Morrissey attacks Kate Middleton

The pregnant Duchess of Cambridge at the Queen's garden party on May 22. (AP Toby Melville)

What’s with Morrissey and his weird fixation with the Duchess of Cambridge and her body?  The vocalist for rock bank The Smiths hit out in his fanzine at Kate Middleton and her apparent taste for foie gras.

But what is odd is the disgust he seems to have for her pregnancy, which overshadows fair comment over foie gras which animal rights activist say is cruel food because ducks or geese are forcefed until their livers are fattened.

He criticizes department store Fortnum & Mason for selling the French delicacy and congratulates Prince Charles for banning it from functions. 

He writes: “However, unsurprisingly, this most savage and cruel commodity continues to be the favorite "dish" of smiling mother-to-be Kate Muddleton (from whom, in fact, we expect no less.)”  

He goes on to say that Fortnum is stocking the stuff, “possibly with the hope that smiling Kate will wobble in and place an order for her unborn child.”


Wobble in? Her unborn child? What’s that got to do with cruelty to animals? 

Can the Duchess of Cambridge’s supposed taste for foie gras possibly be the only reason why Fortnum's is selling it? The basis of the attack is a gossip item in a tabloid a few months back where a waiter at a restaurant told a journalist the duchess ordered foie gras as a starter.

Last year Morrissey blamed Kate Middleton for the death of a hospital nurse who committed suicide after she was duped by a hoax call from Australian DJs posing as the Queen and calling Kate Middleton’s hospital room. She was recovering from acute morning sickness, a potentially dangerous condition.

Morrissey, who does not have a medical degree, however, determined that she was in hospital “as far as I could see for absolutely no reason” and called the arrogance of royals "staggering."   

Kate Middleton is not exactly an inspiring role model in the mold of Hillary Clinton or Serena Williams – she met a prince, waited for his proposal, got married and is now pregnant. Very retro.  But why use her body as a way to take potshots against the monarchy or support animal rights? 

Hamida Ghafour is a foreign affairs reporter at the Star. She has lived and worked in the Middle East and Asia for more than 10 years and is the author of a book on Afghanistan. Follow her on Twitter @HamidaGhafour 

Big Data is watching you, and you, and you

Fact or fiction? Scene from the 1955 British movie of George Orwell's 1984 resonates today, though many sophisticated systems of government snooping are invisible to the ordinary citizen.


There’s an elephant in your room – and it never, never forgets.

It’s Big Data, and, says Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, co-author of a book by the same name, it is “A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think.”

From cradle to grave (and even before birth) we’re tracked, trailed, photographed, videoed, scrutinized, biometrized, analysed and….you can see where this is going.
 
Mayer-Shoenberger is a fan of Big D for its ability to put together information that connects patterns we could never understand from smaller bits and bytes. He also has some warnings about what can happen when staggering amounts of personal data are put together to map our lives in a virtual human cybergenome.

Q: Is Big Data just Big Brother writ larger -- an era of total surveillance?

A: There are two important elements. One is the obvious fact that we’re collecting more information than ever before and most of it is in a digital format. That creates a much more comprehensive capability of surveillance.

Q: And the other?

A: It takes the quality of ephemerality out of our communications. We used to depend on things we said or did being plausibly deniable. They would go away. We could say they never happened. Now that’s much more difficult.

Q: What happens in Vegas doesn't stay in Vegas?

A: If you look at Facebook and Twitter, the younger generation uses them as an ephemeral way of communicating. They don’t realize it doesn’t disappear like water cooler gossip. What I say will stay with me and may be used against me in the future.

Q: And the effect on behaviour?

A: What’s happening goes beyond surveillance per se. In the past, watching was done in the same time frame. Now it’s the panopticon. That was a prison in which inmates didn’t know if they were being watched, so they had to assume they were watched all the time. That created compliance without active watching.

Q:  No escape?

A: There’s a “data shadow” following us that transcends time, which is new. And this may freak you out, but in the Big Data age there’s an even bigger problem, our vastly increasing reliance on probability.

It means calculating propensities based on probabilities. We’re using all that data to predict a 90 per cent likelihood that the person standing in front of us is going to commit a crime next week. So punish him now – like Minority Report. Or take him into an interview and persuade him not to do it.

