I think the New York Times got it right in an editorial on Monday. "This morning Israel finally began withdrawing from the teeming, thirsty strip of land where it settled nearly 9,000 Jews in the middle of more than a million Arabs. Gaza has always been the ultimate example of the bankruptcy of Israel's settlement policy, and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon should be congratulated for finally doing

Remember when John Kerry called Dubya out because he was scared to go before the 9/11 comission? Bush was so frightened that he only wanted to appear for an hour before the comission investigating the event that he loves to use to define his presidency. Kerry zinged "If the president of the United States can find time to go to a rodeo, he can find the time to do more than one hour in front of a

Robert Scheer also weighs in on the White House's confused Iran policy. Though he's headed in the right direction, he gets some things wrong. The latest exhibition of this approach was President Bush's thinly veiled threat this weekend to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities or even invade the country as a last resort, sparked by Tehran's troubled negotiations with the West over its nuclear program.

Fareed Zakaria on the poverty of Bush's Iran policy.

The Washington Post is way late in its editorial today on the crisis in Niger. If Niger's largely unpolitical emergency cannot trigger prompt sympathy, it's time to rethink the way relief is organized. The world depends on an ad hoc, pass-the-hat system; there's no standing ability to respond quickly when the first signs of disaster appear. This raises the cost of action. In the Sudanese province

Today three major news outlets all front the Niger famine story. Coincidence. I think so. Perhaps because CNN has featured Christiane Amanpour Anderson Cooper from Niger all week. Today the NYT, LAT, and NPR all ran "front page" stories (in the case of NPR it was "Morning Edition") on Niger. Why so late to the story? In summarizing the NYT story (in a couple of sentences) for Slate's "Today's

Donald Rumsfeld is the latest high-ranking official/pundit/hand-waver to put forth the "there's no link between the bombings in London and the war in Iraq, because I say so" argument. Rumsfeld was speaking before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council and hoped no one there would notice the illogic of his "argument." "Some people seem confused about the motivations and intentions of terrorists and

Eight months in the making -- don't wait for CNN to explain why they are so late. But to show how serious they are about it now, they sent Wolf Blitzter Anderson Cooper.

There's a thread running over at Daily Kos that I just have to comment on. It concerns the recent deal the White House made to supply India with civilian nuclear technology. (This is a big deal because sanctions prohibit this because India has detonated a nuclear explosion and is not a nuclear weapons state within the Nonproliferation Treaty.) The uproar center on this Reuters article. A recent

The Washington Post editorial page today sort of weighs in on a pending deal in Colombia that would "grant limited immunity to thousands of right-wing fighters known as "paramilitaries." In exchange for turning in weapons and disclosing information about their organization and financial assets, the militants would be eligible to receive quick trials and prison terms limited to a maximum of eight

Seriously, do you read this stuff? Hi-larious. My non-serious post for the month.

From the AP In Niger, a desert country twice the size of Texas, most of the 11 million people live on a dollar a day. Forty percent of children are underfed, and one out of four dies before turning 5. And that's when things are normal... To the aid workers charged with saving the dying, the immediate challenge is to raise relief money and get supplies to the stricken areas. They leave it to the

You may have heard or read about the DoD's latest annual report to Congress on China's military power. There was a good story on NPR last week about it. I've only recently become interested in the "rise of China" debates. But the more I read, the more I'm convinced it's much ado about nothing. China wants to be seen as a great power. It recognizes that the road to take is through economic strength

In other news that has also flown under the radar, Iraqbodycount has issued a report on civilian casualties in Iraq. Findings include: Who was killed? 24,865 civilians were reported killed in the first two years. Women and children accounted for almost 20% of all civilian deaths. Baghdad alone recorded almost half of all deaths. When did they die? 30% of civilian deaths occurred during

CNN finally featured a short piece on the crisis in Niger during Wolf Blitzer reports today. It saw no irony in reporting that the crisis could have been prevented if the internaitonal community had paid attention months ago. CNN of course not being part of the international community because it's hard to get news down in Atlanta.

See some photos of an insurgency in its last throes from the WaPo.

The UN says some aid is finally flowing to Niger. The BBC article quotes UN officials as saying that "it took graphic images of dying children for this to happen." But that's no thanks to U.S. media. Have you seen any graphic images?

I sent an email to the people at the Center for American progress about the Niger famine and they included a paragraph on it today's Progress Report (scroll down to 'Under the Radar').

