From the BBC:

"Our intelligence services have confirmed to me that he's alive," Mr Abbas (Mahmoud, the Palestinian president) told reporters in Sweden.

(Alan) Johnston, 44, has not been seen since he was seized at gunpoint on his way home in Gaza City on 12 March.

On Sunday, an unknown militant group said it had killed him, but the BBC said and Palestinian officials said they could not verify the claim.

Mr Abbas said he knew which group was holding Mr Johnston but did not give any details.

In Gaza, a senior security official said the earlier reports of Mr Johnston's death were unfounded.

I did a backgrounder for the Virginia Tech University shootings: Common threads run through school shooters.

The most haunting part of the story is this quote that U of T psychology prof Jordan Peterson read me from Milton's Paradise Lost as a way of explaining the mindset of such people:

"'The more I see pleasures around me, so much more I feel torment within me as from the hateful siege of contraries. All good to me becomes bane. And in heaven, much worse would be my state. ... Only in destroying do I find ease to my relentless thoughts.'"

And on a much, much lighter note, here's a preview of the Hot Docs festival: Hot Docs festival to offer 'feisty' lineup.

I got the big question out of the way fast:

Will this be the best Hot Docs ever?

"It's always the 'best Hot Docs ever'," Sean Farnel, director of programming, told CTV.ca with a laugh.

From Yahoo! News:

Popular online hangout MySpace entered the news business -- http://news.myspace.com (beta) -- Thursday with a feature that lets its users determine what items other members see.

MySpace News brings to a much larger audience the user-recommendation capabilities already available through Digg and Time Warner Inc.'s Netscape. It also marks the site's further inroads into becoming an Internet portal akin to Yahoo Inc. and others.

Unlike Digg and Netscape, which rely heavily on user submissions, MySpace will also scan thousands of Web journals and news sites and group results by categories such as sports and politics. MySpace will go further than Google Inc.'s news offering by letting users vote on items, helping to determine what makes the front or section pages.

As part of the service, MySpace will pull and display headlines from the outside news sites, a practice that contributed to legal challenges against Google. The search engine leader recently reached a settlement with Agence France-Presse and earlier with The Associated Press, although no lawsuit had been filed by the AP.

From the BBC:

Civilians in Afghanistan are increasingly facing suicide attacks, abductions and beheadings, according to a leading human rights group.

A report by Amnesty International says that attacks on civilians are widespread and systematic, and are used by Taleban rebels to instil fear.

The report says that scores of civilians have been deliberately killed by the Taleban in the past two years.

It accuses the Taleban of "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity".

Targets between January 2005 and March 2007 have included women's rights activists, election candidates, clerics, government and health workers and teachers.

At least 183 schools were burned in arson attacks across the country between 2005-2006.

Two Egyptian women who worked as newsreaders for state TV want to wear veils on air. Their employer has issues with that. So do some Egyptians.

From the BBC:

Staff at an Afghan television station in the capital, Kabul, have protested against a raid by armed police who allegedly assaulted workers there.

Dozens of journalists and Members of Parliament demonstrated outside parliament against the raid.

They accused President Hamid Karzai of smothering freedom of speech during Tuesday's raid at Tolo TV.

MP and former journalist Shukria Barakzai accused the authorities of having no respect for the law.

"It's a small example for journalists in Afghanistan. We face lots of violence," he told the rally outside parliament.

BBC visitors have not lost their fascination with the goat marriage story.

See here for context.

From FishOntario.com:

The dried-up river in question is the Jackpine, which flows into Lake Superior about 24 km east of Nipigon.

The story poses this question: Can Ontario's trout survive climate change? 

The unfortunate answer is, probably not over the longer term. Trout require cold water, and that's becoming an ever-scarcer resource. Another interesting visual element deeper in the story is the spread of small and largemouth bass populations in northwest Ontario (the images show the differences between 1930, 1950 and 2000). Bass are a warmwater species.

However, I suspect it's not just Ontario. When I went fishing on the Bow River (one of the world's great trout fisheries) last summer just southeast of Calgary, I noticed that side channels that used to have fishable water were bone-dry.

Farther north in Alberta, around Lesser Slave Lake, all the streams appeared to be way down. One fishing operator said the walleye were in deep, deep water trying to escape the heat.

And when I went fishing around Hazelton, B.C. in that province's northwest, I was told the rivers were at 20-year lows.

The temperature of B.C.'s Fraser River was getting to be near-lethal for sockeye salmon last August (it cooled just before the famed Adams River run started making its way upstream).

This may well be a widespread phenomenon. We really should see this as disconcerting.