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Even before the polls opened, the telltale signs of seismic change began to drift across Northern Ireland's rolling green hills.

With the exception of Nova Scotia, every province has tabled its 1998-1999 budget.

The backroom boy is in. So is the dark horse. As expected, Hugh Segal, the consummate Tory fixer, announced his run for the federal party leadership last week, followed in short order by Brian Pallister, the former Manitoba cabinet minister.

They are a strange pair in many ways, these two Quebecers of different generations who share the conviction that their province belongs in Canada. Politics has never been a science for Jean Chrétien. He has forged his remarkable political career by following the call of his heart and his gut.

Rebecca Hunter and her partner of 6 ½ years, Debra Lamb, were making their way through rush-hour traffic on a busy Toronto expressway last Thursday when they heard the report over the car radio.

Angel's Roost is a small, elite residence for graduate students at tiny tradition-bound University of King's College in Halifax.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

According to his friends and longtime political associates, there are two John Savages. The first is the private man, whom they describe as warm and compassionate, a doting grandfather, an affable golf companion.

It is the worst possible time for the cell phone batteries to die. The messages blaring out of the emergency room intercom demand a response: "Ambulance on the way - traffic accident victim. Charge nurse call triage re incoming car accident.

Among political strategists, it is sometimes known as "the barbecue factor": the manner in which a once-hot candidate ends up cooked on election day. The principal example, one that many of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien's strategists recall with a shudder, is former Ontario Liberal leader Lyn McLeod.

On the last day of what may have been Jean Chrétien's final election campaign, the Prime Minister went back to the place where his life and his political career both began.

Just past the halfway point in the four-week Ontario election campaign, nastiness was lurking around every corner. Liberal Leader Dalton McGuinty accused Premier Mike HARRIS of lying baldly and of pitting Ontarians against each other in a callous bid for votes.

For a diplomat, words are everything, and the world's top diplomat had reason to regret some of his last week. Kofi Annan, the United Nations' secretary general, was flying back from Baghdad after negotiating the arms-inspection deal that averted a new American attack on Iraq.