Sri Lanka's government wants to see its journalists behave like team players, and that's leading to -- shall we say? -- tensions. However, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam are worse. They've been known to ...   more »

If the allegation is true, this is possibly the creepiest real-life story involving a journalist that I've ever read.

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Tourists and neo-druids alike flocked to Stonehenge at daybreak to mark the summer solstice.

And that provides an excellent excuse to post YouTube clips from what film? You guessed it! Enjoy!

More Stonehenge stuff to follow.

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While grabbing a westbound Queen West streetcar, I saw a car heading north on Spadina. Its driver honked his horn furiously, and the passenger exultantly held a Russian flag out the window.

Curious behaviour, if -- as I had anticipated -- Russia lost to the Netherlands in the quarter-finals of Euro 2008.

But it did not.

In a tournament of upsets and nail-biters, Russia toppled the big orange scoring machine by a 3-1 score! They scored twice in extra time.

Here's the BBC match report.

One quarter-final left: Spain versus Italy tomorrow. Russia will play the winner of that game on Thursday.

At the risk of dooming them, go Azzuri!

Turkey moves on to the Euro 2008 semis after an amazing comeback win over Croatia!

Regulation time decided nothing.

Late in OT, Turkey's goaltender is caught out of position. A Croatian player heads it in. Doom looms for Turkey.

The young Turks on the patio at Sotto Sotto in Little Italy are crushed.

But fortunately for them, Turkey was able to come through with a little pick-me-up.

One of their players blasted the ball to Croatia's top corner (goalie's right) to tie the game with less than a minute to play!

Pandemonium!

It gets better for Turkey. In the shootout, Croatia only pots one to Turkey's three, putting an end to that team's fine tournament.

Here's the BBC match report.

Turkey goes up against Germany, which won handily on Thursday over Portugal, next Wednesday.

The critics are not being kind to the Love Guru, Mike Myers' new vehicle. Can't say I'm surprised.

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The Toronto Star's Haroon Siddiqui spoke with veteran Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, who is out flogging a new book -- Descent into Chaos. Rashid believes the troubles of Afghanistan are tightly wound into the Gordian knot of Iran, central and south Asia.

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From an NYT editorial:

It was almost inevitable that a combination of $4-a-gallon gas, public anxiety and politicians eager to win votes or repair legacies would produce political pandering on an epic scale. So it has, the latest instance being President Bush’s decision to ask Congress to end the federal ban on offshore oil and gas drilling along much of America’s continental shelf.

This is worse than a dumb idea. It is cruelly misleading. It will make only a modest difference, at best, to prices at the pump, and even then the benefits will be years away. It greatly exaggerates America’s leverage over world oil prices. It is based on dubious statistics. It diverts the public from the tough decisions that need to be made about conservation. ...

... The Congressional moratoriums on offshore drilling were put in place in 1981 and reaffirmed by subsequent Congresses to protect coastal economies that depend on clean water and clean coastlines. This was also the essential purpose of supplemental executive orders, the first of which was issued by Mr. Bush’s father in 1990 after the disastrous Exxon Valdez oil spill the year before.

Given the huge resources available to the energy industry, there is no reason to undo these protections now.

This snippet of a June 18 Globe and Mail story, ostensibly about a tax case, caught my eye:

When Henry Rachfalowski joined Canada Life Financial Corp. in 1998 as a senior executive, the firm offered to pay for a golf club membership as part of his employment package. But there was just one problem: He hated golf.

Mr. Rachfalowski asked whether the company could give him cash instead or pay for a membership at a curling club. His bosses refused, saying he would look like a maverick or rebel and wouldn't fit in (emphasis mine - BD) if he didn't join a golf club.

Companies say they want "diversity" -- just not in the choice of leisure activities. :)

I'm particularly sympathetic to Rachfalowski because golf leaves me cold. :)

The Associated Press wants to tighten up how its stuff is quoted in the blogosphere (it's not unknown to see entire articles reproduced on some blogs). The reaction has been entirely predictable. AP has backed off somewhat.

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From the Globe and Mail's Ingram 2.0 column of June 17:

NowPublic.com, a leading Vancouver-based "citizen-journalism" site that allows users from around the world to post their comments, photos and video of news events, has relaunched its website with new features. Among them is the ranking of contributors to the site on the basis of their activity level, so that other users can gauge how trustworthy their contributions are likely to be. ...

Another new feature is that NowPublic users can now pull in their content from other social-media sites such as Flickr and YouTube instead of having to post their photos or videos or stories in several different places at the same time. NowPublic chief executive officer Leonard Brody says the site calls this a "presence stream." Users are also able to create a customized "news dashboard" on their profile pages at the site, with the photos, news and video they are interested in from sources they can specify.

BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen on the mindset journalists must cultivate if they want to function in war zones.

