An independent U.S. journalist died and four other people were wounded in two shooting incidents in the Mexican city of Oaxaca.

Vik Franke, a Dutch documentary filmmaker in Afghanistan, first shot a roadside ambush by the Taliban with his camera. But when the camera's batteries died, he picked up a machine gun and helped the Dutch commandos and other NATO troops fire back.

F. Brinley Bruton talks about her experiences in this AlertNet blog posting.

The Independent has given over its front page to highlight the plight of four bloggers currently serving prison sentences in places like China, Vietnam, Iran and Tunisia (See it here).

The Guardian: Five stars

Peter Bradshaw writes: "Borat is the hero of this extraordinary mocu-reality adventure: a film so funny, so breathtakingly offensive, so suicidally discourteous, that strictly speaking it shouldn't be legal at all."

The Daily Mail

Baz Bamigboye writes: "Sacha Baron Cohen and his director Larry Charles shot over 400 hours of footage for their film Borat: Cultural Learnings Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan and then spent months finely editing it to just under two hours. It boils down to the funniest 120 minutes to hit the big screen this year. The movie's going to offend just about every living soul on the planet. No one escapes Borat's razor-sharp wit."

The Telegraph

Sukhdev Sandhu writes: "Perhaps you'll laugh at the subtitle: Cultural Learnings of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Perhaps you'll laugh at the opening credits: a grab-bag of public-information-film graphics and sputtering newsreels from an inept cable-network show. The only guarantee for anyone who sees Borat is that once you start laughing, it will be impossible to stop. Kids who can't recite a line of poetry will be reeling off the entire script within days. ...

"Seeing a Barbie doll at a yard sale of a woman whom he's convinced is a gipsy, Borat demands: 'Who is this lady you have shrunk?' Seeing a couple of cockroaches on the floor of a Jewish-run guesthouse, he shrieks: 'Look! The Jews have shifted their shapes!'"

The Times: Three stars out of five

Larry Charles's big-screen account of Borat's cockeyed adventures is a squirming joy and a film to cherish.  It begins in a muddy village in Kazakhstan. This, explains Borat, is home. He is a cool and confident narrator. He introduces neighbours and hugs the local rapists, criminals and psychopaths. There is a cow in his state-of-the-art living room. This is rural bliss. Women are inherently stupid; incest is normal; bestiality is best. It’s a civic duty to butcher gypsies and Jews. It’s good, clean, normal fun.

Some U.S. reviews are available at rottentomatoes.com.

A Danish judge has denied the libel claim of a group of Muslims, filed over the cartoons published in the newspaper Jyllands-Posten that satirized the Prophet Muhammad.

The Washington Post hired Travis Fox as a photo editor back in 1999. He picked up a video camera on his own and started doing some video pieces for the newspaper's website, washingtonpost.com.

Now he's a full-time video journalist -- actually, one of seven -- and has filed from major world news hotspots, earning Emmy nominations in the process.

According to this AP story, yes they do.

MLB Advanced Media, Major League Baseball's online presence, has 1.3 million subscribers, yearly revenues of US$200 million and is valued at US$5 billion. That is a very nice little spin-off from the core content produced on the field, reports The Globe and Mail.

The Beeb: A nest of leftist anti-Christians overpopulated with city-loving, politically correct gays and ethnics who hate Americans and country people, or a diverse group of journalistic professionals who worship impartiality as the one true God?

I report. You decide.

Not satisfied with lattes and frappuccinos, Starbucks is venturing ever further into selling cultural products.

Sting 'journalism' in India hit a new low when hidden cameras captured a fading Bollywood star trying to seduce a young female journo posing as an actress.

While the stings are considered a standard part of the Indian news media's tool kit, there is some push-back coming from the courts.

Once again, the CBC's Tony Burman waits until everyone else finishes prognosticating before regurgitating the conventional wisdom; however,this letter-from-the-editor-in-chief is a useful review on the impact of the forces buffeting the mainstream news media these days.

The Toronto Star's Thomas Walkom brings up an inconvenient fact about the Juliet O'Neill story on Maher Arar that brought the wrath of the RCMP on her -- it was wrong.

And he cautions this should be taken as a lesson about assigning credibility to sources, particularly ones journalists must cite anonymously.

Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri have cameos in a new Republican TV ad as the U.S. moves closer to its mid-term elections.

The Globe and Mail reconstructs how the firing of Toronto Star publisher Michael Goldbloom and editor-in-chief Giles Gherson went down -- and why it's not really Torstar's biggest problem.

In throwing out search warrants used by the RCMP to search the home of Ottawa Citizen reporter Juliet O'Neill, a judge has truck down three sections of the Security of Information Act, a post-9/11 piece of legislation.

If you're in Taranna and a vota, check out Campaign Bubble, by Marc Weisblott for globeandmail.com.

From the blog:

A fresh and sometimes irreverent look at political behaviour leading up to the Nov. 13 Ontario-wide municipal elections. Marc Weisblott blogs the local races, focusing on the Toronto area.

If you're not in sub-Saharan Africa but are interested in what's what there, check out The Sub Saharan African Round Table, Canadian expat Blake Lambert is one of the contributors and principals.

He explains in one post why Robert Kabushenga is bad news for Ugandans (Mr. K is a former government spokesman who now heads the state-owned New Vision newspaper. Former managing director William Pike "left" the paper after running a story that enraged the gov't. More from this BBC story).

Lambert himself was forced from Uganda for doing, er, journalism.

And who commented on his expulsion on behalf of the Ugandan government? Robert Kabushenga!