Q: This isn’t science fiction. Ordinary people in Britain have been arrested because surveillance data predicted they might cause trouble during the royal wedding.

A: Right, and in the U.S. there’s “predictive policing” in a number of cities. They use Big Data analysis to determine where and what time crime spikes. But this is deeply troubling because profiling becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

Olivia Ward has covered conflict, politics and human rights from the former Soviet Union to Europe, South Asia and the U.S., winning national and international awards.

Sir Alex Ferguson retires and a 'squeaky bum time'

News that Sir Alex Ferguson is to retire after this soccer season made waves in more than just the sporting world. And for those of you who don't follow sport, trust me -- this is officially a Big Deal.

Along with his 13 Premier League titles and take-no-guff attitude, the longtime Manchester United manager is admired for coining interesting phrases such as"squeaky bum time," which nicely describes the final, tense minutes of an important sporting event. 

Off the football pitch (sorry, soccer field) the 71-year-old is also well-known in the United Kingdom for his support of the opposition Labour Party. And so Westminster weighed in on his departure, too -- and the news virtually knocked the Queen's Speech, in which the British government lays out its legislative plans for the coming year, off the front pages. 

Labour party leader Ed Miliband tweeted: "Proud man. Great manager. Staunch Labour Party supporter. Sir Alex Ferguson will never be forgotten." (Twitter tutted a bit after this, with many correspondents pointing out to Miliband that the Sir Alex was not, in fact, dead - just retiring.)

Despite the political divide, Prime Minister David Cameron also paid tribute to Sir Alex. On Twitter, the Conservative Party leader said Sir Alex's "achievement at #MUFC has been exceptional. Hopefully his retirement will make life a little easier for my team #AVFC." Cameron is a fan of Aston Villa Football Club.

And Tory Chancellor George Osborne, in whose constituency Sir Alex lives, also chimed in. 

"Have memories of a spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to canvass his house as a young candidate," he tweeted.

Spectacularly unsuccessful? Now that sounds to me like squeaky bum time.

Jennifer Quinn is a foreign affairs and investigative reporter at the Star. As a journalist with the Associated Press, based in London, she wrote extensively about British politics. Follow her on Twitter @JQStar.

U.K. party looks to Canadian Reformers for election inspiration

U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage reacts during a media interview outside the Marquis of Granby pub in Westminster, central London on May 3. (Olivia Harris/ Reuters)

It's unlikely Nigel Farage will be Britain's next Prime Minister, but there's no denying he's good value.

The leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party may be best known -- by those who don't follow U.K. politics obsessively - for surviving the crash of a light plane, which was towing his party's banner, during the 2010 general election. Not funny. (Okay, kind of funny. Now.)

Despite that mishap, Farage hasn't been afraid to get back on the campaign trail, and this morning, he's on the front pages of many U.K. news websites either supping a pint or giving an enthusiastic thumbs-up. This is because Nigel and his party have had a Good Night. 

Thursday saw elections in about 30 county councils, mostly in England, and while these are pretty yawn-inducing for the general public, they're a relatively big deal for Britain's political classes. Many conclusions will be drawn, and with European Union and national elections looming, the results will be scrutinized to within an inch (or centimetre, for those in the EU) of their lives.

Farage's UKIP -- which has always been something of an niche party, focused on issues related to the European Union, of which it is not fond -- appears, so far, to have taken about a quarter of the votes cast where it has candidates. Nick Robinson, the BBC's political editor, summed it up when he said, "UKIP have changed from being a pressure group to a real political party."

Farage hopes this is just the start. And while he isn't fond of the politics across the Channel, he's happy to look across the Atlantic for inspiration.

"We want to fundamentally change British politics. And there is a very good example of this," Farage said Friday morning on the BBC's "Today" program, must-listen radio which often sets Britain's news agenda.

 "You know, 25 years ago, the Reform Party of Canada started, everyone said you're wasting your time under a first-past-the-post system," Farage said. "They won one by-election and then at the next general election they were the biggest party in the Canadian parliament. It can happen."

Just to keep things in perspective, with 32 of 34 races counted, the Conservatives have 970 councillors; Labour has 400; the Liberal Democrats 291 and UKIP 117. It appears that the Monster Raving Loony Party - a perennial also-ran - failed to gain a single seat.

