June 16, 2008

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NATIONAL

INSIDE THE BERNIER AFFAIR

To understand it all, you need to go back to that clip. The TV news clip of Maxime Bernier and julie Couillard getting out of a car at Rideau Hall last August for his swearing-in as Canada’s new foreign minister. The clip everyone has seen a million times, the one that revealed what a blogger for Italy’s La Stampa last week called “il décolleté più fotografato del Canada,” the most photographed cleavage in Canada. By PAUL WELLS, Philippe Gohier

WORLD

I testified against Saddam Hussein

A mena waited 20 years for justice. After her entire family was murdered during the Iraqi Baathist regime's genocidal 1988 attack on Kurdistan, and after she herself had survived Iraq’s worst death camp, she longed for the day a noose would be placed around the necks of those ultimately responsible for the crimes. By SUSAN MOHAMMAD

SOCIETY

Finally, it is all about you

Parental sacrifice once followed a contained trajectory: changing diapers, sleepless nights, attending school recitals, paying college tuition. Now, its summit has been raised to cosmic levels. The most positive sacrifice parents can make for their adult offspring? Die. By ANNE KINGSTON

INTERVIEW

Explain parental alienation. QA: What I call divorce poison are the things parents do that undermine the relationship with the other parent. It can range from occasional badmouthing to a vicious campaign to remove the parent from the child’s life.

MAIL BAG

YES INDEED, Burma’s tragedy in pictures is worth not a thousand but a monumentally infinite number of words (“Burma: A tragedy in pictures,” World, May 26). Burmese generals are criminally guilty of letting this human tragedy take place under their very own eyes, and on their watch.

JUSTICE

THROWN OUT OF COURT

Emily Ross knows her way around a courtroom: she and her “noncompliant” ex-husband have been before a judge several times over the years, battling over support payments for their three children. Because the Ontario woman couldn’t afford to hire a lawyer, she went to a paralegal. By KATE LUNAU

THE BACK PAGES

But we were getting along so well!

The charge levelled against Maclean’s by the Canadian Islamic Congress is that, in publishing an excerpt from my book, this magazine exposed Muslims to “hatred and contempt.” Alas, at the first day of the Great Maclean’s Show Trial at the British Columbia “Human Rights” Tribunal, the well of my book excerpt’s “hatred and contempt” pretty well ran dry in the first hour. By MARK STEYN

Crime

WHEN THE POLICE ARE ON THE JUICE

When the going got tough on the streets of Bramalea, Ont., help was never more than a radio call away. With 255 lb. of well-defined bulk on his six-foot, one-inch frame, Const. Roger Yeo was the sort of cop who could collar a violent drunk like the rest of us might pick up a doughnut— an order of power highly prized in patrol-level policing. By CHARLIE GILLIS

THE BACK PAGES

THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD

There’s no deficit of tragedy in the story of the Beach Boys, the band of brilliant disappointment artists who emerged in the golden California sun in the early 1960s, topped every chart and heralded a new rock ’n’ roll sound before receding ignominiously into a fog of drugs, alcohol, and psychological breakdowns.

SPORTS

Jessica Zelinka THE POWER OF SEVEN

Jessica Zelinka had just 450 metres to go. A bit more than a lap of the track atjoão Havelange Stadium in Rio de Janeiro last July would seal the deal-a Pan American Gaines gold medal, her first major international win. Then someone kicked her right heel, or so she thought. She felt something pop, and then excruciating pain. The 800-m race was the last of seven events; heptathletes earn their glory on the instalment plan. She’d already rolled to a comfortable lead in the two-day event’s other six disciplines: By KEN MACQUEEN

June 92008