Ever dreamed of living in a place where your commode has glass walls, so people elsewhere in your dwelling can see you doing whatever? Do you simply want your life on display? Then start saving, because such a building is coming to Manhattan's financial district in 2009.

Here's a piece I did for CTV.ca on Saskatchewan's provincial election. The vote takes place Wednesday.

Given that Saskatchewan is the province that gave us the Mossbank Debate, it sounds like the quality of political discourse in the province I called home for10 years has precipitiously declined.

Jane Chalmers is stepping down as vice-president of CBC Radio, leaving expanded local programming as her main legacy.

Leading U.S. Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani has told a whopper about the chances of surviving prostate cancer in the United States versus the socialized medicine hellhole of Great Britain. The NYT's Paul Krugman is wondering why the U.S. political press isn't calling Rudy on his fib.

From TheStar.com:

Liban Hassan, 11, needed to stand on a special riser to see over the podium as he talked about his "uncle," Ali Sharmarke, who was killed when his car drove over a remote-controlled landmine in Somalia.

"Have you ever imagined being a journalist, reporting from a war zone?" he asked the 500 people gathered Thursday evening in downtown Toronto for the annual International Press Freedom Awards, presented by Canadian Journalists for Free Expression.

Several in the crowd actually had reported on wars, but most hadn't.

While most journalists in Toronto work hard and long hours, we don't face the threat of being kidnapped, tortured, imprisoned or, as in Sharmarke's case, murdered for just doing our jobs.

From the BBC:

With a year to go before the 2008 US presidential elections, young Americans are poised to mark their growing engagement in politics with an ambitious online news site.

The creators of Scoop08.com, which launches on 4 November, say it will be the first to harness the power of students across the US to follow the campaign.

"We noticed there was a void when it came to national, grassroots, student journalism that really could have an impact on issues of importance," said co-founder Alexander Heffner, 17.

Whether the venture sky-rockets or fizzles, its very existence reflects a social shift that candidates and major parties ignore at their peril.

Namely, America's young voters, traditionally seen as apathetic, are becoming more active voters - and there are more and more of them.