There isn't a political price to be paid yet for doing nothing. People need to get upset with President Bush. People need to get upset with their Congressmen.
The conflict in Darfur could escalate to where we're seeing 100,000 victims per month.
As soon as I was old enough to drive, I got a job at a local newspaper. There was someone who influenced me. He wrote a column for The Guardian from this tiny village in India.
I have often tried to tell the story of a place through people there.
The fact that people will pay you to talk to people and travel to interesting places and write about what intrigues you, I am just amazed by that.
The bulk of the emails tend to come after a column. I can get about 2,000 after a column.
I try to be careful about wording. One of the things I've tried to combat in my blog is the notion that journalists are arrogant and unconcerned with the readership.
You will be judged in years to come by how you responded to genocide on your watch.
It's easy to keep issuing blame to Republicans or the president.
The news media's silence, particularly television news, is reprehensible. If we knew as much about Darfur as we do about Michael Jackson, we might be able to stop these things from continuing.
Neither Western donor countries like the U.S. nor poor recipients like Cameroon care much about Africans who are poor, rural and female.
Half a million women die each year around the world in pregnancy. It's not biology that kills them so much as neglect.
The U.N. Population Fund has a maternal health program in some Cameroon hospitals, but it doesn't operate in this region. It's difficult to expand, because President Bush has cut funding.
Abortion politics have distracted all sides from what is really essential: a major aid campaign to improve midwifery, prenatal care and emergency obstetric services in poor countries.
In Angola, I visited 'HeroRats' that have been trained to sniff out land mines (and, in some countries, diagnose tuberculosis). In a day, they can clear 20 times as much of a minefield as a human, and they work for bananas!
Dr. Ben Carson has the most moving personal narrative in modern presidential politics. His mother, one of 24 children, had only a third-grade education. She was married at age 13, bore Ben and his brother, and then raised the boys as an impoverished single mother in Detroit. As a young boy, Carson was a terrible student.
Saudi Arabia has supported Wahhabi madrasas in poor countries in Africa and Asia, exporting extremism and intolerance. Saudi Arabia also exports instability with its brutal war in Yemen, intended to check what it sees as Iranian influence.
Saudi Arabia isn't the enemy, but it is a problem. It could make so much positive difference in the Islamic world if it used its status to soothe Sunni-Shiite tensions and encourage tolerance. For a time, under King Abdullah, it seemed that the country was trying to reform, but now under King Salman, it has stalled.
In effect, Saudi Arabia legitimizes fundamentalism, religious discrimination, intolerance and the oppression of women. Saudi women not only can't drive, but are also told by some clerics that they mustn't wear seatbelts for fear of showing the outlines of their bodies.
Saudi Arabia inflames the Sunni-Shiite divide and sets a pernicious example of intolerance by banning churches.
