For anyone thinking sanctuary was only about gorrillas in the mist or guerrillas hit and missed, something interesting from The Economist: "The Militarization of Space: Disharmony in the Spheres." The Economist  (19-25 Jan 2008), p. 23-25. The report gets into US military reliance on satellites, and the stability of space – the literal, empty version, not in the sense of  a place imbued with meaning.

So says Leila Fadel, the McClatchy Newspapers’ Lebanese-American-Saudi bureau chief in Baghdad, of the content of her staff’s blog, Inside Iraq. Quoting her in "As Iraqis See It," New York Review of Books (17 Jan 08), writer and journalist Michael Massing surveys the McClatchy chain’s local blogscene. Inside Iraq is an official online extension of the MClatchy mortar and brick office, but it retains the unedited edginess of experiential blogging amidst life lived in hard places.

No kidding. Writing in The New Republic, Kenneth M. Pollack of the Brookings Institution notes that in the wake of the troop surge, there’s good news and there’s bad news. The good […]

Michael Nazir-Ali, Bishop of Rochester, "Extremism Flourished As UK Lost Christianity," Telegraph (7 January 2008). To scathing response, the Nazir-Ali, "the Church’s only Asian bishop", criticized the emergence of Muslim-dominated  – and noisy – "no-go areas" as a consequence of multiculturalist ghettoization, official secularism, and the "multifaith ‘mish mash’ ". He also warned of dire consequences if "Britain does not recover that vision of its destiny which made it great", bemoaning the loss of Christian preeminence.

I’ve had a soft spot for Samantha Power ever since I was an early graduate student working on the history of modern genocide and ethnic conflict. Never mind that this redhead is both beautiful and captivating (note to Red: not a fetish). Her Pulitzer wasn’t for nothing: ‘A Problem From Hell’: American in the Age of Genocide (Basic Books, 2002) is one of the most important books available on the subject. A professor of public policy at Harvard who remains a practicing journalist, she writes with great clarity and style on some of the most gut-wrenching human rights and foreign policy issues of the day. So when she publishes something new, I perk up.