From the BBC:

A final draft seen by the BBC will say nations can protect the climate, but only if they make policies to halt the global growth in emissions by 2030.

The draft refers to stabilising emissions between 450 and 550 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Anything less is unrealistic, economists believe.

But America and China are alarmed by any discussions of a safe limit because it increases pressure to curb their pollution.

From the NYT:

Mark Halperin, who stepped down last month as the political director of ABC News, is moving to Time magazine.

Mr. Halperin, a pioneer of online reporting who founded ABCnews.com’s political memo, The Note, will join Time as an editor-at-large and senior political analyst effective next Monday, the magazine said.

ABC said that Mr. Halperin would continue to play a role at the network as a political analyst and consultant. David Chalian, a longtime political reporter at ABC, replaced him in late March as political director, while a senior political reporter, Rick Klein, will take over this week as the primary author of The Note.

From the NYT:

First come the renovated condominiums, the latte bars and the expensive baby strollers. Next, apparently, come the bloggers.

One Web site’s survey of the prevalence of blogs in urban neighborhoods found a link between gentrification and the number of people who feel compelled to think out loud about the changes in their backyards. The site, Outside.in, crowned Clinton Hill in Brooklyn as the most blogged-about neighborhood in America.

Also on the top 10 list were Harlem; Shaw in Washington; downtown Los Angeles; Newton, Mass.; and Rogers Park/North Howard in Chicago.

Before the survey, the staff of Outside.in was “not conscious that local blogging would be so closely allied with gentrification,” said Steven Berlin Johnson, a founder of the site. Change, he said, “makes people particularly interested in every little development in their neighborhoods.”

This has me wondering if a similar analysis has been done of GTA nabeblogs.

In reference to the lede, I found myself at Dovercourt and College about a year ago. The Starbucks had recently opened, and a yuppie couple was out pushing a stroller that likely cost more than many peoples' cars (price of child not included; maybe they were just strolling with the stroller -- I don't even remember seeing a kid). And I thought, "'There goes the neighbourhood!'" :)

But note this from an April 20 G&M story:

Potential homeowners are searching harder to find overlooked areas that offer more moderate prices than the most trendy downtown neighbourhoods. Some buyers are extending their search farther east or west, while developers are rapidly building new houses and condominiums on industrial land.

Up-and-coming communities, agents say, include New Toronto, Runnymede, Cedarvale, Corktown and Birchmount Heights.

"All you have to do is track where they're opening the next Starbucks and you have the next hot real estate market," says Richard Silver of Bosley Real Estate Ltd.

From the NYT story on the new Viagra campaign (only in Canada!):

How much sexual innuendo can an advertiser pack into 15 seconds?

Where's my manners? The headline should have come first:

Minky Viagra? Pfizer Doesn’t Want You to Understand It, Just Buy It

The NYT's Frank Rich takes a look at the sorry spectacle of  the White House Correspondents' Association dinner.

From the NYT:

THE rush to go on a carbon diet, even if by proxy, is in overdrive.

In addition to the celebrities — Leo, Brad, George — politicians like John Edwards and Hillary Clinton are now running, at least part of the time, carbon-neutral campaigns. A lengthening list of big businesses — international banks, London’s taxi fleet, luxury airlines — also claim “carbon neutrality.” Silverjet, a plush new trans-Atlantic carrier, bills itself as the first fully carbon-neutral airline. It puts about $28 of each round-trip ticket into a fund for global projects that, in theory, squelch as much carbon dioxide as the airline generates — about 1.2 tons per passenger, the airline says.

Also, a largely unregulated carbon-cutting business has sprung up. In this market, consultants or companies estimate a person’s or company’s output of greenhouse gases. Then, these businesses sell “offsets,” which pay for projects elsewhere that void or sop up an equal amount of emissions — say, by planting trees or, as one new company proposes, fertilizing the ocean so algae can pull the gas out of the air. Recent counts by Business Week magazine and several environmental watchdog groups tally the trade in offsets at more than $100 million a year and growing blazingly fast.

But is the carbon-neutral movement just a gimmick?

On this, environmentalists aren’t neutral, and they don’t agree. Some believe it helps build support, but others argue that these purchases don’t accomplish anything meaningful — other than giving someone a slightly better feeling (or greener reputation) after buying a 6,000-square-foot house or passing the million-mile mark in a frequent-flier program. In fact, to many environmentalists, the carbon-neutral campaign is a sign of the times — easy on the sacrifice and big on the consumerism.

The BBC's Caroline Wyatt:

This one small town (Donzy) still had a butchers, three bakers, two doctors' surgeries, several hairdressers and two beauty salons. Yet unemployment was the same as most similar French towns, hovering around 10%, far higher for the young.

