s “serial hypocrisy” or Mitt Romney taking “blood money.” The candidates have been able to escape responsibility for the vitriol by noting that the ads weren’t run by the campaigns, but by independent “political action committees.” Known as super PACs, they have pumped an estimated $45 million into the Republican race so far—doubling what the candidates’ own campaign organizations spent in some states.

The political resurrection of Newt Gingrich and his victory in South Carolina were paid for in large part by a single billionaire, the 78-year-old casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who together with his wife contributed $10 million in January to a single super PAC, Winning Our Future, a group run by former top Gingrich staffers that has been running attack ads against Romney. In the wake of Romney’s victory in the Florida primary vote on Jan. 31, Adelson’s desire to continue bankrolling Winning Our Future and its attack ads against Romney may determine how long the primary campaign slogs on and how damaging it becomes to front-runner Romney.

Adelson’s role in this race is exactly the kind of deep-pocketed backroom influence U.S. lawmakers tried to end a decade ago when they passed a sweeping bipartisan law to limit money in politics. The law capped the amount of funding any individual could give to a candidate’s campaign at $2,500, and banned corporations and unions from donating to campaigns and political action committees. It also capped the amount of money a PAC could accept from an individual, and the amount it could spend promoting a single candidate, at $5,000 each. The campaign finance rules were aimed at preventing any one person, company or labour union from “buying” a candidate—but it also meant candidates had to spend a lot of time hustling for small contributions from large numbers of donors.

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What to do with the Maoists in Nepal?

By Alex Ballingall - Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments

Prakash Mathema/AFP/Getty Images

Disagreements over the implementation of an agreement to release thousands of former Maoist fighters from enclosed camps in Nepal are threatening to snuff out hopes that an ongoing political stalemate can give way to the country’s long-awaited rebirth.

In early November, the coalition government of Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai—himself the face of the former Maoist insurgency—struck a long-sought accord with opposition parties to release 19,000 Maoist soldiers from UN-monitored camps. Under the agreement, 6,500 of those soldiers would be integrated into the Nepalese army; the rest would be given roughly 800,000 rupees ($10,000) to start a new life. The accord promised to bring some closure to a decade-long civil war that killed more than 16,000 people. A further 100,000 were uprooted from their homes in the conflict, which featured jungle shootouts, extrajudicial executions, bombings and assassinations as Maoist rebels tried to overthrow the government in Kathmandu and replace the existing constitutional monarchy with a federal republic.

After the fighting ended in 2006, the question of what to do with the Maoist soldiers was deeply divisive for the political parties jockeying for influence in Kathmandu. In a 2009 report, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon wrote that the issue “is one important indication of the wider tensions between the political parties, which could imperil the completion of the peace process.” Indeed, since Nepal’s last elections in 2008, political infighting has resulted in five different coalition governments. Now, many contend this agreement may be the last chance for the currently elected politicians to draft and implement the long-promised constitution that would complete the country’s transformation to a republic after the abolition of the monarchy more than three years ago.

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Donald Trump puts the brakes on ‘world’s greatest golf course’

By Gustavo Vieira - Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 8:10 AM - 0 Comments

David Moir/Reuters

Celebrity businessman Donald Trump sure keeps himself in the news. Last year the billionaire flirted with a run for the Republican presidential nomination, and so fiercely contested President Barack Obama’s citizenship that the White House had to produce a presidential birth certificate to prove the man wrong. This year he was awarded an official Scottish coat of arms by the Scottish heraldic authority—after being slapped down for trying to use an unregistered one—while taking another jab at Obama, calling the administration’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline “disgraceful.” And he’s also announced that he’s about to pull the plug on a controversial $1.2-billion development in Scotland, because of what he calls an “ugly” offshore wind farm.

That seems to be Trump’s latest excuse for not finishing a project that, since 2005, he’s been trumpeting as the “world’s greatest golf course.” The resort was supposed to feature a five-star hotel and hundreds of holiday homes on a pristine area of sand dunes off the Scottish coast north of Aberdeen. Now, the wind farm proposed by a group of energy companies would install 11 wind turbines about 2.5 km off the coast where Trump’s golf resort is located. Trump says until Scottish authorities decide on the fate of the wind farm project, which is not expected to happen at least until May, he’s halting all future developments for the site, including a “super-luxury” clubhouse that, according to a local politician, looks like “a Victorian lunatic asylum.”

