While there's a thousand and one caves that al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden could call home, a top U.S. counterterrorism official thinks he's likely in Pakistan.

From UK's The Prospect: Communism is the only political system to have created its own international brand of comedy. The standard interpretation is that communist jokes were a form of resistance. But they were also a safety valve for the regimes and jokes were told by the rulers as well as the ruled—even Stalin told some good ones. (Thanks, Kevin!)

Down in Vermont, people were asking why Chris Graff, the state's Associated Press bureau chief, got whacked by the news co-operative.

Here's the termination letter sent to Graff by Larry Loughlin, Graff's supervisor at AP.

Dick "Aim for the Face" Cheney was in Kazakhstan Friday, and called for new routes to export energy commodities that didn't require crossing Russian soil.

Veteran South Asian journalist Ahmed Rashid for the Beeb on why relations between Pakistan and the U.S. are the worst they've been in years.

On College St.:

"I don't have any money because I work less than everybody else."

-- A candid slacker

"That is so fucking Minority Report."

-- A woman in her early 20s referring to one of the city's new trash bins.

Tavola Calda, one of my favourite Italian restos on College St., is no more. It's being replaced by a sushi joint.

Tavola was great. Laid-back atmosphere, terrific, flavourful southern Italian food and reasonably priced to boot. I'm sad to see it go.

The second disappearance is the Rui Gomes Portuguese butcher shop.

While I didn't patronize it, the shop had the most eccentric window display in Little Italy: A number of frolicking, anatomically correct male pigs (the guy must have got complaints from time to time, because he would sometimes position the pigs in a more modest manner).

Instead, the space will soon be home to something called the 'Boulevard Cafe' (sounds very one-of-a-kind).

A unique bit of College St.'s character has been lost, although I understand not everyone might mourn the passing of Rui Gomes for the same reasons I do. :)

As I'm getting on the streetcar, I open my wallet and flash my pass as I've done hundreds, if not thousands of times before.

This time, however, it would not do.

I start walking back to a seat, but the operator calls out "Sir? Sir??" I return to see what the issue is.

"Can I show you something?" she said in that tone that the really smart people reserve for the learning-disabled.

"It's really important that you pull the pass all the way out of your wallet so the operator can see this," she said, rapping the giant As (for 'adult') on the bottom of the card, still with the tone.

"OK," I said with a shrug. "But this has never been an issue with any other operator. Like -- ever."

"Well, some operators like to take chances," she said smugly.

"Yeah, like every other operator in the TTC,"  I responded in a surprisingly muted WTFF tone, not quite believing I was having this conversation.

I'm not going to amend my transit-pass-showing habit just to see if this ever happens again in my lifetime. What silly bureaucratic nonsense.

Here's the list: The 10 most fucked-up countries on earth in 2005 (2004 position in brackets):

1. Sudan (3)

2. DR Congo (2)

3. Ivory Coast (1)

4. Iraq (4)

5. Zimbabwe (15)

6. Chad (7)

(Tie) Somalia(5)

8. Haiti (10)

9. Pakistan (34)

10 Afghanistan (11)

A senior Afghan army officer says there's essentially no way to stop foreign suicide bombers from infiltrating Afghanistan and attacking foreign troops, including Canadians.

Britain's Lt. Gen. David Richards has assumed command of NATO's Afghanistan mission (ISAF, or International Stabilization Assistance Force). He will take command of the southern region in late July. Canada's Brig. Gen. David Fraser currently calls the shots there.

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of Hezb-e-Islami, is onside with Osama.

According to a Canadian Council on Learning report, 42 per cent of all adults in this country are semi-literate. See the CTV.ca story for details.

I didn't see anything that said whether a semi-literate person could read a newspaper competently, but I'm guessing no.

Citizen journalism guru Dan Gillmor ponders this question as he retells the death of a thousand revenue cuts that traditional media companies have suffered from online competitors.

