Despite graduating about 400,000 engineers and scientists every year, India is already starting to wonder whether it will have enough in the future to meet the demands of globalization.

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The NYT's Mark Bittman on why broilers deserve respect and how to get maximum benefit from it.

The crux of his story:

If I’d told you I had an appliance that could brown like a grill, was as convenient as your oven, and cooked most food in less than 10 minutes, you’d buy it. But you don’t need to.

This NYT story talks about the pitfalls that the new media might pose for pols, with a particular look at one Hillary Rodham Clinton.

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From CTV.ca:

U.S. scientists have been pressured to make their writings on global warming fit with the Bush administration's skepticism on the topic, a U.S. Congressional committee has been told.

A survey by the Union of Concerned Scientists found 150 climate scientists had personally experienced political interference in their work over the past five years. The survey had 279 respondents.

At least 435 incidents were recorded, representatives of the watchdog group told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

"Nearly half of all respondents perceived or personally experienced pressure to eliminate the words 'climate change,' 'global warming' or other similar terms from a variety of communications," said Francesca Grifo.

More than 1,000 of the 4,400 Afghans who died in conflict-related violence in 2006 were civilians, Human Rights Watch says in a new report.

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The Beeb with some detail on a messianic Shiite cult involved in a major gun battle in Najaf, Iraq that left at least 200 of its members dead.

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If you want to be a foreign correspondent for a major U.S. newspaper, you might be 20 years too late. The business people say those resources would be better off spent on local coverage.

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This NYT story looks at the genesis of a story designed to smear Sen. Barack Obama, candidate for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, over something that allegedly happened when he was seven.

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Writing in the NYT magazine, Michael Pollan has the following advice:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.

He went on to take some shots at some key players as to why the act of eating hs become so incredibly complicated and confusing:

The story of how the most basic questions about what to eat ever got so complicated reveals a great deal about the institutional imperatives of the food industry, nutritional science and — ahem — journalism, three parties that stand to gain much from widespread confusion surrounding what is, after all, the most elemental question an omnivore confronts. Humans deciding what to eat without expert help — something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees — is seriously unprofitable if you’re a food company, distinctly risky if you’re a nutritionist and just plain boring if you’re a newspaper editor or journalist. (Or, for that matter, an eater. Who wants to hear, yet again, “Eat more fruits and vegetables”?) And so, like a large gray fog, a great Conspiracy of Confusion has gathered around the simplest questions of nutrition — much to the advantage of everybody involved. Except perhaps the ostensible beneficiary of all this nutritional expertise and advice: us, and our health and happiness as eaters.

Perky got shot by a hunter in Florida. The hunter dumped Perky's body in a fridge along with some other ducks. Two days later, the guy's wife opens up the fridge to find Perky staring back at her.

They take the duck to a vet. The vet operates. Perky flatlines twice on the operating table, but is resuscitated.

She now has a pin in her wing but is expected to recover.

More at this Beeb story.

The Age newspaper in Australia has obtained an early draft of the second installment of the IPCC fourth assessment, and it doesn't bode well for the Land Down Under.

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Harood Rashid of the BBC's Urdu service recently travelled to South Waziristan and managed to obtain an interview with Mullah Baitullah Mehsud, leader of a Taliban militia there.

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I prepared a backgrounder for CTV.ca on what to expect in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report expected Friday.

While looking through some climate change-related photos on Monday evening, one caption for a Reuters photo claimed that 13 per cent of Americans had never heard of climate change.

It didn't say whether 12.999 per cent of Americans live in caves.

From the BBC:

China is failing to make progress on improving and protecting the environment, according to a new Chinese government report.

The research ranks China among the world's worst nations - a position unchanged since 2004.

After the US, China produces the most greenhouse gases in the world.

The Chinese report, prepared by academics and government experts, ranked the country 100th out of 118 countries surveyed.

Some 30 indicators were used to measure the level of "ecological modernisation" including carbon dioxide emissions, sewage disposal rates and the safety of drinking water.

Seems like only yesterday that Europe was full of brave talk about a low-carbon future (well, 18 days ago, anyways).

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This NYT story looks at the corporati at Davos are discussing how Europe is considering giving nuclear power a second look.

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NYT public editor Byron Calame wrote about the ethics of freelance contributors in his Jan. 28 offering.

