From the BBC:

"Charlie Hebdo must be veiled!" says the cover of the magazine

French interior minister and presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy has defended a weekly sued for printing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

Two French Muslim groups are suing Charlie Hebdo magazine for defamation over the cartoons, printed a year ago.

Mr Sarkozy's letter of support was read out in the Paris court hearing the case and prompted France's top Muslim body to call an urgent meeting in response.

Editor Philippe Val told the court the cartoons critiqued "ideas, not men".

The newspaper Liberation republished the cartoons on Wednesday in solidarity with the magazine.

The two-day trial is being seen as a test of the boundaries of free speech and religious sensitivities in France.

From the BBC:

An Italian judge has ordered a US soldier to face trial over the death of an Italian intelligence agent in a car at a checkpoint in Baghdad.

Nicola Calipari, 51, was shot in March 2005 as he escorted Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena to the airport after securing her release from kidnappers.

The soldier, Mario Lozano, will face a charge of murder in a case that put serious strain on US-Italian relations.

He will probably be tried in absentia as he has been cleared in the US.

To see my previous posts on the Sgrena shooting, click here.

From the Guardian:

Companies wanting to demonstrate corporate social responsibility by being a member of the FTSE4Good stock market index will be forced to show they are reducing their carbon emissions.

About a quarter of the energy-intensive users in the FTSE4Good are heading for removal unless they change their ways, according to the index's organisers.

Oil companies, airlines and mining firms will be told today they must deliver a 2.5% per annum reduction in carbon emissions and publish specific climate-change policies for which their boards must take direct responsibility under a first phase of the new initiative that will gradually be rolled out for all members.

You may be asking yourself, "what's the FTSE4Good index?" Find out here.

Fuel economy? Safety? Advanced technology? When it comes to selling its full-sized Tundra truck in the U-nited States of America, Toyota has essentially said, "fuck that shit." (my paraphrase)

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From the NYT:

For decades, space experts have worried that a speeding bit of orbital debris might one day smash a large spacecraft into hundreds of pieces and start a chain reaction, a slow cascade of collisions that would expand for centuries, spreading chaos through the heavens.

In the last decade or so, as scientists came to agree that the number of objects in orbit had surpassed a critical mass -- or, in their terms, the critical spatial density, the point at which a chain reaction becomes inevitable -- they grew more anxious.

Early this year, after a half-century of growth, the federal list of detectable objects (four inches wide or larger) reached 10,000, including dead satellites, spent rocket stages, a camera, a hand tool and junkyards of whirling debris left over from chance explosions and destructive tests.

Now, experts say, China’s test on Jan. 11 of an antisatellite rocket that shattered an old satellite into hundreds of large fragments means the chain reaction will most likely start sooner. If their predictions are right, the cascade could put billions of dollars’ worth of advanced satellites at risk and eventually threaten to limit humanity’s reach for the stars.

The European Commission wants to force the continent's carmakers to reduce CO2 emissions in their vehicles by 18 per cent by 2012 -- the year the Kyoto Protocol expires.

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Needless to say, European environmentalists and the car industry are at war with each other over the legislative push to cut CO2 emissions from the transport sector, the one area where EU GHG emissions have been rising rapidly.

So, what type of legislation will ultimately emerge?

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From the BBC:

Three-quarters of Europe's car brands are failing to improve fuel efficiency fast enough to meet a key European emissions target, a study has claimed.

The top performer on fuel efficiency was Fiat; while Nissan came bottom of the table.

The report is the first to show the progress of individual European car brands on meeting the commitment to cut carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

Improving fuel efficiency is vital in efforts to tackle climate change.

The more fuel a car uses, the more of the greenhouse gas CO2 is released into the atmosphere.

The story has a chart that ranks the automakers based on what percentage of their reduction target they managed to acheive.

Sciolist: A superficial pretender to knowledge.

The Rev. Ted Haggard, after weeks of intensive counselling in the wake of revelations he had dallied with a male prostitute, has emerged convinced he is "completely heterosexual," declared one of the ministers overseeing him.

"That is something he discovered. It was the acting-out situations where things took place. It wasn't a constant thing," said the Rev. Tim Larkspur in an AP story on CTV.ca.

Congratulations to Rev. Haggard for successfully navigating this journey of self-discovery! :)

Good luck to him as he follows his counsellors' advice to leave Colorado Springs, Col. and move to a quieter place! Here's wishing him well as he also follows their advice to find a more secular way to make a living!

And, as always in these types of stories, file under 'Schadenfreude.'

From an AP story on globeandmail.com:

China will spend more to research global warming but lacks the money and technology to significantly reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are worsening the problem, a government official said Tuesday.

