Wednesday, May 09, 2007

More Misc.

Three recent New York Times articles have caught my attention:
Fifty years after the Little Rock integration crisis shrouded the city in infamy that it has never entirely cast aside, the city is again dealing with political divisions in which race plays a role. But the divisions are not quite along the lines of what you might suspect.


Clark Kent Ervin, the former inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, current director of the Homeland Security Initiative at the Aspen Institute and the author of Open Target: Where America Is Vulnerable to Attack, jumps out of his phone booth (get it? Heh.) in time to help try to rescue us from a future terrorist attack. The recommendations range from the commonsensical to the insightful, but it is always worth keeping these sorts of suggestions on the table. The threat is still out there, and if we can depoliticize the terrorism question, maybe we can even implement some of his ideas.


Finally, Colum McCann, a professor of creative writing at Hunter College and Dublin native uses personal experience to urge measured optimism about the recent advances in the always ongoing Northern Ireland peace process. Still, the Troubles once seemed every bit as intractable as the conflicts in the Middle East. There certainly is room for hope, but in geopolitics, hope must always be guarded.

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