As recently as June, though, Trump said that it was the global economic crisis that was forcing him to postpone building part of the luxury resort, including a second course. Now Trump is saying that because of the wind farm, he won’t spend another penny on his megaproject, even after allegedly pouring $160 million into it (the first 18-hole course is scheduled to open in June with only a temporary clubhouse). It all sounds very dubious to the strongest opponents of Trump’s plans: local residents, politicians and environmentalists. “I definitely believe he wants to sell it,” says David Milne, who has rejected Trump’s offers for his property, adjacent to the golf course, for years. A Trump International spokesman says the resort is staying. But since the wind farm is expected to be approved, it’s unclear whose family coat of arms may ultimately fly over the resort—or however much of it sees the light of day.

The rise of Egypt’s fundamentalist Salafis

By Adnan R. Khan - Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Shawn Baldwin/Corbis

If 2011 was the year the Arab street rose up in defiance of dictatorship, 2012 is shaping up to be the year of the Islamist. That may sound scary. Over at least the past decade, the term has come to represent fanatics around the world obsessed with sharia law, Allah-bent on destroying Israel and the West in a frenzy of religiously inspired payback. Egypt is the latest former Western ally to fall under the so-called Islamist spell, and the most important one to date. At the end of its first free and open parliamentary elections that concluded on Jan. 11, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) stood atop a rubble heap of liberal secularist parties, winning a plurality of seats and poised to become the powerbroker in a country literally sitting at the nexus of the West’s interests in the Middle East.

In the aftermath, Western diplomats and right-leaning political pundits have been wringing their hands over possible futures: that Egypt will abrogate its peace treaty with Israel, that other Islamist movements will take inspiration from the MB example and increase their political activities, raising the spectre of Islamist politics threatening the world’s oil supply. Stoking the fears was who came second: a little-known group of ultra-orthodox Muslims, the Salafis. Their electoral success came as a shock to most observers, though not so much to Muslims themselves.

For years, moderate Muslims have been struggling against a rising wave of fundamentalist thought within their communities. Salafism is on the rise globally, posing a bigger threat to the West than groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, who occupy a comparatively moderate zone in the Islamic spectrum. And the problem is not restricted to Muslim nations. In a series of interviews with Maclean’s in December 2010, Muslim leaders in Amsterdam complained of the rising influence of Salafism. “It’s the fundamentalists, the Salafis, who are the real problem,” Muhammad Sajjad Barkati, the imam at Amsterdam’s Ghoussia mosque, said at the time. “The Salafis are trying to convert everyone to their way of thinking. They are dividing the Muslim community.”

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Meet Mario Monti, Italy’s ‘Mr. Serious’

By Erica Alini - Wednesday, February 1, 2012 at 8:30 AM - 0 Comments

If one were to pick a movie title to describe Mario Monti, it would surely be A Serious Man. Italy’s current prime minister couldn’t cut a more starkly different figure from his bigmouth, scandal-prone predecessor. An economics professor and the head of one of Italy’s most prestigious universities before he was tapped to lead the country in November of last year, Monti earned the nickname “Super Mario” for taking on Germany’s powerful regional banks and then Microsoft during his tenure as European Union commissioner for competition in the early 2000s. His time in Brussels proved he was everything that Silvio Berlusconi was not: a man of measured words and bold action.

And he did not disappoint. Less than a month since taking over at Palazzo Chigi, the government headquarters in Rome, Monti had rushed through parliament a draconian, $40-billion austerity plan aimed at eliminating Italy’s public deficit by 2013. He pleased Germany, calmed the markets, and still had well over 50 per cent popular support. Italians saw the pain coming, but simply gritted their teeth.

In Brussels, he received a warm welcome from both Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Nicolas Sarkozy—European newspapers were quickly abuzz with rumours that the Franco-German power duo had become a trio. And in some business circles, where France’s president is privately called “Merkel’s fool” for his seeming lack of backbone vis-a-vis the chancellor, people saw in Monti a man who would speak the truth to Europe’s most powerful country. In a September op-ed piece, the professor had pointedly reminded Berlin that it was “none less than Germany and France” that broke the EU’s deficit rules in 2003, “thus sending a ‘don’t worry about fiscal discipline’ [message] to Greece and all the others.”

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Around the world: English lions, Utah cougars

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, February 1, 2012 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments

Australia: Maybe they’d dipped into their own product, but drug smugglers apparently forgot about a $160-million shipment. The narcotics were hidden in the frames of 54 shipping containers that were never claimed and, once empty, were sold as storage units to Australian businesses. As of this week, police had tracked down all but one.

