It's the cold calculus of the high-stakes world of U.S. network television news -- if your show's ratings go down, your prospects go down with them. And with ABC nipping at NBC's heels, the executive producer of NBC's Nightly News with Brian Williams may pay the price.

From the BBC:

The ban reflects a growing unease about using the "N-word"

The city council of New York has voted to ban the use of the word "nigger".

The resolution to ban the so-called "N-word" is largely symbolic as it carries no weight in law and those who use the word would face no punishment.

But it reflects a growing unease that the racial slur is now part of everyday conversation and that the taboo against its usage has been swept away.

The word is in common usage among sections of the younger generation in the United States. ... for America's so-called hip-hop generation using the word among themselves is about self-empowerment.

Its usage is habitual and seems culturally fixed and to stop it is likely to take a change in their attitudes rather than an edict from elected officials.

Addendum

The Beeb followed up on the news story with a feature.

From the BBC:

Thirty-four monks officiated at Osaka's Kyocera Dome

The late inventor of instant noodles was symbolically blasted off into space at a funeral ceremony attended by thousands in Osaka, western Japan.

The event was a tribute to Momofuku Ando's creation of Space Ram, a noodle soup that works at zero gravity.

Mr Ando, who died in January aged 96, created the instant noodle in 1958 and worked hard on the vacuum pack that was taken into space in 2005.

His Nissin Food Products has annual sales of 300bn yen ($2.5bn).

Tuesday's ceremony attracted 6,500 people to Osaka's Kyocera Dome baseball stadium. Thirty-four monks officiated and stars adorned the walls.

A previous post on Mr. Ando's passing.

The CIA has been operating a series of black prisons around the world to better interrogate the world's worst terrorists while safely hidden from prying eyes.

One prisoner has talked to the Washington Post.

From the NYT:

When a psychology professor at DePauw University (in Greencastle, Ind.) surveyed students, they described one sorority as a group of “daddy’s little princesses” and another as “offbeat hippies.” The sisters of Delta Zeta were seen as “socially awkward.”

Worried that a negative stereotype of the sorority was contributing to a decline in membership that had left its Greek-columned house here half empty, Delta Zeta’s national officers interviewed 35 DePauw members in November, quizzing them about their dedication to recruitment. They judged 23 of the women insufficiently committed and later told them to vacate the sorority house.

The 23 members included every woman who was overweight. They also included the only black, Korean and Vietnamese members. The dozen students allowed to stay were slender and popular with fraternity men -- conventionally pretty women the sorority hoped could attract new recruits. Six of the 12 were so infuriated they quit.

“Virtually everyone who didn’t fit a certain sorority member archetype was told to leave,” said Kate Holloway, a senior who withdrew from the chapter during its reorganization.

Here's hoping the six conventionally pretty white women who stayed will meet like-minded, conventionally handsome, white fraternity men, and that they go on to create the foundations of a master race together -- maybe even come up with a final solution for the socially awkward.

Addendum

In a CNN interview, some of the insufficiently committed women said they were told the nickname of their sorority was "the doghouse."

How much are we to make of the fact that a Taliban suicide bomber blew himself outside the Bagram air base in Afghanistan while U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney was safe inside?

This NYT analysis suggests it may symbolize American worries about a Taliban and al Qaeda resurgence in Afghanistan.

The Kajaki dam, once it gets fully up to speed, could provide electricity for another two million Afghans. Don't think the Taliban don't know that.

From the NYT:

President Bush has decided to send an unusually tough message to one of his most important allies, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the president of Pakistan, warning him that the newly Democratic Congress could cut aid to his country unless his forces become far more aggressive in hunting down operatives with Al Qaeda, senior administration officials say.

The decision came after the White House concluded that General Musharraf is failing to live up to commitments he made to Mr. Bush during a visit here in September. General Musharraf insisted then, both in private and public, that a peace deal he struck with tribal leaders in one of the country’s most lawless border areas would not diminish the hunt for the leaders of Al Qaeda and the Taliban or their training camps.

Now, American intelligence officials have concluded that the terrorist infrastructure is being rebuilt, and that while Pakistan has attacked some camps, its overall effort has flagged.

“He’s made a number of assurances over the past few months, but the bottom line is that what they are doing now is not working,” one senior administration official who deals often with South Asian issues said late last week. “The message we’re sending to him now is that the only thing that matters is results.”

The Toronto Star's Haroon Siddiqui with Pakistan's side of the story on the current situation in Afghanistan.

So Martin Scorsese finally wins an Oscar for Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The King of Comedy and Goodfellas! Woo-hoo!! :)

About time!

From the NYT:

Since when did microlending, global poverty, constitutional law and civil wars in Africa become topics for frank discussion on fake-news comedy shows?

