Not many people know about Ed Kennedy today, but on May 7, 1945, his name was on a dispatch from France announcing Germany's unconditional surrender.

     It was the biggest scoop of the Second World War, and it got Kennedy turfed out of Europe and fired… Read full post »

 

 

 

"It was Canada from the Atlantic to the Pacific on parade. I thought then ... that in those few minutes I witnessed the birth of a nation."

    It's not… Read full post »

 

 

     The cold has seeped into my felt-lined boots, winkled its way around my ears and down my neck. My fingers are stupid with it, and I'm shivering. Mostly it's the temperature and wind chill.
     I'm wearing a scarf, watchcap and army… Read full post »

     It's a late fall evening on the depressing field where two semi-pro teams are squaring off. I've had to sign a waiver both to be on the sidelines and in the dangerously decrepit press box on the roof of the rickety stadium. Smoke from a foundry across the road belches… Read full post »

 

     My God, but we were a disreputable bunch of gibbering, ink-stained hacks. Well hell, we were expected to be, and we worked very hard at it.

      That tradition is long gone, of course, along with a lot of other newspaper eccentri… Read full post »

Come with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear as the Lone Derangers ride again....

 

It was March 1972, and the university's student-run weekly newspaper had just printed its annual parody edition of the local daily.

Called "The Freak Press", the satire was declared so obscene, s… Read full post »

     I recently read in The Telegraph, one of the UK's respectable, if rightwing, newspapers, that the first ever Victoria Cross -- Britain's highest award for bravery -- was going up for auction and was expected to fetch about $185,000 Cdn.

     How do you put… Read full post »

    “All men dream; but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act out their dreams with open eyes, to make it… Read full post »

 

 

    It's not much to look at on an army ordnance map -- a sort of whaleback feature in Nord-Pas-de-Calais that's less than five miles long, nowhere even 500 feet above sea level and overlooking a broad plain of small villages, roads, trees and fields.
  &… Read full post »