From IHT.com:

A press rights watchdog condemned on Wednesday the attempted murder of the last woman openly working as a journalist in Somalia's northern Puntland region.

Reporters Without Borders said Bisharo Mohammed Waeys, a talk ...   more »

Who does Russia's new president love more: His wife, Deep Purple or Vladimir Putin?

To be perfectly frank, my CTV.ca feature doesn't address that question (it's a bait-and-switch effort), but it does give an overview of Dmitry Medvedev, a long-time Putin associate who officially became Russia's president today.

Alas, I fear he won't be the same human quote machine as the Putinator, nor be likely to provide amazing photo ops like this:

Note the date of the originating event for this story. Shades of Minority Report, I tell you:

Post odds, if you wish.

The zany populism of YouTube appears to be under siege by governments and other powerful entities. Case in point? A vid by Jordan's Queen Raina.

Hate the sucky search function built into Outlook? There may be a solution available.

From AP via TheStar.com:

Gunmen shot dead an Iraqi reporter on Sunday after pulling her out of a car in northern Mosul, a notoriously violent city where journalists are often targeted and live in fear of their life.

Police said Serwa Abdul-Wahab, in her mid-30s, was on her way to work when gunmen forced her from her taxi in eastern Mosul, 390 km north of Baghdad, and shot her once in the head.

A colleague said she had received a text message on her phone three weeks earlier warning her to stop reporting or she would be killed.

Allow me to refer you back to this post.

The BBC's Alan Johnston tells the Globe and Mail's Sarah Hampson he heard a report that he'd been killed.

From AP (May 5):

KHARTOUM, Sudan (AP) — An Al-Jazeera cameraman released from the U.S.-run Guantanamo Bay detention center last week described it Monday as the worst prison mankind has ever seen.

From the May 2 NYT:

Standing in front of a television camera last week, the chairman of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign, Terry McAuliffe, uttered four words that the Fox News Channel would not soon forget.

“Fair and balanced Fox!,” he exclaimed, noting that the network was the first to project Mrs. Clinton’s Pennsylvania primary win.

Fox executives could not have asked for a more rousing endorsement. The next day it showed up in promotions.

All of a sudden, the once-frosty relationship between Fox News and the Democratic candidates seems to have grown warmer. Mrs. Clinton and Barack Obama, who steadfastly refused to attend Fox-sponsored debates last year, are now giving plenty of interviews as they court Fox’s viewers, who are largely white, conservative and undecided.

“It’s probably true that we appeal to white working-class voters,” said Brit Hume, the network’s Washington managing editor and the host of “Special Report.” “The candidates are going where the voters are.”

Conversely, Fox seems to have softened its stance toward the Democrats, mindful of the intense viewer interest in the prolonged primary season. Although Fox News remains firmly in first place among news channels, CNN has crept up in the ratings on primary nights. So Fox wants to appeal to people who might otherwise flip the channel in search of more time with the Democrats.

In short, Fox News and the Democrats abruptly find each other useful.

Economist Todd Hirsch says that too many argue Canada's economy needs what he calls "faster horses" -- more tax cuts for business, more social spending for the poor.

But the problem is a horse-drawn-buggy economy, when Canada needs to think about a transformation on the scale of mass production of automobiles (his opening anecdote is based on a Henry Ford quote: "If we had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

The Globe and Mail's Lawrence Martin uses the Conservative government's decision to kill the Access to Information database to review the many and creative ways the Harperites attempt to control the information agenda.

The Tories quoted ATI expert Alisdair Roberts in question period today to justify their decision to kill the CAIRS database. Roberts then uncharitably crapped on their talking points.

British j-prof Adrian Monck (City University; can be likened to the Columbia of Britain) has written a book entitled Can We Trust The Media? The short answer, is no, and don't bother trying. The Beeb's Kevin Marsh says the real issue is the notion of "the story."

Two German research teams say shifting ocean currents may blunt global warming for the next 10 years, but that climate change deniers shouldn't take much comfort from that.

Back in July 2007, I made the following post: First Alan Johnston, now Sami al-Haj and Bilal Hussein

They are both now out of U.S. custody.

Al-Haj, a cameraman for Al-Jazeera arrested near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, was released from Guantanamo Bay on Friday after six years in custody.

This Guardian story about al-Haj is fairly extensive.

On April 16, Hussein, an Associated Press photographer in Iraq, was released by the U.S. military. He had been held for more than two years.

Welcome back to the land of the living, gentlemen!

It's too late for my up-before-the-crack-of-dawn workdays, but if you're up at 11:55 p.m. tonight and in the vicinity of the Royal, check out Machine Girl.

From Now magazine:

The Machine Girl offers lunatic excess from beginning to end. Never mind that our heroine has a machine gun on the stump of her arm – this isn’t some cheap Planet Terror knockoff. It’s a revenge tragedy in the spirit of Lone Wolf And Cub, in the style of Evil Dead II, about a Japanese schoolgirl hellbent on revenge on the yakuza scum who killed her brother.

