From the New York Times…

Supplies intended for NATO forces in Afghanistan were suspended Tuesday after Taliban militants blew up a highway bridge in the Khyber Pass region, a lawless northwestern tribal area straddling the border with Afghanistan.

Hidayatullah Khan, a government official in the region, was quoted by Reuters as saying that the 30-yard-long iron bridge was located 15 miles northwest of Peshawar, the capital of the restive North-West Frontier Province.

Pakistani officials said they were assessing the damage and teams had been sent to repair the bridge. But it was not immediately clear how soon the trucks carrying crucial supplies for NATO forces would be able to travel through the Khyber Pass to Afghanistan.

The Taliban is getting better at this shutting down supply lines thing. The official word is that this is no big deal because other routes can handle the load. But if this becomes a habit there are going to be problems.

Edit: America’s supply problems are not going to be helped by this either.

From the Telegraph….

The protests, which began on Dec 14, rapidly took on a political hue and Mr Putin, who is intolerant of dissent, ordered the Kremlin’s top officials in the far east to use force next time. But senior adminstrators refused to intervene and a week later the government was forced to send a special detachment of riot police from Moscow to break up a second protest in Valdivostok.

Furious that he had again been disobeyed, Mr Putin directed Vladislav Surkov, his top ideologue, to sack the newly appointed head of internal affairs in Primorye, the region surrounding Vladivostok.

But the official, Maj Gen Andrei Nikolayev, flatly refused to leave his post. Sources say he threatened to expose corruption linked to the Kremln in the Russian far east if Mr Putin pressed ahead.

Such a gesture of defiance is almost unheard of in Russia. Gen Nikolayev was supposed to be the man entrusted by the Kremlin to keep regional officials under control.

But he quickly found a powerful champion in the form of President Dmitry Medvedev, who is said to have countermanded his dismissal. “The fight between Medvedev and Putin started over this issue and has been getting worse ever since,” the source close to the Kremlin said.

If this is true I don’t think that Medvedev has long to live. I am pretty sure that the men who know how to kill are still loyal Putin.

From the New York Times…

These new “secondary” forests are emerging in Latin America, Asia and other tropical regions at such a fast pace that the trend has set off a serious debate about whether saving primeval rain forest — an iconic environmental cause — may be less urgent than once thought. By one estimate, for every acre of rain forest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in the tropics on land that was once farmed, logged or ravaged by natural disaster.

“There is far more forest here than there was 30 years ago,” said Ms. Ortega de Wing, 64, who remembers fields of mango trees and banana plants.

The new forests, the scientists argue, could blunt the effects of rain forest destruction by absorbing carbon dioxide, the leading heat-trapping gas linked to global warming, one crucial role that rain forests play. They could also, to a lesser extent, provide habitat for endangered species.

Naturally, lot of people would still argue that this new forest can never be as good as the old forest and the New York Times article gives plenty of space to their arguments. But they don’t seem very convincing to me.

From the San Francisco Chronicle…..

Berkeley’s public library will face a showdown with the city’s Peace and Justice Commission tonight over whether a service contract for the book check-out system violates the city’s nuclear-free ordinance.

(H/T National Review)

From the Telegraph….

Public sector workers – from schools, hospitals, the Post Office and publicly-funded media – will join forces with car factory workers, helicopter pilots and even ski-lift operators from the private sector, to leave much of the country paralysed.

The show of force is backed by all of France’s main unions, the opposition Socialists and 75 per cent of the public see it as justified, according to one poll.

According to François Chérèque, leader of the moderate CFDT union, the strike is a “cry of anger” from workers who feel the government has given billions to banks and industry but not protected their jobs or “purchasing power”.

Not much is going to come of this. The French government is going to back down so fast that there will be no need to prolong the strikes.