The Globe and Mail editorialized today that the B.C. Human Rights Commission tribunal hearing the Maclean's case should find the section governing discriminatory speech to be unconstitutional -- even while admitting that's very unlikely to happen.

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CBC Sports cannot come to terms with the copyright holder of the Hockey Night in Canada theme song.

From Andrew Coyne's "live blog" of the B.C. Human Rights Commission tribunal hearing complaint against Maclean's magazine:

CODA: There will be no more liveblogging. As I left the courtroom for the lunch break, i was taken aside by a sheepish-looking court official, who said that he’d just learned that I had been “broadcasting” from inside the courtroom. So had I. Broadcasting, I said? I didn’t have a microphone, or a camera.

No, he explained: but liveblogging counts as broadcasting. It’s not the computer that’s the problem. You can type away on it all you want. If you step outside to send it, that’s okay, too. But if you send text from within the courtroom, that’s broadcasting.

Anyway, I gave him my solemn word that I would do no more broadcasting. What with the hearings being almost over and all. It seemed a fitting way to put a cap on the week.

In the Independent last Sunday, British pundit Johann Hari spared a grudging word of support for his old adversary -- conservative commentator Mark Steyn.

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CBC's The Current had four guests on about the current dustup before the B.C. Human Rights Commission between the Canadian Islamic Congress and Maclean's magazine over the Mark Steyn article The Future Belongs to Islam.

I'll offer some notes below, in order of appearance. For the most part, I'm summarizing. For exact quotes, listen to the items (click on part two):

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Ryerson j-prof John Miller takes a run at the notorious 2006 Maclean's article ("The future belongs to Islam") by conservative polemicist Mark Steyn.

Actually, writing at thejournalismdoctor.ca, Miller also uses the p-word:

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From the Guardian:

The BBC has abandoned plans to create a "licence fee" option for users of its international news website who were outraged by the introduction of advertising last year.

BBC director of global news, Richard Sambrook, said in October that the corporation intended to offer a subscription service for international users "in the next year" after scores of complaints over the introduction of advertising to bbc.com.

However, the BBC today confirmed it had dropped the idea. "We did look into it, but all the evidence from commercial operators is that what ever people say about wanting a subscription, it is not the case," said the BBC World managing director, Anne Barnard.

"A number of other operators have moved away from subscriptions," Barnard added.

From CBC.ca:

A Vancouver newspaper has fired one of its sports columnists after he admitted that he copied parts of a Sports Illustrated article and used them in his own piece.

The decision came after David Pratt admitted he plagiarized material from a Sept. 12, 2000, article written by Rick Reilly, a basketball commentator, the Province announced Wednesday.

Pratt, a long-time sports journalist, wrote about Canadian Hockey broadcaster Bob Cole in his column on Tuesday.

A reader contacted the newspaper after noticing three separate spots where phrases used in Pratt's piece were almost identical to Reilly's column.

Pratt explained that he wrote the offending column on a Saturday and that he "wanted to get out of (the office) before noon."

Pratt doesn't find himself in completely dire straits. The Team 1040 radio station will be keeping him on as a show host.

From the Associated Press:

Lawyers for a Canadian television journalist being held as an enemy combatant in Afghanistan filed a lawsuit Wednesday accusing the Bush administration of holding him illegally and demanding his release.

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From RSF.org:

Reporters Without Borders is outraged by the failure to punish the murder of Zakia Zaki, the director Sada-e-Solh (Peace Radio), exactly one year ago. Her husband tells the organisation there has been no progress in the official investigation, probably because of pressure from those who ordered her murder. Zaki was shot in her home in Jabalussaraj, in the northern province of Parwan, in the early hours of 6 June 2007.

“Today we pay tribute to an outstanding woman who was one of the symbols of the renaissance of independent media in Afghanistan,” Reporters Without Borders said. “We support her family’s efforts to keep her memory alive and to demand justice.”

The organisation added: “The impunity in this case is outrageous and has paved the way for a new wave of violence against women journalists. More than 15 Afghan women journalists have been attacked, threatened or reduced to silence since her murder. We call for an immediate reaction from the Afghan government.”  

From washingtonpost.com:

Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, calmly told a U.S. military court Thursday that he wishes for a death sentence so that he can become "a martyr."

Call me cynical, but last week, the CIA was saying al Qaeda is on the run.

This week, Mohammed is finally going on trial, despite being in custody for five years.

Presumptive Republican nominee John McCain has consistently presented himself as the national security candidate. Dubya's time is winding down. He needs a legacy.

Whatever could it all mean? :^)

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Bora Nikolic, a former globeandmail.com colleague from back when I worked there, has a blog posting up announcing completion of the globeandmail.com e-reader, which allow one to view and browse the newspaper online.

You can see the demo here: http://eedition.globeinvestor.com/demo/

It's part of globeandmail.com's effort to revamp its subscription product offerings.

(Thanks, Mungo)

The Toronto Star has been hacking around with Google Maps since about 2005. You can find more at the Map of the Week blog.

From a discussion between Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and the Washington Post:

What is your outlook for the future of media?

In the next 10 years, the whole world of media, communications and advertising are going to be turned upside down -- my opinion.

Here are the premises I have. Number one, there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.