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From the BBC (posted June 16):

A memorial to journalists killed while doing their work has been unveiled by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

The 10m (32ft) glass and steel cone on top of BBC Broadcasting House in central London will shine a beam of light into the sky every night at 2200.

It is dedicated to all news journalists and those who have worked with them, including drivers and translators.

Over the past 10 years an estimated two war reporters per week have died, with many more killed covering corruption.

From the BBC:

Prolific Italian TV prankster and condom advocate Gabriele Paolini faces a prison sentence unless he behaves.

Mr Paolini has made a career of popping up uninvited behind unwitting on-air TV reporters promoting condom use.

Guinness World Records says Mr Paolini is the world's most successful TV hijacker, interrupting 20,000 link-ups.

But now Italy's Supreme Court has upheld a three-month suspended sentence on him for interrupting a report on the state broadcaster RAI in June 2001.

The court has also ruled that anyone who deliberately gets onto TV while standing in a public place can commit an offence even if they are silent and immobile.

So who's on LinkedIn? The NYT sums up users in this way:

The average age of a LinkedIn user is 41, the point in life where people are less likely to build their digital identities around dates, parties and photos of revelry.

LinkedIn gives professionals, even the most hopeless wallflower, a painless way to follow the advice of every career counselor: build a network. Users maintain online résumés, establish links with colleagues and business acquaintances and then expand their networks to the contacts of their contacts. The service also helps them search for experts who can help them solve daily business problems.

The four-year-old site is decidedly antisocial: only last fall, after what executives describe as a year of intense debate, did the company ask members to add photos to their profiles.

That business-only-please strategy appears to be paying off. The number of people using LinkedIn, based in Mountain View, Calif., tripled in May over the previous year, according to Nielsen Online. At 23 million members, LinkedIn remains far smaller than Facebook and MySpace, each with 115 million members, but it is growing considerably faster.

Here's a link to my LinkedIn profile.

From the BBC:

Lithuania's parliament has passed the toughest restrictions anywhere in the former Soviet Union on the public display of Soviet and Nazi symbols.

It will now be an offence in the Baltic state to display the images of Soviet and Nazi leaders.

This includes flags, emblems and badges carrying insignia, such as the hammer and sickle or swastika.

Correspondents say equating Soviet and Nazi symbols in this way is certain to infuriate Russia.

From the BBC:

National Geographic has produced a film based on the book

A book about global warming has won this year's Royal Society prize for popular science writing.

Mark Lynas' Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet has already been turned into a TV programme and is now almost certain to experience a jump in sales. The book explains how Earth will change for every degree rise in temperature - from droughts to mass extinctions.

Mr Lynas was presented with the winner's £10,000 cheque at a ceremony hosted by the UK academy of science.

The award is one of the major publishing events of the year in the UK. Previous winners have included Bill Bryson, Stephen J Gould, Roger Penrose, and Stephen Hawking.

Six Degrees uses published scientific data and interviews with leading researchers to illustrate the changes we could witness in a warmer world.

Professor Jonathan Ashmore, the chair of the judges, described the book as "compelling and gripping".

"It presents a series of scientifically plausible, worst-case scenarios without tipping into hysteria," he said.

"Six Degrees is not just a great read, written in an original way, but also provides a good overview of the latest science on this highly topical issue.

"This is a book that will stimulate debate and that will, Lynas hopes, move us to action in the hope that this is a disaster movie that never happens. Everyone should read this book."

I was standing at King and John waiting for a streetcar.

A carload of delirious people waving a red flag with a white crescent and star on it were honking their horns and celebrating (here's why).

I resisted the urge to ask any of them this question: "Is that a Greek flag?"

Three late-teens, early-20s women talking about a mutual friend as they rode a TTC bus:

YW1: She's so calm.

YW2: She's so nice.

YW3: She's the Dalai Lama!

Check it out.

Afterthoughts

Sometime in the early 1990s, I was up in Saskatoon covering a legal conference. There was a horrible thunderstorm, that unbeknownst to me at the time, spawned a small tornado.

This twister damaged no property and caused no injuries. The normally excitable Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, the Regina Leader-Post's sister paper, showed restraint by doing "only" 11 stories. I always wondered what they would have done to top that had there been death and destruction.

Anyways, some woman shows up in Regina that night with what she says are pictures of the tornado. She took them with a Kodak Instamatic and they were basically as full-frame as what the NYT highlighted above.

She was reportedly blasé about it, but our shooters shat themselves when they saw the pics. She apparently didn't realize she'd put her life in great danger.

Reminds me of the following song (name the artist!):

Texas tornado
Comin' down from the sky
Texas tornado
Lord I don't wanna die!
Texas tornado
The Lord's gonna see us through
Texas tornado
Be careful it don't get you

Skip ahead to the late 1990s. I'm now working at the Western Producer, a weekly agricultural newspaper in Saskatoon. A guy comes in, and does he have a story to tell!

