July 18, 2011

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Business

Driving the recovery

IN 2009, when there seemed no bottom to how far the economy might fall, a series of photographs circulated online showing thousands of unsold cars piling up around the world. With consumers paralyzed by the credit crisis, automakers filled docks, vast meadows and even abandoned airport runways with the vehicular glut. By JASON KIRBY

MACLEAN'S BACK PAGES

The afterlife of Harry Potter

IT WASN’T SUPPOSED to be this way. The marketing slogan for the July 15 release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, four years after the last Harry Potter novel was published, was: “It all ends here.” The final film adaptation was set to close the door on perhaps the most far-reaching pop culture phenomenon of all time. By BRIAN BETHUNE

International

Free for now—but far from forgiven

IT WAS THE sort of fall from grace from which it seemed impossible for any leading public figure to recover. On May 14, New York Port Authority police pulled Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then head of the International Monetary Fund and a likely Socialist challenger for the French presidency in 2012, from the first-class cabin of a flight bound for Paris. By MICHAEL PETROU

Interview

On presidents who were failures, the trouble with historians, and how to tell a story

HISTORIAN DAVID MCCULLOUGH has won the Pulitzer Prize twice, for his biographies of John Adams and Harry Truman. His new book, The Greater journey, is about highachieving Americans in Paris between 1830 and 1900, and how they changed the world.

Books

MISS NEW INDIA

In Mukherjee’s eighth novel, a young photographer tells Anjali Bose, “It’s all a matter of light and angles,” after shooting her (much-doctored) portrait for a matchmaking website. Anjali doesn’t quite understand the expression, but she repeats it to impress people in Bangalore, the booming metropolis in southern India where she goes in pursuit of her dreams (and to escape a brutish groom-to-be). By DAFNA IZENBERG

Letters

It must be heartening for the Conservative Party of Canada to hear Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Jason Kenney’s assertion that Conservative values are Canadian values (“When Tories agree to disagree,” National, June 27). It is perhaps equally encouraging to hear of tax relief for kids’ sports and artistic activities, for students, volunteer firefighters, caregivers, transit users, tradespeople, immigrants, seniors and corporations.

INTERNATIONAL

Independent—but still troubled

HANDS MOVING NERVOUSLY, her gaze staring at a nearby table, Sarah Clero Rial still remembers vividly the memories of her troubled past. Rial is Southern Sudanese, now a single mom with three kids and a job in both the United States and her home country; in 1991, she was just a young African girl living in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, after having barely escaped the civil war that was raging in the south of the country at that time. By MATTEO FAGOTTO

THE ROYAL VISIT

WE’RE ALL IN THE ROYAL FAMILY

EVEN BEFORE Prince William and his bride Kate had arrived in Canada—before they had visited their first cancer patient, or listened to their first war vet, before they had thrilled hundreds of thousands in Ottawa or talked with street kids in Quebec or surveyed the efforts to rebuild Slave Lake, Alta.—the nation’s newspaper columnists were sounding the alarm at the invasion. By ANDREW COYNE

National

BAD FOR KIDS?

IN PUBLIC POLICY, few subjects are as sure to spark fierce debate as child care. Prime Minister Stephen Harper portrays a stark divide when he talks about his Conservative policy of giving parents $100 a month for every child under six, and how he scrapped the previous Liberal government’s plan to pour billions into deals with the provinces to expand subsidized daycare. By JOHN GEDDES

This week

Newsmakers

A French couple has spent the last 13 years raising a 120-kg gorilla in their home. Zookeepers Pierre and Elianne Thivillon adopted Digit after her mother refused to breastfeed her. Digit spends her days with other animals at the Saint Martin la Plaine Zoo near Lyon, but returns to her adoptive home at night where she sleeps in the Thivillon bed, according to a new BBC documentary. By NANCY MACDONALD, ALEX BALLINGALL, EMMA TEITEL, CIGDEM ILTAN

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