Not every shot and effect works, but director Noboru Iguchi’s creativity with deep-fried heads, a flying guillotine and much more easily outweighs his small blunders.

At CTV.ca, we had a poll today on which early summer movie a person might be most interested in seeing.

Of the 2,952 people who voted as of the time I wrote this, myself and 30 other iconoclasts went for Speed Racer.

Indiana Jones is likely to do big numbers, if this completely unscientific poll is indeed representative of the movie-going public

Compared to the rest of the world, Canada doesn't do too badly in the area of press freedom. The Canadian Newspaper Association's Anne Kothawala puts our situation into perspective.

I know Rex Murphy's got a good vocabulary and all, but who on Earth who knows anything about climate change was touting biofuels as a solution to that problem?

This CBC climate crank claimed tonight that environmentalists saw things like ethanol and whatnot as climate silver bullets.

Some of the biggest boosters of biofuels have been U.S. President George Bush and Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and I suspect more for reasons that have to do more with perceived energy security and domestic partisan politics than fighting climate change.

Most responsible environmentalists have said from the get-go that food crops shouldn't be converted into fuel -- or tropical forests, for that matter. I believe it was also environmentalists who noted that food crops produced with industrial agriculture techniques aren't climate-friendly. They do think there's some promise in converting cellulosic fibre (i.e. straw and other biomass) into ethanol. But the economics aren't there for that process yet.

There was nothing in Murphy's commentary that reflected those facts. Draw your own conclusions.

"You are an idealist. I pity you like I would pity the village idiot."

- Gen. George Broulard (Adophe Menjou) to Col. Dax (Kirk Douglas)

In this scene from the classic 1957 Stanley Kubrick film about the aftermath of a First World War French military debacle, Broulard blasts Dax for turning down a promotion to general.

Broulard thought Dax's efforts to defend three men scapegoated for the botched attack and to nail a general who wanted his own troops shelled were just part of manoeuvring for a promotion. :)

Here's a Wikipedia page on the film and a collection of reviews at Rottentomatoes.com.

Seen at Norman's Spectator via Kinsella -- From Angus Reid Strategies:

Canadians give top marks to doctors, teachers and police officers, a new Angus Reid Strategies poll has found, while politicians garner the least amount of respect.

In the online survey of a representative national sample, a large majority of Canadians say they have a great deal or a fair amount of respect for doctors (94%), police officers (83%) and teachers (83%). At the bottom end are politicians (25%), lawyers (44%) and journalists (49%).

The results of the current survey are especially noteworthy when compared to those of an identical poll carried out by the Angus Reid Group in 1994. Interestingly, over the past 14 years, respect for every single profession—with the exception of doctors—has diminished across the country.

The professionals who endured the most noticeable slump are journalists. In 2008, less than half of all respondents say they have a great deal or a fair amount of respect for journalists (49%), compared to 73 per cent in 1994.

Okay, why? Too left-wing a bunch of elitists, like the conservative MSM-haters will say? Or too right-wing a bunch of craven, careerist, corporate lackeys like the lefty MSM-haters will say? Or both?

Craigslist has become such a toxic mess that many users are giving up on it, claims this Globe and Mail story.

I'm taking the Ossington bus south. It has to turn left onto King Street, but its progress is blocked by an illegally parked Volvo XC90 SUV.

Said SUV was parked to make for the shortest possible line between the vehicle and the Starbucks at Shaw and King.

Its well-coiffed, sleekly-dressed driver came back out of the coffee joint, beverage in hand, and sashayed back to her vehicle. The bus driver opened his door and gave her a verbal blast. "Sorry," she said -- in a quiet, flat tone that suggested she was anything but.

"You drive a Volvo and you think you can park anywhere you want," muttered the still-steamed driver as he pulled into the stop.

Now, this Davisville princess could have easily parked legally and not inconvenienced anyone, but at the cost of adding 10 or 15 seconds to her walk from her $65,000 (base price) vehicle into the Starbucks.

I have many flaws, but after this incident, I'm thinking a major self-improvement project should be developing a greater sense of entitlement.

OTOH, maybe the princess has some type of medical condition where if she doesn't keep up her caffeine levels, she can go into a coma. In that case, I'd be getting snarky about someone who was really trying to avoid a medical emergency. But I suspect that's not the case.

Addendum

I shouldn't forget acknowledging her male, high-end-SUV-driving counterpart from the previous evening who showed great arm-waving annoyance when the Queen streetcar operator honked him into stopping so that passengers could exit and enter the streetcar in safety.

It cost Mr. In-A-Hurry 10 seconds out of his life!

And finally, a shout-out to all the cyclists who like to blow through red lights. Please don't whine when ultimately, your aggressive riding catches up with you.