North Korea: The official news agency reported that, the day after the death of Kim Jong Il on Dec. 17, a songbird appeared at the country’s embassy in Berlin to mourn the Dear Leader’s passing. A plant also bloomed there in spite of the chilly weather, “in token of mourning.” Perhaps overcome, North Korea’s ambassador to Germany decided to go fishing on Berlin’s Havel River—without a licence. Police could do nothing because of his diplomatic immunity.

Iceland: On Jan. 20 Icelanders celebrated Husband’s Day, a tradition that extends back to Viking times. In many households, lucky spouses got to partake of the midwinter feast of dried fish, smoked lamb, putrefied shark, soured blood and liver pudding, and, perhaps, preserved lamb testicles, reports Iceland Review.

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What will Kate wear now?

By Patricia Treble - Wednesday, February 1, 2012 at 8:10 AM - 0 Comments

Danny Martindale/Getty Images

Royal Ascot has had its fill of the current less-is-best fashions. After years of hemlines creeping ever upward and hats shrinking into little more than feathered pompoms, the taste arbiters at Britain’s grandest racetrack are getting out rulers to enforce more conservative clothing requirements at the five days of racing in June that is Britain’s top social event.

Now fascinators, those tiny head-top confections so beloved by Kate, duchess of Cambridge, are strictly verboten—headpieces have to have at least a 10-cm base to be allowed into the exclusive invitation-only royal enclosure. In addition, all dresses and skirts are to be of “modest length, defined as falling just above the knee or longer.” Even tops and dresses concealed by jackets have new rules: they can’t be strapless, halter-neck or have a strap of less than 2.5 cm. And Ascot’s fashion police will also be casting their critical eyes over the men—cravats are banned, as are coloured bands on top hats and any shoe colour that isn’t black.

How the British used a fake rock to spy on Russia

By Jen Cutts - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 at 11:50 AM - 0 Comments

RTR/CP

It sounds more like an episode of Inspector Gadget than one of international relations, but a former U.K. official has admitted that Britain used a fake rock to spy on Russia. Six years ago, Russia’s security service, the FSB, claimed British agents had been using handheld computers and a transmitter—concealed inside a plastic rock and planted in a Moscow park—to retrieve data planted by Russian double agents. At the time, then-prime minister Tony Blair downplayed the accusations. But Jonathan Powell, Blair’s former chief of staff, said in a BBC documentary that aired on Jan. 19 that Britain had indeed been caught red-handed.

“They had us bang to rights,” Powell confessed. “There’s not much you can say. The spy rock was embarrassing.” Russia was apparently tipped off to the rock’s significance after the device stopped working. Surveillance footage showed several men slowing as they walked by the rock; one stopped to give it a kick (using the favoured technique of DIYers everywhere), another carried it away.

And why has Powell chosen to break the first rule of spying now? It’s certainly a humbling revelation for Britain’s spy service. Not only was the espionage work so bumbling, but the U.K. was violating a post-Cold War agreement not to spy on Russia. (That said, the number of Russian spys in London “has not fallen since Soviet times,” according to MI5’s website.) Nikolai Kovalyov, a Russian politician and former FSB head, told a Russian news agency that Powell’s admission “is a serious signal from London that it is time to improve our relations.” Perhaps a step forward in an often rocky relationship?

Gambian president targets “lazy workers”

By Gabriela Perdomo - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Seyllou/AFP/Getty Images

“Lazy workers” will be the target of Gambian President Yahya Jammeh in his new term in office. The long-serving leader, who has been in power since a coup in 1994, was sworn in for a new five-year period on Jan. 19 after a November election widely seen as tainted. In his inauguration speech, Jammeh vowed to “wipe out almost 82 per cent” of workers if they don’t become more productive.

Exactly what he meant by that is unclear. Massamba Jagne of the Gambian Canadian Cultural Association of Toronto says, “He’s the one who’s lazy.” Jagne adds that “Gambians are not lazy. Actual Gambian citizens are developed. Not the government. The little development that is in Gambia is being done by actual citizens who are building businesses.”

A country of 1.8 million, Gambia has an average annual income of $456. Jagne, who was in Gambia during the November presidential election, says he witnessed blatant government abuse of advertising space for political purposes. “In the middle of the night—that’s when you would see the opposition’s ads. During the daytime, it was all Jammeh,” he says. No wonder Jammeh won with 72 per cent of the vote.

