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.