I note this sentence with a raised eyebrow:

"THE ability of The New York Times to maintain its ethical standards among its far-flung outside contributors continues to be a major concern of mine. As these freelancers fill column after column at a lower cost than full-time reporters, readers have a right to expect that editors ensure the integrity of that journalism."

However, the second-last of these grafs made me smile:

In a push in the right direction, the (Jan. 16) memo (from Craig R. Whitney and William E. Schmidt, two assistant managing editors) requires editors to ask freelancers if they are “familiar with our ethics rules” the next time each is given an assignment — and to “make it clear that continuing to contribute to The Times depends on observing those rules.” If a freelancer “deliberately disregards” the paper’s Ethical Journalism guidelines, “we stop giving assignments to that person,” the two editors warned.

So how did the freelancer conflicts on these stories escape detection before publication?

The freelancer who took the Samsung junket, John Biggs, had responded to the online ethics questionnaire for outside contributors in May, shortly after it became a requirement. “Have you accepted any free trips, junkets or press trips in the last two years?” one question asked. His negative response was accurate at that time, according to Mr. Whitney, who is also the paper’s standards editor.

After taking the October junket, primarily to write for CrunchGear.com, a blog about electronic gear, Mr. Biggs told me, he “simply forgot” about updating his ethics questionnaire response so Times editors would be aware of his conflict of interest and not assign him any Samsung stories. His editor doesn’t share his vague recollection that he mentioned Samsung’s role in his trip. In any case, comments he posted on CrunchGear on Oct. 17, the day he arrived in Seoul, make it clear to me that he understood the unethical aspect of junkets. “I’m here with Samsung,” he wrote, “suckling on the sweet teat of junket whoredom.”

Unfortunately, The Times’s online ethics questionnaire system requires updating of freelancer responses only every two years. Mr. Biggs, who in recent months has been writing brief articles almost every week for the business section, wasn’t asked to update his responses before writing the two stories about Samsung products in November.

BBC Online business editor Tim Weber with his take on the bouyant enthusiasm for the climate change issue among the business elite at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

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Political tea-leaf readers are still a-twitter over the fact that Dubya mentioned climate change in Tuesday's State of the Union speech.

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Andrew Coulson, editor of the News of the World, has resigned after his royals reporter and a private investigator were jailed for intercepting more than 600 messages for senior officials in the royal household.

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Giant mirrors in space. Filling the atmosphere with reflective dust. The United States wants scientists to develop ways to reflect sunlight back into space, and they want that strategy included in next week's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, says the Guardian.

It brings new meaning to the phrase "smoke and mirrors." :)

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Amir Bar-Lev made a documentary called My Kid Could Paint That, about a four-year-old in Binghamton, N.Y. who is supposedly an art prodigy. Bar-Lev set out to make a film supporting the kid, Marla Olmstead, and her family -- who has been accused of helping her.

But he came to believe that Marla might not be the prodigy she was being made out to be. And when his film came out, the Olmsteads -- who came to think of Bar-Lev as their friend -- felt terribly wounded by the choices he had made.

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Toronto.ctv.ca has a story with photos showing the new ads that Toronto's Live with Culture campaign is running in some U.S. alt.weeklies.

The campaign's purpose is presumably to reinforce the stereotype that our city's ad creators have bad judgment, a lack of vision and no ability to make people laugh.

I'm a T.O. fan and I wouldn't visit here after looking at those ads.

If any visually-inclined T.O. bloggers stumble over this, what images would you use to sell people on a visit to this burgh? Leave a link in the comments area or drop me an email (the link's at the upper right). Your city thanks you.

Kevin Wilson at Mack the Hackistan has a post saying that Toronto Sun ME Gord Walsh is the latest to be departing from 333 King St. E. (the Toronto Sun Family blog, which Kevin linked to, has the same thing).

That can't be a particularly fun place to work these days (that's me -- a master of understatement).

From A.O. Scott's take on Smokin' Aces in the NYT:

“F.B.I.! F.B.I.!” Blam blam blam blam. “[Expletive]. [Expletive].” Blam blam blam. Spurt of blood. Plot twist. “F.B.I.! F.B.I.!” “[Expletive].” Blam blam blam blam blam. “[Expletive].” “F.B.I.!” “Hotel Security!” Blam. Exploding skull. Guy sits on a chain saw. Montage. [Expletive]. Plot twist. Roll credits.

