International

A little good news...for the first time, Saudi women competed and voted in chamber of commerce elections.

Check out the word counts from Bush's Iraq strategy speech as compiled on the Mojo blog.  It makes a point in a round about way.

There have been a couple of recent episodes of This American Life with interesting stories about Iraq.  Act Two of episode 302 (Strangers in a Strange Land) is about soldiers blogging from Iraq.  Act Two of episode 300 (What's in a Number?) tells the interesting story of how the Johns Hopkins study, published in The Lancet (available online, free registration required), that tried to estimate the number of Iraqi deaths that resulted from the war.  Act Three tells the story of a captain who "...was given a particularly tough assignment in Iraq: to build relationships with a town where U.S. bombs had killed twelve innocent people.

1,476 homicides in Jamaica, an all-time high, with 37 days remaining in 2005.

From an article in USA Today, according to a recent UN study:

Hunger and malnutrition kill nearly 6 million children a year... Many of the children die from diseases that are treatable, including diarrhea, pneumonia, malaria and measles... Diseases such as AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, which kill more than 6 million people a year, hit the hungry and poor the hardest, according to the report's findings. Millions of families are pushed deeper into poverty and hunger by the illness and death of breadwinners, the cost of health care, paying for funerals and support of orphans. About 75% of the world's hungry and poor live in rural areas in poor countries, the report found.