From the Oct. 29 Globe and Mail:

Talking to the Taliban – long dismissed as unthinkable – was endorsed Tuesday by senior envoys from the embattled governments of both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

By that, I mean the British public broadcaster displayed breathtakingly bad judgment in airing an episode broadcast by two of its comedy stars.

From Reuters via globeandmail.com:

The Earth's natural resources are being depleted so quickly that "two planets" would be required to sustain current lifestyles within a generation, the conservation group WWF said on Wednesday.

The Swiss-based WWF, also known as the World Wildlife Fund, said in its latest Living Planet Report that more than three quarters of the world's population lives in countries whose consumption levels are outstripping environmental renewal.

Its Living Planet Report concluded that reckless consumption of "natural capital" was endangering the world's future prosperity, with clear economic impacts including high costs for food, water and energy.

"If our demands on the planet continue to increase at the same rate, by the mid-2030s we would need the equivalent of two planets to maintain our lifestyles," said WWF International Director-General James Leape.

Jonathan Loh of the Zoological Society of London said the dramatic ecological losses from pollution, deforestation, over-fishing and land conversion were having serious impacts.

Here's the report link.

The report also likes to liken the situation to a looming ecological credit crunch.

Scientists are worried about the fate of killer whale populations off the coasts of southern B.C. and northern Washington state. Some of the whales are disappearing. This has the scientists tossing around words like "extinction."

Longtime CBC News foreign corro Patrick Brown talks in his new book about the peripatetic life of a TV news "fireman" and his personal battle with alcoholism.

Observe:

Dammit: I was really looking forward to a description about the path to Conservative dominance, but it's not available. Grrr. :^)

As I said before, the danger of automated Twitter feeds.

From AP via CTV.ca:

The Christian Science Monitor said Tuesday it will become the first national newspaper to drop its daily print edition and focus on publishing online, succumbing to the financial pressure squeezing its industry harder than ever.

Saying he can't make a financial go of it in an era of free political blogs, publisher Michael Bate says he is shutting down both Frank magazine and efrank.ca, its online counterpart.

From CP via Canoe.ca:

The contract was ratified by 67 per cent of newspaper carriers, 75 per cent of the pressmen and 91 per cent of the inside workers, including journalists.

(Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union spokesperson Mary Agnes) Welch said the workers will get pay raises of two per cent per year for three years and 1.5 per cent in the fourth year of a four-year, nine-month contract.

The strike lasted 16 days. Welch said to get a better deal would have required staying out at least a month, which could have crippled the paper.

From the Guardian:

Websites being used to disseminate propaganda by al-Qaida appear to have come under systematic cyber-attack, forcing the closure of three for well over a month and fuelling speculation that governments are targeting them in a shadowy new front in the "war on terror".

From Patricia Best's blog at globeandmail.com:

Conrad Black is enjoying a flourishing journalistic renaissance from the confines of his Florida prison – though he's not making money from it because that would be against U.S. prison rules. He's made two noteworthy authorial appearances on a hot, new website called The Daily Beast, run by former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown. His first column – on how John McCain missed his chance to take political control of the financial meltdown ran Oct. 17. His second, on Franklin Delano Roosevelt (the subject of his last book), appeared last week and was reprinted in The Globe and Mail.

But it doesn't end there: In the latest issue of the Literary Review of Canada, Lord Black contributes a densely packed two-page article on Margaret Atwood's book Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. Lord Black uses the review to wave his large literary and historical database, while praising Ms. Atwood's book as “learned but never pedantic or turgid” and herself as “an elegant stylist with a fine sense of humour.” At one point in the article, Lord Black offers that “I do not hold myself out as an authority on the Middle Ages, and I am not now in a place that facilitates the study of them.” Ha, ha.

From the Globe and Mail:

Global Television in British Columbia paid $5,000 to a charity to interview Graham McMynn, the son of a wealthy businessman, who was held in captivity for eight days.

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J-prof Philip Meyer, author of the 2004 book The Vanishing Newspaper, offers this prescription for the future newspaper: "A smaller, less frequently published version packed with analysis and investigative reporting and aimed at well-educated news junkies that may well be a smart survival strategy for the beleaguered old print product."

J-prof Kelly Toughill on why one analyst thinks news media organizations would be better off as privately-held entities.

Toronto Star columnist Haroon Siddiqui believes the Canadian news media should come under scrutiny and engage in some self-examination for how it covered the cases of the three Arab-Canadians mentioned in the Iacobucci report on Canada's role in their being tortured abroad, plus Maher Arar.

The Globe and Mail's Colin Freeze has developed a timeline -- The Road to Torture -- on torture and the war on terror in Canada, specifically the cases of Maher Arar, Abdullah Almaki and Ahmad Abou El Maati.

It's an ambitious undertaking, and it shows some of the strengths and weaknesses of online interactives.

How to sound authoritative about anything. The two big lessons? Learn how to smile and interrupt.

From the Guardian:

Things must be bad - AC/DC are No 1

AC/DC's most successful albums coincide with the dates when Britain has faced financial crisis

From a Toronto Star editorial published Oct. 24 about Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh, the Afghan journalism student sentenced to 20 years for blasphemy:

However this murky travesty of justice plays out, the Harper government ought to issue a strong protest. Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who can pardon criminals, should be told that Canadian taxpayers cannot be expected to fund a "justice" system that can condemn someone to death after a quickie trial, with inadequate defence, for raising basic questions about human rights in a university classroom.

This looks more like the Taliban than any court Canadians would recognize as such. Canada's troops are not fighting and dying in Afghanistan to make the place safe for religious zealots who hold human life in low regard.

That was the thesis of Globe and Mail TV critic John Doyle's column on Thursday.

Norman Spector and Geoffrey Stevens offer some perspective at globeandmail.com.