I always champion the work of Samantha Power and her oustanding book A Problem From Hell. Now she will also be working as a foreign policy adviser to Senator Barack Obama. Good news all around.

Condi is only a couple of countries away. Will she say anything about the crisis in Niger? In related, and much more important news, NBC's Andrea Mitchell got roughed up by Sudanese security for being uppity.

That's what this CNN story purports to tell us. Except it's not really a CNN story. It's a wire report from Reuters. How did the rich ignore Niger crisis? Major media outlets like CNN -- which in the past played a huge role in bringing attention to suffering in Somalia and Ethiopia -- couldn't care less these days.

CNN, a month ago on famine in Niger: Millions of people on the southern fringe of the Sahara desert face severe food shortages unless donors come up with enough cash to help see them through the next three months, the United Nations said on Wednesday. ... The next three months are vital, with $7.2 million needed immediately to ensure subsistence farmers and their families in the arid band of

Can this really be happening with so little media coverage (and attention by international community) just two weeks after Live 8 and the G-8 summit? Children are dying of starvation in feeding centres in Niger, where 3.6m people face severe food shortages, aid agencies have warned. The crisis in the south of the country has been caused by a drought and a plague of locusts which destroyed much

Juan Cole gets is right on the double standard Christian Terrorist Rudolph Sentenced What the Rightwing Press Will not Say Notorious Christian terrorist Eric Rudolph was sentenced to two life terms on Monday. The one-time fugitive had carried out four bombings that terrorized the southeastern areas of the United States. Among his crimes were the blowing up of an abortion clinic in Birmingham,

The president took time away from the G-8 summit in Scotland to express condolences over those fifty or more people killed in London on July 7. I guess like the rest of us, he's so used to waking up each morning for the Iraqi suicide bomb report that he forgot to do the same for the bomb blast Saturday that killed 100 people.

A couple of things about Plamegate don't make sense to me after thinking about it for a few days. Literally, a couple. First, part of the pseudo Rove defense seems follow the lines of I didn't mention Valerie Plame by name and/or I didn't know she was a covert CIA operative -- the covert part being essential to whether a crime was committed or not. But if Rove knew she worked for the CIA how

Salon went to a lot of trouble to list reasons why George W. Bush will not fire Karl Rove over the Valerie Plame scandal. Reason No. 1: Firing Rove would be perceived as an admission by George W. that things are amiss in his administration. The hallmark of Bush's presidency has been its ability -- when faced with adversity or controversy about a war, a policy or an individual -- to simply ignore

A op-ed in today's Washington Post laments the fact that Arab countries have done nothing to stop the killing in Darfur. Joseph Britt, the author, seems to think that the "Muslim community" has a responsibility for doing something. Absent from the picture have been the other Arab states. This is exceedingly strange, and not just because most of Darfur's victims are Muslims. Darfur is thousands

I find it alternately amusing and alarming that whenever there is a terrorist attack -- and since 9/11 and the anthrax attacks that means in some other country --there are is this self-examination about whether we (Americans) are doing enough to make ourselves safe. On one hand, it's a noble idea. On the other hand it's a continuing effort at deluding ourselves. I've written here numerous times

Over the holiday weekend the LA Times published a two-part fascinating series on North Korea and the extreme poverty there. It's really worth reading. Check it out here and here. On a related note, I recently discovered this blog dedicated to North Korea related issues.

I've read similar sentiments from conservative writers, commentators and bloggers today -- don't blame the London bombing on Iraq. I obviously disagree. It seems to be a reaction in the vein of "don't let the terrorists win." It's something I want to write about in the coming days. This country, and particularly conservatives need to come to grips with backlashes against American foreign policy.

One would think that September 11th would have produced in television news the ability to handle a crisis better than what I've watched today. I don't remember much about the Tuesday, September 11th coverage on television. I was too shocked to notice and I think news outlets were too overwhelmed for inanity. Today, I guess because the London attack is smaller in loss of life and is, well, over

I'll weigh in later; comments I've read briefly show this not to be bloggers finest hour. A few are really up in arms about George Galloway's statement. See some photos here and here.

I'm not sure what all the fuss is (if there is indeed a fuss -- CNN gave it a lot of play this morning) about whether Iranian president-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was a hostage taker in Tehran during the U.S. embassy takeover. Okay, that's interesting in a page A12 kind of way. But the WaPo says The controversy revived bitter memories of the embassy seizure and brought to the forefront a dispute