From AP:

Afghanistan's lower house of Parliament passed a resolution Monday seeking to bar television programs from showing dancing and other practices deemed un-Islamic.

From CP via CTV.ca:

Is our appetite for celebrity gossip waning, spurred on by the mystifying fame of cookie-cutter reality stars and a preponderance of speculative stories that rarely come to pass?

Some are suggesting that a 10-year tidal wave of Hollywood celebrity news has crested and is beginning to recede -- though others counter that, in fact, the unfiltered gossip found on blogs and websites is pulling readers away from more traditional sources of dirt.

From the NYT:

Dith Pran, a photojournalist for The New York Times whose gruesome ordeal in the killing fields of Cambodia was re-created in a 1984 movie that gave him an eminence he tenaciously used to press for his people’s rights, died in New Brunswick, N.J., on Sunday. He was 65 and lived in Woodbridge, N.J.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, which had spread, said his friend Sydney H. Schanberg.

Mr. Dith saw his country descend into a living hell as he scraped and scrambled to survive the barbarous revolutionary regime of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979, when as many as two million Cambodians — a third of the population — were killed, experts estimate. Mr. Dith survived through nimbleness, guile and sheer desperation.

Driving westward on a streetcar through the Spadina/Queen intersection, a young woman gestured southward and told her male companion with a sigh, "I used to live over there in a condo."

Now, she added, "I live in a sem-detached."

For extra detail, she volunteered this bit of information, delivered with a hint of a grimace: "I can hear my neighbours having sex."

The big event starts at 8 p.m. EDT here, but it's come and gone in Sydney, Australia. Some Globe and Mail stuff:

Will the last one out turn out the lights?

60 things to do during Earth Hour

In training for the big event

Personally, I don't see Earth Hour hurting anything, but for it to be of real value, people should use the hour to think about how they can reduce their carbon energy consumption on an ongoing and permanent basis.

Along with historically high oil prices, the price of staples like rice, wheat and corn have doubled in the past year, causing unrest in places that already suffer stability issues.

From the NYT:

More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can’t afford their mortgages and in some places now they can’t even afford rice.

None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe.

Scientists say that is very unlikely — though they have done some checking just to make sure.

Henry Hill's life story was immortalized in the incomparable Goodfellas. He lived a high-flying life as a gangster before crashing in a drug bust and ratting out his associates to literally save his own life.

Late-night newscasts led with word of a shooting in a TTC subway car.

The "victim" and a friend had reportedly been yipping with two guys for some time. She reportedly pulled a knife; unfortunately, he had a gun (there is an alternate version; darned if I know what the truth is as I write this).

However, here's the key question I will be mulling as I lay me down to sleep: Where are the TTC police?

I never see them. And given the other crime issues reported on the subway, I'm surprised that I never see any transit cops just being seen walking the tube.

And I mean even once a year (I ride the tube at least six days per week).

Essentially, it would seem you're on your own down there -- which is fine as long as your fellow subway riders aren't packing. 

Addendum

I was on an eastbound Queen streetcar recently when one mentally ill fellow was acting out so much that everyone abandoned the back end of the car. The operator was oblivious.

BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner on the United Arab Emirates troops serving in Afghanistan, where they deliver humanitarian aid and occasionally get into it with the Taliban.

Oh, and they take a 'religion first, then development infrastructure' approach.

More in this post from Steve Herman, editor of the BBC news website, at The Editors blog. But in the meantime, the new BBC home page is live. The Beeb offers a tour; you can customize this new home page.

From AP via CTV.ca:

New data confirming slowing growth in Google Inc.'s paid clicks renewed debate Thursday on Wall Street over whether the Internet search company's revenue can quickly adjust to changes it made in how it generates clicks.

From the Guardian:

BBC Radio 4 newsreader Charlotte Green's famously steadfast composure on the Today programme deserted her this morning as she dissolved in a fit of giggles live on air while reading an obituary - sending the press office into meltdown.

Green's perfect enunciation is so constant it is an article of faith among her millions of fans, but it fell apart shortly after 8am today as she read a news item about the death of Oscar-winning screenwriter Abby Mann and had to be rescued by presenter James Naughtie.

However, the corpsing spread, with Naughtie struggling to suppress giggles when introducing the next report at 8.10am, about the danger that Iraq may be sliding into civil war after this week's clashes in Basra between government forces and fighters loyal to the radical cleric Moqtada al Sadr.

Here's an audio file link.

From the Times Online:

The BBC said that Ms Green's giggles started when she heard in her earpiece a colleague's remark that the clip sounded like "a bee buzzing in a bottle". A spokeswoman said that the programme had so far had 20 comments about the incident, "all positive, about how funny they found it" and no complaints. ...

She has form in this area however, having “corpsed” in 1997 while delivering a Today programme item about Papua New Guinea’s chief of staff Jack Tuat. But Ms Green was unrepentant. Recalling the incident in a recent interview, she said: “It’s an open secret that I have a ribald sense of humour. I knew immediately that I was going to have trouble getting through the next story, which to compound the problem was about a sperm whale. For me, it’s essential to laugh both at the absurdity of life and at oneself. Inevitably, the laughter sometimes spills over into my work and I find myself poleaxed by merriment.”

Globe and Mail columnist Ivor Tossell on the bottomless appetite for lists online -- and how Cracked has turned them into an art form.

You can see Fitna the Movie here (the title means "Ordeal" or "Strife," in Arabic). Here's the BBC story. Here's one from the Washington Post.

