From the BBC:

The British army's operation in Northern Ireland will come to an end at midnight on Tuesday after 38 years.

Operation Banner - the Army's support role for the police - has been its longest continuous campaign, with more than 300,000 personnel taking part.

A garrison of 5,000 troops will remain but security will be entirely the responsibility of the police.

British troops were sent to Northern Ireland in 1969 after violent clashes between Catholics and Protestants.

When the first soldiers were deployed in August 1969, commanders believed they would be in Northern Ireland for just a few weeks.

Call me crazy, but I think we should look on this as very good news. The Troubles had been regarded as being amongst the world's most intractable conflicts, but now it appears that a lasting peace has taken hold in Northern Ireland. We shouldn't write off that possibility elsewhere.

The question is, how did Northern Ireland get to that point?

From the BBC:

The Associated Press (AP) news agency has been reporting news and transmitting pictures since 1846, in the earliest days of the long-distance telegraph.

As the agency publishes Breaking News, a history of its role reporting war and peace around the world, the BBC asks three AP photographers - Horst Faas, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner most famous for his work during the Vietnam War, Santiago Lyon, AP's current global director of photography, and Oded Balilty, an Israeli who won a 2007 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography - for their views on the dangers of carrying cameras in conflict (audio slideshow).

From the BBC:

Nato is considering the use of smaller bombs in Afghanistan to try to curb the rising number of civilians killed during operations against the Taleban.

Commanders have also ordered troops to hold off attacking militants in some situations where civilians are at risk.

Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer acknowledged civilian casualties had hurt the alliance politically, in an interview with the Financial Times.

Aid agencies say Western forces have killed 230 civilians so far this year.

Between 700 and 1,000 civilians were killed by both sides during 2006, according to the Agency Co-ordinating Body for Afghan Relief (ACBAR).

Two non-journalists make some sweeping statements about how blogging has improved journalism. Allow me to raise a skeptical eyebrow in response.

Further to the post below, here's a Wired article on crowdsourcing. From the blurb:

Remember outsourcing? Sending jobs to India and China is so 2003. The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R & D.

Citizen journalism, "crowd powered media" company NowPublic Technologies Inc. of Vancouver now has US$10.6 million to play with courtesy of U.S. venture capitalists.

Ed Anger, the long-time voice at the Weekly World News for the perpetually miffed trailer park set, isn't a real person. After you've picked yourself up off the floor, continue reading.

From the NYT:

“The bug at the bottom of the Calendar front in today’s Los Angeles Times says columnist Patrick Goldstein is on assignment,” began a July 24 item on the Web site L.A. Observed. “Not true. His The Big Picture column for Tuesday was killed.”

The site ran the 1,450-word column, which “fell into our hands,” in its entirety. In it, Mr. Goldstein proposed that his newspaper promote itself by following the lead of The Mail on Sunday in Britain, which inserted Prince’s latest CD into 2.9 million copies, and also give away music.

From the NYT:

Activists are urging Home Depot, which recently unveiled an environmentally conscious marketing program, to withdraw advertising from Fox News, whose hosts and commentators dismiss global warming as liberal hysteria. But Home Depot is unswayed, and the environmentalists appear to be doing something they generally discourage: wasting energy.

A short video by Robert Greenwald, “Fox Attacks: The Environment,” has been viewed more than 380,000 times since it was posted on YouTube on July 9. Like his feature-length “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism,” the video highlights Fox News clips, in this case experts claiming that global warming caused by pollution is, among other things, a “hoax.”

In April, Home Depot introduced an Eco Options label for thousands of products that it deemed environmentally friendly.

“You can’t say we’re green and give money to an organization that day after day, week after week and month after month says that global warming is something that is made up by a few kooky scientists,” Mr. Greenwald said.

“It’s not our place to judge Fox News’s position or any other media outlet’s position on global warning,” responded Ron Jarvis, vice president for environmental innovation at the retailer, based in Atlanta. “Nor will we try to influence that position with our advertising dollars. We’re advertisers, not censors.”

Greenwald has another video up: Fox Attacks Bloggers.

College Street, between Euclid and Shaw Streets, is one of Toronto's liveliest nightlife strips. And for many residents, therein lies the problem. They're pushing the regulators to crack down.

Someone named Aileen Su referred to a black applicant for a government of Ontario job as "ghetto dude." That set off a firestorm. Aileen Su has been pilloried on Facebook. Trouble is, people are pillorying the wrong Aileen Su.

From the BBC:

If you're out and about in downtown T.O. and using cabs for transportation, make sure you check your change before you leave the cab.

I've had a couple instances lately where the drivers apparently felt inadequately compensated. This shortchanging phenomenon seems particularly prevalent at night.

