Before Christmas, Tory election team honcho Doug Finley sent out a fundraising letter to the faithful claiming he was shocked -- shocked!! -- that a CBC reporter has been accused of passing questions to a Liberal MP to ask Mulroney about Schreiber.

From a memo by Cincinnati Post editor Mike Philipps to his newsroom staff on what will happen today, the last day the 126-year-old afternoon newspaper will ever publish:

John Vissman will arrange for food, beverages and treats for all as we get the last editions out, clean out our desks and say good-bye. But . . . tempting as it may be . . . please do not bring any alcoholic beverages into the newsroom. Let's go out like the professionals we have been these last, difficult weeks.

Observed The Daily Bellwether's Bill Sloat:

So that is the script for the day a newspaper dies. No booze. Turn in the cell phones. Your e-mail accounts at the office are turned off. And you can take six copies of the paper with you before the doors are locked forever.

(From TDB via Romensko)

DING! DING! DING! That was this blog's 5,000th post since its inception in August 2004!

It will be the 30th anniversary of Boney M's immortal tune Rasputin.

The Dead Kennedys officially formed in June 1978, but they didn't start to hit the relative big-time (in the context of being a snarly, snotty, highly political underground punk band) until 1980.

That year, the group released its debut LP - Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables.

And my world was never the same again. :)

From the BBC:

The Malaysian government has reversed a decision to ban a Christian newspaper using the word Allah to refer to God.

The government had threatened to refuse to give the Weekly Herald a publishing permit if it continued to use the word.

The paper's editor said the word had long been used by Christians to refer to God in the Malay language.

The ruling was immediately condemned by civil rights and Christian groups in Malaysia, who said it infringed their right to practice their religion.

But Malaysia's internal security department demanded the word be removed, saying only Muslims could use it.

I just phoned for a cab and had the following exchange:

Dispatcher: Where you going? 9 Channel Nine? (i.e. CTV)

Me: You read my mind.

Dispatcher: Well, I used to work for a psychic line.

Bremerton, Wa. appears to be the Scarborough of Puget Sound.

Longtime Turkmenistan dictator Saparmurat Niyazov -- the eccentric, self-styled Turkmenbashi, or father of all the Turkmens -- checked out about a year ago.

Now, energy-rich Turkmenistan is still largely a dictatorship, but a normal one -- one where people look down on Uzbekistan.

From the NYT:

William Kristol, one of the nation’s leading conservative writers and a vigorous supporter of the Iraq war, will become an Op-Ed page columnist for The New York Times, the newspaper announced Saturday.

Mr. Kristol will write a weekly column for The Times beginning Jan. 7, the newspaper said. He is editor and co-founder of The Weekly Standard, an influential conservative political magazine, and appears regularly on Fox News Sunday and the Fox News Channel. He was a columnist for Time magazine until that relationship was severed this month.

The paper matter-of-factly noted that Kristol had been a "fierce critic" of the Times.

From the Star:

Ian Urquhart, a former managing editor of the Star and currently Queen's Park columnist, will take over as editorial page editor, publisher Jagoda Pike announced yesterday.

Bob Hepburn, the Star's current editorial page editor and an award-winning veteran of the paper, is to become director of community relations and communications.  ...

(Hepburn) will be responsible for "fostering, maintaining and enhancing the Star's relationship with the many diverse communities that comprise the GTA, as well as holding responsibility for external communications," Pike said.

"Bob's depth and breadth of background in journalism and editorial leadership, as well as his excellent community relationships and knowledge of the GTA, make him uniquely qualified for this important new role," Pike said.

Pakistan's government is pointing fingers at al Qaeda-linked militants for the death of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto and claims she died by bumping her head following the suicide blast.

Here's a round-up of reaction from a variety of Canadian, U.S. and British publications.

Here's the stuff I found interesting and noteworthy over past 12 months. It's kind-of, sort-of in order. But right now, I'm building it as a stream-of-consciousness thang. Consider it a work in progress.

Many people have expressed shock this morning at the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister of Pakistan and opponent of President Pervez Musharraf -- and a target of Islamist extremists.

At the risk of sounding callous, I'm not sure why anyone should be shocked. Given the fanaticism of her enemies and their complete disregard for human life, one should have seen this morning's tragedy in Rawalpindi as entirely predictable. In October, they tried to kill her within hours of her return to Pakistan.

A major question for me is how did her assassin manage to get close enough to shoot her in the neck and chest before detonating his or her bomb?

By an adult woman, no less.

The Toronto Star's Dale Brazao tells the tale of an interview with someone suspected of running an illegal daycare operation. The woman, Klara Solodar of Thornhill, Ont., stole the flash from Brazao's camera. Here's what happened next:

As we were interviewing a mother who had arrived to pick up her child, Solodar jumped (reporter Robert) Cribb from behind, bit him on the wrist, drawing blood, and wrestled a digital voice recorder from his hand before running into the house with it.

Requests to have the $500 flash and $200 recorder returned fell on deaf ears, much to the amusement of neighbours who had front-row seats in this theatre of the absurd.

Negotiations for the return of the equipment lasted a week and went nowhere.

Cribb's digital recorder contained several crucial interviews carried out during our lengthy investigation into the state of daycare in Ontario. So we turned to Peel Region police for help, telling the officers we weren't interested in seeing charges laid, just getting our equipment back. The cops went to see Solodar and put an end to the drama.

But our elation turned to a mixture of horror and bemusement as soon as Cribb pressed the play button on his returned recorder: 12 hours of interviews had been erased and replaced with an hour of Russian folk music.

Ravi Baichwal, an anchor with ABC News in Chicago (who used to work at CTV and is a very nice guy), was on air when a car slammed into his TV studio's glass storefront wall.

"... This happened about seven or eight metres to my right, and I challenge anybody to kind of completely look straight at the camera when something like that happens," the affable (and normally unflappable) broadcaster told Canada AM with a chuckle.

You can see the video and Ravi's interview on Canada AM at this CTV.ca story.

A satiric intrepretation by the Star's Theo Moudakis:

From Don Martin's Dec. 21 column in the N-P:

Bored reporters sprawled across chairs inside the drafty 24 Sussex Drive solarium with only the family's attention-craving, aptly named cat Fluffy for company.

Stephen Harper, his face coated with television makeup, was running more than an hour behind schedule in his parade of year-end interviews.

It's a pre-Christmas ritual between journalists scrambling to extract a news scoop during their 10 minutes of face time and a prime minister equally determined to control his message. There will be many, many pages of Stephen Says journalism today as the embargo is lifted and "exclusive" stories from dozens of interviews pour into the news hole.

The notable exception will be CBC Radio, which was denied a chat with the Prime Minister because his office wouldn't approve Kathleen Petty, host of The House weekly politics show, as a worthy interviewer. Outrageous, if you ask me.

Forbes.com's Matthew Kirhady looks at Santa's positives and negatives as a 21st century business leader.

From AP:

Art Conrad has an issue with the commercialism of Christmas, and his protest has gone way beyond just shunning the malls or turning off his television. The Bremerton resident nailed Santa Claus to a 15-foot crucifix in front of his house.

"Santa has been perverted from who he started out to be," Conrad said. "Now he's the person being used by corporations to get us to buy more stuff."

A photo of the crucified Santa adorns his Christmas cards, with the message "Santa died for your MasterCard."

Eight U.S. journalism school deans criticize this week's F.C.C. ruling allowing the ownership of newspapers and TV stations in the same market, saying it will hurt local public affairs broadcast journalism.