flickering pictures

Why does it always have to be “Death to so-and-so”? Is there no middle ground between “Long live Imam Khomeini” and “Death to the dictator”? Why not something a little more constructive, like “Stop beating and killing unarmed protestors for no damn reason”?
With temperatures dipping to a nippy 3°C on National Students’ Day, […]

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Go on, find Palau on a map without Googling it — I double dog dare you.
Its 21,000 citizens have only had a country for 15 years, but the Pacific mini-state of Palau is already distinguishing itself by welcoming 17 Chinese Guantanamo inmates with open arms, and inviting them to settle wherever they like on its […]

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So the posting here has been a little slow for the last week or so — mainly because the rest of my life has been anything but. I’ve got reams of work to plow through and don’t even really have time to be posting right now, but this story was exactly the kind of […]

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So there’s this guy with a broken foot in New York who has been hobbling around town on crutches, and who’s fed up with perfectly healthy people who refuse to give up subway seats reserved for people with limited mobility. He’s so fed up, in fact, that he started taking their pictures and posting […]

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The Vatican has rejected yet another potential U.S. ambassador — Caroline Kennedy this time — because even though she’s Catholic, she isn’t anti-abortion. And as if to drive home the point, the Vatican chose Easter to express its outrage at Washington’s “calculated insult to the Holy See.”
Washington’s previous nominee, a former lawyer for Reagan […]

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Now I know what you’re thinking: more Montreal bias from Mark. But this isn’t coming from me — it’s science. Well, sort of. Actually not at all.
A joint analysis by the Toronto Sun and beautifulpeople.com — pillars of the research community that they are — has finally produced incontrovertible evidence of what […]

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Remember Muntadhar al-Zeidi, the Iraqi reporter who last December threw his shoes at George W. Bush, yellng “this is from the widows and orphans and all those killed in Iraq”? That gesture just earned him three years in prison, and something tells me that if he’d been a white guy tossing shoes at Bush […]

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It’s only sleeping.
A few days ago, B sent me a link to an excellent article by Stephanie Nolen, a Canadian Globe and Mail reporter who — in my opinion at least — does some of the finest journalism out there, and has for years. She opened the Globe’s South Africa bureau back in 2003, […]

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Unless you haven’t turned on a television lately, you know that ten days ago the Israeli army launched a full-scale attack on Hamas forces in Gaza, with the stated aim of halting the barrage of homemade rockets that have been launched into Israeli towns since 2000. As I write this, the fight has left […]

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Not that it’s any of my business, since I’m not American, but on behalf of the rest of the world, congratulations on choosing the best person for the job. We — and 52% of America — could be wrong about him, and we’ll have four years to find out, but in terms at least […]

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