Crazy.

Jennifer Quinn is a foreign affairs and investigative reporter at the Star. As a journalist with the Associated Press, based in London, she wrote extensively about British politics. Follow her on Twitter @JQStar.

Canada joins outrage over Richard Falk's Boston Marathon comments

UN Human Rights Council's Palestine monitor, Richard Falk, gives a speech in Istanbul in 2005. He is at the centre of a controversy over a blog on the Boston Marathon bombings. (Cem Turkel /AFP/Getty Images)

Now it’s Canada’s turn.

As Britain, the U.S. and numerous media bloggers swiped UN special rapporteur Richard Falk for his “anti-Semitic” remarks following the Boston Marathon bombings, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird issued his own statement Wednesday.

“Once again, United Nations official Richard Falk has spewed more mean-spirited, anti-Semitic rhetoric, this time blaming the attacks in Boston on President (Barack) Obama and the state of Israel,” Baird said. “There is a dangerous pattern to Mr. Falk’s…comments. The United Nations should be ashamed to even be associated with such an individual.”

The offending comments -- which steamed up the social media -- came from a lengthy blog written by the 83-year-old Falk, an emeritus professor of Princeton University and international law expert. In a rambling discourse on the aftermath of the bombings, he mused that they might be laid at the feet of the “American global domination project,” which was “bound to generate all kinds of resistance in the post-colonial world.”

This, of course, was not what a grieving and fearful nation wanted to hear. And Falk, who is Jewish, added that America’s closeness to Israel and policy on Iran’s nuclear program could spark more attacks, “if there is no disposition to rethink U.S. relations to others in the world, starting with the Middle East.”

Cue the calls for his ouster as special rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

But from there things get more complicated. And the solution, for his critics, is unclear.

A Wall Street Journal blogger took UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to task for “shirking” his responsibility for “(doing) anything about his Falk problem.” 

Another, at undispatch.com, blamed the Bush administration for allowing Falk to be appointed in the first place.

It’s not the first time the prickly Falk has raised international hackles and brought down calls for his removal. Geneva-based UN Watch, one of his fiercest critics, called on Western countries to repudiate “Falk’s recidivist pattern of indicting America for the acts of jihadi terrorists.”

In a 2011 blog, Falk questioned the “official version” of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and was sharply reprimanded by Ban and Washington’s UN ambassador Susan Rice. He wrote earlier pieces maintaining that the U.S. government’s lack of investigation of the event “subtly taints” its legitimacy. Meanwhile his blistering condemnations of Israel’s policies in Gaza outraged its supporters and brought more calls to roll up his rapporteur’s role.

So, you may wonder, with such powerful opposition why is he still serving the last of a six-year term at the UN?

 The answer lies in the complex structure of UN bodies and appointments.

“The key fact is that rapporteurs and experts are appointed in their personal capacities and emphatically do not represent their governments,” says Jeffrey Laurenti of the Century Foundation in New York, an expert in UN machinations. “They are intended to be insulated from political pressures; the political responsibility is that of the states on the council when they decide how to respond to the rapporteur’s reports.”

The 47-member council is made up of country representatives from regional blocs that do not take direction from the West.  Falk was elected by consensus, and can’t be fired by the UN chief or the U.S. government.

Will he be retired at the end of his term next year?

Stay tuned.

Olivia Ward has covered the UN since the early 1990s, as well as international conflicts, human rights and politics, winning national and international awards. She is still struggling to understand how the World Body works.  

PHOTOS: Playing under a flight path

Students from Hounslow Heath infants school play in one of four adobe huts designed to help minimize the noise of aircrafts landing at Heathrow airport in Hounslow, west London. (Stefan Wermuth/Reuters)

The playground is directly under the flight path of Heathrow's southern runway and outside play for the children is interrupted every two minutes or so by landing aircraft passing over their heads. (Stefan Wermuth/Reuters)

Students play in the huts. (Stefan Wermuth/Reuters)

Can a poster of glaring eyes stop your bike from being stolen?

(Photo: Newcastle University)

You've tried heavy locks, chains, taking off the seat and even dragging your bike inside the building with you.

But your beloved bicycle still gets stolen, right?

Now a team of researchers at Newcastle University have come up with a novel  -- and cheaper -- approach: a poster of eyes staring down at your bike.

