The Beeb's Paul Reynolds analyzes the two reports on the 7/7 subway bombings in London. While the parliamentary committee report is less bland than the official government one, he finds that both find that while mistakes were made, no individual is to blame.

Abe Rosenthal was born in Canada in 1922, the son of Jewish immigrants from what's now known as Belarus.

He would go on to help shape the modern New York Times, as this lengthy obituary shows.

One black spot not mentioned was the treatment of NYT correspondent Raymond Bonner over the backlash from Bonner's coverage of the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador.

Zerby has another post on the Luntz vs. Thompson contretemps.

(Frank Luntz is a Republican pollster who was speaking to the right-wing Civitas Society on the weekend. He reportedly said the Conservatives should nail the Liberals for every scandal the Grits triggered during their 13-year reign. Elizabeth Thompson of the Montreal Gazette did the reporting.)

Thompson put a response to Luntz online. Here's an excerpt:

This isn't a story about me, my accuracy or whether you can hear a presentation through an open doorway. It is a story about the fact that a Republican pollster met with the prime minister of Canada last Friday. It is a story about the advice he gave a group of influential Conservatives. It is a story about whether the Canadian government is following that advice.

I've spared you a couple of bad warm up jokes at the beginning about how Conservatives dress too formally. The last couple of minutes of the tape, during which he described Conservatives and Republicans as allies, social and economic conservatives as all being the same family and offered $1,000 U.S to anyone who could convince the Conservatives to give him a contract for the next election campaign has yet to be transcribed. The occasional inaudibles are the result of a discreetly held taperecorder and a professional transcriber who doesn't write it if they don't hear it. I could have filled iin the blanks about Preston Manning being so cheap he only provided chips in his suite in 1993 or Bill Clinton being successful because he felt your pain but I chose to go with what the transcription service produced.

That will be all.

Actually, if you want to read a bit more, you can read this story about Bluemile.ca.

Here's some of what King Kaufmann had to say at Salon: (free with a daypass)

I think I lost my eyesight late in the first overtime and my sanity somewhere in the second, but it might have been the other way around.

And you know what? I still had fun. Overtime playoff hockey is just the bomb. There's no other sport that can give you such a combination of fluidity and -- bam! -- instantaneous game-ending drama.

I know you're going to write and say: "Soccer." OK, I'll give you that just so we don't have to argue. I'm short of sleep and don't have the energy. But let me just say, between yawns, that unless there's a steal on the doorstep or something, soccer goals tend to gather. The play develops, gains momentum toward a goal.

Because of the size of the playing field and the fact that people run slower than they ice-skate, it takes a few seconds for the situation to gain steam. That's its own kind of excitement. I understand that.

But in hockey, while some plays gain momentum, soccer style, such as a length-of-the-ice rush, as often as not goals appear almost out of thin air. There'll be a scrum much like a hundred other scrums in the same game, or some random perimeter passing, and then -- bang! -- red light. And in overtime it's -- bang! -- game over.