From the BBC:

The US military in Iraq says it has released Associated Press (AP) photographer Bilal Hussein after holding him for two years in detention.

Mr Hussein, an Iraqi, was detained in western Anbar province on suspicion of working with insurgents.

He has always denied any improper links with insurgents and says he was doing his job as a journalist.

The US military's decision comes after an Iraqi judicial panel ordered him to be released under an amnesty law.

There are billions being spent to "help" Afghanistan, but at the same time, some consultants are making $500K per year, staying in the best hotels and eating in the best restos Kabul has to offer -- and still probably making a healthy profit, finds this BBC story.

The Korengal Valley of eastern Afghanistan is relatively close to the location in Pakistan where al Qaeda number-two Ayman al-Zawahri came within a few hours of getting his ticket punched. The opponents of the 173rd Airborne Combat Brigade Team are a mixture of local and foreign fighters.

The secret in winning militarily may well be straightforward: Control the high ground.

From the Globe and Mail:

Some of the world's biggest grain exporters barred their farmers from selling in global markets yesterday, exacerbating the food price crisis for poorer nations that import their food and highlighting the failure of governments to nurture stronger rules for agricultural trade.

Rice and corn prices soared to records on U.S. markets and wheat jumped to its highest in a week after Kazakhstan, the world's fifth-largest wheat exporter, and Indonesia, a major rice producer, became the latest nations to impose export bans. The price increases further inflated global food costs that already had surged 48 per cent since the end of 2006.

The latest moves highlight the difficulty of solving a problem that has its roots in years of trade policy indecision, the push by richer nations to produce more fuel from food crops, growing demand from developing countries such as China, and Wall Street investors who see a money-making opportunity in surging commodity demand.

“Business as usual is no longer an option,” Paris-based UNESCO says in a sweeping report on the world agriculture system that was three years in the making and released yesterday. “There is a recognition that the mounting crisis in food security is of a different complexity and potentially different magnitude than the one of the 1960s.”

One analyst thinks that if we have wacky weather, then prices for "soft commodities" -- stuff we eat, like rice, wheat and corn -- have no where to go but up, up, up.

And with a changing climate, weather becomes less predictable.