Frankly, it's one nasty little propaganda film. And unfortunately, one could make the same type of film about Christianity (see the book The End of Faith to see what I mean; more in this earlier post). In fact, it would be interesting to run Fitna and jihadi propaganda films simultaneously on a split screen. Here's an AP story about how al Qaeda's media arm, al Sahab, is looking for a few good online-savvy media geeks.

From AP via CTV.ca:

Former "Nightline" reporter Dave Marash has quit Al-Jazeera English, saying Thursday his exit was due in part to an anti-American bias at a network that is little seen in the U.S.

From the March 27 Washington Post:

The United States has escalated its unilateral strikes against al-Qaeda members and fighters operating in Pakistan's tribal areas, partly because of anxieties that Pakistan's new leaders will insist on scaling back military operations in that country, according to U.S. officials.

Eric Alterman writes the following in the New Yorker about newspapers:

Three centuries after the appearance of Franklin’s Courant, it no longer requires a dystopic imagination to wonder who will have the dubious distinction of publishing America’s last genuine newspaper. Few believe that newspapers in their current printed form will survive. Newspaper companies are losing advertisers, readers, market value, and, in some cases, their sense of mission at a pace that would have been barely imaginable just four years ago. Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, said recently in a speech in London, “At places where editors and publishers gather, the mood these days is funereal. Editors ask one another, ‘How are you?,’ in that sober tone one employs with friends who have just emerged from rehab or a messy divorce.” Keller’s speech appeared on the Web site of its sponsor, the Guardian, under the headline “NOT DEAD YET.”

In his New Yorker article on American newspapers, Eric Alterman asks whether the liberal U.S. news website the Huffington Post is the future of news delivery.

From AP via CTV.ca:

The Los Angeles Times apologized for using documents that were apparently fabricated in a story implicating associates of Sean "Diddy" Combs in a 1994 assault on rapper Tupac Shakur.

From the NYT:

According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one.

From the Globe and Mail:

Call it the double-double defence: Would dangerous jihadists take a break from their winter training camp to warm up inside a Tim Hortons?

Defence lawyer Michael Moon raises the question in a new motion concerning the so-called Toronto 18 terror trial. Citing previously undisclosed evidence to be presented at trial, he argues that any schemes of the accused have been grossly exaggerated by informants, police and the news media – and even by the group's own ringleaders.

“In fact this hapless F-Troop, who ventured into the deathly cold of winter without a proper tent … was reduced to sleeping in the vehicles at night to prevent freezing to death,” writes Mr. Moon in a new factum. He adds they went “trooping off to the Tim Hortons multiple times a day for coffee and use of the bathroom.”

Here's an absurd, non-sequiturish thought: Maybe the secret to peace in Afghanistan is to agree to a foreign troop withdrawal on the condition that the Taliban agree to play nice with the elected government and not support global jihad.

In exchange, we'll leave behind a network of Tim Hortons shops. As this case shows, even jihadis have to go to the can and both warm and double-double up. :)

Except the evidence so far suggests some of these mildly hypothermic Timbits fiends were serious.

Addendum

I can't believe the lawyer used an F-Troop reference. Talk about dating yourself. :)

As an aside, Mike Myers used to be served by a German waiter in Ottawa who became the template for his "Dieter" character on Saturday Night Live.

Apparently this guy once told Myers: "Larry Storch is a much-maligned genius." :)

If you don't know, Larry Storch was an F-Troop star.

Ahem. I've just dated myself.

From the NYT:

As Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama debated in Cleveland on a snowy evening in late February, 650 journalists descended on the city to follow every jab and parry, albeit on enormous televisions in two makeshift filing centers.

But early the next morning, as the two candidates set off for engagements across Ohio and Texas, representatives of only two dozen or so news organizations tagged along.

For most of the others, the price of admission — more than $2,000 for just one person to travel on Mr. Obama’s charter flights that day — was too steep, in an era in which newspapers in particular are slashing costs and paring staff, and with no end in sight to a primary campaign that began more than a year ago.

Among the newspapers that have chosen not to dispatch reporters to cover the two leading Democratic candidates on a regular basis are USA Today, the nation’s largest paper, as well as The Boston Globe, The Dallas Morning News, The Houston Chronicle, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Baltimore Sun, The Miami Herald and The Philadelphia Inquirer (at least until the Pennsylvania primary, on April 22, began to loom large).

From AP:

Too much money meant for Afghanistan aid is wasted, with a vast amount spent on foreign workers' high salaries, security and living arrangements, according to a report from humanitarian groups published Tuesday.

The prospects for peace in Afghanistan are being undermined because Western countries are failing to deliver on aid promises — and because much of the aid money they do send is going to expatriate workers, according to the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief, an alliance of 94 international aid agencies.

From the BBC:

Education Minister Mohammad Hanif Atmar said the answer lay in what he called the "Afghanisation" of security.

Mr Atmar, who is a close ally of President Hamid Karzai, said Afghan forces needed more training.

In the latest violence, officials say the Taleban killed six people in the western province of Herat.

Traditional system

While Nato leaders have been calling for member countries to commit more troops to Afghanistan, Mr Atmar told the BBC that this was not the answer.

He says a traditional Afghan system, with local communities being allowed to practice self-defence, would be more effective.

He believes that Afghan forces could defeat the Taleban in five years, instead of the 15 he believes Nato would need.