Iraq and Russia, step forward to claim your prize! Colombia, don't be shy -- you slaughter lots of journos too! :(

From the BBC:

Clashes between tribesmen and foreign militants near Pakistan's border with Afghanistan have left at least 15 people dead, security officials say.

Shooting went on all day near the town of Wana in the troubled tribal area of South Waziristan, the officials said.

Fighting appears to have broken out after a failed attempt on the life of a local elder. Twelve of the dead were reported to be Uzbeks.

Tensions over foreigners are high after peace deals with Pakistan's government.

Foreign militants are accused of taking part in raids over the border in Afghanistan. Under the controversial agreements, they must leave the tribal region or end attacks.

From the BBC:

The Taleban say they have kidnapped an Italian journalist and two Afghan nationals in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan.

A source close to a regional Taleban commander told the BBC that the three men were seized after entering an area of Helmand without permission.

He accused them of spying and said they were being detained at a Taleban base.

The Italian, who the Taleban initially said was British, is reportedly working for Italy's La Repubblica newspaper.

The Guardian defied pressure from the authorities and published a story on the Blair government's money-for-peerages scandal, while the Beeb battled in the courts.

Nothing like the potential fall of a plutocrat to bring out the media hordes. And the judge is warning them to behave -- especially those Canuck ones.

The scandal involving the crystal-meth-fueled gay sex experimentation of the Rev. Ted Haggard with a prostitute has had an impact on the bottom line (so to speak) of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Col. The church has had to lay off 44 of 350 employees.

Ah well, it's God's will.

The BBC's M. Ilyas Khan reports from North Waziristan on how the Taliban are settling in quite nicely there and in South Waziristan. Not only that, they are trying to expand their influence elsewhere in the North West Frontier Province.

From the BBC:

India and Pakistan are holding the first meeting of a joint panel to combat terrorism.

The meeting in Islamabad is expected to focus on the fire-bombing of a Pakistan-bound train in India last month. The blaze killed 68 people.

India has said it will share with Pakistan details of the investigation.

The leaders of the two countries agreed in September to set up a mechanism as a way to boost cooperation between the regional rivals.

For 60 years the armies and intelligence agencies of Pakistan and India have seen each other as the main enemy.

So the idea of sharing information to jointly combat terrorism is quite a change and still tentative.

The thing is, the employee wasn't part of the conversation. He was monitoring the interaction of NYT retail reporter Michael Barbaro and Wal-Mart's media relations staff.

I didn't visit the old USAToday.com, very much, but the new version allows people to "vote up" stories.

They can also comment directly on stories -- something globeandmail.com has been doing for a while. Here's the full highlight list taken from the editors' note:

• Scan other news sources directly on USATODAY.com;
• See how readers are reacting to stories;
• Recommend stories and comments to other readers;
• Comment directly on stories;
• Participate in discussion forums;
• Write reviews (of movies, music and more);
• Contribute photos;
• Better communicate with USA TODAY staff.

Most of this is not particularly paradigm-shifting. The nytimes.com has allowed people to write mini-movie reviews for a while (and to let others vote on them), photo contributions have been around for years, and the BBC has posted links to stories from other news organizations (although they aren't a commercial service).

What USAToday is doing with its redesign can best be described as the new normal.

An interesting juxtaposition in Sunday's Toronto Star.

Haroon Siddiqui has been sticking up for Pakistan in his last several columns.

Sunday's effort (Memo to Canada: Might won't win in Afghanistan) is more focused on Afghanistan, and where Pakistan sees the NATO-led effort as going wrong. Actually, some of the advice he quotes from Pakistani politicians about Afghanistan seems to be pretty good.

On the facing page is this headline for an editorial: Pakistan's stability imperilled by terror.

An excerpt:

Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf has long scoffed at the idea that his country has become a sanctuary for terrorists, as Afghanistan was before the 9/11 terror attacks on the U.S. Just last month he said he was "500 per cent" sure that the top Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, was on the run somewhere in Afghanistan.

That claim will be hard to maintain, now that Pakistan's army has reportedly captured Mullah Obaidullah Akhund in the Pakistan city of Quetta. He is one of Omar's two top deputies, sat on Omar's council and was Taliban defence minister before 9/11. Other Taliban were captured with Akhund.

