Africa

Why did thousands of Palestinians yesterday converge upon Israel's borders? Partly because Syria's war-criminal leader, Bashar al-Assad, and his ally, Hezbollah, wanted them to. But there's more to it than that. Palestinians also marched from Jordan and Egypt, whose governments did their best to stop the protests. In fact, they marched from every corner of the Palestinian world, in a tech-savvy, coordinated campaign. What hit Israel yesterday was the Palestinian version of the Arab spring.

"Why does the world care about Libyans and not about us?" I was asked during a phone interview with a Darfuri leader recently. He told me that the displaced people in the camp he was speaking to me from had been listening to radio reports about how swiftly the world had moved to protect civilians from Muammar Qaddafi.

It was a beautiful, sun-splashed Cairo morning, and a brass band was playing in Tahrir Square. The musicians, about two dozen in all, wore driven-snow white trousers and red military jackets with gold tassels. They performed a repertoire of short, patriotic anthems with gusto, if less-than-perfect technique. A crowd of onlookers began to swell, and before long, people were snapping cell-phone pictures of the band and hoisting children on their shoulders to watch.

The California Assembly Health Committee held a hearing today on proposed legislation that would allow the state to regulate health insurance rates before the bill passed out of committee with 12 votes. AB52, authored by Michael Feuer, D-Los Angeles, would let regulators reject proposed rate increases deemed excessive or unfairly discriminatory.

The war in Libya is not going well. Muammar Gaddafi shows no sign of giving up power. His forces' siege of the rebel-held city of Misratah has killed upwards of 1,000 people, including two Western journalists. One month in, NATO's air campaign is plagued by halfhearted commitment and intracoalition blame-passing. The rebels on whose behalf the U.S. and its allies intervened have failed to advance much beyond their strongholds in eastern Libya. Only a few inveterate optimists seem to believe the anti-Gaddafi forces still have a chance to win.

"The more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances that it will sustain democracy," wrote American political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset in 1959, crystallizing the idea, now a received wisdom, that wealth is the inevitable handmaiden of political freedom.

The first words that were used to describe Tim by almost anybody who knew him were "humble" and "modest."

Yet, Tim was a guy who had great talents. He took highly artistic photos and had released a photography book "Infidel," which consists of his portraits of American soldiers fighting in the Afghan War.

He was also someone who would go out in the field and take the grittiest pictures of combat.

Since Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi's Green Book was published in three installments -- in 1975, 1976, and 1978 -- every Libyan child has had to study it in school; but many, perhaps most, Libyans make fun of it in secret. Western analysts have tried to tease out the book's logic on governance, searching for clues to the intellectual influences on Libya's eccentric strongman, but this is perhaps an overly optimistic endeavor.

When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, it was clear what the nation needed: a return to robust New Deal-style programs in domestic policy to help Americans with stagnant wages and shrinking benefits, and a reduction of U.S. defense spending and commitments abroad. To put it another way, the times required a synthesis of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier in domestic policy and Dwight Eisenhower’s New Look in foreign policy. Unfortunately, President Obama has provided the exact opposite, combining the domestic policy of Eisenhower with the foreign policy of Kennedy.

It has become virtually an article of faith among America's chattering class that the Western intervention in Libya cannot be considered a success unless Muammar Gaddafi is removed from power. Reacting to President Obama's speech on Libya last week, CNN's Eliot Spitzer said, "If ...