You know that 20-cent-per-litre price hike you got ambushed with Wednesday morning? Brace yourself for another hike Thursday morning. Maybe even Friday morning.

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Zhao Zan, a researcher in the Beijing bureau of the New York Times, has been held in custody for almost a year, accused of leaking state secrets.

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Arnold Amber, president of the guild at the CBC, takes on CBC president Robert Rabinovitch's commentary from Tuesday's Globe:

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This Washington Post column looks at how journalists and newsrooms, particularly from the New Orleans area, are trying to keep people informed despite the devastation.

The NYT covers the same ground in this story.

Actually, the W-P column also talks briefly about the blogging and podcasting efforts of locked-out CBC staff.

The governor of Louisiana has ordered everyone out of New Orleans because holes created in the levees can't be fixed. Here's a feature I did last night for CTV.ca on the levee system.

This Salon photo essay dates back to Aug. 23 (roughly a full blog-year in the past). It shows some disturbing images of the carnage in Iraq and talks about why Americans are spared views of them by the MSM.

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An Iraqi television journalist was killed on the weekend covering a pro-Saddam Hussein rally east of Baghdad.

An excerpt from the AP story carried on Salon.com:

Rafed Mahmoud al-Rubai was shot by unidentified gunmen ... Rubai, a freelance contributor to the Iraqi TV station Al Irakiya, died instantly, Reporters Without Borders said.

"Rafid became a target after he did a great job during the elections" in January, Iraqiya's editor-in-chief Bassem al-Fadly said.

Rubai was the 67th journalist or media assistant to be killed in Iraq since the start of the war in March 2003. In addition, two are still missing, it said. In contrast, a total of 63 journalists were killed in the Vietnam war, which lasted from 1955 to 1975.

The BBC followed up on the notion of journalist safety in Iraq.

Here is some of what it had to say:

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CBC president Robert Rabinovitch has an op-ed piece in today's Globe and Mail. Here are some excerpts:

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The Toronto Star ran two op-eds on Monday, one defending the CBC, the other saying let's keep the $987 million in our pockets.

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Carl Wilson offered up a reply to Warren Kinsella's broadside against him in a Zoilus posting entitled O Kinsella, where is thy sting?

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Wow. In just over two years, more journos have died in Iraq than did during the entire Vietnam War.

To add to the grimness, a Reuters TV soundman was killed by a U.S. Army sniper in Baghdad on Sunday while the cameraman was wounded.

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The Toronto Star's editorial board weighed in on the CBC lockout this weekend, as did Globe and Mail columnist Kate Taylor.

Methinks Taylor has more to say.

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Decima Research released a poll Sunday which found 61 per cent of respondents saying the CBC lockout has had no impact on them at all.

A Canadian Media Guild official retorts that the poll firm asked the wrong people.

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Check out David Brooks' column in the NYT. He explains what the 'oil spot' strategy is, and why it conflicts with U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's view of how 21st century wars should be fought.

According to a report in The Observer, the top official in the foreign secretary's office told Prime Minister Tony Blair's office in 2004 that the Iraq war was fueling Muslim extremism.

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Alt.country superstar Steve Earle was at Camp Casey in the past week, and he had this to say about Cindy Sheehan:

"... The Vietnam War didn't end because I opposed it. It ended because my father came to oppose it. And we have Cindy Sheehan to thank for the beginnings of what I think is a mainstream movement against this war."

You can see a few clips of him and folk legend Joan Baez performing at truthout.org.

I loved this quote from Earle in a 2004 Mother Jones interview:

"Artists have always been the consciences of their societies. And I don't sing good enough to be an entertainer."

Why? No particular reason, except that he seems to have crawled up the ass of one W. Kinsella and started gnawing on said W.'s haemorrhoids by writing critically about Fury's Hour, Kinsella's new book about punk rock, triggering a rather frenzied response.

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A university paper in Illinois had spent a year chronicling the thoughts of a motherless eight-year-old whose father was serving in Iraq.

