410 Quick Readings

Busy preparing to leave town again, but just wanted to flag a few quick reads:

  • Ellen Knickmeyer (and Nora Younis) give legs to the story of the Darfuri refugees slated for expulsion from Israel. I’m glad Ellen has been posted to Cairo. She’s doing a fantastic job.
  • Also in the Washington Post, Julie Flint, who deserves credit for being among the first to shout to the world about the crisis in Darfur, urges UN peacekeepers to “step out of that armored car and ask the Darfurian people: ‘Just what the hell is going on here?'”
  • The Iraqi government limps along.
  • Russian police arrested an Israeli man wanted by Interpol for training Colombian militants. In a former life, I used to follow South and Central America more closely and was intrigued by the Israeli and Lebanese (sometimes identified as Hizballah-affiliated) merchants of war messing around in the region. Sometimes stories would pop up in the local press about arms deals that would implicate corrupt or cynical officials in three or more countries, but whenever I’d have a correspondent dig deeper, the stories would die on the vine because of information from dodgy sources, libel laws, and fears for the correspondent’s safety. Other times, the story would simply be too tangled to explain to a casual reader in less than 6,000 words. There’s gotta be a good book, New Yorker essay, or Hollywood thriller in one of these stories.
  • Speaking of corruption and arms sales…
  • Kudos to the Christian Science Monitor. Sometimes journalism can make a difference, as in the suspension of the Pentagon’s creepy (but impressive) ADVISE data-mining system, which the CSM first reported in February 2006.
  • I enjoyed Wassim’s reflections on Edgware Road.

2 Comments »

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  1. Jeffrey Goldberg wrote this a few years ago. It was shit.

    http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/tny/a_reporter_at_large_in_the_par_1.php

    Comment by Abu Muqawama — August 30, 2007 #

  2. Oh yeah, now you mention it, I remember this one. Struck me at the time (and still does) as awfully credulous. There was a brief enthusiasm for the Chavez-Hizballah-Al-Qaeda axis (sometimes expanded to take in Castro) in the US press after Otto Reich’s return.

    Comment by The Skeptic — August 31, 2007 #

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