Morgan W. Brown, a visitor to this blog from the beautiful state of Vermont, kindly pointed me to a column in Seven Days, the state's alternative web weekly, about the firing of long-time AP Vermont bureau chief Christopher Graff on Monday.

The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, La Presse, the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Radio Canada, the Victoria Times-Colonist and the Vancouver Sun are all nominees for the Michener Award for Meritorious Public Service.

Details here.

Yep, the Lincoln Group did nothing wrong by trying to surreptitiously plant positive stories in the Iraqi media -- by, uh, paying those outlets.

An update on Abdul Rahman: The Afghan authorities are saying he's talking crazy (saying stuff like "Praise Jesus," no doubt :) ), and if he's crazy, they can't kill him for turning Christian.

I suspect President Hamid Karzai and his team are praying to their God that some type of face-saving solution emerges from this horrible mess.

Here's the NYT story, in which Dubya says he is "deeply troubled" by the case.

This CTV.ca News story has some stuff from Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

This was another interesting nugget:

Two Afghan journalists were sentenced to death for blasphemy three years ago but they fled and sought asylum abroad.

Christopher Graff, 52, is looking for work after a 27-year career with the Associated Press. He was the wire service's chief correspondent in Vermont until Monday, when he was told he no longer had a job. There are some theories as to why he got whacked.

NYT film critic Manohla Dargis talks about the New Directors/New Films festival taking place in New York over the next 12 days. An excerpt:

Now in its 35th year, the pocket-size New Directors/New Films festival serves New York cinephiles looking to take a trip around the cinema world — from Iceland to India and Ireland — in 12 days. This year's selection, which gets off to a strong start tonight with Ryan Fleck's drama "Half Nelson," allows you to catch sneak previews (about half of the features have distribution) and discover more rarefied works that may never make it to a theater near you — like the mesmerizing 162-minute German documentary "Into Great Silence," about Carthusian monks living in enveloping quiet in the French Alps, which shows next week.

New Directors makes no attempt to be all things to all people; there are no juggling clowns and dancing bears, just 32 dramas and documentaries, short form and long, for thinking adults. A joint venture of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Department of Film and Media at the Museum of Modern Art, the event is invariably eclectic and determinedly inclusive. There are films about Filipino kids on the verge of sexual awakening and Mexican outsiders on the brink of an entirely different kind of epiphany. While personal expression sometimes seems to matter more than production values, the embrace of world cinema remains the festival's most significant virtue, particularly given the unfavorable climate for foreign-language film distribution.

U.S. President George W. Bush took a question from UPI's Helen Thomas on Tuesday -- the first time in more than three years.

She was on him about Iraq. Democracy Now! has a transcript, and you can see some video at Crooks and Liars.

C&L also has video from a Wednesday appearance by Thomas on CNN's The Situation Room.