America's most lovable atheist interviews Anglo-America's most irritating on Pope Benedict's cover-up crisis, and though it pains Andrew Sullivan to say it, "he's right, isn't he?" Moneyquote: Suppose you and I are having a martini...

This month, Apple approved a free CBC Radio app that offers yet another reason to own an iPhone. It will prove a boon to radio listeners not tied to their radios all day. The CBC Radio app will give iPhone or iPod users live audio streams from of Radio 1, 2, and 3 (the corp's net-based, indy-oriented network). It will let users listen in any time zone, so when Atlantic Canadians miss a national program, they have four chances to catch up. Want to listen to a local show in real time? Pick it off the station menu (below left), our use...

When then-prosecutor Bob Lutes realized he would be speaking at the same small conference as Donald Marshall, Jr., he braced himself for the rage he thought Marshall must feel toward any prosecutor.  Instead, he found a "calm, quiet, respectful" man, who "had a presence about him." Lutes's must-read letter in today's Halifax Chronicle-Herald recalls the encounter: He was everything that you would want your children to be when meeting someone for the first time. I watched him, listened to him, and spoke with him. He amazed me...

One of the great things about running a blog is that when you write about something interesting that you know little about, readers rush in with a wealth of further information. Contrarian friend Andrew Weissman directed us to an extraordinary TED talk by Hans Rosling illustrating the phenomenal potential of the digital graphs we touched on this morning. Rosling is a professor of international medicine at Sweden's Karolinska Institutet (the organization that hands out the Nobel Prize for Medicine). He discovered Konzo, a previously unknown paralytic disease associated with hunger in Africa. He also co-founded the Gapminder Foundation, which developed the...

brooke&rodney
Conservatives were furious when Premier Donald Cameron quit his Pictou East seat in a huff on election night in June, 1993. So on election night in June 2009, Premier Rodney MacDonald was careful to say he had no plans to resign his Inverness seat. That was then; this is now. Rodney announced this afternoon that he is quitting the seat after all, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper is fixing to name some Senators. Throughout the spring, the assumption was that Nova Scotia's next Senate seat would go to Brooke Taylor, Harper's earliest and most ardent leadership acolyte among Nova Scotia Tories—and the only provincial cabinet minister to campaign against Cumberland-Colchester's ousted Tory MP, Bill Casey, in his successful re-election bid as an Independent last fall.

The Altantic's James Fallows assesses the the Gates-Obama-Crowley Rose Garden pissup from a beer connoisseur's viewpoint and finds it "mainly missed opportunities." But then, it's hard to get Propeller in Washington, D.C....

Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan, a British immigrant to the United States whom I would describe as a principled conservative, chronicles Obama's failure to check the America's slide into a police state. I backed Obama because I believed he wanted to roll some of this back. It increasingly appears that I was wrong. The 9/11 police state is with us. Obama is slowly legitimizing it, despite being elected to unwind it. This country is no longer as free as many others in the world - and unrecognizable compared with the free country I found in 1984. And it's getting less free every...

Leonard Cohen wants fellow musicians to stop doing covers of Hallelujah. "I was just reading a review of a movie called Watchmen that uses it, and the reviewer said 'Can we please have a moratorium on Hallelujah in movies and television shows?' he told CBC Radio's Jian Ghomeshi in a live interview on Q last Thursday. "And I kind of feel the same way. I think it's a good song, but I think too many people sing it." The following day, the Guardian newspaper in the UK published a partial transcript of the interview, and suddenly, Cohen's comment about Hallelujah became a...

The fact that Stephen Harper mistakenly thought Michael Ignatieff was the author of a warning that Canada could lose G8 status misses the point. Substandard staff work? Sure. But at root, it was simply a mistake, for which Harper quickly, if tersely, apologized. It's the ease, nay alacrity, with which Harper slips into a nasty tone that reveals so much about Harper's character. "Ignatieff is supposed to be a Canadian," he snarled, implying that the Liberal leader's patriotic bona fides are somehow less than his own. The same ugly tone plays out in Harper's TV attack ads, a polite grilling about...

Overheard on Twitter: @statsgirl Swine 'flu at the Tattoo? Sounds like a Dennis Lee book title to me....