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Check this out:

I saw it at the Revue last night (they've been making some good programming picks with respects to vintage films). I got the teensiest bit of motion sickness in the scenes where you get an windshield-eye view as the cars are literally flying down the streets of San Fran (about 3:35 in on the above YouTube video).

I also want to acknowledge the nice little touch where the driver of the bad guy's car buckles up right before the fun really starts. :)

No CGI action sequence compares.

Afterthought

I stand corrected. I saw The Matrix: Reloaded in Imax. The opening scene where Trinity swoops down on her motorcycle almost did me in. :) And of course, the freeway sequence in Reloaded is sublime.

From the BBC:

An Egyptian newspaper has taken the unusual step of publishing what it calls "visual proof" that the president pays his taxes just like everyone else.

Egypt's state-run press often like to show Hosni Mubarak on their front pages and his comments make headline news.

But one daily has found a new angle, reproducing a bill Mr Mubarak paid for E£65 excise duty - or about $10.

The president's office insisted on paying the duty on a box of dates sent by a Saudi royal, the paper said.  

From the BBC:

Evidence of serious flaws in the multi-billion dollar global market for carbon credits has been uncovered by a BBC World Service investigation.

The credits are generated by a United Nations-run scheme called the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

The mechanism gives firms in developing countries financial incentives to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

But in some cases, carbon credits are paid to projects that would have been realised without external funding.

The BBC World Service investigation found examples of projects in India where this appeared to be the case.

Arguably, this defeats the whole point of the CDM scheme, set up under the Kyoto climate change protocol, as these projects are getting money for nothing.

The findings reinforce doubts that the CDM is leading to real emission cuts, which is not good news for the effort to combat climate change.

From the Globe and Mail:

As they worked to shore up ebbing support for the Afghanistan war in the fall of 2006, senior federal officials grew concerned about the lack of positive news stories coming out of the conflict zone and asked the Canadian Forces to start supplying a list of journalists embedded with the troops and details of what coverage was planned.

The October, 2006, request came from the Privy Council Office, the bureaucratic arm of the Prime Minister's Office, e-mails obtained under Access to Information law show.

"They want to know which embeds are in theatre and what they are doing," Major Norbert Cyr, a military public affairs officer, wrote in an e-mail to colleagues in the Canadian Forces.

The Privy Council Office told the Forces that it was concerned the military wasn't sufficiently "pushing" development and reconstruction stories with embedded journalists, e-mails show.

The fall of 2006, if you'll remember (and as the article notes), was the heaviest period of combat for Canadian troops since the Korean War.

In any event, the military thought it was doing a good job on getting reporters to see the sunny side of life in the 'Stan:

"I think you will see from the movements of the embeds below and the coming plans for interviews that the [public affairs officers] have been quite successful in their efforts to get the embeds to focus their attention elsewhere than the military kinetic [combat] operations," Ms. Daly wrote.

Last week, Michael Hayden, the CIA's chief announced that al Qaeda is on the run. Nearly a year ago, a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate said that al Qaeda had rebuilt its operational capability to a level not seen since, say, Sept. 10, 2001.

How do we square that circle?

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I'm playing around with Twitter these days to see what's what -- but most of all, because I don't spend enough time online. :^)

My Tweets appear at right. Here's my Twitter page.

If you're on Twitter (apparently there's only about 3,300 TOians) or have otherwise checked it out yourself, let me know.

The Sunday Star had a big Twitter piece. Some excerpts:

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Frank Moher has issues with CBC's At Issue panel (too white, too CentCan). He even includes a YouTube rant about the show!

Brian Brennan flogs newspaper blogs, wondering what exactly is their reason for existence:

As I see it, the biggest single problem with many of these Canadian newspaper blogs is that they lack a sense of immediacy or urgency. They are allowed to sit without updates for days and sometimes weeks on end. The whole idea of a newspaper blog, surely, should be to provide information and comment sooner. The American newspapers have apparently figured that out because they now make political blogs an integral part of campaign coverage, bringing to them a mixture of gossip, commentary, and trivia along with serious reporting produced at lightning speed. In Canada, a newspaper has to produce new content daily, yet the blog postings on that newspaper's site are often allowed to stagnate before being refreshed. The newspapers have the technology and the talent to do things better. They should make use of it.

That is how former White House press secretary Scott McLellan characterized the White House press corps with respects to selling the Iraq War to the American people.

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From the BBC (May 31):

The scientist who coined the term "global warming" in the 1970s has proposed a radical solution to the problem of climate change.

Wallace Broecker advocated millions of "carbon scrubbers" - giant artificial trees to pull CO2 from the air.

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The formerly secretive Taliban leader in Pakistan felt comfortable enough to hold a news conference last month. Some wonder whether Pakistan's government really wants to bring Baitullah Mehsud to heel.

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Globeandmail.com has lifted its Globe Insider restrictions that required you to be a subscriber of some type to access premium content on the website -- your Jeffrey Simpson columns and sudoku puzzles and whatnot.

However, you'll still have to pay for certain things:

• Archive searches
• E-Edition, the digital version of the Globe and Mail
• GlobeinvestorGold

All those are bundled into a package called Globe Plus, which costs as much as ... Globe Insider did, if not more! :)

By you, I mean whoever reads this blog.

I would have bet a large amount of money that this would have been my most popular post in May -- and I would have lost.

It didn't even crack the top 10.

The question now becomes, was it too bizarre ... or not bizarre enough?