The end of Hugo Chavez

By Gabriela Perdomo - Friday, January 27, 2012 at 4:41 PM - 0 Comments

Spain’s ABC newspaper is claiming to have accessed classified medical records indicating that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez may have only one year to live unless he undergoes more aggressive treatments for prostate cancer. The paper refers to results from Chavez’s tests on Dec. 30, 2011, and quotes a medical diagnosis stating his cancer has “clearly” continued to metastasize “into his bones and spine.” Additionally, the president has developed a new tumour “of about 2.0 by 1.5 millimeters” in his colon, the report says. Doctors quoted in the documents conclude that Chavez has between nine and 12 months to live, barring “a more intense treatment,” which the president has apparently refused to take so far, is followed.

The president’s office is not releasing any information on his health, and the authenticity of the ABC source cannot be independently confirmed. However, it’s not the first time the media speculates the Venezuelan president’s days are counted. Last November, the Wall Street Journal reported similar news based on information from a European intelligence agency. Continue…

Ahmadinejad’s call for talks: olive branch or delay tactic?

By Alex Ballingall - Friday, January 27, 2012 at 11:25 AM - 0 Comments

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came forward Thursday to announce his support for renewed negotiations with the international community over his country’s uranium enrichment program. If you’re reading this, you’re likely aware that the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program—which it insists is for energy and medical isotopes, not warheads—has been getting hotter. On Monday, the 27 members of the European Union announced an oil embargo against Iran, effectively putting 18 per cent of the country’s oil exports (roughly 450,000 barrels per day) in jeopardy. The U.S., meanwhile, is pressuring oil companies in India, Japan, China and South Korea to stop dealing with Iran. And Canada has banned any economic activity with Iran’s central bank, as well as any new investment in its oil and gas industry.

Israel, meanwhile, has held air raid drills to prepare for Iranian missile strikes, while at the same time refusing to preclude the possibility of launching a pre-emptive attack on Iranian nuclear enrichment sites. And of course, as Michael Petrou recently wrote in this magazine, violent attacks and assassinations have been carried out against nuclear scientists in Iran, possibly with the involvement of Israel’s infamous Mossad intelligence agency and/or the CIA. Continue…

Be careful who you criticize in Iran

By Michael Petrou - Friday, January 27, 2012 at 8:05 AM - 0 Comments

The only Iranian ever to have led his country in battle against the U.S. has sparked uproar in Iran by seeming to compare recent crackdowns on public dissent to similarly harsh repression by the shah—who was overthrown by the Islamic revolution in 1979.

Retired Rear Adm. Hossein Alaei is the founder of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps navy, and in 1988 led Iran in a two-day naval skirmish against the U.S. This month he published an essay in the daily newspaper Ettelaat in which he raises hypothetical questions the shah might have asked himself after being forced into exile: “If I had not ordered the security forces to shoot at the people and taken measures to calm them down, wouldn’t I have reached a better outcome?” Alaei concludes with a quote from the Quran: “Thus, learn your lesson, o men of vision.”

Alaei did not specifically name Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, but his comments have been interpreted in Iran as criticism of the murderous suppression of public protests following Iran’s rigged 2009 presidential election. Hard-liners responded by protesting outside his house, while current and former Revolutionary Guard members wrote a letter accusing Alaei of making Iran’s enemies happy. He has since said his article had been “misinterpreted.”

How Newt Gingrich pulled this one off

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Friday, January 27, 2012 at 7:20 AM - 0 Comments

Win McNamee/Getty Images

“I am a grandiose thinker,” Newt Gingrich proclaimed in one of his more modest utterances of the recent presidential debates. Indeed, there is little that isn’t grandiose about the former House Speaker: from his proposals for a lunar colony to mine minerals to his more earthy appetites, from the partisan victories to his fall from political grace, the moral indignation and the moral failures, and, now, his latest breathtaking political resurrection. Newton Leroy Gingrich, history professor and maker of history, lover of policy minutiae and women he’s not married to, has become the sudden front-runner in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. With the Jan. 31 Florida primary on the horizon, Gingrich smashed Mitt Romney’s well-oiled political machine and beat him soundly in South Carolina—a state that has consistently predicted the party’s nominee for the last 32 years—grabbing a comfortable lead in polls of likely voters.

