From TheStar.com:

Quebecor Media Inc. said late Thursday it's buying Osprey Media Income Fund for a total enterprise value of about $516.9 million.

Quebecor Media, a wholly owned subsidiary of Quebecor Inc. (TSX: QBR.A), said it will pay $7.25 per unit, which represents a total equity value of Osprey Media of $355.5 million. ...

Osprey Media Income Fund (TSX: OSP.UN) owns 54 Canadian newspapers including such titles as the St. Catharines Standard, the Kingston Whig-Standard and the Peterborough Examiner. It also owns magazines and specialty publications but derives most of its revenues from its newspapers.

Quebecor Media owns Sun Media Corp., which has a national chain of tabloids and community newspapers; TVA Group Inc., operator of the largest French-language conventional television network in Quebec, a number of specialty channels, and the English-language Sun TV.

From the NYT:

“In some ways a suburban city can be understood as an intolerant city.” If that loaded quotation from the Calgary-based architect Marc Boutin doesn’t tell you exactly where “Radiant City” stands on the issue of suburban sprawl, the filmmakers have plenty more just like it.

From the BBC:

Indonesian troops deliberately killed five Australian-based journalists during the invasion of East Timor in 1975, an Australian inquiry has heard.

A senior lawyer has told a coroner in Sydney that eyewitness evidence has proved the men were murdered after they had tried to surrender.

The Australian and Indonesian governments have always insisted the journalists died accidentally.

From the BBC:

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has denounced what he called fresh plots to destabilise his government, after he closed an opposition TV channel.

He urged supporters to be on alert for a coup attempt and threatened a second TV network, Globovision.

Thousands of people across the country protested for a second day after Mr Chavez's decision not to renew Radio Caracas TV's (RCTV's) licence.

Police, government supporters and protesters clashed violently on Monday.

In a national address shown by all TV stations, Mr Chavez defended his decision to close RCTV as a public service, denouncing the 53-year-old station - Venezuela's most popular - as a "permanent attack on public morals".

He also called news network Globovision an enemy of the state, attacking its coverage of the protests against RCTV's closure.

"Enemies of the homeland, particularly those behind the scenes, I will give you a name: Globovision. Greetings, gentlemen of Globovision, you should watch where you are going," Mr Chavez said.

"I recommend you take a tranquiliser and get into gear, because if not, I am going to do what is necessary."

Congratulations to Syria's President Bashar Assad, who won another seven-year mandate by capturing 97 per cent of the vote!

Not only that, voter turnout is estimated at 95 per cent!

Still, Assad isn't as popular as the late, lamented Saddam Hussein, who captured 99.6 per cent of the vote in Iraq's last pre-colonial election in October 2002.

Did I mention that both Assad and Saddam were the only candidates in their respective elections?

From globeandmail.com:

Sam the Record Man, a Yonge Street staple since 1961 and once Canada's top music retailer, will be closing its doors for good next month.

Citing ubiquitous music downloads, Jason and Bobby Sniderman, the sons of Sam Sniderman and present owners of the flagship Toronto store, said rarely does a day go by without a story about declining CD sales.

“We are making a responsible decision in recognizing the status of the record industry and the increasing impact of technology,” said Bobby Sniderman in a press release.

He would not elaborate when reached by telephone Tuesday.

The store will close June 30.

This is sad news, but totally understandable. I buy far more music on iTunes these days that I spend on CDs. The story notes that Sam Sniderman gave Canadian artists a chance to sell music when no one else did.

That's commendable, but in the market of 2007, that's no longer enough.

Afterthought

CTV Toronto did a story on the move. The video report showed photos of Sniderman with stars like Sammy Davis Jr., Burton Cummings and Johnny Cash.

I found those photos to be both quaint and revealing.

I see this:

Poland targets 'gay' Teletubbies

By Adam Easton BBC News, Warsaw Tinky Winky was once attacked by the late US Rev Jerry Falwell A senior Polish official has ordered psychologists to investigate whether the popular BBC TV show Teletubbies promotes a homosexual lifestyle. The spokesperson for children's rights in Poland, Ewa Sowinska, singled out Tinky Winky, the purple character with a triangular aerial on his head. "I noticed he was carrying a woman's handbag," she told a magazine. "At first, I didn't realise he was a boy." EU officials have criticised Polish government policy towards homosexuals. ... Tinky Winky's psychological evaluation is being treated fairly light-heartedly by many people here. One radio station asked its listeners to vote for the most suspicious children's show. Some e-mailed in, saying that Winnie the Pooh had only male friends.

