Kate Heartfield - The Ottawa Citizen

Today's column is about 1989, that year of remarkable things, and the effect it had of creating optimism about the state of the world...

About a year and a half ago, I wrote a column about Roger Stone, a Stittsville man who found himself with four acres of extra land and decided to put it to good use...

It's kind of refreshing to see a bill named honestly and plainly these days. But that's the only nice thing I have to say about Uganda's "The Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009", which prohibits "any form of sexual relations between people of the same sex." This goes beyond criminalizing anal sex...

We on the Citizen's editorial board recently published an editorial about migration, which was the theme of this year's UN Human Development report. The Economist has put a nice little videographic about movement trends and remittances up on YouTube:

My love for local graveyards, especially at this time of year, is the topic of this week's column. Audio version here.

Only a human-rights NGO could put out a top-10 list that has no 10th place, but instead has two entries sharing "equal ninth." How very Canadian...

The editorial board met today with Daniel Taub, legal adviser for Israel's ministry of foreign affairs. We spoke about the Gaza attacks of last year, about the ways in which democracies can balance human rights and security, and about what works in counter-terrorism. The audio is here as an mp3.

The fall edition of the Ottawa International Writers Festival runs from Oct. 21 to 27, and as usual the line-up is an interesting one. Tomorrow night, there's a bit of a preview with Karen Armstrong and Tim Flannery, and I'm sorry I'll probably have to miss it...

A couple of things I've been meaning to link to: CIDA's report to Parliament on Canada's official development assistance, 2008 to 2009, contains all the latest numbers and is a very useful resource if you care about this sort of thing...

If that headline made you think I got to the bottom of something juicy that the mainstream media are covering up, well, you'd be wrong...

It's striking that the dividing line between support for Zelaya and support for the new government in Honduras does seem to be geographical: In contrast to the international consensus, most of the mail I get from within Honduras about this takes the view that what happened to Zelaya was...

I had the chance to speak with Dr. Paula Kantor this morning, director of the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, based in Kabul...

 can be found here, and the audio version here.

When I last blogged about the coup in Honduras, I got a lot of thoughtful and interesting comments from people who said they had been very worried about Manuel Zelaya and were happy to see him ousted. Fair enough...