Ali Mohaqiq Nasab, who edits a womens' rights magazine in Afghanistan, dealt with some controversial issues, like criticizing the 100-lashes penalty for adultery.

As a result, the Ulema Council -- a body of distinguished Islamic clerics -- asked the judiciary to punish him. So they did.

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If you buy beansprouts, don't forget to refrigerate them. If you don't, they decay quite quickly into a putrid, liquified mess.

The Internet is quickly becoming the indie filmmaker's best friend, in terms of helping them find a market for their work. And they have Indieflix to thank.

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There's always this contribution from Slate's Jack Shafer. An excerpt:

... Miller continues to haunt the New York Times two and a half years after her Iraq work was widely discredited, because the paper has yet to document how she botched the story of the decade and catalog the role she played in the current White House imbroglio. Yes, the Times pointed to Miller's work in its May 26, 2004, mini culpa about its Iraq reportorial failings. And yes, the paper effectively ended Miller's career as a serious journalist last Sunday by portraying her as a newsroom loon and weapons-grade egomaniac. Assisting the paper in that assessment was Miller herself, whose accompanying first-person account described how she clawed her way into the Alexandria Detention Center and wimped her way out 85 days later.

The Times won't break free of Miller's malevolent spirit until the paper commissions an exorcism in print, akin to the ones it conducted following the Blair and Lee possessions.

The Village Voice, the granddaddy, the eminence grise of alt.weeklies, is about to merge with New Times Media -- along with five other alternative papers.

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 In a post at Inkless Wells about the virtual round table on Canadian journalism, Macleans' Paul Wells also posted an email from Globe and Mail editor Edward Greenspon about "reimagining" the newspaper.

See it here.

Here's the CTV.ca story. It contains video of PM PM's and the GG's speeches.

In the blogosphere, there were some posts at The Dirt, CalgaryGrit (probably the best one), and Conservative Life (funny Martin picture there).

Macleans' Paul Wells took a bit of a shot last night from PM PM.

Martin said he did 20 hours' worth of secret interviews with Wells, but Wells "only turned the tape recorder on when he was talking."

While Inkless Wells was active this morning, he didn't post on the dinner.

Another good shot from Martin was taken at the folks from CanWest, when he said (something pretty close to): "I haven't seen this many people from CanWest in one room since the last Fraser Institute annual meeting."

One of the privileges of being a Globe and Mail subscriber is getting Toro magazine for free.

As a result, you get top-quality magazine writing buttressed by razor-sharp editing ... er, most of the time.

Take  the November 2005 issue. On the cover is Steve Nash.

The lede talks about a late-season game between the Phoenix Suns and the Los Angeles Clippers.

Uh, which season? The new one's about to start, so I guess they mean 2004-05.

But it gets worse. The article refers to Nash being a frontrunner for the NBA's most valuable player award.

Newsflash, Toro: HE WON!! Check it out.

At this point, I'm wondering if this story was filed in March or April and then left to rot in a drawer or in some folder on a hard drive for months until someone at the mag remembered there would be another basketball season coming up.

But one would think the editors would read the piece over and change that which would make it look really, really stale. I didn't read the rest of it because the first three grafs or so were so jarring.

Man, big oops.

NYT executive editor Bill Keller talked with his staff Friday about what, in retrospect, he'd have done differently in the Judith Miller case.

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NYT public editor Byron Calame said while he's heartened by some aspects of the paper's response to the Judith Miller Problem, "the article and Ms. Miller's account also uncovered new information that suggested the journalistic practices of Ms. Miller and Times editors were more flawed than I had feared."

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In her Saturday column, the NYT's Maureen Dowd popped off a few rounds at her colleague Judith Miller, to wit:

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North Korea is, hands down, the world place in the  world to be a journalist, but China, Burma and  Vietnam suck pretty bad in their own ways, says Reporter sans Frontieres (Reporters without Borders).

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Rory Carroll, Baghdad correspondent for The Guardian, was worried he might lose his head while in the captivity of insurgents -- literally.

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Saw this over at Zerby's blog (I've been a tad lazy today): Some anonymous group, apparently one that includes some CanWest Global types, has started The Dirt.

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Stephen Colbert's Daily Show spinoff, the Colbert Report, launched Monday. Here's a few reviews I was able to find:

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After eight years as host of CBC Radio's iconic As It Happens, Mary Lou Findlay wants to retire and move on to other projects.

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Democracy Now! ran some excerpts from the documentary Hotel Palestine: Killing the Witness, produced by the Spanish TV network Telecino. It contains interviews with two of the wanted soldiers.

Saturday Night, the venerable Canadian magazine, has been shut down by St. Joseph's Media, the current proprietor.

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Rory Carroll, the Baghdad correspondent for the Guardian, has reportedly been freed and is unharmed.

Here's a link to the Guardian's coverage.

The writer gets a courage award from PEN tonight, much to the annoyance of the Globe and Mail's editorial board and pretty much anyone else with a pro-American bent.