Publishers say that particularly for the last six months, “The Daily Show” and its spinoff, “The Colbert Report,” which has on similarly wonky authors, like the former White House official David Kuo, have become the most reliable venues for promoting weighty books whose authors would otherwise end up on “The Early Show” on CBS looking like they showed up at the wrong party.

(Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad) Yunus’s appearance gave a jump-start to his national press tour and sent his rank on the online bookseller Amazon soaring, said Susan Weinberg, who is the publisher of PublicAffairs. “It was our pièce de résistance,” Ms. Weinberg said. “It had a huge impact on the book.”

Tony Fox, a spokesman for Comedy Central, said that though “The Daily Show” has been on the air since 1996, the number of authors featured has increased significantly in the last five years.

Authors are treated to a fairly straight conversation with Mr. Stewart, but Stephen Colbert, who remains in character as a Bill O’Reilly-type commentator, can be a more challenging interviewer who forces the author to play along with his schtick. “It’s a different experience,” Ms. Weinberg said wryly.

From the NYT:

Johnna Cottam was showing a group of her girlfriends how to do a move called the Fireman.

As music by Shakira played, she strode up to grab the portable pole in the living room of her well-appointed lakefront home here, wrapped her right leg around it, swung wide with her left, and spun. When she reached the bottom, Ms. Cottam, in a pink “Got Pole?” tank top and black workout pants, tossed her hair back, mudflap-girl style.

“Kick it right out of the ballpark, just kick it,” she encouraged her five friends and neighbors. Making way for the women to try the move, Ms. Cottam backed into a rocking chair draped with pink and purple feather boas that partly covered her twin sons’ two teddy bears.

Pole dancing, once exclusively the province of exotic dancers, has flared up as a much-hyped Hollywood exercise craze, and has seeped into the collective unconscious through shows like “The Sopranos” and “Desperate Housewives.” A variant called motorized pole dancing, which occurs in stretch limos, has raised eyebrows as far away as Britain, where some female university students pole-danced as a fund-raiser for testicular cancer. And mini-poles have even been spotted as dance props at over-the-top bat mitzvah parties in suburban precincts.

I was riding the Scarborough Rapid Transit line on Wednesday when two young women started talking about bachelorette parties.

One says she knew of one girl who had a midget stripper entertain at her "sweet 16" party, "and he even gave her a lap dance."

Says the other: "That's kind of funny."

Well, I certainly thought so! :)

Now, those who follow celebrity gossip much, much more closely than I do inform me that some professional party girls have themselves hired such entertainment for their own all-girl soirees.

Who knew?

Who cares?

With Dubya leaving the stage, and two Republican presidential front-runners who are relatively moderate on religious issues, the U.S. Christian right has some picking to do.

The Globe and Mail's Martin Mittlestaedt on why some experts think food supply might be among the first major casualties of global warming.

From the BBC's Matt Frei in Washington:

When little green men from Mars eventually descend on our planet and unearth America's time capsule dating back to the beginning of the year 2007, it could skewer their whole view of our great civilisation.

Astronaut Lisa Nowak's story sparked huge media interest

"What's with the viewing figures?" they will wonder.

The country was embroiled in a losing war in Iraq, a festering war in Afghanistan and a looming war at the presidential polls.

But the issues that glued the nation to their flickering screens involved an astronaut who wore a nappy while driving across the country, a pop star who was so vexed by celebrity life she shaved off all her hair and a dead stripper whose burial tested the wits of Florida's finest legal minds.

I've recently read the Sam Harris book The End of Faith, just finished watching the documentary Jesus Camp and am about one-third the way through Chris Hedges' American Fascists.

They work well as a trilogy (Updated).

From the BBC:

Supporters say future peace depends on the amnesty

Around 25,000 people have rallied in the Afghan capital Kabul, calling for a proposed war crimes amnesty for former military commanders to be made law.

The protesters, who gathered in a stadium, included ex-mujahideen and several top government officials.

The upper house of parliament has passed the controversial bill but it has yet to be signed by the president.

Tens of thousands of people were killed and tortured during decades of war and unrest in the country.

If the bill were to become law, those who led fighting first as leaders of the anti-Soviet resistance during the 1980s and then during the 1992-1996 civil war would be immune to prosecution for war crimes.

International rights groups and the UN have voiced opposition to the proposal, saying justice must be done.

The Toronto Star's Antonia Zerbisias on the effects of the Quebecor starvation diet on the Toronto Sun.

From the AP story on globeandmail.com:

The editor of The New Yorker said Thursday his magazine never intended to offend anyone when it published a cartoon that joked about a Polish name and drunkenness.

David Remnick was responding to the reaction of some New Yorkers of Polish origin, angered by what they consider a “Polish joke” published in the Feb. 19 issue of the magazine.

