Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller warns that al Qaeda will attempt to exploit the situation generated by the Prophet Muhammad controversy.

But that's just one development. Here's some others, including another paper being closed in Russia.

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British historian David Irving now says he made a mistake in arguing there was no one killed in gas chambers at Auschwitz. He has pleaded guilty in Austria to criminal charges of denying the Holocaust and will be sentenced later today. The maximum penalty is 10 years.

You can see more at this CTV.ca story.

Addendum:

According to this BBC story, Irving will appeal his three-year sentence.

A headline on CBC.ca: Iran, Pope call for end to cartoon violence

Afterthought:

And I guess that would also mean Itchy and Scratchy would be completely out of the question.

Double-afterthought:

If you care, this BBC story has what the Pope said.

Flemming Rose -- the cultural editor of Jyllands-Posten, but currently on indefinite leave -- explains why he commissioned the cartoons on the Prophet Muhammad.

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Francis Fukuyama, who wrote the seminal essay 'The End of History', is now arguing that the neoconservative ideas that won the Cold War now threatens peace. He calls for a demilitarization of U.S. foreign policy, among other things. In the NYT Magazine.

Ths story looks at how some U.S. religious universities are dealing with the reality that many of their students and faculty are kinda tolerant and secular.

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I've seen a few people tout Robert Wright's NYT Essay 'The Silent Treatment' as providing excellent perspective on the current Muhammad cartoons controversy. I beg to differ.

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The Salon blurb: "Facing a slow death, newspapers are desperately trying to reach young readers with dumbed-down tabloids full of stories about Kobe, Britney and dental bling."

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The dismissed editors of Freezing Point, a weekly journal recently shut down, have blasted Chinese propaganda officials and called for freedom of speech in a public letter. Some intellectual supporters of theirs wrote a joint letter to China's President Hu Jintao, saying the closing of the journal violated China's Constitution.

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Eugene Jarecki has created a film that I wanted to like a lot more than I ultimately did.

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Roses of the Prophet Mohammad.

That's what Iranian bakers in Tehran are now now calling danishes, according to this BBC story.

In fact, I've previously uttered the same sentiments as Stephen B. Shepard, dean of the City University of New York's graduate school of journalism.

He said a Chronicle of Higher Education interview:

"People complain all the time that the profession isn't diverse enough. And I don't mean diversity just in the sense of racial and ethnic diversity, but I mean in class terms, too. Working-class people, immigrants, people who have served in the military. The press in this country is not very representative."

H/T to Jim Romenesko

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld thinks the U.S. is doing a second-rate job of using the Internet and satellite TV to combat al Qaeda and other enemies in the struggle to win Muslim hearts and ...   more »

Novelist Kamila Shamsie, writing from Karachi, Pakistan, about the Prophet Muhammad cartoons controversy, says there is a growing belief there that the cartoons were published (and re-published) as a deliberate provocation to Islamic countries.

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Gorodskiye Vesti, or City News, the official paper of Volvograd, has been given a month to liquidate itself after publishing a cartoon  showing Muhammad along with Jesus, Moses and Buddha. "Well, we did not teach them that," Moses says in a caption, as the four watched a TV broadcast of a conflict between two groups.

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Denmark has temporarily closed its embassy in Pakistan while Pakistan is recalling its ambassador from Denmark.

A Muslim cleric in Pakistan and a minister in India's state of Uttar Pradesh have offered rewards for whoever kills or beheads the cartoonist.

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton said the following in Pakistan:

"I strongly disagree with the creation and publication of cartoons that are considered blasphemous by the Muslims around the world," the AFP news agency quotes him as saying. "I thought it was a mistake."

Addendum:

Minutes after I posted this, the BBC flashed an alert that nine people died in a protest outside the Italian consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Apparently, the protesters were angry over an anti-immigrant cabinet minister's decision to wear a t-shirt bearing one of the Prophet Muhammad cartoons.

The editor-in-chief and opinion page editor of the Daily Illini at the University of Illinois-Champaign have been suspended after publishing the Prophet Muhammad cartoons in their Feb. 9 issue.

Marc Weisblott of Paved.ca linked to a terrific article by Clive Thompson for New York Magazine called Blogs to Riches. It talks about the haves and have-nots of the blogosphere and why the laws of social physics make getting ahead so tough.

Akeel Mohammed wrote a letter to the Toronto Star on Tuesday that shows some misunderstanding about the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I attempt to explain.

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Can anyone out there tell me if Jyllands-Posten or any other newspaper or magazine that reprinted the cartoons offered rebuttal space to the Muslim communities in their towns, cities or countries?

I can't remember seeing any reference to them having done so.

And if that's indeed the case, it's a one-sided use of freedom of expression and bad journalistic practice.

 José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, says Europe must fight for its core values, including freedom of expression. But he also said European politicians must be vigilant to protect Muslims from prejudice.

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This Washington Post feature looks at how the global protest over a Danish newspaper's caricatures of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad evolved.

There are monsoon-like rains out there right now. Plus thunder. And lightning.

WTFF??