Update

Sowinska has since backed off her remarks. She is the childrens' rights ombudsman and according to the AP story:

... is a member of the League of Polish Families party, which is militantly anti-gay rights and anti-abortion. The party is a junior member in the coalition government led by Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski.

From the BBC:

Venezuela's government has accused a TV station of inciting people to kill President Hugo Chavez, hours after taking another network off the air.

It said footage shown on Globovision implicitly called for Mr Chavez to be killed. The station denies the claim.

Communications Minister William Lara said Globovision had called for the death of Mr Chavez by airing footage of the 1981 assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II with the song "This Does Not Stop Here" sung by Ruben Blades, now Panama's tourism minister.

"The conclusion of the specialists ... is that (in this segment) they are inciting the assassination of the president of Venezuela," Mr Lara said, as he filed a lawsuit against the news network at the state prosecutor's office.

[The closure is] a major setback to democracy and pluralism Robert Menard Reporters Without Borders Send us your comments

The government was also suing the US station CNN for allegedly linking Mr Chavez to al-Qaeda, Mr Lara said.

"CNN broadcast a lie which linked President Chavez to violence and murder," he said.

Globovision director Alberto Federico Ravell rejected the accusations against his station as "ridiculous".

Globovision was the only TV station to air footage of a large demonstration against the government's growing control over the media.

Here's a RSF news release on the situation.

And here's a BBC feature: TV row widens Venezuela's rift

The Congressional Quarterly's Jeff Stein on why stories about the horrific failures of the Bush administration on Iraq deserve to be told, but why the public might be tuning out.

From the Boston Globe via truthout: GOP Rivals Embrace Unproven Iraq-9/11 Tie

In defending the Iraq war, leading Republican presidential contenders are increasingly echoing words and phrases used by President Bush in the run-up to the war that reinforce the misleading impression that Iraq was responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Today is Memorial Day in the United States, a day to honour U.S. military personnel who died in service.

The NYT's David Carr attacks one particularly Catch-22-esque policy for embedded reporters, the number of whom has fallen from 126 to 92 in the past month, and how it constrains coverage of soldiers in Iraq.

The NYT reports that many Muslim militants are taking the skills learned in fighting the Iraq insurgency and using them to conduct terror operations in neighbouring countries and beyond.

From AP via CTV.ca:

A British Broadcasting Corp. journalist kidnapped in Gaza is alive and well and could soon be released, a Palestinian government spokesman said.

Speaking at a literary festival in Wales Saturday, Hamas government spokesman Ghazi Hamad said he knew the "small group" holding Alan Johnston and was personally involved in negotiations to free him.

"I know that he is well and healthy, and in a good situation. No one has tried to harm him or hurt him," Hamad said.

Hamad said he hoped efforts to release Johnston would bear fruit "very, very soon."

The BBC story had this cautionary note:

... There has been virtually no official news about Mr Johnston since his disappearance, despite Palestinian officials speaking frequently of prospects for his release.

Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez took some payback at midnight on Sunday when he allowed the liked of Radio Caracas TV to expire, putting the opposition TV station off the air and replacing it with a public service station.

RCTV supported the coup that temporarily overthrew him in 2002.

I saw the documentary Revolucion!?, by Montreal director Charles Gervais, on Friday.

The Globe gave it 3.5 stars. Eye Weekly gave it three stars. The spoilsports at Now gave it two stars, and called it a mighty dull film.

I concur with Now.

From the Star:

Kathy English, who first worked as a copy messenger at the Brantford Expositor 30 years ago, is the Star's new public editor. ...

English's newsroom credits include reporting, feature writing, editing and assigning for the Star in the 1980s, Toronto Sun, Hamilton Spectator and London Free Press. She was most recently the reader response editor at the Globe and Mail. ...

She replaces Sharon Burnside, now the Star's assistant managing editor of training and development.

Psychology researchers are finding the story you tell about yourself -- and how you tell it -- goes a long way towards defining you. The implication is clear.

So, within a week, the senior director of Radio-Canada’s new media operations and the senior director of CBC.ca both take their careers in new directions outside the public broadcaster.

