Here's a CTV.ca feature I wrote on whether this country's housing prices are destined to follow the lead of the U.S., where a collapse is underway in some markets.

Expense, danger, a stagnant story line and other, more compelling news could explain a precipitious drop in coverage of the Iraq War by the U.S. news media.

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The NYT's David Carr on how some successful businessmen who thought they could turn U.S. newspaper properties around are currently rueing their investments in the troubled industry. Some might have trouble meeting financial obligations.

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The NYT's Elaine Sciolino prepared some tips for adapting to French culture. This one particularly applies to journalists.

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See them here.

Conrad Black tells The Canadian Press that he's adapting to life behind bars.

"I am doing fine,'' Black said in an e-mail to The Canadian Press from his Florida prison. "This is a safe and civilized place and I don't anticipate any difficulty.''

Globeandmail.com has a major feature online this morning: Talking to the Taliban.

The NYT's Paul Krugman offers his assessment of why the U.S. financial system is coming perilously close to going off the rails -- again.

He began by explaining how things went wrong in the 1929-1931 period, how the U.S. Congress subsequently passed laws to prevent the same situation from happening again -- and how Wall Street manoeuvred around those restrictions.

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From the NYT:

Faced with a sharp escalation of suicide bombings in urban areas, the leaders of Pakistan’s new coalition government say they will negotiate with the militants believed to be orchestrating the attacks, and will use military force only as a last resort.

That talk has alarmed American officials, who fear it reflects a softening stance toward the militants just as President Pervez Musharraf has given the Bush administration a freer hand to strike at militants using pilotless Predator drones.

Many Pakistanis, however, are convinced that the surge in suicide bombings -- 17 in the first 10 weeks of 2008 -- is retaliation for three Predator strikes since the beginning of the year. The spike in attacks, combined with the crushing defeat of Mr. Musharraf’s party in February parliamentary elections, has brought demands for change in his American-backed policies.

CBC's The National previewed a bit of freelance journalist Julian Sher's documentary Sunday -- Afghanistan: Between Hope and Fear.

The parts highlighted tonight are alarming, showing evidence of a Taliban parallel government (not strictly news; the Senlis Council talked about this some time ago). You can see Taliban checkpoints operating, Taliban collecting taxes and operating sharia courts.

Sher travelled to Afghanistan, but said much of his footage came from Afghans who were given cameras before they went deep into Kandahar and Helmand provinces.

Looks like it will be worth checking out.

From AP via CTV.ca:

A journalist for state-run Russian television was found dead in Moscow early Friday and prosecutors have opened a murder investigation, colleagues and officials said.

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From the Guardian:

Fanning out across yesterday's news stands, the front pages of the British tabloids offered a rogues' gallery of female stereotypes, all of them applied to one woman: Heather Mills. The Daily Mail cast her as the proud, cunning gold-digger, definitively hoisted by her own petard, with a front-page headline screaming "Damnation of her ladyship". The Daily Mirror opted to give her the mantle of the hysteric, dubbing her "Lady Liar", a stereotype also seized upon in the Daily Express headline "Judge savages fantasist Heather". And then there was the Sun which, in usual subtle style, opted for a headline combining "hysteric" with "whore": the simple, inventive "Pornocchio".

From washingtonpost.com:

In the last six years, the international community has set aside hundreds of millions of dollars for Afghan poppy eradication, built a state-of-the-art maximum-security facility for drug traffickers outside Kabul and dispatched hundreds of troops to try to persuade farmers to plant wheat, fruit trees and saffron instead of poppies.

The result of those efforts: Last year Afghanistan produced 90 percent of the world's opium and its derivative, heroin -- more than at any time in the country's history. The only major drug traffickers held in the new prison wing were allowed to escape. And a special international fund for motivating Afghan leaders to eradicate poppies has barely been touched, according to international officials involved in Afghan anti-drug efforts.

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A New York state legislator wants to put the brakes on how much non-consentual commercial use online companies can make of the information they collect on people.

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What woman appears in both Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy in a speaking role, speaking in both to Robert DeNiro's characters?

No IMDBing! :)

From the Globe and Mail:

Normally, media companies are defendants in legal disputes over commentary and publishing. But not CanWest, it seems. A couple of weeks ago, we told you about a lawsuit CanWest has launched against West Coast website The Tyee. Now another has surfaced, involving, on one level, questions about trademark and allegations of a conspiracy "to embarrass and to injure" media giant CanWest.

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From the BBC:

A Moroccan man jailed for pretending to be the brother of the king on the social networking site Facebook has been given a royal pardon.

Fouad Mourtada's lawyer said his client had left the Casablanca jail where he was serving his three-year sentence.

He had been arrested at the beginning of February for "usurping the identity of Prince Moulay Rachid".

From the BBC:

Media rights activists in Sri Lanka have criticised the appointment of a retired army officer to a senior post in the state-run television station.

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From the BBC:

A cartoonist in Bangladesh who was jailed after the government said his drawings were insulting to Muslims has been released, prison officials say.

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Here's a CTV.ca feature I wrote today on the credit crunch.

Addendum

Here's the (better) effort by the NYT's David Leonhardt: Can't Grasp Credit Crisis? Join the Club.

The U.S. Project for Excellence in Journalism released its 2008 State of the News Media report on Monday.

Here's the link to the online section.

Here's an excerpt from a posting by Online Journalism Review's Robert Niles (I'm bagged tonight, so sorry, no thinking):

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From the NYT:

The Chinese government is restricting foreign journalists from entering Tibet and neighboring areas, and blocking some news, video and Internet reports about the protests there from appearing inside China, according to journalists working here.

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From the NYT:

In 2005, Starbucks looked like it was going to do for undiscovered music what it had done for the nonfat latte. The company decided to stock “Careless Love,” a CD of sophisticated pop-jazz songs by Madeleine Peyroux, who had attracted only a modest following in this country, plying her craft in small bars. Ms. Peyroux soon found herself at No. 81 on the Billboard chart, and has become a mainstay of jazz.

Starbucks was betting that its eclectic taste played to the upscale atmosphere of its coffee shops, where it enticed customers to pay $4 for their daily caffeine fix. And record companies saw Starbucks at the vanguard of a new class of unconventional sales outlets that could keep the CD alive in an age of digital downloads.

But the ardor for Starbucks has gone the way of yesterday morning’s grounds. Critics in the music industry say the company squandered its cachet by mismanaging the effort to broaden its music mix. The choices that reflect its early taste for the offbeat — like an album from Lizz Wright, a torchy pop singer — are now squeezed in with offerings not unlike those at Wal-Mart, including the latest releases from Alicia Keys and James Blunt. The shift has not been lost on some customers.

The music offering “is more popular now,” said Hazel Delgado, 33, a social worker and Starbucks regular from San Bernardino, Calif., who attended a recent concert presented in front of one of its coffee shops by another act on the company’s label, the singer Sia. “I want to come in and be surprised,” she said. “If they do get more mainstream, why bother?”

The Ontario Court of Appeal has ruled that forcing reporters to reveal their sources has to be done while considering the Charter of Rights and Freedoms' provisions on freedom of the press.

In the case of Ken Peters, a Hamilton Spectator reporter cited for contempt after refusing to identify a source in a civil trial, the trial judge didn't use that test. So Ontario's highest court has overturned the contempt citation.

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