China “lags behind Europe and the United States” in the technology needed to clean its coal, which accounts for 69 per cent of its energy output, said Qin Dahe, chief of the China Meteorological Administration.

“It takes time to catch up,” said Mr. Qin, who served as one of China's representatives to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that last week announced that global warming is very likely caused by mankind and will continue for centuries.

His comments at a news conference Tuesday, the first official Chinese response to the report, came as winter temperatures in China's capital hit a 30-year high, state media said.

The China Daily newspaper said Beijing's temperature hit 13 on Saturday – a 30-year high for the date – prompting an early spring, with frozen lakes melting and trees blooming.

Well, when you see a headline like that, you have to link to it, don't you? Author Mai Yamani writes in the Guardian about why the U.S. and Britain must stop propping up 'moderate' dictatorial Mideast regimes.

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Some excerpts from the NYT story:

SENATOR JOSEPH R. BIDEN’S characterization of his fellow Democratic presidential contender Senator Barack Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy” was so painfully clumsy that it nearly warranted pity.

There are not enough column inches on this page to parse interpretations of each of Mr. Biden’s chosen adjectives. But among his string of loaded words, one is so pervasive -- and is generally used and viewed so differently by blacks and whites -- that it calls out for a national chat, perhaps a national therapy session.

It is amazing that this still requires clarification, but here it is. Black people get a little testy when white people call them “articulate.” ...

“Look, what I was attempting to be, but not very artfully, is complimentary,” Mr. Biden explained to Jon Stewart on Wednesday on “The Daily Show.” “This is an incredible guy. This is a phenomenon.”

What faint praise, indeed. Being articulate must surely be a baseline requirement for a former president of The Harvard Law Review. After all, Webster’s definitions of the word include “able to speak” and “expressing oneself easily and clearly.” It would be more incredible, more of a phenomenon, to borrow two more of the senator’s puzzling words, if Mr. Obama were inarticulate.

The NYT has a feature on former NY Ranger Brian Leetch, who is in sort-of semi-retirement from pro hockey. The story also talks to three of his former teammates -- Mike Richter, Adam Graves and Mark Messier -- about making that difficult decision that it was time to quit something they loved doing and that had defined them as persons.

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From the BBC:

Google Earth peeps into every corner of the planet

Google is in talks with India about sensitive sites viewable via the Google Earth service.

Citing security worries the Indian government has asked Google to reduce the detail in a selection of images.

The government is drawing up a list of places it considers sensitive, which is expected to include military bases and government buildings.

Many other areas in Google Earth have been blurred by governments keen to stop people seeing sensitive sites.

The BBC has a backgrounder on clean coal technology. It talks about washing coal, gasifying it, capturing particulates and other pollutants and, last but not least, capturing carbon dioxide emissions.

Post och Inrikes Tidningar, a Swedish newspaper that began publishing in 1645, will now only be available online. Then again, it only has one employee right now.

An excerpt from the NYT story:

The paper was and remains the official organ of the Swedish government. It thrived during the 17th and 18th centuries, covering foreign and domestic news. But as competition grew, PoIT stopped covering news and instead carried announcements by financial, legal and corporate institutions. The final print version, published Dec. 29, had only 1,500 subscribers.

Christina, who became queen at age 5 although she did not receive her coronation until she was 18, helped found the newspaper when she was 19, amid much court intrigue and a chaotic romantic life. If only the paper were online then, she could have blogged about it.

The BBC looks at the nine-month command of Gen. David Richards, who led 30,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan. U.S. Gen. Dan McNeill will replace him.

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Holly Barnes Higgins spent a year in Afghanistan, starting in October 2005, working on an economic development project sponsored by the U.S. government. She didn't feel very idealistic when she departed.

Here's her story.

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BBC diplomatic correspondent Jonathan Marcus seems to think there's a case for it. However, that unintended consequence may spawn other unintended consequences.

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From the BBC:

They said such action would have "disastrous consequences" for security in the Middle East and also for coalition forces in Iraq.

They said the crisis over Tehran's nuclear programme must be resolved through diplomacy, urging Washington to start direct talks with Iran.

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BBC Tech reporter Chris Long breaks it down this way:

I've made a list of the people that the launch was really of interest to. It's not a long one.

1 - people who are thinking of buying a new PC

2 - technology managers who have to install it in offices

3 - geeks

And that's about it.

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.

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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.

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In a word, feedback, explains the Guardian.

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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.

There's a lot of deja vu all over again in the fourth assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but what it has done is remove the question mark about human influence on climate change, writes the BBC's Richard Black.

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In the coverage and commentary I've seen on climate change in recent days, some have noted that Canada produces only two per cent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions.

The U.S. produces 25 per cent, which it claims to be a paltry contribution.

Canada has .04 per cent of the world's population, and the U.S. about five per cent.

