Errata, observations and working notes
from Parliament Hill reporter David Akin
View Article  Conrad Black headed a "kleptocracy", critics charge
Newspaper barons Lord Conrad Black and his long-time associate David Radler led a "kleptocracy" at Hollinger International Inc., says a 400-page report prepared by an independent committee of directors of that company. The report was filed yesterday with a court in Illinois and made public today through the U.S. Securities ...   more »
View Article  Well, that's pretty cool: A new iMac from Apple
Apple took the wraps off its latest, greatest innovation this morning, a new iMac that compresses the all-in-one form factor of the first-generation iMacs into a machine that is basically a thick flat-screen display. More cool product design. The design team, incidentally, behind the new iMac are the same folks ...   more »
View Article  Computers in Canada get cheaper
Statistics Canada tracks just about anything that can be counted so I shouldn't be surprised to learn this morning that it maintains the Computer and Peripherals Price Index or CPPI in Statscan-speak. The federal agency just released the latest index for June and, it turns out, computers continue to get ...   more »
View Article  The FujiBlimp is over NYC -- peeking at protestors
Police in New York City have commandeered the Fuji Blimp to keep an eye on the Republican National Convention. But that's not all. The police will have some very high-resolution cameras able to read the phone numbers in your little black book, should you hold it skyward.
Is this right? ...   more »
View Article  [What they said] Copyright is worth saving from governnment legislators
Leah Theriault, an S.J.D. candidate at the University of Toronto, writing in the inaugural issue of Innovate magazine (the in-house mag at the U of T's Centre for Innovation Law and Policy): The Canadian Government’s slow pace in implementing the WIPO treaties could actually work to its advantage, allowing ...   more »
View Article  An immigrant's commitment to America - depends on where s/he's from
Reviewing several books on the state of the American body politic, Andrew Hacker says that only 40 per cent of Canadians who emigrate to the U.S. seek to take out American citizenship. Just 33 per cent of Mexicans who end up living and working in American ask for the ...   more »
View Article  Does anyone anywhere actually use Bluetooth?
There's always been a lot of yakking about Bluetooth, the short-range wireless networking technology built into the very laptop computer I'm using; into millions of cell phones, PDAs and other info-gadgets but you know what? I've never known anyone -- myself included -- to actually transfer any data over a ...   more »
View Article  Toronto Star has a new editor
The Toronto Star has a new editor: Giles Gherson, formerly of the National Post and the Edmonton Journal, and currently the editor of Report On Business at the Globe and Mail, is the new Star editor, we've just learned over here on our side of Front Street.
Giles ...   more »
View Article  Journalism ethics: Toronto police shoot a hostage taker. What do you show on TV?
If you live in Toronto, the big news event of the day (and I'm sure this made several national newscasts), was the police shooting of an armed hostage taker. Our cameras and cameras from ...   more »
View Article  [What they said] So Weirdly Wrong
[Hilarious report from AKMA, vacationing in Maine] A few minutes ago, a police officer passed the bench where I was sitting outside the [edit: Nantucket] Athenaeum, enjoying the mild temperature and the wifi signal, and he said, “Sir, you can’t use the Internet outside the library.&rdquo. I said, ...   more »
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