From the BBC:

Six years after being ousted in the US-led invasion, the Taleban have retaken about 10% of Afghanistan, US intelligence chief Mike McConnell says.

The government controlled just 30% of the country, and the rest was under tribal control, the director of national intelligence told senators.

But that assertion has been denied by the Afghan government as incorrect.

From the BBC:

With Russia's presidential election campaign entering its last day, the head of the electoral commission has admitted media coverage was unequal.

Vladimir Churov told the BBC not all candidates had enjoyed equal access to the media, but he still believed the coverage had been fair.

Turkish religious scholars are pouring over the Hadith -- a collection of sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, and the second-most sacred text in Islam after the Koran -- with an eye towards a radical modernization.

CBC Radio's Mike Hornbrook reported this morning that the normally e-loquacious Conrad Black is not responding to e-mails these days.

And Black appears to be taking efforts to avoid being photographed in the waning days of his pre-incarceration freedom.

Black's lawyers were in court in Chicago on Wednesday. They are arguing for him to allow to remain free on bail awaiting his appeal rather than commence serving his sentence on Monday as scheduled. Black may hear the outcome of that application today.

Sadly, Black wasnt' successful, so the big house looms ever closer.

The Star's David Olive passed along this observation on Feb. 25:

And now, an irony within a paradox wrapped in an enigma:

Journalist Doug Bell, who blogged impartially on the Conrad Black trial last year for Toronto Life, has come upon a recent, resigned observation by Himself in the Irish press: "The place [prison] I have been assigned to is relatively good and if I do go there, they will ask me to teach, but I guess it's an elite occupation in a prison," Black said. "It's like back to boarding school, without, one dares to assume, the tedium and indignity of corporal punishment." As he made clear in his mid-1990s memoir, Black regarded many of his Upper Canada College instructors as kapos.

Not sure what's more retch-worthy here: that Black always places himself on the most elite plane that circumstances allow; or his implication that outside of prison, teaching – a vocation of more critical importance to a healthy society than, say, investment banking – is very much sub-elite. 

In composing my post on the battle for the Korengal Valley and the fact that the insurgents were quite willing to put women and children at risk in their fights with U.S. troops, I remembered a relevant snippet of dialogue from Apocalypse Now Redux.

NYT Magazine contributing writer Elizabeth Rubin spent some time with the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team in the Korengal Valley, located in Afghanistan's Kunar province. She found a place where -- from my reading -- a My Lai-like situation could be just one more ambush away.

This is a must read.

In January, Vanity Fair published an article on fighting in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley. To my mind, it buttresses another remarkable article on U.S. troops in that area by NYT Magazine contributing writer Elizabeth Rubin.

With Vladimir Putin about to shuffle titles, the NYT is looking at just how tightly he has controlled Russian public life. While life is freer than it was under Soviet times, it's still pretty restricted. This is the first part of a series.

From the Washington Post:

An internal watchdog office at the Justice Department is investigating whether Bush administration lawyers violated professional standards by issuing legal opinions that authorized the CIA to use waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques, officials confirmed yesterday.

H. Marshall Jarrett, counsel for the Office of Professional Responsibility, wrote in a letter to Democratic lawmakers that his office is investigating the "circumstances surrounding" Justice opinions that established a legal basis for the CIA's interrogation program, including a now-infamous memo from August 2002 that narrowly defined torture and was later rescinded by the department.

By happenstance, there's a movie playing at the Royal Theatre this weekend called Taxi To The Dark Side, by Alex Gibney. It's up for best documentary feature at the Academy Awards this weekend.

Gibney's narrative thread is wrapped around the tragic story of Dilawal, a young Afghan cab driver who ended up in the U.S.-operated Bagram Prison and came out dead. His death certificate read "homicide."

His legs were "pulpified," according to a U.S. coroner. Had Dilawal lived, his legs would have required amputation because of the tissue damage he suffered.

Dilawal's case was investigated and prosecuted, but as with Abu Ghraib, the investigations looked down. Gibney's film looks up. W-a-a-a-a-y up.

As predicted, it's out with the fundamentalist MMA and in with the secular Pashtun nationalist Awami National Party (ANP) in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province. But can the Taliban and al Qaeda-led militancy in the area be rolled back?

From the Los Angeles Times:

Family members describe Sayed Parwez Kaambakhsh as a frightened young man, sitting in a cramped Afghan prison cell alongside 30 hard-core criminals, hoping an apology will save him from execution for blasphemy.

But to the outside world, the 23-year-old student and journalist has become a cause: a symbol of Afghanistan's clashing constitutional commitments to freedom of expression yet also to Islamic law that allows apostasy to be punished by death. His sentence, imposed after a closed-door trial during which he was not permitted a lawyer or a hearing, has become a rallying cry for foreign critics who want Afghanistan to hew to international norms on human rights.

The question now is whether international protests will save Kaambakhsh from a firing squad, or instead stiffen the spines of religious conservatives who fear that Afghanistan's morals are being diluted by imported Western values. ...

From the Feb. 17 Observer:

Wikipedia, the free online encyclopaedia, is refusing to remove medieval artistic depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, despite being flooded with complaints from Muslims demanding the images be deleted.

More than 180,000 worldwide have joined an online protest claiming the images, shown on European-language pages and taken from Persian and Ottoman miniatures dating from the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, are offensive to Islam, which prohibits any representation of Muhammad. But the defiant editors of the encyclopaedia insist they will not bow to pressure and say anyone objecting to the controversial images can simply adjust their computers so they do not have to look at them.

Here's the Wikipedia Depictions of Muhammad page.

Here's the discussion page.