According to Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist F. Sherwood Rowland, who discovered the threat to the ozone layer by CFCs, the answer is, yes they could.

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Jonathan Landman, deputy managing editor of the NYT responsible for digital journalism (and a hero of the Jayson Blair fiasco), took questions from readers this week.

The Daily Show (disclosure: Broadcast in Canada by CTV; I work for CTV News) has an extensive Web presence in the U.S. (the video doesn't work for Canuckistani IP addresses). If you're an American, you can get virtually everything there.

U.S. cable companies pay Comedy Central to broadcast the show. They are getting a mite irritated by the web thing.

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The Toronto Star ran a six-part series this week on the Secret Capital -- a look at how the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper manages information. I've excerpted the media-related parts.

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From the Guardian:

It has long been the holy grail for those who believe that technology can save us from catastrophic climate change: a device that can "suck" carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air, reducing the warming effect of the billions of tonnes of greenhouse gas produced each year.

Now a group of US scientists say they have made a breakthrough towards creating such a machine. Led by Klaus Lackner, a physicist at Columbia University in New York, they plan to build and demonstrate a prototype within two years that could economically capture a tonne of CO2 a day from the air, about the same per passenger as a flight from London to New York.

The prototype so-called scrubber will be small enough to fit inside a shipping container. Lackner estimates it will initially cost around £100,000 to build, but the carbon cost of making each device would be "small potatoes" compared with the amount each would capture, he said.

The scientists stress their invention is not a magic bullet to solve climate change. It would take millions of the devices to soak up the world's carbon emissions, and the CO2 trapped would still need to be disposed of. But the team says the technology may be the best way to avert dangerous temperature rises, as fossil fuel use is predicted to increase sharply in coming decades despite international efforts. Climate experts at a monitoring station in Hawaii this month reported CO2 levels in the atmosphere have reached a record 387 parts per million (ppm) - 40% higher than before the industrial revolution.

"Elite" and "elitism" used to have different definitions, but in the faux populism of U.S. politics today, either word is used to denigrate opponents. This must stop, because the slur is also being directed at knowledge itself, even though ignorance is a big problem facing the U.S., argues an author.

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From the NY Sun:

A leading (U.S.) reporter on the national security beat, William Gertz of the Washington Times, has been ordered to appear before a federal judge next month to identify the sources for a news article about the prosecution of a Chinese spy ring based in southern California.

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Former White House press secretary Scott McLellan's memoirs have leaked, and he has blasted his former employer's handling of the Iraq war.

The other current and former minions of Dubya have fought back.

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From the BBC:

A journalist working for a private TV channel in Sri Lanka has been killed in the northern Jaffna peninsula, company officials say.

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A Washington Post reporter on his way out the door sneaks in a farewell to his readers.

Here's the May 23 story (read the first letter of every paragraph).

And here's the Editor and Publisher story about the buyouts at the venerable paper. (Thanks, Mungo)

In recent days, there have been suggestions that Oprah Winfrey's ratings have been declining because she stuck her nose into politics. And the lesson we should take from that is ...?

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This is a trip down memory lane, but late last year, the BBC ran two interesting items about the climate issue -- -- A post on the Editors blog and a news story about whether climate skeptics were self-reporting censorship.

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I always liked this scene at the Harvard Club in New York featuring Sydney Pollack and John Travolta in the 1998 film A Civil Action:

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From Reuters:

The leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, vowed on Saturday to carry on fighting NATO and U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan regardless of negotiations for a peace deal with the government of Pakistan.

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You, as an online content creator, may want a full evening of romantic coupling with the web user you lured into your cyber-boudoir (stickiness and all that). However, chances are they just want a quickie and then get back to their life.

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A story I neglected to note last week was Google's attempt to make websites more sociable with its Friend Connect feature.

Fortunately, over at The Media Manager, Kirk LaPointe has had his eye on the bouncing Google ball.