In the case of the latter, she's just leaving.

Whatever does it mean? The e-mail address link is to the right at 2 o'clock. :)

Update

None of my regular sources are ponying up anything. The irregular ones aren't saying anything either. That means either nothing was going on, or something.

I know what my bet is! :)

Afterthought

I wonder if Ms. Gardner will land on her feet at Alliance-Atlantis. :)

This Ouimet posting has much discussion on Sue Gardner's tenure as CBC.ca director.

From the Washington Post:

Months before the invasion of Iraq, U.S. intelligence agencies predicted that it would be likely to spark violent sectarian divides and provide al-Qaeda with new opportunities in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a report released yesterday by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Analysts warned that war in Iraq also could provoke Iran to assert its regional influence and "probably would result in a surge of political Islam and increased funding for terrorist groups" in the Muslim world.

The intelligence assessments, made in January 2003 and widely circulated within the Bush administration before the war, said that establishing democracy in Iraq would be "a long, difficult and probably turbulent challenge." The assessments noted that Iraqi political culture was "largely bereft of the social underpinnings" to support democratic development.

More than four years after the March 2003 invasion, with Iraq still mired in violence and 150,000 U.S. troops there under continued attack from al-Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents, the intelligence warnings seem prophetic. Other predictions, however, were less than accurate. Intelligence analysts assessed that any postwar increase in terrorism would slowly subside in three to five years, and that Iraq's vast oil reserves would quickly facilitate economic reconstruction.

The fad of allowing civilians to create advertising spots for them isn't exactly providing H.J. Heinz with a wealth of brand-building opportunities to choose from.

Everyone got hot and bothered this past winter when Dubya mentioned the phrase "serious challenge of global climate change." But in talks leading up to the G8 summit next month, the U.S. is rejecting the notion that the climate change situation is urgent or that emissions must be cut by mid-century.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio spoke for an hour on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives this week saying Iraq is all about the oil, which isn't an unusual claim. However, he claims Democrats are helping the Bush adminstration privatize Iraqi oilfields, which, er, is.

From Editor and Publisher via truthout:

New York staffers at McClatchy's Washington, D.C., Bureau - one of the few major news outlets skeptical of intelligence reports during the run-up to the war in Iraq - claims it is now being punished for that coverage.

Bureau Chief John Walcott and current and former McClatchy Pentagon correspondents say they have not been allowed on the Defense Secretary's plane for at least three years, claiming the news company is being retaliated against for its reporting.

"It is because our coverage of Iraq policy has been quite critical," Walcott told E&P. He added, "I think the idea of public officials barring coverage by people they've decided they don't like is at best unprofessional, at worst undemocratic and petty."

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman called such assertions "absurd," adding, "There is no basis of fact for that allegation. It is not true. There are always more people who would like to travel with the secretary than seats available."

From TechCrunch, who picked it up from former TechCrunch writer Marshall Kirkpatrick at Twitter via Cyberjournalist: Things sure are quiet at MySpace News

An excerpt from the May 14 post:

... The front page of MySpace News shows most stories with zero votes. Two stories have a single vote. None have more than that. Perusing through the various categories shows the same thing - page after page of stories with no votes or other evidence that anyone is visiting the site.

MySpace PR isn’t commenting, but I do note that MySpace news, which is still in beta, is not linked from the MySpace home page or otherwise being promoted.When will MySpace begin promoting it? They can’t be getting much in the way of valuable beta feedback since no one is using it. For now, the site is DOA.

BBC Tech correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones writes a reasonably amusing (well, by Beeb standards) yarn about his foray into the world of social networking sites as a 40-something.

It's a warm one in T.O. today -- 27 degrees Celsius, feels like 33.

One business I went into on my rounds had its AC on, which is understandable. But it also had its front doors wide open, which is not.

While making my purchase, I idly inquired if they had the AC on. The clerk answered in the affirmative.

"Then you might want to close your front doors," I suggested as gently as possible.

She grimaced, concurred and acted. I said thanks.

On the streetcar ride home, there were all sorts of businesses with their front doors open. If they are all running AC simultaneously, then I would suggest they probably aren't paying enough for electricity.

This is a grim, stylish, riveting look at the world of one despicable, middle-aged Parisian gangster and the changing of the repugnant guard around him.