The Globe and Mail's Patricia Best has a hilarious story about one of my favourite world leaders.

In this case, the negligent parents were two adult Canada geese.

I was heading home from work, riding south on one of the McCowan Street buses just south of Corporate Drive (the intersection with Extend The Brand Road is one of Toronto's hidden-gem intersections) when all of a sudden, everyone starts doing brakestands.

I look to see what the hell is going on, and two adult geese are crossing from west to east, with two awkward goslings in tow.

McCowan has three lanes of traffic going south, and three going north. Considering drivers don't even like stopping for pedestrians there, I'd say these geese got off easy.

At least I think they got off easy. The bus moved on before they tried crossing the northbound lanes.

The parents picked a crossing where there's a concrete divider that tapers down. They could go up and over easily enough, but one of the little ones was having some problems with this obstacle.

Bonne chance, my feathered, excrement-machine friends.

From CP via globeandmail.com:

Tony Burman, the one-time head of CBC news, has been appointed managing director of Al Jazeera's English operations.

The BBC's Paul Danahar on his efforts to stay out of the clutches of Burma's Special Branch police and keep reporting from the disaster-ridden country.

If you haven't heard, Karl Rove -- once best known as Bush's Brain -- is a pundit for Fox News while also acting as an informal adviser to presumptive Republican nominee John McCain. But he's hardly the only ex-politico backroomer showing up on American airwaves.

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark thinks there's many reasons besides his creation why U.S. newspapers are facing troubles these days -- even though it pulls in US$80 million to $100 million annually with just 25 employees.

Vancouver writer Stan Persky on the 75th anniversary of a notorious event in anti-intellectualism. He wrote about it at the Tyee:

May 12, 2008 -- Some things I take personally. This is one of them. That's because I write books. So, whenever people burn books -- whether it's the ancient library of Alexandria, Egypt going up in flames nearly two millennia in the past, or the 2003 torching of the National Library in Baghdad just five years ago, at the beginning of the U.S. invasion of Iraq -- I take offence. And it's personal. When the temperature reaches Fahrenheit 451, the degree at which paper burns, books like mine were and are reduced to ashes.

Opernplatz Square, 1933.

That flame-scorched history is why I was in Berlin's August Bebel Platz on Sat., May 10. It's the site where, 75 years ago on that date in 1933, the most notorious book burning of the 20th century was ignited by the then recently-installed Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler. Less than four months after Hitler became chancellor of Germany, Nazi students throughout the country were egged on by Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels to purge the nation's libraries of all thought of which the government didn't approve. ...

As the tongues of hungry flame lit up the night sky, Goebbels himself was on hand to put the government's official stamp on the event. "My fellow students, German men and women, the era of exaggerated Jewish intellectualism is now at an end," the propaganda chief declared. He promised the mob that "the future German man will not just be a man of books." The young would be educated "to repudiate the fear of death in order to gain again the respect for death. That is the mission of the young and therefore you do well at this late hour to entrust to the flames the intellectual garbage of the past." ...

If one wants a more shudder-inducing, immediate sense of the event being remembered, it's as close as your computer. The Nazis, obsessed with recording the triumphs of what they expected to be a Thousand Year Reich, scrupulously filmed the May 1933 book burning. There are the crackling flames, and there's Goebbels, thundering away, in a film clip available at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum website.

From a BBC collection of blog postings and independent reportage in the wake of cyclone Nardis's horrific strike on Burma:

A reporter for the Mizzima news site, based in India and run by Burmese exiles, interviewed some survivors.

Twelve-year-old Ma Ei Lay walked for days to the nearest township after her family perished in the storm. "I waded through the corpses and came back to my village. I could not recognise my own village. Only some trees were left without leaves."

"Those who found the corpses probably cut off the ears and hands to take the earrings and bracelets," he said. 

Her journey was through a wasteland with no food or aid. "I drank coconut milk. There was no water on the way."

An anonymous survivor talks about the psychological damage sustained. "Most of the people lost their family members while they were clinging to each other... Many people are traumatised and have a lost look on their face as if they are semi-unconscious."

The desperate situation in the delta is documented in other exile Burmese news sites such as Yoma3 which has heard of the spread of disease among the cyclone victims in Bogalay.

A resident of the south-western township of Kyonmange who is helping the cyclone victims there gave grisly detail to the Democratic Voice of Burma about corpses being found without ears and hands - interpreted as evidence of looting.

From the deck for David Olive's column in the Sunday Star: "Unprecedented ineptitude and complacency are leading America's paper of record into irrelevance."

It's been five years since a journalistic time bomb named Jayson Blair finally exploded at the New York Times, leading to an article published on the newspaper's website with the following sombre headline: "Times Reporter Who Resigned Leaves Long Trail of Deception."

The sometimes media critic writes on his thoughts about the $450 million temple to the news biz that recently opened in Washington, D.C.

Globe and Mail reporter Katherine O'Neill on her first order of business upon arriving in Afghanistan: Buying a burka.

From the BBC:

Russian tanks and intercontinental missile launchers have been paraded through Moscow for the first time since the collapse of the USSR.

The Russian leadership has decided to revive the Communist-era custom of featuring military hardware in the annual Victory Day parade.

New President Dmitry Medvedev said the army and navy were getting stronger.

Observers say the point of the parade was to demonstrate that Russia is a serious military force.

The Kremlin insists the event, which marks the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, is not meant to threaten anyone.

Guardian columnist Roy Greenslade stands up for journalistic tradition.

