Canadian Federal Budget 2007

In the Canadian House of Commons, Minister of Finance Jim Flaherty has been delivering his Federal Budget Speech for the financial year 2007/2008.

Amongst the changes detailed, there are, unsurprisingly, a lot of measures designed at improving the environment, such as a new green levy on "gas guzzlers".

CBC News has the details on the budget speech in a special section, and links to the whole budget speech.

A Television Legend returns to the Cornish airwaves!

Yes, it is true. A legend of the television industry has returned to the broadcasting ether.

This particular legend first arrived on South West televison screens in 1961, and disappeared in 1992. He's been spending his time since then at a local Cornish tourist attraction.

That will probably be enough clues for most people who had experience of Westward and TSW between 1961 and 1992.

The answer is to be found here, at the website of Cornish radio station, Atlantic FM.

RTE broadcasting live news video from St Patrick's Day.

For years now, you have been able to listen to RTE's radio stations online, but the situation with live video webcasts has been very limited at best.

Special events is about all you've been able to watch on very infrequent occasions. Even the RTE News was a recorded video webcast and not all programmes and bulletins were available.

But from St Patrick's Day (March 17th) 2007, RTE News output, will be broadcast live online for all the world to see.

For me, this is a very positive development. The BBC have made their BBC1 News bulletins available online live for quite some time now, but News 24 is not available. The old ITN News Channel was available online from it's launch in 2000, til it became the ITV News Channel. In the US, some local stations air their newscasts live online too, such as WCBS TV in News York.

I like the fact that the late night News On Two is also being inlcuded in the live webcast schedule, as this has been the major bulletin that has been missing from the RTE News recorded webcasts.

I will probably be watching a lot of these webcasts.

Breaking News: ITV Play to close. Hooray!

Well, I have to say this is great news for people like myself who have a love of the broadcast media. The overly commercial venture known as ITV Play, is to completely closedown, and will be replaced on Freeview by ITV2+1.

Whilst I am not a big fan of the timeshift channels, I have even less inkling to see any more channels of the ITV Play ilk, so this is a positive move.

In The Pod... Fox News Radio

I admit that I rarely have much nice to say about Fox News Channel, or indeed any of it's sister operations. However, I find myself saying some very positive things about the Fox News Radio bulletin podcast, available on iTunes and also here. Unlike it's TV counterpart, the Fox News Radio bulletins are nowhere near as overtly political. These bulletins do seem to just report the news rather than the standard Fox News TV style of incorporating commetary into the news.

The bulletins are made up of 2 x 2 minute news segments, separated by 1 minute of ads, which seems quite usual for Amercian radio news. The bulletins are updated every hour, and the updates seem to be consistent. If nothing else, it is worth listening to, to hear a different perspective on the news.

I give the Fox News Radio podcast a credible 6.5 out of 10.

Fox News Channel turns into Fox Propoganda Channel!

Fox News Channel has released some new promos for the channel, and in my view, the promos cross the line into propoganda. Inside Cable News has screenshots of one promo which says "Iraq. Immigration. Katrina. America Has Problems. The Problem Is Not America." and Newshounds has screenshots of another promo which says "The Only Cable News Channel That Does Not Bring You The Usual LEFT WING BIAS."

Actually, that last one has a point, as Fox News actually brings you the usual RIGHT WING BIAS that you and I have come to expect from them and their staff of Conservative talk show hosts, such as Sean Hannity, John Kasich, John Gibson and Bill O'Reilly. They continue to claim they are fair and balanced, yet there continues to be evidence that proves otherwise. So, in some ways, Fox News Channel has long been the Fox Propoganda Channel...

Priorities on Sky News???

Now, usually, I do not criticise 24 hour news channels for their choices of stories. There are thousands of stories out there every day, and each channel has to decide how they are going to fill the airtime, and it's not an easy decision.

But I do have one big criticism to make here, and it involves the Celebrity Big Brother racism row, which I believe Channel 4 and Endemol manufactured, with the help of Jade Goody, in order to get ratings for a programme which otherwise was failing this year.

Some background first though. Every Saturday and Sunday afternoon from 2pm to 5pm, Sky News do a rolling news format of news, sport and weather every 15 minutes, in much the same way the ITN News Channel used to.

For the 4.45pm segment of News, Sport and Weather, as it is labelled on the EPG, Sky went through the main top stories of the day in the first two and a half minutes, all except for one story, which they then spent the next five minutes on. Now this was the lowest ranked of the top stories. They then spent two and half minutes on Sport before going to ads. Which one story justified half the airtime in a 10 minute segment? Jade Goody breaking down in tears to a News Of The World reporter, on video.

The other stories, Changes at the Home Office, dangerous chemicals washing ashore in Devon, British soldier killed in Iraq and the amazing video of marines attempting to rescue a dying colleague, all those only merited 2.5 minutes, whilst Jade Goody merited 5 minutes? I think not.

A hope for treating cancer, but pharmaceuticals may pull plug!

I don't normally write about developments in health and food, simply because you can never get experts to agree on anything. However, this article was passed onto me by a Canadian friend of mine, and I am astonished by the thought that pharmaceutical companies may pull the plug on this potentially ground breaking research, simply because there is no profit in it.

Surely, to deny potentially life saving research to continue, because of there being no profit in it, would be criminal, would it not?

One from a bored story writer???

Okay, I admit, the Weekly World News is not your most trusted source of news. It is however quite often a good source for stories to go the Ridiculous News File. However, this one is refused entry to that file, on account of the fact that it goes beyond ridiculous, to somehwere around the "You Cannot Be Serious!" file.

According to the story, a parent disappeared during a game of peekaboo with her 10 month old son. Now, the location for this story is Worson, Delaware. That is kind of appropriate, because this is the WORSt ONe that I have ever seen from any of these Amercian tabloids. I am utterly convinced that some bored writer at the offices of Weekly World News made this one up. Then again, they always say the truth is stranger than fiction...

Graphically Unbalanced??? Looks like it.

Fox News Channel constantly advertise themselves as "Fair and Balanced", but the reality of these chyrons, or lower thirds, is quite different. Newshounds has the screenshots.

We Report, You Decide!