In a two-year experiment on the university campus, the academics managed to reduce thefts from the racks by 62 per cent with the poster,combined with a short anti-theft message, according to the university website.

The posters show a pair of watchful, almost angry eyes, staring down at the bikes - almost daring anyone to do something untoward. "We are watching you," reads the warning.

“One strong possibility is that the images of eyes work by making people feel watched,” said the lead author of the paper, Professor Daniel Nettle. “We care what other people think about us, and as a result we behave better when we feel we are being observed."

In a related BBC TV interview about the study, another expert points out that humans are like other animals: they glare at any enemy to protect themselves or their belongings. "There are birds, insects, animals out there that use exactly the same principle," David Holmes told the BBC.

The results from the Newcastle study are convincing enough that campus police decided to put up those glaring posters at all the bike racks on the campus.

 British Rail police are also looking at testing the system at train stations.

There was one piece of bad news, though.

While bike thefts near the eye poster went down by 62 per cent there was, as the researchers put it glumly, “a noticeable difference in places without the signs, where bike theft went up by 63%” -- suggesting that the crime had not disappeared, just been displaced.

So consider carrying around a poster with menacing-looking eyes -- but be aware the bikes down the street from you might be easy prey.

Julian Sher is a foreign affairs and investigative journalist with the Star and can be reached at jsher@thestar.ca and on Twitter @juliansher 

Train terror plot: Al Qaeda deja vu?

Chiheb Esseghaier, one of two men accused of plotting a terror attack on rail target, is led off a plane by an RCMP officer at Buttonville Airport on Tuesday. (The Canadian Press/Chris Young)

Once upon a time there was a man named Ahmed Chalabi.

You may remember him as the one who told the CIA that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction – and that it was linked with deadly Al Qaeda groups that plotted to destroy the U.S.

In London, Chalabi’s Knightsbridge office (handy to Harrod’s) was busily dispensing such vital information to the British government and media. It represented the Iraqi National Congress, a loose coalition of Shiite Muslim, Kurdish and royalist exiles hoping to garner Western support to topple Saddam Hussein and catapult them to power.

When I met with their local point man, behind an unmarked door, he was eager to tell me of a convoluted plot involving Sept. 11 mastermind Mohamed Atta – whose life I’d researched in Germany. Atta, he said, in ominous tones, had met with an Iraqi agent in the Czech Republic.

“We’re sure that Mohamed Atta, who was one of the main planners of the U.S. attacks, met (Iraqi) Col. Muhammed Khalil al-Ani in Prague,” he said. “Al-Ani is one of the most highly skilled intelligence officers, and his special expertise is terrorism and killing.”

Amazing detective work!

It was especially amazing because Saddam – who used savage methods to crush religious extremism in Iraq, and terminated enemies of his Ba’ath Party with extreme prejudice --  had never been spotted under the covers with the most violent proponents of radical Islam.

The CIA had doubts too. But in spite of internal grousing, the INC allegations became Washington’s official position, and eventually the casus belli that the U.S. Bush administration needed to launch an invasion of Iraq. The rest is history – a scorched chapter for more than 100,000 Iraqis who died since 2003, and at least four million others who were forced to flee their homes. Some who fled to Syria have now been driven back by the murderous conflict there.

Flash forward to Canada, 2013, where the RCMP announced that an alleged “Al Qaeda-supported plot” to blow up a VIA Rail passenger train had ties to Iran. The detective work, we were told, was assisted by the FBI  and Washington's Department of Homeland Security.

But isn’t Iran the place where “apostates” who deviate from Shiite Islam (such as the ultra-Sunni Salafists of Al Qaeda) harshly punished? And which has one of the highest numbers of political prisoners in the world, including two Canadians sentenced to death? Thousands of student protesters have been rounded up, jailed and tortured, opposition leaders put under house arrest and even relatives of suspected dissidents harassed, blackmailed and detained. Ordinary Sunnis have also been seized, their mosques and holy books destroyed.

But like Iraq, Iran is on the political radar of Washington’s far right, which sees a military strike as the answer to its prayers for halting Tehran's ongoing nuclear ambitions. Yet President Barack Obama has not been convinced to fire up the war planes.

