Emily Wax, East Africa bureau chief for The Washington Post has written this excellent and important summary: 5 Truths About Darfur. This is just a taste — she provides the background.
1 Nearly everyone is Muslim
2 Everyone is black
3 It’s all about politics
4 This conflict is international
5 The “genocide” label made it worse
(via Passport)
From Glenn Greenwald’s The difference between Iran and China:
So why are we heaping praise on China and developing increasingly productive relations with them, while threatening Iran with invasion and even preemptive nuclear attack? One obvious answer — that China has nuclear weapons and Iran does not — surely cannot be the explanation, since to embrace that framework is to send the most dangerous and counterproductive message possible to the nations of the world: obtain nuclear weapons and we will treat you with great respect and civility; fail to obtain such weapons and we will threaten you with invasion and attack you at will.
The BBC News: Vietnam gives Gates star welcome
Bill Gates has been greeted like a pop star by thousands of university students during a visit to Vietnam.
About 7,000 students waited for hours, some clinging to trees and balconies, to get a glimpse of Mr Gates during his visit to the Hanoi university.
“You represent the future,” the world’s richest man said during a speech, “the future of invention and technology, the future of this country.”
“…He is excellent and successful,” 21-year-old student Do Yen told AFP. “He is my idol. I hope that our country will have someone like him in the future.”
Me too.
How did “red hot tamales” get to be a staple of the Mississippi Delta? Southern Foodways Alliance director John T. Edge tells Debbie Elliott that it happened a century ago, when migrant Mexican farmworkers came to pick cotton side by side with African Americans in the deep South.
I really thought it was about deflection and cathexis.
From the economists at Marginal Revolution, “How to get a macho guy to give in;” a better gloss of this now widely circulated report:
Researchers at the University of Leuven in Belgium asked men to play an ultimatum game, in which they split a certain amount of money between them. High-testosterone men drove the hardest bargain — unless they had previously viewed pictures of bikini-clad models, in which case they were more likely to accept a poorer deal.
Hmmm… let’s see…