There has been some fuss about the Venezuelan government's plan to remove the license for the Radio Caracas Television (RCTV) network. Rabble.ca even linked to it.

The main problem seems to be that an organization that receive funding from the US State Department, the National Endowment for Democracy and the International Republican Institute (and then refuse to disclose the details) is calling it a crackdown on freedom of speech.

Mahmoud Jaballah, Mohammad Mahjoub, and Hassan Almrei have sent an open letter to Canadians about their indefinite detainment.

The Andean Information Network, once its website is up and running again, has a few more articles about the current developments in Cochabamba, Bolivia. As well, this blog offers a good conglomeration of news stories, including translations from local press, on a variety of topics related to the country's politics.

There is a mounting campaign to "Close Guantanamo North", a reference to the "prison within a prison" at the Millhaven Institution. It's where the Canadian government is indefinitely detaining non-citizens under "security certificates", an "anti-terror" provision which allows the government to suspend the civil liberties of foreign nationals and hold them without granting access to evidence against them, if it exists.

Murray Dobbin has revised his assessment of Stephane Dion as "progressive". As unlikely as it is, it would be neat if this signaled a much faster turnaround in the public's willingness to take the hype of a supposedly progressive Liberal Party at face value. I confess to having very little faith that Canadians will ever stop voting Liberal unless they're really pissed off, but could it be that they'll do so without believing that for which there is no evidence?

At least then we could be reassured that Canadians are actually in

After 30 years, Steve Jobs still has the ability whip lot of people (well, journalists and geeks, anyway) into a frenzy of anticipation and speculation. The famed reality distortion field is stronger than ever. Why, I remember being a junior high kid compulsively reloading the MacWeek web site in a beta version of Mosaic on similar occasions. And "why?" is indeed the operative question. There's no rational reason to get riled up about this stuff, excepting perhaps that shiny things are neat. Oooh, shiny.

According to this interesting analysis by Eliot Van Buskirk of Wired News, major labels may be getting reading to take their drops when it comes to online digital distribution. Buskirk cites a coming massive drop in CD sales and a desire to end Apple's and iTunes' dominance in digital music distribution as the main reasons. The analysis is optimistic to say the least, but it's fun to think that things like better treatment of artists, lower prices (read: prices circa 1970s) and cool new features are just around the cor

WSWS film critic Patrick Martin has a decent political critique of De Niro's CIA flick:

Nowhere in the film does De Niro touch on the principal impact of the CIA internationally: the destruction of hundreds of thousands of lives and the trampling on the democratic rights of (literally) hundreds of millions of people in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America. His Guatemala is a country where the CIA organizes the overthrow of the government without a visible bloodbath. His Congo is an exotic locale for romance and spycraft, not a place of civil war and ruthless struggle for control of vital natural resources.

According to the Times of London, the US is making a move to take over leadership of the UN's Peacekeeping forces. The report speculates that this is part of a strategy for getting US troops out of Iraq.

Here's Dana Carvey doing Tom Brokaw covering Gerald Ford's death in 1996.

The newswire is cookin', now drawing on over 60 news feeds from around the world, with more being added regularly.

I'm not sure if it's a function of the press not having anything else to cover on new year's day, if it's a function of a lot of alcohol consumption and a pressure to have a blast, or if it's a sign of things to come, but 2007 is off to a rocky start.

In BC, two teenagers were attacked while walking a trail, prison guards are cracking down on inmates in New Brunswick, a female Montreal bus driver was attacked by two guys with a beer bottle, someone rammed their minivan into a house in PEI, a kid in Alberta died of exposure after wandering away from a party, three people were shot in separate incidents in Toronto, a Winnipeg man was in critical condition after crashing into a snow plow, and a boy was shot in the abdomen and a woman was found dead in New Brunswick.

Earlier than expected, our newswire is up and running. It will feature a daily selection of news from dozens of sources, independent and otherwise.

Feedback is welcome, and if you have suggestions for feeds (in RSS or Atom format) that should be added to the mix, send them along.

Well, the brand new Dominion site is online, after a lot of time and a few headaches. We've successfully (with a little help from friends) moved over ever one of the old entries. Thanks to the flexibility of Drupal, our new content management system, all the old urls still refer to the same articles.

The weblog archives didn't make it into the new system, but we didn't break any of the links, and you can still look at articles as they used to look on the old site in the archives.