Essentially, both countries punch well above their weight when it comes to emitting GHGs into the atmosphere. They contribute five times more than they should when compared to their share of the global population.

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The 'very likely' in this context means a probability of greater than 90 per cent, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

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From The Guardian:

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). ...

The letters were sent by Kenneth Green, a visiting scholar at AEI, who confirmed that the organisation had approached scientists, economists and policy analysts to write articles for an independent review that would highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the IPCC report.

"Right now, the whole debate is polarised," he said. "One group says that anyone with any doubts whatsoever are deniers and the other group is saying that anyone who wants to take action is alarmist. We don't think that approach has a lot of utility for intelligent policy."

CBC Radio's As It Happens interviewed Green and some others on this topic.

I Feel Love, by Donna Summer -- in conjunction with the Italian producer/genius Giorgio Moroder.

The first real trance song. Hard to imagine most modern electronica without it.

Still an urgent, slinky, exciting tune today -- and it will be 30 years old this year.

Afterthought

I would also like to call it audio literature. Listen to it through headphones a few times; you can always pick out a few things that you didn't notice before -- and they will make you appreciate this amazing song all the more.

This Wikipedia post has a list of those who have either covered or borrowed heavily from the song.

This YouTube clip has a decent version.

In Bangalore, India, journalists trudge into an office in the middle of the night to begin their day covering the New York Stock Exchange and other financial news for Reuters. Here's why.

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From the BBC:

National consumption fell by over 1% during the switch-off

The lights of Paris dimmed for five minutes on Thursday in a nationwide "lights out" campaign, aimed at raising public awareness over global warming.

The Eiffel Tower, lit by 20,000 bulbs, also went dark at 1955 (1855 GMT).

During the switch-off, the power grid operator RTE observed a fall of 800 megawatts, representing just over 1% of France's total consumption.

It comes a day before the release in Paris of a major report warning of humanity's role in climate change. ...

Environmental campaigner Anne Briangault told the BBC that people would like to be involved in tackling climate change but needed advice on what they could do.

"... we are explaining they can do things, they can switch off some lights but it's not enough. Politicians have to make actions too," she said from the base of the Eiffel Tower.

Jim Elve of BlogsCanada gets into moderately high dudgeon over a book about lonely bloggers.

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Dean Baquet stood up to the Tribune Co. beancounters who wanted big cuts at the Los Angeles Times, where Baquet was the editor.

Predictably, Baquet got fired last November for his troubles (publisher Jeffrey M. Johnson preceded him by about a month).

Luckily, his old paper, the New York Times, has taken him back as Washington bureau chief and assistant managing editor.

Note this graf from the NYT story:

In the Washington bureau of The Los Angeles Times, which will now be competing directly with Mr. Baquet, Doyle McManus, the bureau chief, said in a memorandum that competition was good for journalism. But, Mr. McManus added, “it will still be the N.Y. Times, still encumbered by that paper’s institutional weaknesses and still, even with Dean on the premises, an often unpleasant place to work.”

Democrat Al Franken has reportedly decided to run for a U.S. Senate seat in Minneapolis, the state where he grew up.

In doing so, he will try to defeat Republican incumbent Norm Coleman.

Franken is currently hosting on Air America, but will be leaving that gig on Valentine's Day.

He gained some fame performing on Saturday Night Live in the early 1990s. One of his favourite sketches of mine was his mobile satellite uplink, particularly the one where he collapsed in the desert while covering Operation Desert Storm. A buzzard landed and started picking flesh off his face. :)

I couldn't find that clip on YouTube, but you might enjoy Franken's appearance on the Colbert Report.

Molly Ivins, the acerbic and irreverent Texas writer who came up with the nickname of "shrub" for Dubya, has died.

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Admittedly, Iran has a hard government to love, given the torture and beating death of Zahra Kazemi and the calls by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for Israel to be wiped off the map -- to name just two.

However, it really does seem like the the U.S. would love to duke it out with their Persian adversaries at some point.

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Environmental concerns rank just 23rd of 26 factors when people choose a car, claims a new survey.

However, fuel economy is one of the top three; is that not an indirect environmental factor?

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I ran out of bandwidth. Because it was near the end of the month, I said screw it, I'm not buying any more for now (this blog is hardly a money-spinner for me).

However, I did make some posts here: http://bdoskoch.blogspot.com

When I can figure out how to import them into Blogware, I'll do so. The problem seems to be at Blogger's end; when I try to generate a template using the code Blogware provided, I got a "Your template could not be parsed because it is not well formed" message.

Anyways, I'm back up now, but be advised I'll use the above blog as a backup if I run into similar issues in the future. So if you're among the millions of people who literally cannot get through a day without seeing what I've posted, bookmark the above link for insurance.