Saying he can't make a financial go of it in an era of free political blogs, publisher Michael Bate says he is shutting down both Frank magazine and efrank.ca, its online counterpart.

From CP via Canoe.ca:

The contract was ratified by 67 per cent of newspaper carriers, 75 per cent of the pressmen and 91 per cent of the inside workers, including journalists.

(Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union spokesperson Mary Agnes) Welch said the workers will get pay raises of two per cent per year for three years and 1.5 per cent in the fourth year of a four-year, nine-month contract.

The strike lasted 16 days. Welch said to get a better deal would have required staying out at least a month, which could have crippled the paper.

From the Guardian:

Websites being used to disseminate propaganda by al-Qaida appear to have come under systematic cyber-attack, forcing the closure of three for well over a month and fuelling speculation that governments are targeting them in a shadowy new front in the "war on terror".

From Patricia Best's blog at globeandmail.com:

Conrad Black is enjoying a flourishing journalistic renaissance from the confines of his Florida prison – though he's not making money from it because that would be against U.S. prison rules. He's made two noteworthy authorial appearances on a hot, new website called The Daily Beast, run by former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown. His first column – on how John McCain missed his chance to take political control of the financial meltdown ran Oct. 17. His second, on Franklin Delano Roosevelt (the subject of his last book), appeared last week and was reprinted in The Globe and Mail.

But it doesn't end there: In the latest issue of the Literary Review of Canada, Lord Black contributes a densely packed two-page article on Margaret Atwood's book Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. Lord Black uses the review to wave his large literary and historical database, while praising Ms. Atwood's book as “learned but never pedantic or turgid” and herself as “an elegant stylist with a fine sense of humour.” At one point in the article, Lord Black offers that “I do not hold myself out as an authority on the Middle Ages, and I am not now in a place that facilitates the study of them.” Ha, ha.

From the Globe and Mail:

Global Television in British Columbia paid $5,000 to a charity to interview Graham McMynn, the son of a wealthy businessman, who was held in captivity for eight days.

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