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People Feature
Why do elephants paint?
Well, because there's a shortage of jobs in the logging industry these days. And, no, as a matter of fact, they don't sell their canvases for peanuts.
By Elizabeth Bukowski
[03/23/00]

Nothing Personal
Hugs 'n' drugs
Mackenzie Phillips: "My father taught me how to shoot up"; Halle Berry: Why do bad drivers happen to good dogs? Plus: Mariah Carey says ninth-graders are hotter than she is!
By Amy Reiter
[03/22/00]

People Feature
Where the boys are
A new wave of films shows a fresh element in filmmaking: The sexualization of the male actor by the female director.
By Jessica Hundley
[03/22/00]

Nothing Personal
Another one cites the bust
"Love my breasts" disease strikes Zeta-Jones; Hef's a uniter, not a divider; and Beck on why he was bullied ... but in a fair way.
By Amy Reiter
[03/21/00]

Brilliant Careers
Timothy Ferris
Disregarding our illusory firewalls of thought, he boldly goes where no science writer has gone before.
By William Speed Weed
[03/21/00]

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Had it come to this? The United States and Canada, the two nations that share the world's longest unprotected border, on the verge of becoming another Bosnia -- all because of a bunch of fish? Not exactly. But there is plenty of empirical evidence to point to a serious worsening of U.S.-Canadian relations.

In fact, ever since the Toronto Blue Jays won baseball's World Series for two consecutive years in 1992 and 1993 (during which a U.S. Marine color guard accidentally carried a Canadian flag upside-down at a pre-game ceremony), Americans' tolerance for cute and cuddly Canada has fallen considerably, the relationship now having chilled to a temperature slightly frostier than a March midnight in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.

Consider the following:

1. Title III of the 1996 Helms-Burton Act -- sponsored by America's No. 1 loon, Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C. -- not only gives Americans the right to sue foreign companies that own property in Cuba seized from Americans during Fidel Castro's revolution but also prevents executives of such companies and their family members from entering the United States. (This law has kept many Canadians from gaining entry to the States, and Canada officially complained that the law violated the North American Free Trade Agreement.)

2. An additional piece of legislation, a 1996 bill known as "IRA IRA" (a nickname for the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act), contains a hotly disputed passage, Section 110, that would subject all foreigners -- including Canadians -- to odious border checks before entering the United States. Presently, most Canadians are simply waved through, but if Section 110 passes, officials in both countries are predicting up to 20-hour traffic tie-ups at border crossings, which could cause irreparable damage to the $1 billion worth of business we do with our No. 1 trading partner, Canada, every day. (The act was to go into effect in 1998 but has been postponed until the end of 2001.)

3. In 1997, a concerned shopper in a Winnipeg, Manitoba, Wal-Mart noticed that some of the pajamas on the shelves were made in (gasp!) Cuba. Amazingly, tensions between Washington and Ottawa rose over this incident, and anti-Canadian sentiments on this side of the border stirred as Wal-Mart vowed to continue selling the pj's in its 136 Canadian stores. The pajamas were actually on the agenda when Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien visited the White House that year. Thumbing his nose at Washington, Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy later paid a state visit to Cuba, in further bold defiance of the American-led boycott and isolation policy.

4. The Malaspina incident also strained U.S.-Canadian relations over the summer of 1997, and things got even worse in December of that year, when Canada attempted to take center stage in the international political arena by hosting a landmark convention intent on banning land mines the world over.

The United States snubbed the Ottawa Treaty, denying Canada its moment in the sun and embarrassing the Chrétien government. (More than 120 countries signed the treaty, while the United States joined Yugoslavia, Libya, Iran and Albania among the 30 or so countries that did not.)

5. As recently as this January, Washington became concerned with seemingly lax Canadian border patrols, after a couple of Algerian terrorists managed to enter the United States via Canada.

"We have excellent relations with Canada," argued a U.S. State Department official who requested anonymity. "Yes, the things you pointed out have happened, but they're by no means any indicators of the state of relations between the U.S. and Canada. The fact of the matter is that Canada is our largest trading partner, millions of people cross the border freely every day and we continue to work together on any number of bilateral and multilateral issues. These are minor bumps in an overall excellent relationship."

Sure, Canada may be our most important neighbor to the north -- indeed, it's our only neighbor to the north -- but it seems that even American media outlets are feuding with the Canadian government. The New York Times' Canada correspondent, James Brooke, actually covers Canada from the quite un-Canuck bureau in Denver.

Meanwhile, in some sort of reverse geographical gamesmanship, the Los Angeles Times' Canada correspondent apparently covers the country from its New York bureau. (The Boston Globe has a bureau in Montreal, though its bureau chief lives in Vermont.)

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