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').

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.

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

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.

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.

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! :)