He rented a front-end loader to do some work on a place south of Swift Current, in the province's southwest. He's beavering away when he sees a twister coming! He phones the machine's owner in a panic and asks for advice. "Hold on!" is what he is told. So he does.

This little twister passes right over him. He's inside a tornado.

The twister bangs him around a bit, but it's small and the machine's large, so he survived. After the twister hits, he's in the cab, panting and thanking his lucky stars. His cellphone, which had fallen to the floor, rings. It's the RCMP. The owner had phoned the cops, and they phoned the guy to tell him to watch out -- another one might be coming!

He watched as the second twister blew apart a building.

Where might you expect this story to play in a newspaper crying out for good human-interest stories?

If you guessed page 17, you'd be right.

It didn't manage to push the usual "Dull politician makes boring pronouncement" story off the front page.

I wince about that to this day -- and no, I didn't write that story; I just don't like to see great yarns like that get buried. I still haven't heard about a second person who was inside a tornado and lived.

Mark Lynas, author of the 2007 book Six Degrees, argues that to get world governments to take the climate issue seriously, a disaster might be needed sometime in 2010 or 2011.

At a session in Stockholm, Lynas and other climate experts tried to envisage some scenarios: "Agree and ignore," where governments admit there is a problem but do nothing, and "Kyoto Plus," which would be committing to new, stronger targets but not really getting emissions to stop rising before 2030.

And then there's "step change."

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From the Guardian:

China's carbon emissions are soaring past those of the US, new figures reveal, making it the dominant country in the global warming debate.

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Tim Russert -- host of NBC's Meet the Press, a host of several presidential primary debates and a bit player in the Scooter Libby affair -- has died at age 58.

More at the NYT's The Caucus blog.

You can also check out this CTV.ca story.

From AP via CTV.ca:

Fox News Channel referred to Michelle Obama as "Obama's baby mama" in a graphic on Wednesday, the latest in a trio of references to the Democratic presidential campaign that have given fuel to network critics.

The graphic "Outraged liberals: Stop picking on Obama's baby mama" was flashed during an interview with conservative columnist Michelle Malkin about whether Barack Obama's wife has been the target of unfair criticism.

In the past two weeks, Fox anchor E.D. Hill has apologized for referring to an affectionate onstage fist bump shared by the couple as a "terrorist fist jab," and Fox contributor Liz Trotta said she was sorry for joking about an Obama assassination. ...

Joan Walsh, a columnist from Salon.com, criticized the graphic on Thursday as a slur.

"Do you try to explain that 'baby mama' is slang for the unmarried mother of a man's child, and not his wife, or even a girlfriend?" Walsh wrote. "Are they racist, or just clueless? Isn't there racism even in their cluelessness, if somebody didn't know what 'baby mama' means, but used it anyway? Even at Fox, won't somebody have to apologize?"

It's not in the above wire story, but apparently someone at Fox has apologized.

Salon also has this backgrounder on the offending phrase.

From the Globe and Mail:

"Over the years, people have urged me to remaster The Last Pogo, but it is what it is," filmmaker Colin Brunton says, talking on his cellphone from Canadian Tire. "When the sound falls apart at the end, that's exactly what happened at the show - it was chaos."

It has been three decades since Brunton made The Last Pogo as a 25-minute film document of Toronto's vibrant punk scene - begging for leftover film stock, borrowing film students and gear and persuading arts councils to give him grants to complete it. And now, the film is being dusted off (literally) for a screening at North by Northeast's music-themed film festival this weekend.

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I was fishing off a bridge just outside Wabasca, Alta. in the summer of 1985 (the area is known for its terrific walleye fishing).

At one point, an ambulance went screaming by me. It was heading out of town towards Slave Lake, about 120-plus kilometres to the southwest.

I wondered out loud what that was about.

"Oh, that was Joe," said a boy in a strangely matter-of-fact voice. "He shot himself in the head this morning."

It's always haunted me that some children grow up in environments where suicide is almost normal.

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From AP via globeandmail.com:

Democrat Barack Obama's campaign said Thursday that Michelle Obama never used the word “whitey” in a speech from the church pulpit as it launched a Web site to debunk rumours about him and his wife.

The rumour that Michelle Obama railed against “whitey” in a diatribe at Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ has circulated on conservative Republican blogs for weeks and was repeated by radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh. The rumour included claims of a videotape of the speech that would be used to bring down Mr. Obama's candidacy this fall.

“No such tape exists,” the campaign responds on the site, www.fightthesmears.com. “Michelle Obama has not spoken from the pulpit at Trinity and has not used that word.”

The site is a response to the realities of a brave new world, where information travels 24 hours a day on blogs and voters are increasingly turning to the Internet for information. It's a particular problem for Mr. Obama, a relative newcomer to national politics who is still unknown to many voters and has been the target of persistent misinformation campaigns online.