Clearly, if Omar isn't in Quetta running the Afghan insurgency beyond the reach of 50,000 American, Canadian and other troops, his top men are.

Ya know, I don't recall Mr. Siddiqui mentioning the arrest of Akhund in the Islamist snakepit of Quetta -- making Akhund one of the few top-ranking Afghan Taliban to be nabbed in Pakistan. In comparison, at least three top al Qaeda operatives have been grabbed in that country. However, the arrest -- and public word of it -- were both available well before Sunday's column.

What would Siddiqui make of the arrest? Would he paint it as showing Pakistan to be a solid ally in the war on terror, or did Pakistan only grab a big fish this time to take some of the pressure off?

All I know is that Star's editorial board seems to be more skeptical about Pakistan than Mr. Siddiqui is.

Well, it's more that Essjay isn't who he says he is, and that he lied about his creds. The unravelling of his secret forced the New Yorker to issue a rare editor's note.

The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News are offering readers a sponsored digest page that looks more Web than print.

The NYT story.

The U.S. says a convoy of Marines was attacked by a suicide bomber, then came under fire from multiple enemy positions. Civilians died because they were caught in that crossfire.

Afghans say the U.S. troops shot up a 10-kilometre stretch of highway indiscriminately. But some of the wounded Afghans in hospital say the only shooting came from the Marines.

Here's the BBC story. Here's the NYT one (2nd story in lineup on the World/Asia-Pacific page; not a top World story). Here's the Washington Post one (pA11).

An excerpt from a Jan. 3 AP story on CTV.ca:

NATO said Wednesday that it killed too many Afghan civilians during fighting last year against resurgent Taliban militants, but that the Western alliance was working to change that in 2007.

FWIW, these particular Marines weren't under NATO.

From the BBC:

Military strikes against Iran could speed Tehran's development of nuclear weapons, according to a UK think tank.

A report by the Oxford Research Group says military action could lead Iran to change the nature of its programme and quickly build a few nuclear arms.

Iran denies Western claims it is trying to build weapons, saying its nuclear programme is entirely peaceful.

The study comes as the UN nuclear watchdog is set to discuss the nuclear programmes of Iran and North Korea.

In February, Iran ignored a deadline set by the UN Security Council to stop enriching uranium.

A report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said Iran was instead expanding the programme.

The Beeb also has a feature: Iran: Can a military strike work?

That's the question posed in Darwin's God, an NYT magazine feature.

A number of A-list conservative evangelicals are urging the National Association of Evangelicals to muzzle the Rev. Richard Cizik, the association’s vice president for government affairs, on climate change.

They want him talking about important stuff, like the evils of homosexuality and abortion.

GHG emissions in the United States are projected to grow by 11 per cent between 2002 and 2012. They increased by 11.6 per cent between 1992 and 2002.

Author and aid worker Rory Stewart on the Afghan pipe dreams of the international community.

In response to recent pressure from the U.S. to "do more" in the war on terror, Pakistan's ambassador to the U.S. warns that too much of that kind of pressure could imperil the presidency of Pervez Musharraf and empower militant Islamists within Pakistan.

From the standpoint of U.S. national security, the real front on the war on terror may be in the frontier provinces of Pakistan -- Pakistan's protestations to the contrary not withstanding.

I made my way through Kensington Market this afternoon, walking eastbound on St. Andrew St..

Downtown Torontonians may know that the Bright Pearl dim sum aircraft hangar sits on the southwest corner of that street's intersection with Spadina. They may also know about the Chinese-style architecture.

The green part of the roof in the (unseasonal) photo at right works very well as a veritable launching ramp for melting snow -- which was abundant in T.O. today.

As I walked west on the north side of the street, eastbound people on the south side were getting splattered big time. They literally had to run a gauntlet of falling snow. One poor old lady took a major plop to the head. But she was a trouper and shook it off. :)

Many businesses in the market were shut down this afternoon due to a power outage -- which negated my entire reason for being there.

While the snow thing was fairly harmless, falling ice prompted police to shut down some streets in the downtown core to pedestrian traffic.

Last year, I published a post about the 10th anniversary of the massive downsizing of the Regina Leader-Post -- something orchestrated by the Hollinger of David Radler and Conrad Black. Their company had taken ownership of the newspaper two days before.

That post turned out to be the most-read story ever on this blog, with only a commentary about Elvis's death day coming close.

