The big news from This headquarters this week is that the magazine’s new editor, Jessica Johnston, has officially started. Jessica is an ideas woman with the attention to detail required to turn plans into action. She has served as This & That editor and copy editor for This, and also has plenty of experience in […] More »

Stuart Neatby, Christian Heyne and John Dimond Gibson, a group of Canadian reporters sponsored by the Nova Scotia Public Interest Research Group, have been blogging in recent months from Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Their important work — which seeks to hold Canadian authorities to task for their involvement in perpetuating a democratic deficit in that country — […] More »

So nice to see our new federal government taking the lead on a policy of conditional democracy. As in, “Democracy around the world is our aim, unless we don’t like the results of the free and fair elections that are held.” The proof of this policy, of course, is the decision to cut off all […] More »

I don’t really expect any of our readers to go through all these documents, but I think it’s important to post them anyway: They are documents from The Future of Iraq Project, spearheaded by the U.S. State Department in 2001, completed in May, 2003, and then virtually ignored since. Russ Kick from The Memory Hole […] More »

The story of former Iraq hostage James Loney just gets interestinger and interestinger. Homosexuality and the role of the press are now major issues in the tale, joining pacifism and the role of Canadian authorities in the hostage rescue. Among the details revealed today: Loney’s sexual orientation was kept a secret for fears it would […] More »

Today’s National Post has a special section on income trusts, those tax-evading types of companies that became famous during the federal election campaign. As good a time as any, I think, to point to Ellen Russell’s recent column in This about how wealthy investors in income trusts essentially rob the rest of us from badly […] More »

Call me a dreamer, but I think Control Arms — a new campaign from Amnesty International, Oxfam and the International Action Network on Small Arms in which people can voice their support for the UN to start putting limits on the trade and transfer of small weapons — is going after the wrong bad guys. […] More »

Check out this great graphic I noticed on Boing Boing, detailing where the United States budget, as controlled by Congress, goes, exactly. Simple and elegant. The size of the circle represents the amount of money (in billions) devoted to each program and/or weapons system. Let’s apply Stephen Harper’s logic to this graphic. Instead of the […] More »

So let me get this straight: On Feb. 6, Stephen Harper appointed his Cabinet, a motley crew that notably did not include a deputy prime minister. On March 11, Stephen Harper flew to Afghanistan in a surprise trip. He will remain there for a few days. With no deputy prime minister in the Cabinet, who […] More »

And another thing. Hats off to Montreal’s Maisonneuve, who celebrate their fourth continuous year of publishing with the issue just arrived via Canada Post. I am looking forward to tucking in to “Set Your Phasers On Stun: The time has come to take William Shatner seriously” among others. And not because I don’t take Shatner […] More »

An entry on the Galt Global Review today compares google’s flip-flop on censorship to Orwell’s Animal Farm. The thesis is: Google @ Animal Farm by Peter Meingast Then: “Google does not censor the results for any search term” Now: “It is Google’s policy not to censor search results. However, in response to local laws, regulations […] More »