Few people have noticed, but the competition over e-Book formats between Google-Sony et al, and Kindle-Amazon has introduced two tiers into the emerging market for electronic books. Google is now going to make all of its 1.5 million titles in the public domain available in various formats, establishing it as...

Back in the '80s, I went out with a girl who was in love with pop. I met her at a party and felt a distinct stirring in my loins, but I was a melancholic writer and she was a fashionista -- very trendy.

As superficial as a disco...

Blessings and Peace upon the courageous people of Persia from your devoted admirers in democracies around the world.

It's my impression today that the leaders of your current government are now quite worried, but also quite eager to stop appearing indecisive.

They have outlawed your demonstrations,...

When George Bush sleazed the 2000 election out from under Al Gore, he did more damage internationally than anyone has yet acknowledged. In securing the leadership of a leading democracy by applying the Cheneyan belief that the ends justifies the means, democracy lost its best proponent and its greatest selling...

I'm tapping my way through a manuscript about the future of climate change here in North America.

Yes, polar bears are dying, but it's not a book about the Arctic.

With a confirmed global average of +4 degrees C warming, we now know there will be devastating consequences. The...

No one was more surprised when Made To Break won an environmental award in 2007. I was not an environmentalist then, and my impression of these people ranged from the nasality of John Denver to dogmatic feminists cramming political correctness into any available ear while claiming that they would save...

These are stressful times. Every couple of days, there's another story about a out-of-work parent killing his children and then taking his own life. It just happened again in a trailer park outside Seattle. Usually, these stories make me wince and I scroll pass the headlines quickly.

I'm discouraged...

Newspapers are folding around the country like luxury car dealerships. There are unpaid 'furloughs' at USA Today and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is reinventing itself as an Internet research firm. Denver's Rocky Mountain News has already gone belly up and it's even money that the San Francisco Chronicle -- a good...

BY Andrew NIikIforuk, a Calgary-based business reporter and the author of Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent.

For a free and complete .pdf download of Nikiforuk's book follow the link at the bottom of this article. *

American reliance on fuel from Alberta's tar...

It shouldn't surprise anyone that Willard Foxton, heir of Major William Foxton OBE, is pretty angry about his dad's suicide. Willard intends to travel from Southhampton, UK to the United States next week to confront his father's investment broker, Bernie Madoff, at his New York trial.

Displaying a father's...

A heckler stuck himself to my blog page the other day like a bored kid's spitball. He was someone who, despite a large number of egregious opinions, just couldn't be wrong. But with each new post, he made his position more fantastic digging a deeper and deeper hole. Unfortunately, he...

The President will visit America's largest trading partner on Feb. 19th, but for the five hours he's in Ottawa, he'll barely leave Air Force One.

This is an important diplomatic lesson that Canada had better understand. America's Canadian relationship is vitally important, but Canada's current Prime Minister needs to...

CEO Jeff Bezos watched a master for years. He marveled when the master took over digital music files with a cool new player called the iPod. Later, Bezos became sick with envy while the master waited -- patient and amused -- as the public themselves invented and named a spin-off...

Politicians are mainly now-guys, welded to the present, forced to react to the remorseless wheel of change with little time to see bigger pictures.

For instance: planes commandeered by rabid ideologues smash into the center of the world's economy. Our leaders respond to the attack, and the next eight...

On a snowy night in Toronto way back in 1982, my then-wife took me to see Harold Pinter's Betrayal. It didn't help us settle the question of who had began the string of infidelities that would soon culminate in a mutual mercy-killing of our ill-conceived and extremely brief union. But...

I'm writing this because I know people will look back sometime and wonder, 'What were they thinking? What was it like?'

I don't pretend to be H. L. Mencken, but I want to make sure I knew. The beauty of the Internet is that whenever I'm wrong, someone will...

Damned if I know why it was an Iraqi who tossed his shoe at the lesser Bush last week, but it didn't come as a total surprise.

For months I'd been expecting the mother or father of a dead infantryman to throw paint on the presidential car or for a...

It's been a helluva year, hasn't it?

Last Tuesday, Al Gore, Barack Obama and Joe Biden were upstaged by Governor Rod Blagojevich who appears destined for the same prison that currently houses his predecessor.

But not to worry, George Homer Ryan is applying for one of the lesser Bush's...

An eight year boy old shot his father dead last week.

Don't you wish you could have spoken to him first?

Across the country, people are traveling long distances to abandon their children to the guardianship of the state. More relatives are bunking in, and yard sales have become...

The next President will face a financial shortfall as he tries to put the economy back on track. Universal healthcare and the vast research and development effort needed to achieve self-reliance in energy will strain a federal budget challenged by deepening recession and urgently needed tax cuts.

Worse yet......