Afterward:

I went to a local meat shop Friday night. The guy told me at the beginning of the month, they had flies buzzing around the garbage container. In Toronto. In February.

And as I head off to work on Saturday, it's a not-so-balmy -13. On Monsoon night, it was +8.

The things you miss when you skip the book review pages on the weekend.

Marc Weisblott at Paved.ca has the basic story of how T.O. writer Ryan Bigge had unkindly reviewed Globe and Mail columnist Leah McLaren's new novel The Continuity Girl in the Toronto Star this past Sunday.

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A blog posting by the Guardian's Simon Avery asks whether the media should have published new photographs from Abu Ghraib prison, even though the photos date from 2003.

These BBC stories look at whether the 'cartoon' protests in Pakistan are really about the depictions of the Prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper or if something else is going on.

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The Freezing Point, an investigative newspaper in Beijing shut down by the Chinese authorities, is being allowed to re-open ... but without its previous editor and deputy editor.

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BBC: Iraq death squad 'caught in act'

BBC: New Abu Ghraib images stoke U.S. fears

British historian and Holocaust denier David Irving goes on trial in Vienna next week for a 1989 speech in which his claims the gas chambers at Auschwitz weren't used for mass killings. Not everyone thinks this is a good thing.

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You carry three shopping bags and your purse in one hand, with your BlackBerry in your free hand?

And when you put down your bags on the subway, you keep your BlackBerry in one hand while you rumage in your purse with your other hand?

In fact, you never lose physical touch with your BlackBerry and stare incessantly at the screen, even though you don't appear to be inputting anything?

Just asking.

Two conservatives -- Ezra Levant, publisher of the Western Standard, and Scott Anderson, editor in chief of the Ottawa Citizen -- debated the cartoons issue on CBC's The Current today.

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The Globe and Mail's Marcus Gee rips Western governments for their timid response to the Muslim world's reaction to the Muhammad cartoons.

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The Toronto Star's Antonia Zerbisias wrote her treeware column today on Kim Bolan. She's the Vancouver Sun reporter who's toiled long and hard on the Air India bombing file.

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A number of former Chinese Communist Party officials have grouped their voices to protest the decision to close Freezing Point, a popular news journal.

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Cartoonist Shahid Mahmood on the cartoon crisis. He finds fault with both sides.

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Fouad Ajami, director of Middle Eastern studies at Johns Hopkins University, on the cartoons crisis in the Grano lecture.

An excerpt from the Toronto Star transcript of his talk:

If you want to live in a liberal society, you have to be willing to be offended. And these people (Muslims) are not willing to be offended. They don't understand the nature of life in a modern society. They are in the West, as I always have said about them, but they are not of the West.

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The Toronto Star's Richard Gwyn columnized Tuesday on the cartoons crisis and various high-profile acts of religious disrespect by Muslims and Christians alike.

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Iraq has officially become the most dangerous conflict ever for journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

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BBC: Danish PM talks to Muslim group

BBC: Pakistanis rampage over cartoons

BBC: Iran paper's Holocaust cartoons

I particularly liked this from Rob Corddry, the show's "vice-presidential firearms mishap analyst":

"Tonight, the vice-president is standing by his decision to shoot Harry Whittington.

"According to the best intelligence available, there were quail hidden in the brush," Corddry said.

"Everyone believed at the time there were quail in the brush. And while the quail turned out to be a 78-year-old man, even knowing that today, Mr. Cheney insists he still would have shot Mr. Whittington in the face. He believes the world is a better place for his having spread buckshot across the entire region of Mr. Whittington's face."

In a post 9/11 world, "the American people expect their leaders to be decisive," Corddry said. "Had Cheney not have shot his friend in the face, it would have sent a message to the quail that America is weak," he dead-panned.

The 'supers' Cheney's Got a Gun and VP: No. 2 with a Bullet also made me laugh.

Stewart made this personal plea to parents:

Moms, dads, if you're watching right now, I can't emphasize this enough: Do not let your kids go on hunting trips with the vice president. I don't care what kind of lucrative contracts they're trying to land, or energy regulations they're trying to get lifted -- it's just not worth it."

This AP story has some of Jay Leno's and David Letterman's gags.

 

In an issue released Monday, the Western Standard magazine reproduced eight of the 12 cartoons that are supposedly responsible for a worldwide outcry.

Various Islamic groups want them charged under Canada's hate crimes laws -- something I suspect won't end in a conviction.

With that update, you might want to watch the following debate between Ezra Levant, the Standard's publisher, and Tarek Fatah of the Canadian Muslim Congress. To see it, go to this CTV.ca story. It's under the 'video' section.

The L.A. Times reported Monday on a leaked draft UN report that finds detainees at the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba violates their right to physical and mental health. Oh yeah -- it also mentions ...   more »

While yapping with my co-worker Tyrone on the subway home this evening, I came to the not-particularly-brilliant-or-original thought: When it comes to public voice and persona, Christians and Muslims have much in common.

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Doug Saunders is a London, England-based correspondent with The Globe and Mail. He did an online Q-and-A about the Prophet Muhammad cartoons on Monday at globeandmail.com.

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