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In a downtown Toronto hotel last week, 300 trustees and school board staff had gathered for the annual conference of the Ontario Public School Board Association.

At moments during last week's Liberal nomination meeting in the provincial riding of Humber East in Corner Brook, Nfld., the spirit of the legendary Joey Smallwood seemed to permeate the room. At the microphone, a pumped-up Brian Tobin, in a pugilist's stance, was in full rhetorical flight.

By the standards he set during his street-brawling youth in Shawinigan, it was not much of a rout.

As Prime Minister Jean Chrétien's government tried to evoke a new era of Canadian team spirit in the House of Commons last week, it was no coincidence that the one premier who came to listen was Captain Canada himself.

In the end, the protest sputtered out, a victim of high seas and bad weather in the choppy Straits of Florida. The 35 boats and several private planes that set out from Key West, Fla.

In this holiest of lands, there is nothing particularly sacred about the intersection of King George and Dizengoff boulevards in downtown Tel Aviv. No prophets are buried on the spot. There are no slabs of ancient rock to be worshipped or fought over.

Terrorism is not a new curse. There was a time when the most fearsome terrorist of the day was "Carlos" Sanchez, better remembered by his flashier nom de guerre, The Jackal.

"Be careful, some of 'ems in a nasty mood," warned a police constable to those venturing into Smithfield Market in London last week. The sprawling shed with its grand Victorian lattice has been the centre of Britain's meat trade since the last century.

In the end, a dangerous and irresistible vanity - talking on the phone - proved fatal for Dzhokar Dudayev.

As usual, Brian Mulroney was dressed for the occasion, impeccably suited in sober, even prime ministerial, blue.

It was a short-lived fiasco that federal Liberals prefer to look upon as a petit faux pas.

On Christmas Eve, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien asked Brian Tobin to drop by 24 Sussex Drive for a private chat about the future. Longtime political colleagues and, more recently, personal friends, Chrétien and his fisheries minister had much to discuss.

On the weekend before he planned to shuffle his cabinet, Jean Chrétien was tired but in a teasing mood.

As he prepared to deal with mounting criticism of his government's handling of national unity issues and last week's cabinet shuffle, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien spoke to Ottawa Editor Anthony Wilson-Smith.

The new Maritime quest for unity began during those achingly anxious hours when Quebecers counted their ballots and decided the fate of the entire country. As the tally in last October's referendum seesawed back and forth, Liberal MP George Rideout, a former mayor of Moncton, N.B.

Richard Sterritt sounds sleepy after a night spent manning a Loyalist barricade in the Northern Irish border county of Armagh. But his voice swells when he's asked to describe the sound of a Lambeg drum. "It sounds like a church bell," he says of the ringing beat from the 45-lb.

In fewer weeks from now, if the pact that the leaders initialled on Nov. 21 proceeds as planned, a U.S.-led international army will launch an effort to turn virtual reality into actuality.

While it may seem odd for a businessman to criticize austerity measures by a Conservative government, equally unusual was the size and scope of Eves's cost-cutting program. The financial statement, which slashed $6.