I think Denton, and others who support his view, are wilfully misunderstanding the digital revolution. They think that "factual news" appears on the net by magic. It's put there by agency journalists and stringers - the downtrodden peasants of the modern journalistic class structure - and then the squirearchy back at base can play with it to astound readers with their interpretative "stories". Finally, the nobility - the high-profile columnists - can employ their dazzling writing skills to give their own spin at £10 a word.

By this time, the readers may have been entertained but will they be properly informed? Will they have had the chance to assess all the facts? It is a fundamental distortion of the digital revolution to wish away the separation of news and comment as some kind of old-fashioned newsprint tradition that is somehow past its sell-by date.

The Denton to which Greenslade refers is Nick Denton of the Gawker Media group. He posted the following at Gawker: Why the (NYT) should abandon the news-opinion divide.

From Globe and Mail Update:

The Globe and Mail's (sic - BD) was recognized with six prizes last night at the 59th National Newspaper Awards in Toronto, more than any other news organization in the country.

The newspaper had 15 nominations among the 21 categories heading into the annual dinner that salutes the best of Canadian print journalism, also the highest number among Canadian news organizations for the ninth year in a row. ...

Among other winners last night were Montreal's La Presse, which won five awards, and the Ottawa Citizen and the Toronto Star, which each won two.

The movie I was keen on seeing did not get kind reviews.

From A.O. Scott of the NYT: "Speed Racer goes nowhere, and you’d be amazed how long the trip can take."

Rick Groen of the G&M: "... From adults through teens to tykes, there's something here for everyone to dislike - the whole clan can have fun making fun of this thing."

I got the point. :)

Pakistan is hemming and hawing about a report that the U.S. wouldn't cut it a cheque in February to fight al Qaeda and Taliban militants. Seems Washington is wondering if that's where the money actually goes.

Observe for yourself:

Some editors wait their whole lives for a chance to get away with writing a headline like that. :)

Here's the actual story.

Incidentally, it was the most e-mailed story on BBC as I write this.

Americans' newfound interest in presidential politics has been noticed by the celebrity magazines.

From the World home page of nytimes.com:

A Place to Read and Comment on Times Articles in Arabic

By ROBERT MacKEY

As part of Generation Faithful, our ongoing series examining the lives of young people across the Muslim world, The New York Times has established an Arabic-language blog.

From the NYT:

When the Pentagon announced in March that Maj. Gen. Jay W. Hood would become the senior American officer based in Pakistan, it reflected the military’s aim to put a crisis-tested veteran in a critical job at a pivotal time in the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

But nearly two months later, the military has quietly canceled the assignment of General Hood, a 33-year Army veteran who was excoriated in the Pakistani news media for one of his previous jobs: commander of the United States prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

During General Hood’s command from 2004 to 2006, military authorities force-fed with tubes detainees who were engaging in hunger strikes at the Guantánamo prison, a step they justified as necessary to prevent the prisoners from committing suicide to protest their indefinite confinement. Also during General Hood’s tenure, reports that an American guard may have desecrated a Koran stirred wide protests in the Islamic world.

The decision to withdraw General Hood’s assignment has not been announced, but it appears to reflect the widening shadow that the military prison at Guantánamo is casting over American foreign policy. While the United States considers Pakistan a close ally in its counterterrorism efforts, the accounts by Pakistanis who have returned to Pakistan after being held at Guantánamo Bay have added to anti-American sentiment in the country.

From AP via Google News:

Dan Rather has filed an amended lawsuit against CBS that says other TV networks refused to hire him because of the damage executives at his former company did to his reputation after a disputed 2004 report on President Bush.

From CP via CBC.ca (May 7):

Readers appreciate good content and will always pay for newspapers, but only the strongest brands will survive the decades ahead by adapting with the times and giving people what they want, Thomson Reuters (TSX:TRI) deputy chairman Geoffrey Beattie said Wednesday.

The newspaper industry needn't worry about a future when readers demand free content because people value a good product and the relationship they build with a brand, Beattie told an audience at a joint conference of the Canadian Newspaper Association and the Canadian Community Newspapers Association.

"Everybody in the world doesn't want everything for nothing," Beattie said, adding that readers will pay for the best brands of newspapers known for their reliability and integrity.

"By paying for something and getting something of value, you're differentiating yourself and you're forming a relationship."

Deeper in the story, Beattie paints it as a packaging problem.

"We haven't come up with a way of presenting the content of a newspaper in a way that makes it attractive for people to pick it up and start reading it," he said.

"I don't think people's appetite for expertized, editorialized, high-value added, interesting content ... is actually going to decline."

So then what, exactly, are we seeing happening to newspapers, particularly in the United States?

Film critic Richard Crouse identifies some of the small summer films that look to be worth checking out between popcorn movies.

For example, Dennis Hopper, Michael Madsen and David Carradine are in the biker movie Hell Ride (woohoo!).

Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg, The Foot Fist Way and Lou Reed's Berlin are among the other promising flicks.

From TheStar.com:

A day after she was fired for giving away a single Timbit to a child, a Tim Hortons employee in London, Ont., has her job back.

Nicole Lilliman, a single mother of four, has been rehired at another Tim Hortons restaurant after what the chain described as an “overreaction” by a manager.

Lilliman was fired yesterday after she was seen giving one of the small blobs of fried dough to a small child who came in with a regular customer on Monday.

The 27-year-old woman, who worked at the outlet for three years, said she didn’t see any harm in giving away the 16-cent treat, since Timbits are often doled out to children and dogs.

But a manager fired Lilliman after telling her that giving food away free was against the rules.

Hours later, Lilliman received a call offering her a job at another Tim Hortons store.

Here's a rather terse and to-the-point news release from the coffee-and-a-donut king.