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The word was out well in advance of last week's cabinet shuffle that the heavy lifters - Finance Minister Paul Martin and Health Minister Allan Rock - were keeping their old jobs.

It doesn't take much to put the spring back into a Quebec separatist's step these days. Their grand project - a march towards independence from Canada, or at least a new partnership of equals with the rest of the country - has bogged down.

An ardent baseball fan since the 1950s and a minority owner of the Montreal Expos, Mark Routtenberg concedes that even his passion for the Grand Old Game waned during the past year.

Growing up in the small town of Hartney in the southwest corner of Manitoba, Grant Little believed that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police "hung the moon.

Everybody agrees it was a dirty job. When Canadian Peacekeepers arrived in Croatia in 1993, many had to work near abandoned industrial sites destroyed during the war that had torn apart the old Yugoslavia. Some got covered in reddish grit while filling sandbags.

Long before the arrival of European visitors, the Cree of northern Saskatchewan used the area's rivers for communication. Travellers carried information by canoe from community to community.

If the tabloids had their way, this royal wedding would be remembered as the saga of Sophie's bared breast. It is a poignant story, even a little tawdry, about a bashful prince and a canny career girl.

Nothing special united the 217 people aboard EgyptAir's ill-fated flight 990. There were babies, teenagers and senior citizens; newlyweds and old married couples; doctors, pharmacists, journalists and lawyers; Christians, Jews and Muslims.

Admittedly, 57-year-old Duff Waddell is a man who embraces excess. Practically every morning he is up at 5:30, pulling on his jogging shorts and gulping a glass of orange juice before heading off for a one-hour run. By 8:15, he is in the small office where he practises real estate law.

Maj. Rod Babiuk picked up his brass abacus for a buck at a garage sale, while many of his colleagues at CFB Kingston hunted down wooden versions of the beaded counting machines. No, the army has not developed a sudden interest in ancient math.

This week, when Joe Wamback addresses the Commons committee reviewing proposed changes to the Young Offenders Act, he will tell the politicians about the horrific assault that almost killed his son last summer.

"Eightball" pulls back his long black hair, adjusts his balaclava and peers across the St. Lawrence River through his night-vision binoculars.

Grant Fahlman, 51, has lived his whole life on the farm 25 km southeast of Regina where his family settled when they came from Russia in 1889, and this year was the first in his memory that no burrowing owls raised their broods in his pasture.

No one knows exactly what the surface of Mars is like, but Robert Zubrin has a pretty good idea. At least some of it, he says, is much like a frozen, god-forsaken corner of the Canadian Arctic called Haughton Crater. The terrain is similar - rough-strewn rock on the floor of a crater 16 km across.

For Finance Minister Paul Martin, the question is not whether taxes should be cut, but by how much and how quickly.

It's a rare Saturday night off in the NBA. Time for the league's hot young blades to don their best duds, pop in the diamond stud and hit the clubs, right? Well, maybe not.

At first they thought it was a prank, the kind of crazy thing that students just a month from graduation might pull.

Most government leaders like to cloak themselves in the trappings of high office when they call an election.