Here's a summary of that call, as provided by the Prime Minister's Office: The call lasted roughly 15 minutes.... Prime Minister Harper also discussed his upcoming trip to Europe with the President and that he would be meeting with the G8 European leaders - President Sarkozy, Chancellor Merkel, Prime Minister Berlusconi and Prime Minister Brown - in advance of the G8 summit to discuss key issues. Leaders also discussed the latest developments Middle East in advance of the Prime Minister's upcoming trip.

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Not that I'm taking a triumphalist turn or anything, but I note this morning that, despite the press release from the federal government trumpeting the fact that Canada's fresh new C-17 fleet was just the tool we needed to help in places like Burma, our fresh new C-17 fleet was not able to do so.... As a result, we turned to the Russians, as we often have in the past, to get our aid where it had to go on time and they were able to respond, as they often have in the past, as fast as if we owned the plane ourselves....    more »

If you're one of those who like to communicate via the BlackBerry PIN, I've a new PIN effective immediately.

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And then there's this "we're getting rich, too" press release from B.C. today: The May 21, 2008 sale of oil and gas rights sets new records with $441 million in bonus bids and higher average per-hectare prices than any previous sale. Yesterday's sale brings the fiscal year-to-date total to more than $480 million and puts B.C. on track to smash the $1.2-billion record set last fiscal, Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources Minister Richard Neufeld announced today.... The real money comes when the oil and/or gas starts flowing and provinces get a piece of every barrel of oil or cubic foot of gas sold.   more »

Jennifer Smith is a "left-leaning opinionated writer, singer, woodworker, genealogist, runologist and entrepreneur" who lives in Milton, Ont. She's also a blogger and she was prepared to get herself accredited and pay her own way out to cover the 2008 Conservative convention. She applied, as per instructions at the Conservative Web site, but today, received her rejection letter from party operative Paul Stickney.

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"Until the last decades of the twentieth century most people in the world had limited access to information; but—thanks to national education, state-controlled radio and television, and a common print culture—within any one state or nation or community people were all likely to know many of the same things.... But in the absence of any common culture beyond a small elite, and not always even there, the fragmented information and ideas that people select or encounter are determined by a multiplicity of tastes, affinities, and interests.... Indeed, the complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand—in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies—seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well.

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Lawrence Hill (right) of Burlington, Ont. is this year's winner of The Commonwealth Prize for his novel The Book of Negroes. (It is published in the U.S. as Someone Knows My Name, apparently because the U.S. publisher thought the word 'Negroes' was a bit incendiary. Honest -- that's what Hill says to a Guardian reporter.
Hill wins 10,000 pounds for the honour.   more »

Some bloggers are very closely connected to the party and it wouldn't surprise me if some bloggers had their bills paid by the party or like-minded political organizations -- and that goes for bloggers from the right and left. The CBC journalists, for the record, who will attend will have their tabs covered by federal taxpayers; private sector MSM journalists -- possibly yours truly -- will have their bills paid largely from the sale of advertising.)... Instead, the Conservatives say that: "The accreditation of bloggers will be based on various factors - including interest; space availability at the convention; the readership and influence of a blog; the amount of original content the blog typically generates to name a few."

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He was a barrel-chested bundle of energy and enthusiasm and was an important part of making those early days at the Post so much fun.... I hadn't seen David in a while, though I talked to him once or twice over the last year or so. But I'm told he was in the best shape of his life and I know, cuz he told me, he was on top of the world at Toronto sports radio station The FAN.

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Neat idea. Good luck Brijit editors.

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