So far talk of an Iranian state-sponsored plot against Canada by way of AQ has been dialed back to zero, and perhaps that is where it will stay. Iran, naturally, denies any links with the alleged terrorists and the train plot. But the conjunction of “Iran” and “terrorist” is catnip to the hungry (or agenda driven) denizens of cyberspace. Viral conspiracy theories will proliferate beyond our borders.

And Ahmed Chalabi?  By all accounts he’s very rich. But he has given up his ambition to rule Iraq.  

Olivia Ward was European bureau chief based in London from 1997-2002. She has covered conflict,  politics and human rights from the former Soviet Union to the Middle East and South Asia, winning national and international awards.    

 

The world's billionaires: still pretty much a boys' club

Kirsty Bertarelli with her husband Ernesto Bertarelli in 2010. (Photo by Chris Jackson/Getty Images)

If you are a talented woman and looking to make a billion here is some advice: marry an extremely wealthy man, divorce him and get a massive settlement or wait for your father/brother/any other male relative to strike it rich.

That's not advice from a 1950s manual but a reflection of several rankings of wealth the world over.

The latest is the Sunday Times' Rich List, which details Britain's 1,000 wealthiest people.  

At the very top is Kirsty Bertarelli, worth $10 billion. Bertarelli, 41, a former Miss U.K. 1988 married Ernesto Bertarelli who sold his family's pharmaceutical company in 2006 for $13 billion. She is also a songwriter who is about to release an album. She admitted to the Sunday Times, "I don't think Ernesto is going to stop working and rely on my income just yet. It still feels fantastic, though. It's important to make your own money; it makes buying a present mean so much more."

Forbes magazine calculates that of the 1,226 billionaires in the world, only 104 are women. Chinese journalist who became a real estate developer Wu Yajun is a self-made woman and so is America's Oprah Winfrey.

Men and women have different attitudes to money, says Margaret May who runs the Institute for Women and Wealth in Florida. 

"In other words for men achieving the money is the goal but for women achieving the money is only part of the goal for they are discerning about what the money can do to reach their ultimate goal such as buying a house, educating a child or donating to a cause," she told the Star. "Women’s attitudes regarding money and wealth are both behavioral and biological starting at an early age with the values we perceive regarding money and its usefulness in our lives."

Bloomberg's Billionaire index of the top 100 richest in the world features 10 women. While there is a diverse range of backgrounds from Chile to Australia, every woman has inherited or married into money.

Africa's richest woman is Angola's Isabel Dos Santos who worked her father's connections as president to acquire a number of lucrative contracts.

In Britain divorce is one get rich option. Model Slavica Ecclestone former wife of Bernie, head of Formula One, walked away with $1.1 billion when their marriage of 23 years ended. And Irina Malandina's lawyers secured her $242 million when she divorced Russian tycoon Roman Abramovich.

Ayesha Vardag, top British divorce lawyer didn't mince her words. "In England today, the single easiest way for an attractive woman to make her fortune is to marry a very rich man and then divorce him a few years later, preferably after having a child," she told the Sunday Times.

Across the pond the picture is similar. The richest woman in America is Christy Walton, wife of the late John Walton whose family own Walmart. Her husband died in a plane crash and she now has $28 billion to her name, according to Forbes.

And the richest woman in the world? She lives in France. Liliane Bettencourt is the L'Oreal heiress worth $30 billion whose grandfather founded the cosmetics giant.  

Of course there are plenty of men who haven't done much to earn their money, either. The Grosvenors have been nurturing their family wealth for 400 years and the current Duke of Westminster is one of the largest landowners in Britain.

But self-made men find it easier. The richest man in the UK is a Russian, Alisher Usmanov, the son of a civil servant who made $20 billion from mining and lumber in the former Soviet Union. The son of Lebanese immigrants to Mexico, Carlos Slim worked his way up to become the richest man in the world and sits on a $72 billion fortune.  

Hamida Ghafour is a foreign affairs reporter at the Star. She has lived and worked in the Middle East and Asia for more than 10 years and is the author of a book on Afghanistan. Follow her on Twitter @HamidaGhafour

PHOTO: The royal baby bump

Britain's Duchess of Cambridge meets scouts as she attends the National Review of Queen's Scouts at Windsor Castle, near London Sunday. (AP Photo/Olivia Harris, Pool)