More than 400 people out ice-fishing had to be rescued off Russia's Sakhalin Island when sheets of ice broke loose and started drifting out to sea, reports the BBC. Check this out:

Operations mounted by the Emergencies Ministry rescued all 442 people who were adrift, although about 70 had initially refused to leave without their gear.

One ministry official was quoted by Interfax news agency as saying many of those rescued were in a state of "heavy alcoholic intoxication".

BBC reporter Richard Black offers this nugget of wisdom:

The crux of the matter, it seems to me, lies in the different ways that scientists and politicians use language.

Science is nothing without precision. You mislabel a larynx as a pharynx, call a nematode a trematode, and your career is done.

Political language, on the other hand, is a triumph of misrepresentation. A failure becomes a success when some little crumb of your plan has worked; winning a battle allows claims of victory even as the war slips away.

So you can describe climate change as 'the biggest threat confronting humanity' even when you are demonstrably doing more about hospital finances, say, about prisons, or some ill-defined threat from abroad.

When a scientist talks about 'reducing greenhouse gas emissions' - I told you we would end up back at this phrase - he or she means just that; actually reducing them. But what it is coming to mean in the political lexicon is something very different; The meeting in Sydney made that abundantly clear.

'Reducing emissions'

The publicity from Mr Bodman and his benevolent business allies spoke of reducing emissions; the small-print acknowledges that if the Asia Pacific Partnership does what it wants to, emissions will still rise, but a bit less quickly than they would have done otherwise. Having them grow less fast becomes equivalent to reducing them.

It is a linguistic trick of huge importance to the drought-ridden citizens of Turkana, and to everyone else who is likely to be at the sharp end of some climate-related impact in the coming years. We should all observe its emergence, document its every use, and fear it like the plague.

A new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq expresses serious doubts about whether Iraqi politicians can hold the country together and whether the Iraqi military can be made ready to challenge powerful militias.

From the BBC:

Taleban forces in southern Afghanistan have taken control of a town which British troops had pulled out of after a peace deal with local elders.

Some local people said they were leaving the town, Musa Qala in Helmand province, for fear of bombing raids on the Taleban by Nato forces.

US commanders and diplomats had criticised the deal.

They said it had not been done with elders but with the Taleban themselves and was not the way to defeat them.

The BBC's Alastair Leithead in Kabul says the loss of Musa Qala to the Taleban is a blow to the strategy of establishing peace deals in Helmand.

Author Mark Lynas explains how the high end of global warming could well lead to mass die-offs -- including humans.

In a word, feedback, explains the Guardian.

Overheard in the Ansel Adams/Alfred Eisenstaedt exhibit rooms at the AGO:

Q: Have you ever been to the temperate rain forests of British Columbia?

A: Actually, I've never been west of the Humber River.