Two news helicopters in Phoenix, Arizona collided in mid-air Friday while covering a police pursuit. A total of four people died, two from each chopper. It could have been worse; there were five news helicopters in the air for that story, plus one police helicopter.

Here's today's story: Deadly chopper crash triggers probe 

Here's the original news story: News helicopters collide, crash; four dead

Here's some video of a fellow pilot reacting to the crash.

From LiveLeak -- A sports reporter is shot in the eye by a Kansas City Royals outfielder wielding a toy gun:

The Globe and Mail's Jeffrey Simpson suggests a tweaking of what is defined as "news."

I don't think it's so much the redefining of news that's at issue. Instead, there needs to be a recommitment to good journalism.

Salon's Andrew O'Hehir:

If everybody in this polarized country could be convinced to sit down tonight and watch the documentaries "No End in Sight" and "The Devil Came on Horseback," we might pull our troops out of Iraq next week and send them to Darfur the week after that.

From the July 25 BBC story:

Support for suicide bombings against civilians has fallen sharply across the Muslim world since 2002, a major survey has suggested.

However, 70% of Palestinians interviewed said they believed such attacks were sometimes justifiable.

The Global Opinion Trends survey, by the US-based Pew Research Centre, polled 45,000 people in 47 countries.

It also found widespread optimism in poor countries that the next generation will enjoy better lives.

And it suggested that people viewed the US as the most friendly country in the world and the most feared. 

The International Herald Tribune had a July 24 story on Africa:

Despite a thicket of troubles, from deadly illnesses like AIDS and malaria to corrupt politicians and deep-seated poverty, a plurality of Africans say they are better off today than they were five years ago and are optimistic about their future and that of the next generation, according to a poll conducted in 10 countries in sub-Saharan Africa by The New York Times and the Pew Global Attitudes Project.

The poll results offer an unusual and complex portrait of a continent in flux, a snapshot of 10 key modern African states as they struggle to build accountable governments, manage violent conflict and turn their natural resources into wealth for the population.

It found that in the main, Africans are satisfied with their national governments and a majority of respondents in seven of the 10 countries said their economic situation was at least somewhat good. But many said that they face a wide array of difficult and sometimes life-threatening problems, from illegal drug trafficking to political corruption, from the lack of clean water to inadequate schools for their children, from ethnic and political violence to deadly disease.

Here's the Pew Global Attitudes Project's news release.

Alistair Burnett, editor of the BBC's The World Tonight, thinks it might be a good idea to not refer to the current chill in British-Russian relations as a "crisis."

Supermarket checkout lines will be a lot less freakishly entertaining in the future. The Weekly World News will no longer be available as a newspaper. It will only be available online.

Malaysia wants to treat bloggers like terrorists, particularly if they insult Islam or the king. Hey, did you know there's an election coming there?

Two Clinton-era national security officials argue that the CIA's paramilitary capabilities should be built up to carry out delicate work in places like, oh, say, Pakistan.

While walking along College St. one day, I gazed at the facade advertising a funky new condo development - N-Blox.

The building's design looked very cool, and when I got home, I went to the website to see how much it would cost to live the dream -- knowing full well that it would cost much, much more than I could afford.

I was thinking an entry-level condo there would be in the $400,000 range. I certainly don't know my real estate. It was $800,000 for 1,200 square feet. The most expensive suite was priced at $1.8 million.

However, I walked by again the other day, and the facade was gone. And the website is gone.

Whatever could it mean? Whatever it is, I hope it's not that Torontonians don't appreciate
progressive architecture and an urban lifestyle, or that there aren't enough discerning buyers in this town who planned to inhabit the space and call it home as they readied themselves to live large.

For that would be too sad to contemplate.

Addendum

This arrived by e-mail:

If one can believe the commentary at http://urbantoronto.ca/showthread.php?t=669 the N-Blox development was over-priced relative to the trendiness factor of its neighbourhood ($700/sq.ft!!). Had it been proposed in, say, the residential streets of Yorkville, I don't think that would have been a problem.

Unfortunate, really, because Toronto must become less conservative in its residential architecture choices (all those vaguely neo-Tudor, neo-Georgian and helplessly suburban monster McMansions scattered all over the place--urghhh!).

I suppose part of this problem is that we North-Americans are trained from an early age not to observe the built environment around us and make choices, everything seems to be built by the "unseen hand" of the market and we acquiesce with the default result.

Dubya is trying to convince Americans that al Qaeda in Iraq and al Qaeda are the same organizations, and backing down in Iraq means another 9/11. I believe the saying is, "that dog won't hunt."

The Tyee's Tom Barrett on just how Chicago lawyer Hugh Totten got to be quoted so much during the Conrad Black trial.

Kevin Marsh, editor of the BBC College of Journalism, thinks the YouTube debate the Democrats held in conjunction with CNN did little to truly put the candidates on the spot, compared to a traditional 'big media' debate format.