He noted the battle this could trigger over who owns personal data (users or the the social network service) and Facebook's attempt to lower the temperature, saying that while Google is a good company, it didn't consult Facebook first -- which is why Facebook blocked access to the feature.

Kirk also noted that Google Earth now has a local news aggregation feature and that a Business Week article quotes an analyst as saying that Google is killing the revenue streams for journalism, capturing the lion's share while not paying one nickel towards content creation.

Gawker has a pointer to this chilling new U.S. blog:

From Gawker:

We've stopped reporting most buyouts and layoffs at America's troubled newspapers because the story is repetitive—and morbid, even for an internet outlet that stands to gain from the flight of readers and advertisers from print. That's why the new Paper Cuts is such a boon. The blog summarizes the latest staff reductions, and displays the data as points on a Google Map.

I don't know if print is "dead," but it's certainly going through a nasty restructuring. And the longer-term prognosis is anything but optimistic.

A reporter for an Urdu-language newspaper has been shot dead in Pakistan after interviewing a spokesman for Tehreek-e-Taleban Pakistan, the Pakistan Taliban Movment.

The shooting of Muhammad Ibrahim took place in the Bajaur tribal region, near the Afghanistan border in the north of Pakistan.

Three men reportedly gathered up Ibrahim's cellphone, camera and notes. (thanks, Mungo).

In Sri Lanka, journalists are protesting after one of their colleagues was kidnapped and then released, but not before suffering a terrible beating.

Keith Noyahr, deputy editor with the English weekly The Nation, had been critical of the Sri Lankan army's conduct in its conflict with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, said the Free Media Movement.

Emily Gould lives in Brooklyn. She's a blogger, which led to relationship problems (the boyfriend didn't much like being part of her posts), but she also landed a gig at Gawker. In a New York Times Magazine article, she writes the following about how that job may have been her destiny:

In the fall of 2006, I got a call from the managing editor of Gawker Media, a network of highly trafficked blogs, asking me to come by the office in SoHo to talk about a job. Since its birth four years earlier, the company’s flagship blog, Gawker, had purported to be in the business of reporting “Manhattan media gossip,” which it did, sometimes — catty little details about writers and editors and executives, mostly. But it was also a clearinghouse for any random tidbit of information about being young and ambitious in New York. Though Gawker was a must-read for many of the people working at the magazines and newspapers whose editorial decisions the site mocked and dissected, it held an irresistible appeal for desk-bound drones in all fields — tens of thousands of whom visited the site each day.

I had been one of those visitors for as long as I’d had a desk job. Sometimes Gawker felt like a source of essential, exclusive information, tailored to the needs of people just like me. Other times, reading Gawker left me feeling hollow and moody, as if I’d just absentmindedly polished off an entire bag of sickly sweet candy. But when the call came, I brushed this thought aside. For a young blogger in New York in 2006, becoming an editor at Gawker was an achievement so lofty that I had never even imagined it could happen to me. The interview and audition process felt a little surreal, like a dream. But when I got the job, I had the strange and sudden feeling that it had been somehow inevitable. Maybe my whole life — all the trivia I’d collected, the knack for funny meanness I’d been honing since middle school — had been leading up to this moment.

According to Wikipedia, Gould left Gawker on Nov. 30, 2007.

A previous Gawker-related post:

Jan. 13 - Has media gossip site Gawker passed its 'best before' date?

Gawker noted Gould's piece here: Emily Gould introduces oversharing to New York Times Magazine

Gould acknowledged the "elephant in the room" at her own blog, Emily Magazine.

The new blue bins arrived in my neighbourhood yesterday.

The Globe and Mail's Margaret Wente had this to say about them:

Tourists complain that there's nothing new to see or do here, just the same old stuff. But they're wrong. Let's take them through Cabbagetown, where they can marvel at the biggest garbage bins in the world. Since nobody can squeeze them into the backyard, they all sit in the front yard. Sure, other cities have mighty cathedrals and soaring skyscrapers, a testament to humankind's enduring aspirations. But no city has more monumental garbage bins.