The Israel-Palestine conflict presented its contorted face to Canada with a steaming, hysterical anger last week.

When the same-sex marriage issue was being debated before parliament and the courts, many of us argued that the entire issue had ceased being about toleration long ago but was now about affirmation.

The Soviet Union was never comfortable living in the same world with the Vatican. The most recent disclosures document that the Kremlin was prepared to go to any lengths to counter the Catholic Churchs strong anti-Communism.

Today marks the 62nd anniversary of the 1945 disappearance of Raoul Wallenberg, the Second World War-era Swedish diplomat whom the United Nations has called "The greatest humanitarian of the 20th century."

The timing could not be more apposite. After the humorless banalities of the CBCs Little Mosque on the Prairie come the grotesque realities of Channel 4s Undercover Mosque in the U.K.

I am certainly not a Churchill. I am not even a Revel. I am having enough trouble just trying to be a Lapin. But I am issuing a very serious warning about deep consequences, just as they did. It is a warning about the earliest stages of what could become a cataract of disasters if not resisted now.

Modern atheists have no new arguments, and they lack their forebears' charm.

It's difficult to explain how much the world has changed in 25 years and for the better. Those who lived through December 1981 would be well served to pause and give thanks for the differences.

It is early afternoon in the Ramadeqai camp for the displaced on the outskirts of the town of Zalingei in the troubled Darfur region of Sudan. The inhabitants, entering the last days of the Ramadan fast, are sweltering under the October sun. You can feel the lethargy thats descended.

Pope Benedict XVI planned his visit to Turkey as an ecumenical Christian encounter with Patriarch Bartholomew I, the titular head of Orthodoxy.