And all here wondered if there was some magic middle way that France can find to keep its way of life, and the things that matter here: family, friends, good food and enough time to enjoy them all ... to keep them and yet put France back to work without turning into Britain or the US (a prospect quoted at me in horror by many on my recent travels).

Human side

Before I moved here I had assumed that the French were rather like the British, although with nicer wine and food, more mobile faces and a better class of shrug.

But I have come to realise just how Mediterranean France really is, far more like Catholic Spain or laid-back Italy than its work-obsessed northern neighbours, where time is money and time is to be raced against rather than savoured slowly.

From the BBC:

The Italian Academy of Cooking has launched a scathing attack on the standard of Italian restaurants abroad.

It says two-thirds of the restaurants they reviewed mistook the ingredients or the preparations.

Boris Yeltsin, the former president of Russia who died earlier this week, leaves a decidedly mixed bag behind for his legacy.

Got cable? Then watch PBS at 9 p.m. EDT today for Bill Moyers' Journal.

Jonno will be on!

"Also on the program: Josh Marshall, blogger and publisher of the influential talkingpointsmemo.com, gives his perspective on the role of politics in the recent firings of federal prosecutors; and Carlo Bonini, Italy's foremost investigative reporter."

In the preview video, Stewart talked about the recent performance of U.S. Attorney General Alberto "I can't remember a damned thing" Gonzales, Dubya's praise of Gonzales and compared it a scene from Goodfellas (possibly the greatest gangster movie ever made!):

Stewart: ... When Henry Hill got arrested for the first time, and Robert DeNiro met him at the courthouse, and Henry Hill was really upset because he thought Robert DeNiro would be really mad at him. And DeNiro comes up to him and gives him a hundred dollars and goes: "You got pinched. We all get pinched. But you did it right. You didn't say nothing."

Gonzales said nothing (see Daily Show highlights here; also analysis from John Oliver. The Oliver piece has Bush's reaction, plus some horrifying footage of Rich Little's performance at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner).

Stewart: "'You made yourself -- a smart man, a self-made man -- look like an utter pinhead on national television. And you did it for me' (Bush)."

FWIW, here's a snippet from the screenplay:

Jimmy Conway (DeNiro): Congratulations! A graduation present! (Gives him a hundred bucks)

Young Henry Hill: Why? I got pinched.

Conway: Everyone does. You did it right. You told them nothing.

Hill: I thought you'd be mad.

Conway: I'm not mad, I'm proud of you. You took your first pinch like a man, and learned the two greatest things in life -- look at me: Never rat on your friends and and always keep your mouth shut.

The other gangsters: Here he is! You broke your cherry! Congratulations!

Well, to the company that does online marketing questionnaires through NYT.com.

To their knowledge, I was born in 1914 and am a female U.S. independent financial advisor who lives in the 90210 zip code. However, I have never heard of most of the major investment companies in the United States, despite the fact I have an exclusively boomer clientele with portfolios in the US$5 million or higher range.

I was relatively modest about my income, claiming to be merely in the US$150,000 to $199,999 range. Frankly, I think I'm doing pretty good to still be working at my age. :)

Why lie like a rug?

I can think of no better answer than because these people pissed me off mightily.

I ponied up US$49.95 for the TimesSelect package, which allows me access to columnists and 100 archived articles per month (getting the Sunday Times alone through my Globe and Mail subscription would cost $20 per month). One would think that would isolate one from irritants like having to make a stopover at a marketing questionnaire page every third clickthrough.

Maybe it actually makes me more of a target.

In any event, I thought maybe if I finally fill out one of these and was completely absurdist about it, they would figure it out and never bother me again.

We shall see if my instincts are correct.

Update

They weren't. The very next clickthrough, I got hit with exactly the same quiz! Agghh!!!!

Ex-CIA official Michael Scheuer, one-time head of its bin Laden unit, held forth earlier this month before a U.S. House of Representatives panel about the program of extraordinary rendition -- one that caught Canadian citizen Maher Arar in its net.

Former CIA director George Tenet will be playing the blame game when his new book comes out on Monday.

An NYT/CBS News poll finds support from both Democratic and Republican Americans for the notion that global warming is a serious problem that must be dealt with. Now, what to do about it?

Bill Moyers was press secretary to U.S. President Lyndon Baines Johnson in the early days of the escalation of the Vietnam War. He describes the impact that then-NYT reporter David Halberstam's reporting had on him, even given his insider's perch, and what it taught him about journalism.

Bill Moyers is returning to PBS, and he talked to Democracy Now! about his lead-off effort -- 'Buying the War,' which looks at how the U.S. news media bought what the Bushies were selling on Iraq.

