Free Republic

STELLARTON, N.S.—The world's most influential diplomat and Ottawa's most eligible bachelor seem to be hitting it off. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay enjoyed a chummy — and unusual — visit to MacKay's Nova Scotia riding yesterday. In stark contrast to the usual government visits where diplomats do business on the fly, Rice spent 23 hours in Canada, many of them in MacKay's riding of Central Nova, a languid locale that couldn't be further from the diplomatic hell holes to which she's usually dispatched. "Peter, your foreign minister and your MP, invited me here....

Readings at the New Glasgow, N.S., public library are usually tame affairs, but then it is not every day an author appears who has written that the local population acts like it is stunned by chloroform. When Dawn Rae Downton read from her new memoir, Diamond, she was met by about 10 hecklers who did not appreciate her unvarnished portrayal of Pictou County, their rural corner of northern Nova Scotia. Ms. Downton never dreamed her book, which is essentially the story of 100 days spent caring for a dying friend, would make her Nova Scotia's own Salman Rushdie. But after...