But national polls also show that more than half of Americans have an unfavourable opinion of Gingrich, and that Barack Obama could beat him handily if the election were held today. His sudden surge has many Republicans wondering how they got here.

The Republican primary voters—many of whom filled Tea Party rallies and showed scores of incumbent politicians of both parties the door in the November 2010 election—have sent a strong message that they are not finished with their desire to remake Washington. Romney, with his cool, managerial mien and moderate record as former governor of Massachusetts, does not seem to fit their notion of someone ready to show up on Inauguration Day and start blowing up the place. Whereas Gingrich has done it before, proving both that he is capable of remaking Washington—and that the process is rather messy. “I have an enormous personal ambition. I want to shift the entire planet. And I’m doing it,” Gingrich told the Washington Post in 1985.

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The hunt for Pippa

By Leah McLaren - Thursday, January 26, 2012 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

WENN/Keystone Press

When the maid of honour at last spring’s royal wedding inadvertently stole the show with a cheeky swing of silk derrière, it’s safe to assume Pippa Middleton had no idea what she was in for. Less than a year later, she is arguably the most hunted celebrity in Europe and, despite her lack of discernible talent, fast on her way to becoming one of the most photographed and publicly gossiped about women in the world. (Move over Kardashians: as the British would say, you’ve been pipped at the post.)

Interestingly, however, the rise of the Pippa phenomenon coincides with a time of uncharacteristic self-reflection for the British tabloid press and media in general. Earlier this month, the Daily Mail’s photo editor Paul Silva moaned about a deluge of Pippa pics, capturing the 28-year-old party planner’s every move—and outfit—that are flooding across his desk. He was testifying at the Leveson inquiry, the ongoing public hearings into the practices and ethics of the press following the phone hacking saga. “There is no reason to photograph her when she is out and about doing her own thing,” Silva said. “At the moment there are nine or 10 agencies outside her house. If she goes to get coffee, she goes back into her house, we get 300 to 400 pictures . . . There is no justification for using them.” He insisted that in recent months the paper had restricted its use of Pippa pics to ones taken at events where photographers are invited.

For those familiar with the Daily Mail and its racy online incarnation, Silva’s outpouring might sound a bit rich. Only a few weeks earlier, after all, his paper had run an old photo of Middleton and her now ex-boyfriend Alex Loudon out shopping, under the snarky, misogynistic headline, “Too sexy, too laid-back, too independent . . . Why some women just AREN’T wife material.”

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Juggling for peace in Afghanistan

By Adnan R. Khan - Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 11:50 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Adnan R. Khan

It’s easy enough to find war in Afghanistan: step out of Kabul, head south and it will most likely find you. I’ve found it often enough: chasing after the Taliban and embedding with Canadian troops in Kandahar. But finding peace, unearthing hope, is another thing altogether. It takes a firm heart to resist the temptation for cynicism, to fight the overarching feeling that every attempt to challenge war with peace is pointless and doomed to failure. It’s a common theme here in Kabul among the foreign aid workers and journalists: Afghanistan will never change; it’s hopeless.

I’ve felt myself slipping into that state of mind in recent years. After 10 years of covering the Afghan war, war had become the lens through which I saw Afghanistan. But then I had a revelation: I decided to join the circus, and everything changed.

As absurd as it might seem, there is in fact a circus in Afghanistan. The Afghan Mobile Mini Circus for Children (www.afghanmmcc.org) was established in 2002 by two enterprising Danes: Berit Mulhausen, 47, a journalist who had had enough of what she perceived as the downward spiral of her profession, and David Mason, 46, a former dancer who arrived in Afghanistan from Pakistan shortly after the fall of the Taliban regime and decided a circus was exactly what the country needed.

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A banner year for rhino poaching in South Africa

By Alex Ballingall - Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 8:35 AM - 0 Comments

Ilya Kachaev/Reuters

Rhino hunting in South Africa got off to a gruesome start in 2012. Not even two weeks into January, two suspected poachers were killed in a shootout with park rangers who had discovered eight rhino carcasses in the famous Kruger National Park. This after a banner year in rhino hunting that saw an all-time high of 448 animals slaughtered in 2011 for their horns, which can sell for more than $50,000 per kilogram according to the International Rhino Foundation.

