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.