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Bunny Greenhouse made $137K US/yr working as a procurement bureaucrat for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. But her work habits apparently went to shit not long after she started asking questions about fat contracts for Halliburton in the run-up to the Iraq war, and she was demoted.

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Judith Miller plans on taking a leave of absence from the NYT, and many are betting she won't ever return. The Village Voice's Jason Vest comes up with the next 10 possible rungs on her career ladder.

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Sydney Schanberg, a former NYT foreign correspondent and now the media columnist for the Village Voice, adds his voice to the Judith Miller imbroglio.

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It's not the best of times for top U.S. Republicans.

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There are fears that Rory Carroll, Baghdad correspondent for the UK newspaper The Guardian, has been kidnapped.

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A Spanish judge has issued an international arrest order for three U.S. soldiers involved in a 2003 incident in Baghdad, Iraq in which a U.S. tank fired on the Palestine Hotel, known for housing journalists. A Spanish TV cameraman and a Reuters journalist were killed.

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A report from The Register about the much-hyped Wikipedia.

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I guess the question we all have to ask is this: If Pittsburgh is unprepared, can any city say it is truly ready?

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Sometimes complete strangers exhibit admirably -- not to mention unexpectedly -- generous behaviour in an environment that, at its best, produces strained politeness.

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Blacklisted from tracking back? Read this message.

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The Public Policy Forum has released a report (.pdf file) about the state of Canadian journalism, as based on a "round table" discussion with some high-profile journalists (thanks to Jacques Poitras, who posted to Canadian Journalist).

I haven't had time to read it in depth, but there was no one from CTV or Global on the panel, and virtually everyone else lived in either Toronto, Ottawa or Montreal.

Is there no one from Vancouver, as one example, who could have contributed to the discussion?

The Globe and Mail has an editorial today based in part on CBC prez Robert Rabinovitch's appearance on CBC's The Current on Monday.

(You can listen to Rabinovitch here. The show also did a segment with the N-P's Andrew Coyne and UBC's Donna Logan on the CBC.)

Carole Taylor, a former CBC chair, also talks about what's wrong with the CBC. She thinks it needs to regain its regional voice.

See it here.

NYT reporter Judith Miller, currently being excoriated over Plamegate, was given a security clearance by the Pentagon so she could go out and join the search for WMDs in Iraq.

Poynter's Jim Romenesko posted a note on Sunday from retired CBS News correspondent Bill Lynch (an excerpt follows):

There is one enormous journalism scandal hidden in Judith Miller's Oct. 16th first person article about the (perhaps lesser) CIA leak scandal. And that is Ms. Miller's revelation that she was granted a DoD security clearance while embedded with the WMD search team in Iraq in 2003.

This is as close as one can get to government licensing of journalists and the New York Times (if it knew) should never have allowed her to become so compromised. It is all the more puzzling that a reporter who as a matter of principle would sacrifice 85 days of her freedom to protect a source would so willingly agree to be officially muzzled and thereby deny potentially valuable information to the readers whose right to be informed she claims to value so highly.

Greg Mitchell of Editor and Publisher also talked about this with Democracy Now!:

AMY GOODMAN: Were you surprised by her Pentagon clearance?

GREG MITCHELL: No. We reported it – I believe we were first to report it in September 2003. In fact, we have sort of rerun that article on our web site today, in which we revealed that status and raised questions about it at the time. The reason it's significant – and I'm sure some listeners are wondering why that's significant in the Plame case – is because as the Times articles this weekend made clear, as Miller admitted, Libby discussed classified information with her. So, this would make him indictable for breaking the Espionage Act, particularly if she did not have any clearance. So, it's incredibly relevant to the Plame investigation right now.

Update:

These lines appeared an AP story on Monday:

Also, a first-person account by Miller said the Pentagon had given her "clearance to see secret information" while she traveled in Iraq with a military unit hunting for unconventional weapons.

Embedded reporters were regularly granted access to some classified information about basic military operations, but it wasn't clear from Miller's article whether she was describing such a routine arrangement or implying she had broader clearance.

Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor and Publisher, says NYT reporter Judith Miller, who figures prominently in both Plamegate and reporting on WMDs, should be fired for crimes against journalism.

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Democracy Now! speaks with Newsweek journo Michael Isikoff and Editor and Publisher editor Greg Mitchell -- who thinks NYT executive editor Bill Keller should fire Judith Miller and apologize to the paper's readers.

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American social commentator Barbara Ehrenreich, in her 50s, went looking for a job. Bait and Switch is the story of her 10-month exercise in futility.

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Check out the Daily Show website and see if they posted the  video clip of Dubya's scripted news conference with troops in Iraq from last Thursday. Mucho amusing!

Salon blogged about it, as did CBS News -- primarily to take a shot at an NBC media stunt.

But Bush's performance plus Jonno's commentary is an unbeatable combination!