Only 13 rhinos were reportedly killed in South Africa in 2007, a measure of how the illegal trade seems to be intensifying. Prices are reportedly being pushed up by demand in East Asia, where rhino horn is considered a luxury item, a hangover remedy, and—without evidence—a cure for cancer. The lucrative trade is luring poachers to the South African backcountry, where they are showing a new degree of innovation: some have been known to use helicopters and night-vision goggles to track down and kill rhinos. “Rhino poaching is being conducted by sophisticated criminal syndicates that smuggle horns to Asia,” Morné du Plessis, head of the World Wildlife Fund’s South African branch, recently told the Guardian newspaper.

How Ron Paul shook up the GOP race

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments

Stephan Savoia/AP

Outside the large outdoor tent where a group of South Carolina Republicans had gathered for a town hall discussion about the presidential race, a few demonstrators shouted loudly and waved signs from the sidelines. In a scene that repeats itself around the Republican campaign trail, they turned out to be not from the Occupy movement, but supporters of Ron Paul, a fellow Republican running for president.

Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who was moderating the event, called out to them, “Come into the tent!” They didn’t budge, showing once again that bringing Paul’s movement into the Republican fold is easier said than done.

Paul, a 76-year-old Republican congressman from Texas, has long been regarded as the party’s cranky libertarian uncle. He inspires jokes about legalizing pot—and eye rolls with talk of moving the U.S. dollar to the gold standard. But in this crowded campaign, Paul has moved from the fringes to the main stage, repeatedly garnering enough votes and dollars to stay in the race while other candidates drop by the wayside. He has little chance of winning the nomination, but the soft-spoken gynecologist from Texas has stunned Republicans with his strong showing. Paul came in second in the New Hampshire primary, behind only Mitt Romney, with 23 per cent of the vote—triple what he drew when he ran for president four years ago. In Iowa, where the top two finishers, Romney and Rick Santorum, drew a quarter of the vote each, Paul came in third with one-fifth. Going into the South Carolina primary, polls had him around 15 per cent.

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The covert war against Iran

By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Iran and the West are engaged in an undeclared covert struggle fought through sabotage, espionage and murder that may yet escalate into open war.

The latest blow against Iran came two weeks ago in Tehran, when two assassins on a motorbike pulled up alongside a car carrying Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, deputy director of Iran’s main uranium enrichment plant, and affixed a magnetic bomb to it. The bomb exploded, killing Roshan and his driver. It was a daring and sophisticated assault, likely requiring long and intensive surveillance of the victim, one or more safe houses, access to explosives, and the ability to make a device that murdered the occupants of the targeted car without harming passersby. Iran immediately blamed Israel, the U.S. and Britain, and says it has made arrests connected to the killing.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued an explicit and categorical denial of any American involvement. Britain also said it was not involved. Israel was more circumspect. The attack came one day after Israel’s military chief, Benny Gantz, told a parliamentary committee the Iranian regime could face “unnatural” events this year. Israel Defense Forces spokesman Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, writing on his Facebook page, said he didn’t know who had killed Roshan, but added, “I certainly won’t shed a tear.”

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Bidding adieu to “mademoiselle”

By Kate Lunau - Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 10:10 AM - 0 Comments

In the town of Cesson-Sévigné, in western France, unmarried women will no longer be referred to as “mademoiselle”—as of Jan. 1, the title (which means “miss”) has been banned from official forms, and all women are to be referred to as “madame.” The move is an attempt to get rid of “anything that could be seen as discriminatory or indiscreet,” a statement from town hall said.

Across France, a growing number insist a woman’s title shouldn’t be defined by her marital status. Two feminist groups have mounted a campaign to get rid of the word “mademoiselle” from official documents, and with it the suggestion that an unwed woman is either a young girl, or a spinster. “Some women appreciate being called ‘mademoiselle,’ and find it flattering,” their website says, while insisting that it’s “nothing less than sexism. It seems that only marriage, and a husband, can confer legitimate social status.”

The French aren’t alone in moving away from this distinction: in Germany, “fräulein” fell out of use as a title for unmarried women in 1972. But even “madame” implies that a woman is married. Proponents of the switch might look for a French equivalent of “Ms.,” doing away altogether with female titles that imply a marital status.

All Kim, all the time

By Gustavo Vieira - Monday, January 23, 2012 at 8:30 AM - 0 Comments

KNS/AFP/Getty Images

Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s “eternal” leader, is set to become literally so as the Hermit Kingdom announced his body is to be embalmed. Since his sudden death of a heart attack last month at age 69, Kim’s body has been on public display at the Kumsusan Palace in Pyongyang, where the body of his father, Kim Sung Il, has been preserved since he died in 1994.