Veteran cartoonist Robert Weber had sketched two children chatting at a bus stop with the caption, “My parents named me Zbigniew because they were drunk.”

Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, offers an analysis of the IPCC report with a view to U.S. domestic politics.

British commentator Timothy Garton Ash asks a question I've wrestled with for some time: Is global capitalism, with its mantra of constant growth driven by manufactured desire, environmentally sustainable over the long term?

But if it isn't, what are we prepared to do about it?

Rising prosperity in India and China means rising demand for air conditioning in those countries (driven by global warming? Shurely not!). And that means more ozone-destroying chemicals making it into the atmosphere, because they're using refrigerants that had been banned elsewhere.

From the BBC:

An international conference is due to open in Norway aimed at banning the use of cluster bombs, despite the non attendance of the US, Russia and China.

The 48-nation meeting has been called by Norway after arms talks in Geneva last November failed to achieve progress towards a ban.

Cluster bombs usually consist of a large shell containing many small bombs that can cover a wide area.

Some fail to explode and endanger civilians years after conflicts end.

The UN estimates that Israel dropped up to four million cluster bomblets in southern Lebanon during last year's war.

The Beeb's Paul Reynolds analyzes the implications.

From the BBC:

An Egyptian court has sentenced a blogger to four years' prison for insulting Islam and the president.

Abdel Kareem Soliman's trial was the first time that a blogger had been prosecuted in Egypt.

He had used his web log to criticise the country's top Islamic institution, al-Azhar university and President Hosni Mubarak, whom he called a dictator.

A human rights group called the verdict "very tough" and a "strong message" to Egypt's thousands of bloggers.

There's a related feature: Eygpt bloggers fear state curbs

Remember, folks, Egypt is considered a pro-Western government.

For comparison's sake, you'd have to rob a bank with a shotgun or accidentally kill someone in a bar fight to get a four-year sentence.

This first started percolating after the Grammys, but now that the Oscars are almost here, I can offer the refined version.

In my vision, all the nominees for a category would go on stage, much like a beauty pageant.

However, when the winner was named, that person would not give a speech. Instead, they would go and sit on a throne, their back to the audience.

Then the losers (and face facts, that's what they are at this point) would have to go before them one by one. Then, while on bended knee, they would have to tell the winner that their performance/film/whatever was better, and then briefly explain why -- or better yet, why they sucked.

The winner would be encouraged to have a superior, triumphalist smirk on their faces.

After they were finished, the losers would have to submissively bow or curtsey to the winner, whichever is most appropriate.

The losers would go offstage as a group to the nastiest boos and catcalls imaginable. The winner would get rapturous cheers.

Hey, I'd watch that! :)

And according to this Globe and Mail story, the producers are trying to spice things up. An excerpt:

Faced with declining viewership (last year's show was the second-least-watched ceremony by Americans in more than a decade) — and previous Oscars that have clocked in at more than three hours — the academy this year is insisting that individual acceptance speeches be, above all, “interesting and memorable.”

If a winner “pulls out a list and starts to read it,” that's pretty much a guarantee that he or she is going to be cut off right away, an Oscar spokesperson said Wednesday.

Even without a list, the famous musical cut-off — when the orchestra drowns out a winner's speech — “still could happen,” she said, particularly if the speech is felt to be going on too long. Winners are being told they have 45 seconds to make their speeches.

From the NYT:

Two days after graduating from high school last June, Jonathan Pope left his home in Miamisburg, Ohio, to join a traveling magazine sales crew, thinking he would get to “talk to people, party at night and see the country.”

Over the next six months, he and about 20 other crew members crossed 10 states, peddling subscriptions door to door, 10 to 14 hours a day, six days a week. Sleeping three to a room in cheap motels, lowest seller on the floor, they survived some days on less than $10 in food money while their earnings were kept “on the books” for later payment.

By then, Mr. Pope said, he had seen several friends severely beaten by managers, he and several other crew members were regularly smoking methamphetamine with prostitutes living down the motel hallway, and there were warrants out for his arrest in five states for selling subscriptions without a permit.

“I knew I was either going to be dead, disappeared or I don’t know what,” Mr. Pope said.

From the BBC:

The upper house of the Afghan parliament has passed a controversial bill giving amnesty to people accused of war crimes over the past 30 years.

Both houses have now backed the bill. It has yet to be signed by President Hamid Karzai, who could veto it.

Many atrocities were committed under Soviet rule, as well as by mujahideen leaders who fought a civil war and finally by the Taleban.

Many victims have reacted angrily to the idea of an amnesty.

Some MPs in the lower house, which passed the bill last month, now say they did not understand its implications when they voted for it.

Today is deadline day for Iran to suspend the enrichment of uranium, as per a United Nations Security Council resolution.

Since that's probably not going to happen, the BBC's Paul Reynolds tries to analyze what will happen next.