Pakistan took out a religious school in Chinagai, on the border with Afghanistan on Monday, hitting it with a missile that killed an estimated 80 people. The institution is reportedly linked both to the Taliban and al Qaeda. The question, however, is why now?

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The U.S. military wants to step up its media war efforts, with a special focus on the Internet and 24-hour cable news channels. Hmm, makes this post even more interesting, doncha think? :)

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The BBC's David Loyn recently did a story on his travels with the Taliban in Afghanistan's Helmand province. He did an online Q-and-A with readers.

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A new report by the former chief economist of the World Bank puts the cost of unchecked global warming at $7 trillion -- more than the two world wars and the Great Depression combined.

Sir Nicholas Stern recommends devoting one per cent of global GDP to fighting climate change now.

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Why, in the Saturday paper under Films Now Playing, does The Globe and Mail list  School for Scoundrels but treat The Last King of Scotland as cinema non grata?

I find myself almost completely unable to bundle up in a way where I'm not overinsulated going to work and underinsulated coming home.

I hate it when the big winds come at this time of year and strip the leaves from the trees. Once that happens, I'm almost ready to say, bring real winter on!!

As I said, almost.

Tonight's entertainment on the TTC "Rocket" was provided by some guy who looked like a combination of sensitive U of T literature undergrad and the "Kevin" character (Elijah Wood) from Frank Miller's Sin City.

This guy had a thing for Ugly Betty promotional posters.

Why he had to work right above the guy who had been asleep all the way from Kennedy will remain an eternal mystery to me.

If you're a fan of primo Hong Kong chop-sockey action movies (and who isn't), keep an eye open for a DVD entitled Kill Zone.

That's the title they slapped on SPL, the outstanding movie I saw at TIFF in 2005. Here's my review.

Usually, the Taliban and other Afghan insurgents take a winter break. The Observer reports this winter in Afghanistan will be different: The Taliban are planning a winter assault on Kabul.

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From The Observer:

Tony Blair's most trusted military commander yesterday branded as 'cuckoo' the way Britain's overstretched army was sent into Afghanistan.

The remarkable rebuke by General the Lord Guthrie came in an Observer interview, his first since quitting as Chief of the Defence Staff five years ago, in which he made an impassioned plea for more troops, new equipment and more funds for a 'very, very' over-committed army.

The decision by Guthrie, an experienced Whitehall insider and Blair confidant, to go public is likely to alarm Downing Street and the Ministry of Defence more than the recent public criticism by the current army chief Sir Richard Dannatt. 'Anyone who thought this was going to be a picnic in Afghanistan - anyone who had read any history, anyone who knew the Afghans, or had seen the terrain, anyone who had thought about the Taliban resurgence, anyone who understood what was going on across the border in Baluchistan and Waziristan [should have known] - to launch the British army in with the numbers there are, while we're still going on in Iraq is cuckoo,' Guthrie said.

In a unprecedented show of scepticism towards Blair, he said the Prime Minister's promise to give the army 'anything it wants' was unrealistic. 'I'm sure he meant what he said. He is not dishonest. But there is no way you can magic up trained Royal Air Force crews, or trained soldiers, quickly. You can't magic up helicopters, because there aren't any helicopters,' said Guthrie, promoted from chief of army staff to become overall head of the military for Blair's first term of office.

Guthrie said Britain was 'reaping the whirlwind' for assuming too great a 'peace dividend' after the Cold War and risks being ill-equipped for a whole new set of dangers.

Elizabeth Rubin, contributing writer to the New York Times magazine, follows up on last week's excellent article with Taking the fight to the Taliban.

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While New York has lost many great venues in recent times, with CBGB the latest, newer ones are sprouting up.

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

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Some tough talk by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney earlier in the week had the White House dancing on Friday.

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Some American lefties are screaming about the possibility that Saddam Hussein will be sentenced to death two days before the U.S. midterm elections on Nov. 7 -- far ahead of what everyone thought the schedule would be.

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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.

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The National Post turned eight today.

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

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Sheikh Taj el-Din el-Hilali, Australia's most senior Muslim cleric, gave a sermon recently in which he essentially said scantily-clad women, out in public without a hijab, invite sexual assault.

"If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside ... and the cats come and eat it ... whose fault is it, the cats' or the uncovered meat?" he is reported to have said.

The imam is now engaged in some serious damage control.

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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).

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There seems to be some confusion on what happened in the Panjwaii district of Afghanistan's Kandahar province earlier this week.

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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.

Twentieth Century Fox has cut down the number of theatres in which Borat will open from 2,000 down to 800. This is apparently not very precedented.

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The Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois still doesn't know how two youths came to die in a transformer a year ago -- an incident that triggered weeks of rioting and vandalism. And despite promises made at the time, nothing much has been done to alleviate the conditions that helped raise frustration to a fever pitch.

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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.

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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.

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According to this AP story, yes they do.

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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.

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NATO is investigating claims that clashes between its troops and the Taliban in the volatile Panjwaii district of Afghanistan's Kandahar province claimed at least 60 civilian lives.

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The British Conservative Party is furious with the Beeb for running interviews with the Taliban in Afghanistan's Helmand province. British army troops are fiercely battling the Taliban there.

But government Commons leader Jack Straw said the UK is a democracy, and the Beeb had every right to air the interview. The Beeb itself weighs in at the Editor's Blog.

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United Talent Agency, one of the five biggest in Hollywood, has set up a unit to find creators of video and other types of online content.

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This article hits the high points, but how it could skip over Schwartz's, the Taj Mahal of smoked meat, is beyond me. :)

Here's an N-P article on Schwartz's. The Gobe and Mail did an Oct. 21 story on the new documentary Chez Schwartz's.

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.

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If the global population continues to chew up resources at the current rate, then two Earths will be needed to sustain the global population by 2050, claims a new report by the World Wildlife Fund.

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From the Beeb:

Heavy mobile use 'damages sperm'

Experts are calling for further research into the effect of mobiles on fertility Heavy use of mobile phones may damage men's fertility, a study has suggested. Researchers found those men who used a phone for four hours or more a day had fewer sperm and those they had moved less well and were of poorer quality. The Ohio study involving 364 men was presented to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine in New Orleans. But a UK expert said it was unlikely the phones were to blame, as they were in use and not near the testes, and it may be being sedentary was the cause.

A group called the Senlis Council released a report Tuesday that says why Canada should stay and help stabilize Afghanistan, it might well be going about it the wrong way.

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Beeb reporter David Loyn managed to gain access to a group of Taliban in Helmand province. It sits just to the west of Kandahar, the province in which Canada's armed forces are operating.

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A primer on British actor/comedian Sacha Baron Cohen's technique for duping his victims in 'Borat.'

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Just one conflict in a low-income country can cost almost as much as the world spends on global aid in a year, says a committee of British MPs.

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