Yes, I condensed a bit, and I’m sorry if I spoiled anything, but the above is a fair summary of Joe Carnahan’s “Smokin’ Aces,” a Viagra suppository for compulsive action fetishists and a movie that may not only be dumb in itself, but also the cause of dumbness in others. Watching it is like being smacked in the face for a hundred minutes with a raw sirloin steak. By the end, there’s blood everywhere, a bad smell lingering in the air, and vegetarianism — or starvation or blindness — starts to look like an attractive option.

A school district in Federal Way, Wash., got into hot water after putting a moratorium on the screening of the Al Gore film An Inconvenient Truth, which has been nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary. Here's why one parent opposed its screening.

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Saw an amusing squib of an interview between U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and Wolf Blitzer, host of CNN's The Situation Room, on The Daily Show on Thursday night.

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Daniel Kitts, a producer with TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin, thinks there's enough evidence to suggest that human-influenced global warming is a reality. While there are parts of the climate-change issue worth debating, that reality isn't one of them.

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From the Washington Post:

Memo to Tim Russert: Dick Cheney thinks he controls you.

This delicious morsel about the "Meet the Press" host and the vice president was part of the extensive dish Cathie Martin served up yesterday when the former Cheney communications director took the stand in the perjury trial of former Cheney chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
 
Flashed on the courtroom computer screens were her notes from 2004 about how Cheney could respond to allegations that the Bush administration had played fast and loose with evidence of Iraq's nuclear ambitions. Option 1: "MTP-VP," she wrote, then listed the pros and cons of a vice presidential appearance on the Sunday show. Under "pro," she wrote: "control message."

"I suggested we put the vice president on 'Meet the Press,' which was a tactic we often used," Martin testified. "It's our best format."

How bad reporting led to death threats for a scientist researching homosexuality in sheep.

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In a commentary for the BBC, Mike Hulme -- director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research -- said the reality of climate change is bad enough without resorting to apocalyptic language.

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Some climate scientists who believe that human-caused global warming is happening also believe that Sir Nicholas Stern's analysis of the economics of climate change made some major errors.

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A round-up of coverage.

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Officials in the former Soviet republic of Georgia grabbed a guy last year who had bomb-grade uranium he was trying to sell (more to the point, he had a sample in his shirt pocket). But he claimed to have up to three kilograms, which is enough for a small nuke.

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The Observer reported that Bush administration was heading for a u-turn on climate change and that he would announce a cap on emissions in his State of the Union Speech on Tuesday.

That was wishful thinking on the part of the Blair government in Britain.

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Here's the Beeb's lede on the start of the World Economic Forum in Davos:

Climate change, the rise of Asia and the next web revolution will dominate the agenda when the World Economic Forum starts on Wednesday in Davos.

And here's a brief excerpt from the Beeb story on the World Social Forum, which opened in Kenya on Jan. 20:

Set up in 2001 as a rival to the World Economic Forum, the forum will cover HIV/Aids, the landless and migration.

It will also emphasise the struggles faced by deprived Africans.

I got a ride part-way home from a co-worker. Phase two was taking the subway down to Collge and Yonge, with the third and final phase being a westward journey on College St. on the streetcar before walking home.

Anyway, some apologetic guy comes around and does the "excuse me, I just need another dollar for the subway" routine. I was summarily dismissive.

No one else would help him out either, so he took his act elsewhere.

One guy was sitting in the bus shelter, with bags and bags of stuff.

After the moocher moved off, a woman -- I'm guessing 50-something, with blond hair and a British accent -- approaches the man and says, "Excuse me: Could you give me some water? I've got the hiccups."

She managed to keep them quiet. I never heard her hiccuping.

Anyway, the guy -- who hadn't come up with any coin for the moocher -- pulls out a full bottle of water from one of his myriad bags and offers it to the woman.

"Thank you," she says, before turning her back on him and going back to absentmindedly stare at the newspaper boxes. This left him in the awkward position of having an unclaimed gift water bottle in his outstretched right hand.

Now, cab after cab after cab passed by going west on Carlton/College, but she never hailed one until the bus showed up. WTF's with that?

As to the water, the guy had a six-pack of San Benedetto mineral water. Maybe she was hoping for one of those. :)