The BBC's Barbara Plett reports on signs of "mullah fatigue" in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province in these parliamentary elections. However, there are also those Islamists who prefer bullets to ballots.

From the BBC:

Human Rights Watch has appealed to Saudi Arabia to halt the execution of a woman convicted of witchcraft.

In a letter to King Abdullah, the rights group described the trial and conviction of Fawza Falih as a miscarriage of justice.

The illiterate woman was detained by religious police in 2005 and allegedly beaten and forced to fingerprint a confession that she could not read.

Among her accusers was a man who alleged she made him impotent.

Human Rights Watch said that Ms Falih had exhausted all her chances of appealing against her death sentence and she could only now be saved if King Abdullah intervened.

From CP via CTV.ca:

Investigative journalist Stevie Cameron denies that she was an informant for the RCMP in the Airbus affair.

From al-Jazeera:

Muslims across the world have reacted angrily to the reprinting of political cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad by Danish newspapers, which they claim are offensive.
 
A Kuwaiti politician on Thursday called for a boycott of Denmark after 17 Danish newspapers ran an illustration of the prophet wearing a turban shaped like a bomb, with a lit fuse.

"We must impose a total political and economic boycott of Denmark," Waleed al-Tabtabai told the Kuwaiti parliament.
 
"This is a provocative and insulting act and we must take a strong reaction."

In the Gaza Strip, Hamas joined in the condemnation, saying the cartoon was an "offence to the feelings of tens of millions of Muslims".

There were also protests in Karachi, Pakistan. Iran summoned Denmark's ambassador to express its displeasure.

However, the story didn't report whether Hamas, Iran and the Karachi protesters also disapproved of the alleged plot to kill the cartoonist Kurt Westergaard of Jyllands-Posten, which first published the cartoons in 2005.

Plotting to kill someone over a cartoon seems a bit much, but I guess that's the secular humanist in me.

The Pentagon said today it plans to use a missile to try and shoot down a spy satellite that's out of control and likely to re-enter the atmosphere and land on Earth.

Here's a CTV.ca feature I wrote on the issue from this past weekend.

I wonder if this is more of a real-world opportunity to test some of the U.S.'s missile-shield technology than an effort to protect the world against the ravages of hydrazine. The Pentagon says no:

The dramatic maneuver may well trigger international concerns, and U.S. officials have begun notifying other countries of the plan -- stressing that it does not signal the start of a new American anti-satellite weapons program.

Military and administration officials said the satellite is carrying fuel called hydrazine that could injure or even kill people who are near it when it hits the ground. That reason alone, they said, persuaded President Bush to order the shoot-down.

''That is the only thing that breaks it out, that is worthy of taking extraordinary measures,'' said Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during a Pentagon briefing.

How beloved is Russia's Dear Leader? One reporter gave President Vladimir Putin a pink, heart-shaped Valentine's card after his last presidential news conference.

From a March 27, 2007 lecture at the U of T's Munk Centre by Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11:

Wanna get more? Be seen reading lots of newspapers, and all the sections within it, if a newspaper industry-sponsored survey is to be believed.

Globe and Mail columnist Lawrence Martin says the continuing ascendancy of the Asper family's CanWest Global media empire -- which has launched a service to compete with The Canadian Press and is now basing its national newscast in Ottawa -- is yet more evidence that Canada's news media are becoming ever more conservative.