Anyway, if you missed Looking Back On The Great Downsizing of 1996 the first time, here it is again.

What makes this anniversary a bit more special is that Lord Black of Crossharbour will be going on trial in Chicago on March 14 for white-collar crimes committed during his tenure as CEO of Hollinger International (see below).

Last week, I had lunch with two former colleagues from those days. Our toast? "May justice prevail!" :)

Conrad Black doesn't go on trial until March 14, but the big media machine is already gearing up. More from the Toronto Star's Antonia Zerbisias.

From the BBC:

The BBC has struck a content deal with YouTube, the web's most popular video sharing website, owned by Google.

Three YouTube channels - one for news and two for entertainment - will showcase short clips of BBC content.

The BBC hopes that the deal will help it reach YouTube's monthly audience of more than 70 million users and drive extra traffic to its own website.

The corporation will also get a share of the advertising revenue generated by traffic to the new YouTube channels.

Pakistan announced the arrest of a former Taliban defence minister -- in Quetta, of all places! The arrest took place on Monday, the same day that U.S. Veep Dick Cheney urged Pakistan to do more to fight terror.

From the BBC:

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has warned that climate change poses as much of a danger to the world as war.

In his first address on the issue, Mr Ban said changes in the environment were likely to become a major driver of future war and conflicts.

He urged the US - the world's biggest producer of greenhouse gases - to take the lead in fighting global warming.

Mr Ban said he would focus on the issue in talks with leaders of the G8 group of industrialised nations in June.

The UN is also due to hold a conference on climate change in Bali in December.

If you look at Asia, Himalayan glaciers feed seven major rivers: The Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra, Mekong, Thanlwin, Yangtze and Yellow rivers.

In 2005, the World Wildlife Fund issued a report warning that those glaciers are shrinking. In late 2006, India and China launched their own study.

Hundreds of millions of people depend on those rivers.

In China, the mighty Yangtze -- Asia's longest river, which supports about 500 million people -- is showing the strain. According to this CBC.ca story, it's drying up. One Chinese expert points the finger at global warming.

And that's aside from other issues like pollution.

The Ganges runs through Nepal, India and Bangladesh. The former latter is a poor country that's quite low-lying, so it's vulnerable to rising sea levels.

India and Bangladesh (formerly part of Pakistan) have historically experienced strained relations over the Ganges, with India accused of diverting excess amounts of water. If there's even less water in the river in the future, I don't think it's a stretch to presume things might get worse instead of better.

If survival basics like food and water become scarcer due to global warming, I would suggest there is a substantial risk of violent conflict over their control, either within a nation or between nations.

The Associated Press, the world's largest news agency, decided to have some impish fun and not move any Paris Hilton stories for a week to see if anyone would suffer from withdrawal. The answer? Not really.

I found myself at Roncesvalles and Queen earlier today. There was but a white void where the sparkling, blue, sewage-and-dioxin-contaminated waters of Lake Ontario could normally be seen. Keep in mind you're only a few minute's walk from the lake at that vantage point.

The street cars were all getting jammed up at that critical intersection as the heavy snow iced up the streetcar tracks.

Ultimately, it proved faster to walk up Roncesvalles to Howard Park (about 20 minutes in normal times) to catch the eastbound 506 than to wait for the northbound streetcar. In any event, the one that passed me was simply too full to take on any more passengers.

At the turning point from Dundas West to get onto College, a streetcar had died, backing up yet more streetcars. There's a bit of a hill at that junction. One vehicle required a push to get up and into Dundas West's westbound lanes. It was a Toyota four-wheel-drive.

Clearly, this is going to be an excellent day and evening to stay indoors and off the roads.

And the freezing rain hasn't even started yet! :)

For more, read this Tyee article -- if you can handle the truth.

Democracy Now! talks to two representatives of the Union of Concerned Scientists about two studies the group did -- One on the muzzling of U.S. government climate scientists and the other on the efforts of ExxonMobil to control the debate.

In Seymour Hersh's latest article in the New Yorker, he writes that the Bush administration has indirectly bolstered Sunni Muslim groups that are sympathetic to al Qaeda as part of an effort to counter Iran's growing influence in the Middle East.

The Bush administration may have overestimated North Korea's progress on a uranium enrichment program, and that raises questions about the decision to confront that country back in 2002.