The Guardian picks up on the eternally-emailed BBC man-goat-marriage story. This caught my eye:

Some News Online hacks wondered whether there was an organised campaign to keep the story in pole position. A thought that world editor Adam Curtis admits also crossed his mind. "It had not been re-published or revised, so how is it that upwards of 100,000 people a day were passing it on to their friends?" he wondered on his blog. "We put our senior software engineer Gareth Owen on the case. His verdict is unequivocal. The demand was genuine".

The NYT's Manohla Dargis reviews Zoo.

Shabab (Youth) News aims to reach the 50 per cent of the regional population that's under age 18.

The kidnapping of the BBC's Alan Johnston, in captivity since March 12, has changed the rules of the game for foreign correspondents covering Gaza.

The Washington Post on how Greenpeace and McDonald's came together to fight Brazilian rainforest deforestation.

From the AP story on CTV.ca:

UN-sponsored scientists who warned of the dangers of a warming Earth will issue a new study next month describing how to avert the worst.

They say that everyone must embrace technologies ranging from nuclear power to manure control. A draft copy of the panel's report says that under a best-case scenario, the global economy might lose as little as three percentage points of growth by 2030.

That is if technologies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions are used.

But the draft report, obtained by The Associated Press, says it won't be easy to achieve.

One of the report's authors, British researcher Rachel Warren, says: "Governments, businesses and individuals all need to be pulling in the same direction."

Those interested in how to get GHG emissions down should read George Monbiot's book Heat: How to stop the planet from burning.

Interesting that the draft suggests the cost will be higher than the Stern Report's estimate that limiting climate change would cost one per cent of global domestic product annually, but doing nothing would cost the world about five to 20 per cent of GDP annually.

Now, in the April 6 IPCC report on climate impacts, some scientists complained that certain countries tried to have the potential impacts lowballed for political reasons (IPCC reports are consensus documents, so every country must sign on).

I wonder if in this new segment expected May 4 that the costs of acting will be boosted for political reasons, but I need to see more details on the three per cent figure, such as whether that's an annual loss.

A key point will be whether the report puts a cost on inaction.

Once upon a time, the Bush administration liked to talk about the "war on terror," then a long war against Islamist extremism. The new head of U.S. Central Command -- which covers the area between Europe and the Pacific -- doesn't much like the "long war" phrase.

David Halberstam, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author who made his name as a young reporter covering the Vietnam War, died Monday in a car crash in Menlo Park, California. He was 73.

The Santa Barbara News-Press newspaper, owned by the eccentric Wendy P. McCaw, ran an un-bylined story accusing former editor Jerry Roberts, who resigned last year, of having kiddie porn on his work computer.

From the NYT:

The Tribune Company is expected to announce staffing reductions as early as today at its flagship Chicago Tribune as well as its largest-circulation newspaper, The Los Angeles Times, as revenue in the newspaper industry declines.

While no official announcement had been made about the cuts, reports in both newspapers late last week, citing informants they did not identify, said they were imminent and would be carried out mostly through voluntary buyout packages.

Advertising executive and entrepreneur Brian P. Tierney bought the Philadelphia Inquirer nine months ago. Many readers are impressed, but employees are paying the price, and accommodating advertisers has become a bit easier under the new regime.

From Yahoo! News:

Ryan Fitzgerald is unemployed, lives with his father and has a little bit of time on his hands.

So, he decided to offer his ear, to anyone who wants to call. After posting a video with his cell phone number on YouTube on Friday, the 20-year-old told The Boston Globe he has received more than 5,000 calls and text messages.

Fitzgerald said he wanted to "be there," for anyone who needed to talk. "I never met you, but I do care," a spiky-haired Fitzgerald said into the camera on his YouTube posting.

He planned to take and return as many calls he could, but on Monday at 5 a.m., his T-Mobile cell phone payment will begin charging him for his generosity when he is no longer eligible for free weekend minutes.

"I haven't quite figured out what I'm going to do about it," he said. "Come Monday, no way I'm going to just hang up on people and say, 'I don't have the minutes.'"

Strangely (or not so strangely), I can't find the video on YouTube. At the Boston.com website, a search on 'YouTube' found no reference to Fitzgerald. The one story I saw posted was from AP. Very odd.

If you do have a link, please shoot it over. Right now, I'm wondering about this story.

* C'mon, children of the 1970s: Name the song and group that inspired my headline! :)

A strange development: Le Journal de Quebec, a paper that's reportedly known labour peace since 1967, finds 140 unionized staff locked out by Sun Media. And why? Apparently to force adaptation to the changing multimedia world.