your eyes are stinking

“Beijing-based artists are finding themselves under attack from the forces of urban development and some are staging increasingly public protests to fight back.”

Glenwright and Pexman presented five- to six-year-olds and nine- to ten-year-olds with puppet show scenarios that ended with one of the characters making a critical remark. This remark could be literal, aimed at a person or situation, or it could non-literal, again aimed either at a person (i.e….

Denise McNeil, one of the detainees at Yarl’s Wood, explains why she has been on hunger strike for the last two weeks

At the opening ceremony of the Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver Friday night, Garou sang in French. The emotional speech of welcome by John Furlong, head of the Vancouver Olympic organizing committee, featured a few French phrases. Governor-General Michaëlle Jean spoke French, as did International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge. And apart from the official announcements, that was that for French on a night that ranked as the most-watched TV event in our history, reaching 78 per cent of the population. No wonder Heritage Minister James Moore thought that there “should have been more French, just period, full stop.” What an extraordinary opportunity wasted for Canada to show the world - and itself - how a bilingual, bicultural country works. But instead of being a celebration of a richly diverse, officially bilingual country, the magical opening ceremony all but ignored a quarter of the country’s population. Stung by Moore’s criticism, VANOC organizers rushed out with explanations, each less plausible than the next. First up: They hadn’t been able to get francophone stars to participate, but the only person aside from Garou they seemed to have asked was global superstar Céline Dion, who couldn’t come. Next out was a careful totting up of French-speakers who appeared in non-speaking roles in the ceremony: astronaut Julie Payette, Senator Roméo Dallaire, race car driver Jacques Villeneuve, acrobats from Montreal’s École nationale du cirque and several members of the production team. Moore is right. It wasn’t enough. Twenty-three per cent of Canadians have French as their mother tongue; 22 per cent of the Canadian Olympic team is from Quebec, roughly proportionate to its population. This marks an improvement over 2000, when a parliamentary report on sport in Canada found disproportionately few French-speakers among high performance athletes, a result of francophone athletes having to overcome greater obstacles such as pervasive unilingualism in national sport organizations and the Canadian Olympic Association. Problems persist outside sport organizations, as well. It was not until a few hours before the start of the Games that francophones outside Quebec were guaranteed television coverage in French of the 17-day event. The Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission authorized CPAC, the not-for-profit, bilingual television service, to carry the Games. According to La Presse, only 15 per cent of the 25,000 volunteers at the Games are bilingual. An Olympic Games is a chance to show the world what we’re made of. Let’s hope the closing ceremony includes more than a token phrase or two of French. © Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette