In Australia, the Land Down Under that didn't ratify the Kyoto treaty. And Prime Minister John Howard must go to the polls this year.

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An AP story from Yahoo! News:

A historical marker has been added to the Mississippi Blues Trail, which will ultimately highlight more than 100 locations in the state that have played roles in the development of blues music.

Three markers were placed by the Mississippi Blues Commission in December. The fourth marker, unveiled Jan. 18, will be located at the Riverside Hotel in Clarksdale. The hotel has been home to many blues musicians through the years and is still in operation.

Since 1944, the hotel has provided lodging for legendary artists like Sonny Boy Williamson II, Ike Turner, and Robert Nighthawk. The hotel was formerly the G.T. Thomas Hospital and is best known as the place where the empress of the blues, Bessie Smith, died in 1937 from injuries sustained in a car accident.

"The Riverside Hotel is a monument to our blues heritage and many international visitors come to make it a part of their cultural tourism experience," Alex Thomas, heritage trails director for the Mississippi Development Authority, said.

The previous three markers are:

The grave of Charlie Patton at Holly Ridge. Patton is considered one of the earliest of the blues singers.

The Southern Whispers Restaurant in Greenville, which honors the blues heritage of Nelson Street, where the restaurant is located.

Former site of WGRM radio in Greenwood, where B.B. King made a live radio broadcast in 1940. In 1939, WGRM occupied the second floor of the building, which was originally built in 1901.

I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby Jr. will be in a courtroom for the next few weeks as his perjury and obstruction of justice trial in relation to Plamegate, unfolds. A number of witnesses will be journalists.

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Is pretty damned Dickensian.

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Barry sent me this little tidbit from PSFK: (thank you, sir!)

Just sold on eBay for $495: a slice of wall from the legendary, and now closed, CBGB club in New York City.

The description reads:

CBGB: approximately 12 by 13 1/2 inches framed piece of the graffiti wall from the club formerly located at 315 Bowery and signed by Hilly Kristal, owner and founder of the club, on the matting below. This particular piece of wall comes from one of the dressing rooms. The wooden frame is 16 by 20 with plexi-glass covering the graffiti wall piece.

Beansprouts require refrigeration.

Yes, really.

The CBC's Ira Basen has a series broadcasting on CBC Radio One's The Sunday Edition called Spin Cycles.

Episode One is entitled A Century of Spin. I only woke up in time for the last half, but what I heard was interesting.

The NYT did some investigating into the relationship between the Taliban and Pakistan's security agencies, and finds there is anecdotal evidence to support the notion that those agencies "are encouraging the insurgents, if not sponsoring them."

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One promise that President Ellen Sirleaf-Johnson, elected last year, made was to combat the problem of rape in Liberia -- something that steadily worsened during 14 years of conflict.

BBC reporter Will Ross assesses progress.

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From the BBC:

Paul Greengrass is currently working on The Bourne Ultimatum

British director Paul Greengrass is to follow up his 9/11 film United 93 with a docu-drama about Iraq after the US-led invasion, according to reports.

He will film an adaptation of Rajiv Chandrasekaran's book Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone, according to trade paper Variety.

Chandrasekaran was Baghdad bureau chief for the Washington Post from 2003-04.

Greengrass has been praised for the way United 93 dramatised the crashing of a plane in Pennsylvania on 11 September.

I've seen the major films Greengrass has done: Bloody Sunday, Omagh, The Bourne Supremacy and, of course, United 93.

I've posted before on Chandrasekaran's book.

Turkish police have arrested suspects in the murder of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, who had been in trouble for "insulting Turkishness" for his writings on the Armenian genocide.

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Now Magazine reported on Doctors without Borders' list of most under-reported stories of 2006.

Here's three:

Haiti

Even with the presence of a UN stabilization team, confrontations between various armed groups and impoverished conditions in the capital have cut thousands off from health care and contributed to a high maternal mortality rate.

Colombia

After a 50-year civil war, only Sudan has more internally displaced people. Thousands are retreating to shantytowns springing up everywhere across the country. Mental disorders caused by witnessing or experiencing violence continue to go largely untreated.

Chechnya

Thousands of displaced Chechens returning after a bitter 12-year war find themselves without homes and facing violence, abduction and abuse at the hands of Russian-backed security forces.

Here's the organization's report.

Globeandmail.com now allows access to online columns and editorials to five or six-days-per-week subscribers to the newspaper.

Before, even subscribers had to pay about seven bucks per month for the privilege of being a "Globe Insider."

I don't know when this change was made (I stumbled across it). I didn't get any email notification from globeandmail.com.

FWIW, globeandmail.com is a corporate cousin of my employer, CTV.ca News.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is expected to release its strongest statement yet linking global warming to increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

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Iran wants bloggers to register with the government. The BBC asks some Iranian bloggers for their reaction.

China has destroyed a satellite with a ground-launched missile, which is not such an easy thing to do. And the United States thought it was the only country that could dominate space.

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Check out 13 Tzameti, at the new, soulless Royal Theatre!

Some excerpts from the three-star Globe and Mail review by Liam Lacey:

Take 13 Tzameti for what it is: a tightly screwed shocker, a suspense tour de force that proceeds through a harrowing chain of events with alarming confidence.

Whether the movie is about something more — a metaphor for capitalism gone insane, or the desperation of immigrant workers in the new global economy — is debatable. Social commentary isn't really the strong point of this malicious and meticulously crafted little cinematic nightmare. ...

The harshest criticism of 13 Tzameti is that the film is nihilistic, a meaningless exercise in showy cruelty. Though it's admittedly not the most redemptive story, 13 Tzameti provides the exhilaration of a skilled filmmaker. Rather than nihilistic, its moral is one supported by the Bible, about the love of money and the root of evil.

From the BBC:

Dink's murder has provoked widespread shock in Turkey

A prominent Turkish-Armenian editor, convicted in 2005 of insulting Turkish identity, has been shot dead outside his newspaper's office in Istanbul.

Crowds of Hrant Dink's colleagues and supporters gathered at the scene, chanting their outrage at his murder.

Dink was given a six-month suspended sentence in October 2005 after writing about the Armenian "genocide" of 1915.

The US, EU and Armenia have condemned his murder and Turkey's leaders vowed to bring those responsible to justice.

"A bullet has been fired at democracy and freedom of expression," Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told a hastily convened news conference.

Wow: Bill O'Reilly and Stephen Colbert, together on the Colbert Report.

Who would have thought that would be so lame?

Now, Fox News's The O'Reilly Factor was much spicier!

Host Bill O'Reilly introduced the segment by saying: "... In the Culture War segment tonight,  The Colbert Report, a very sucessful show on Comedy Central, that owes everything to me."

The first words out of Colbert's mouth: "This is an amazing honor. I want you to know that I spend so much time in the world that is spinning all the time, that to be in the No Spin Zone actually gives me vertigo."

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From the Daily Show: Ever-popular footage of TV reporters getting tasered with 50,000 volts to see if it indeed hurts:

I got a phishing email purporting to be from the Royal Bank of Canada (I'm not a client of that bank). Over the years, I've received dozens of these things, but never actually checked them out. This time, I did.

That email pointed to this URL:

http://www.missmissouri.org/members/pro/rbunxcgiF6=1&F7=IB blah, blah, blah ... )

The site is (poorly) branded as the RBC Financial Group.

I wonder how many people, when confronted with a pallid imitation of a bank website, would -- if their spidey sense wasn't already tingling -- not look at the URL and wonder why the domain was www.missmissouri.org before they inputted sensitive financial information.

Here's the real one: http://www.royalbank.ca/ ... er, I think it's  the real one. :)

No second chance for Stephen Colbert at the next White House Correspondents Association dinner in April after his skewering of Dubya at the 2006 one.

Instead, the dinner will be going with Rich Little (?!?!) as the featured entertainer -- thus ending rumours of Mr. Little's demise.

Here's a news release about the 2006 dinner. Methinks they buried the lede. :)

I would link to video of the performance on YouTube, but I found this nasty message on the page:

This video has been removed due to terms of use violation.

However, Google Video has it.

The Washington Post's Dan Milbanks wrote a column earlier this month wondering what journalist would be invited to speak at Dubya's funeral when that time comes. Oddly enough, Colbert's name never came up. :)

You know how to make a vacuum cleaner last 20 years? Don't use it very much.

From NYT columnist David Pogue's blog today, a riff on The Village People's YMCA. He's blasting the Recording Industry of America Association for using lawsuits to prosecute low-level music pirates:

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Help, I'm surrounded by jerks.

I did some shopping downtown today. When done, I walked up a certain major street on my way to College Street.

A middle-aged woman is on the street. Her facial expression screamed befuddlement.

"Excuse me. What street is this?" she asked as I passed by. "Yonge Street," I told her (more to the point, Yonge St. just south of Gerrard).

"I'm looking for the Delta Chelsea Hotel," she said.

I pointed across the street. There it was, big as life.

She walked off without saying thanks, which had me thinking she might be a Torontonian after all. :)

There are at least four Democrat-sponsored bills on controlling greenhouse gas emissions currently before the U.S. Congress. According to this NYT article, at least one of them will likely become law.

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An excerpt from the NYT obituary:

During the Cold War he marched alongside missiles, tanks and troops in a May Day parade in East Berlin. Another time, he rented a chauffeured limousine to tour Eastern Europe. He wanted the people there to know, as he put it, alluding to his plump physique, what a “bloated, plutocratic capitalist really looked like.”

More often, though, he skewered targets closer to home. In the Watergate years he wrote about three men stranded in a sinking boat with a self-destructive President Richard M. Nixon. As the president hid food under his shirt, he bailed water into the vessel.

In the early 1960’s, Mr. Buchwald theorized that a shortage of Communists was imminent in the United States and that if the nation was not careful, the Communist Party would be made up almost entirely of F.B.I. informers.

“The joy of his column was not that it was side-splitting humor,” his friend Ben Bradlee, the former editor of The Washington Post, said earlier this year, “but that he made you smile.”

It was an amiable brand of wit that sprung from a man who had been reared in foster homes and an orphan asylum and who had decided, when he was 6 or 7, that his life was so awful that he should make a living making everybody laugh, even if he did not always laugh along with them. He had at least two serious bouts of depression in his middle years and regarded himself as occasionally suicidal.

Here's a feature I did for CTV.ca on the damage done to Vancouver's Stanley Park by the horrible windstorms out there this fall and winter and some thoughts on planning the recovery.

A recently captured Taliban spokesman says that Mullah Mohammed Omar, the leader of Afghanistan's Taliban, is living in Quetta, Pakistan (a known Islamist snakepit) under the protection of that country's ISI security agency.

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From The Independent:

Christiane Amanpour, 49, CNN's chief international correspondent, is famous for her work in conflict zones. Her latest documentary, 'The War Within', airs on CNN on 20 January at 8pm.

On her documentary:

Since 9/11 newspaper readers have seen one very partisan view of what the Islamists and extremists, who are preaching violence and jihad, are doing and little attention is given to what the vast majority of Muslims think about it. There is no denying that the radical foreign policy adopted since 9/11 has caused an enormous amount of anxiety and anger across the board. They are fed up with their religion being hijacked and the whole Muslim community being targeted with suspicion of terrorism. But they are motivated to see what they can do about it.

If I weren't talking to you right now I'd be...

Preparing for my next trip, which is to Iran and parts of the Islamic world. I'm going to explore this whole dynamic of this clash of cultures and see what's beneath the surface to try to use my voice as a journalist to increase understanding rather than increase tension.

A phrase I use far too often is...

"Frankly speaking". It's a verbal tick or a point of emphasis.

I wish people would take more notice of...

The truth and what's really going on rather than sensationalism. I don't think anyone can claim to know the truth but I seek to stick very closely to it. I call that old-fashioned journalism, which is rooted in fact-based journalism as opposed to opinion, commentary, agenda or ideology.

The Independent newspaper in Britain with a reader-based question-and-answer session with novelist Martin Amis. (thanks, Kevin!)

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Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez wants to put a broadcasting enemy out of business.

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