The decision follows a bizarre tradition of embalming Communist leaders’ bodies, with the corpses of Mao Zedong, Vladimir Ilich Lenin and Ho Chi Minh being the most famous ones still on display. Meanwhile, as the North Korean people loudly mourned the death of his father, successor Kim Jong Un has been bestowed with, seemingly, all possible laudatory titles the regime can find to bolster the cult of the twentysomething’s personality. The younger Kim even received a congratulatory note from Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, whose crackdown on protesters has killed more than 5,000 people since March, according to the United Nations.

How safe are our cities of the sea?

By Gustavo Vieira - Friday, January 20, 2012 at 8:10 AM - 0 Comments

Max Rossi/Reuters

With 4,200 people scattered throughout the ship’s dining halls, stores and cabins, the crash of the Costa Concordia has confirmed the fears of cruise-industry critics—the ever-expanding size of these floating cities has outstripped the capacity of their crews to get so many people off the ships fast enough.

And the ships are only getting bigger. Carnival Corporation’s latest addition to its Miami-based fleet is five times larger and holds 2,784 more guests than the 1972 version. The biggest cruise ship in the world, Royal Caribbean International’s Allure of the Seas, is almost 1,200 feet long and can accommodate 6,630 people.

After the Titanic went down, international standards were tightened to make sure crews on passenger liners could evacuate everyone on board within 30 minutes of a call to abandon ship. That standard was last assessed in the ’70s, when ships carried about 2,000 people. Critics argue the clock should start ticking the minute the ship runs into trouble, not 30 minutes after the call to abandon.

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Around the world: hacking the police, banning used knickers

By macleans.ca - Thursday, January 19, 2012 at 10:10 AM - 0 Comments

Germany: After a top German federal police officer decided to put a spyware program on his daughter’s computer to check her Internet habits, a hacker friend of hers discovered it. He managed to get into the police officer’s computer and then into the police system, bringing down a crucial server last summer, Der Spiegel recently reported. Little brother is watching.

Zimbabwe: People are starving, looting is widespread, and unemployment is as high as 90 per cent, but the country’s finance minister has zeroed in on Zimbabwe’s real problem: used underwear sold at flea markets. Any husband whose wife has been forced to buy second-hand knickers has “failed,” Tendai Biti declared as he issued a ban on the practice.

United States: A California prisoner released fom custody soon found himself back behind bars—for stealing his prison uniform. According to the Los Angeles Times, the man snuck the jumpsuit out, then changed into it when he boarded a bus. Apparently orange grows on some people.

France: What’s that in the water? La Redoute, a mail-order fashion retailer, issued an apology after a beach ad on its website, featuring children modelling its fashions, also revealed a naked man emerging from the sea. (For a closer look, the company also included a magnifying function, intended for people to examine the clothes in detail.) The unidentified nudist has since appeared in takeoffs, including being part of the moon landing and sporting the face of disgraced former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

Ireland: And the prize for the cleanest Irish community goes to . . . Trim. The award to the medieval town was given by the organization Irish Business Against Litter, after a survey of 53 towns and cities. Parts of Dublin came under special criticism, prompting an official to lash out at “dramatic media-grabbing statements.”

Honouring Macedonia’s lost Jewish community

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, January 19, 2012 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

Ognen Teofilovski/Reuters

The fate of Macedonia’s Jewish community during the Second World War was unique only in the thoroughness of its destruction.

Just after midnight on March 11, 1943, Bulgarian troops occupying the Yugoslav republic surrounded the three cities containing large Jewish populations. “Following what had become the standard system, this operation was carried out at a single stroke with great cruelty,” writes Leni Yahil in her seminal history of the Holocaust. More than 7,000 Jews were rounded up and sent to the Treblinka death camp. Twelve lived.

Of a pre-war population of approximately 8,000, some 300 Macedonian Jews survived the war. Some joined the partisans. Others departed to Albania or were detained in less murderous camps than Treblinka. About 1,000 fled Bulgarian occupation to live with relatives in northern Greece, which until 1943 was occupied by Italians who declined to implement Hitler’s final solution. But this escape was temporary. The Germans took over the occupation when Italy capitulated, and the Macedonian Jews sheltering in northern Greece were sent to Auschwitz.

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