That's how much an issue of Harper's magazine costs on the stand, with tax in.

I'm presuming Harper's doesn't care about newsstand sales and wants everyone to subscribe. For me, I generally like the content, but don't want to subscribe. And for whatver reason, I found the $9.15 price point to be high enough to make me leave it in the store.

One must wonder how much longer such magazines can survive without fully migrating to the Web (assuming the paper stock and printing costs are why the suckers are so expensive).

This May 2 Globe and Mail article is based on a Pembina Institute for Appropriate Development report, which says the water consumption by oil sands plants may well be unsustainable.

It's a few days late, but I'm talking about Game 7 between the Calgary Flames (BTW: Happy golfing, guys! Go brand some calves, or whatever else it is Calgarians do for spring fun! :) ) and the Edmonton Oilers on April 30, 1986.

In case you're wondering, in this NYT story, they're talking about areas either where Canadian troops are operating, or very nearby. :(

While Mark Smith, president of the White House Correspondents' Association, thought Stephen Colbert was pretty funny on Saturday, this NYT story makes it clear there's hardly consensus on that.

The TTC station at Bathurst and Bloor has an aged poster of a gas pump and some text about a friendly reminder that the TTC is still the better way (or some such nonsense).

The price on the pump for this historic relic?

Seventy-seven (77) cents per litre.

Outrageous! I'm surprised the economy didn't collapse back then! :)

From Tim Grieve's The War Room blog for Salon:

A former top aide to George W. Bush tells U.S. News and World Report that the president was visibly angered by Stephen Colbert's performance at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner Saturday night. "I've been there before, and I can see that he is [angry]," the former aide says. "He's got that look that he's ready to blow."

Grieve wrote a stirring defence of Colbert on Monday. (free with a daypass)

A website has sprung up. When I found it, 33,244 people had left a thank-you note to Mr. Colbert.

Top that, Rick Mercer! :)

Saw this VH1 article by a fellow named Gil Kaufman that offers a few thoughts on why Stephen Colbert's lambasting of Dubya didn't spark riotous laughter amongst the Washington media establishment.

The Beeb, Reuters and The Media Center had a firm name Globescan do a 10,000-person survey for them. I found the results interesting but confirmatory.

The big debate behind today's current high oil prices is the concept of  Peak Oil: That world oil production has nowhere to go but down, meaning the price is likely to continue going up. Democracy Now! rounded up two experts to debate the debate.

A new e-paper product from Microsoft.

The left-lib U.S. media is told-ya-so-ing about how Stephen Colbert savaged the Bush record as host of the White House Correspondents Dinner and got virtually no coverage as a result.

Writer Peter Beinhart says the Democrats need a story to tell if they want Americans to trust them on foreign policy ideas. He has some suggestions.

Let's see how this affects the energy markets later today: Bolivian President Evo Morales used May Day to announce the nationalization of his country's natural gas industry.

An odd crime for a country aspiring to join the European Union, but Hrant Dink, an Armenian living in Turkey, has had his conviction of "insulting Turkishness" upheld by the country's appeals court.

These are fertile times for al Qaeda-ologists as they try to sort out what to make of separate messages coming from Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi all in one week.

A look at the impact of YouTube, a five-month-old site where you can post your videos. Some people hope it'll be their ticket to fame. For some, it actually is.

The Washington Post profiles Nabil Khatib, executive editor of Al-Arabiya, the, uh, other major Arabic-language satellite TV news network.

Whaddaya think: Psychological or social profile? Is your terrorist an entrepreneur, protege, misfit or drifter? None of those? Maybe he's a convert.

More on all this at this April 29 BBC story.

Edward Caraballo, arrested in 2004 as part of a bizarre scheme to run a private jail in Afghanistan, is now free to go about his business. The 44-year-old American described his mood as "jubilant" and "happy."

I would think after two years in the Afghan can, that would make him a master of understatement. :)