But there was an itsy-bitsy, teensy-weensy problem with the story. And you, my devoted readership, have been given some broad hints as to what that is.

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As usual, Frank Rich gets it right.

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Why is that the anti-Sheehan protesters see being against the war as being against U.S. troops?

I would think most Americans don't raise their sons and daughters to needlessly die in cynical, mendacious, military misadventures. As a result, why support a such a war that has killed almost 1,800 U.S. servicemen and women so far, and maimed thousands more? How is being against the wasting of their lives being against them?

Why was one guy holding a sign saying "Liberals and terrorists are against the war"?

The worldwide incidence of terrorist attacks has shot up since the March 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. Personally, I think the terrorists are for it.

Actually, I tripped over this, which gives me some insight into the patriot mindset.

And here's another such insight.

This NYT story is about a driving holiday in the southwest corner of South Dakota. But I use it mostly to spin some stories of my own.

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An honest bureaucrat in the U.S. federal government got demoted by the Bush administration after complaining some politically-minded officials in his department pressured him to play down police racial profiling statistics.

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This was sent to me by a friend who may have recognized some of himself in the article -- although if the truth be told, there's definitely some of me in it too. :)

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Since I sometimes make scornful posts about Jon Stewart's occasionally milquetoasty interviews, I should say he acquitted himself well Thursday night with Christopher Hitchens (available on The Daily Show site under 'celebrity interviews').

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The BBC has a few stories about Niger, including one that suggests the NGOs overplayed the crisis, that it was more of a series of localized problems and not a full-scale emergency.

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BBC online editor Pete Clifton talks about typos and how they raise the ire of his readership.

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According to a report in The Globe and Mail, Andy Barrie, the silver-haired, golden-throated host of Metro Morning on CBC Radio One, may start doing a morning show for a campus radio station in T.O. while the lockout is on.

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On Wednesday, Prime Minister Paul Martin announced the federal government would be spending $2.5 million to acknowledge the injustice done to about 5,000 Ukrainian-Canadians in the First World War when they were interned and placed in forced labour camps between 1914 and 1920.

My father's name is Walter H. Doskoch. His father, my grandfather William (after whom  I'm named), was one of the internees. He was locked up from 1914 until 1919.

My dad passed away in late 2000, but recognition of this injustice was something he aggressively fought for in his latter years.

While Dad was around to see markers established at two campsites, one at Jasper and one in the Okanagan (both of which you really have to search for. We apparently want to publicize historical wrongs, just not too much. It's The Canadian Way), I'm sure he would have appreciated Wednesday's announcement.

But again, the federal government can't bring itself to declaratively say "we're sorry."

And when the new plaques and markers go up, it would be a big step forward to put them where people can see them. Let's not passively-aggressively defeat the purpose of the acknowledgement. Otherwise, we might be doing this all over again with our Muslim brothers and sisters at some unspecified future point in our nation's history.

Here's the Globe and Mail's story  on the announcement. And here's another on Mary Marko, the last known survivor.

The Bloor West Village Ukrainian Festival gets underway tomorrow here in T.O.

As I said last week, I turned off my anonymous comments to stop the flood of Texas hold-em and casino spam that was bombarding me.

However, if you don't want to bother with a reader's account, you can email me at blog-dot-billd-at-gmail-dot-com.

Let me know in the message if you want your email posted as a public comment to the blog -- or, perhaps more importantly, if you don't.

Finally, the above is not a primary addy, so I can't guarantee quick responses.

And while I'm not big on poker spam, if you've got billions in ill-gotten Nigerian oil wealth and just need a Canadian bank account to launder it through (for a reasonable fee, of course), let's talk! :)

Me and You and Everyone We Know, by performance artist and first-time filmmaker Miranda July.

 

Mark Starowicz, one of the great minds in Canadian journalism, offers a take on the CBC dispute on Maclean's website, and he finds room to criticize both sides.

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Locked-out CBCer John Gushue points to a statement from the CMG as an expression of hope that negotiations could restart soon.

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