Rex Murphy wrote the following in Saturday's Globe and Mail:

Now we hear that, actually, the law he passed changed nothing. I like parliamentary expert Ned Franks's description of that law as meaning “a fixed election date if necessary, but not necessarily a fixed election date,” which the good Queen's professor supplemented with the observation that “it's what in the trade they call a ‘pious hope.' ”

From my Wednesday CTV.ca feature:

Queens University's Ned Franks agrees, telling CTV.ca the bill creates more of a political problem for Harper than a legal or constitutional one in calling an early election. He agreed one could think of the law as 'a fixed election date if necessary, but not necessarily a fixed election date' -- to paraphrase former prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. "It's what in the trade they call a 'pious hope' -- in other words, a promise that can be broken with impunity if you think you can get away with it," he said of the act.

From the NYT:

- The Edge of Heaven

- Tell No One

- Frozen River

- The Last Mistress

- A Girl Cut In Two

- Vicky Cristina Barcelona

- Trumbo

- Man On A Wire

- Days and Clouds

- Elegy

Would Usain Bolt been as successful at the Beijing Games had he been named Usain Stroll, Usain Saunter or Usain Mosey?

The NYT's Dexter Filkins, writing in the NYT Magazine, tells about what it was like when he confirmed to a U.S. Marine that his comrade -- his face "opened in a large V, split like meat, fish maybe" -- was dead. Filkins was out on patrol with the jarheads in Fallujah, Iraq back in November 2004:

I felt it then. Darting, out of reach. You go into these places, and you think they’re overrated, they are not nearly as dangerous as people say. Keep your head; keep the gunfire in front of you. You get close and come out unscathed every time, your face as youthful and as untroubled as before. The life of the reporter: always someone else’s pain. A woman in an Iraqi hospital cradles her son newly blinded, and a single tear rolls down her cheek. The cheek is so dry, and the tear moves so slowly that you focus on it for a while, the tear traveling across the wide desert plain. You need a corpse for the newspaper, so you take a bunch of marines to get one. Then suddenly it’s there, the warm liquid on your face, the death you have always avoided, smiling back at you as if it knew all along. Your fault.

Filkins needed the corpse of an insurgent for a photo. The Marines offered to go up a minaret tower in search of one, bounding ahead of Filkins and his photographer.

The soldier who died that day was Lance Cpl. William L. Miller, a 22-year-old from Pearland, Texas. Filkins ran into the yound Marine's parents a few months later while at a memorial service in North Carolina. He approached them with trepidation.

“We’re so grateful to you,” Lewis (the father - BD) said to me when the service was over, down on the gym floor. “If it weren’t for you, we would never have known how our son died.”

From Reuters:

Ahmed Nouri Raziak, 38, was handed over to representatives of the Associated Press at a U.S. military compound in Baghdad. He had been detained by U.S. and Iraqi forces at his home in the northern city of Tikrit on June 4, the agency said in a report from Baghdad.

Raziak's release comes two days after the military freed an Iraqi cameraman for Reuters, Ali al-Mashhadani, who was held for three weeks without charge after being arrested while renewing his credentials at a U.S. military press office.

As in Mashhadani's case, the U.S. military said it believed Raziak posed a threat, but concluded after a review that he did not. It did not elaborate.

From CTV.ca:

A  Canadian woman is one of two journalists abducted near Mogadishu in Somalia by unidentified armed men.

The journalists were on their way to visit a refugee camp on Saturday.

A hotel employee in Mogadishu said the two journalists went to Elasha, about 18 kilometres southwest of Mogadishu.

"They left this morning and their whereabouts are unknown," Ajos Mohamed Nor told The Associated Press.

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