A health problem you might not expect to find in Uganda: obesity.

The chairman of the (Nobel Prize-winning) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on why halting global warming is an environmental imperative -- and how it can bring other benefits as well.

Um, CO2 not a pollutant? "With all due respect, are you kidding me?"

A morbid topic, but...

A terrorist leader in Somalia? That's what "the mood" around his brother's house seems like.

A teenage Minnesotan who traveled to the same country last year and was under watch by the FBI. Reportedly.

18 people in Acapulco, Mexico, in a drug-related shooting? Yes, but "no tourists."

The president of Gabon? No. Yes. Definitely.

(image of President Omar Bongo at the UN, 2005)

The Guardian smartly editorializes about the need to fund the World Food Program. Money concluding sentence: "Overseas development aid is about the last thing the developed world should be cutting back on."

Michael Kleinman summarizes the back-and-forth between Jeff Sachs, Bill Easterly, and Dambisa Moyo on the merits of global development. To only dip a toe in, I'll agree that the ad hominem attacks -- or, of course, the "baby-killer" strategy -- should have no place in this debate.

Joe Cirincione says there may be reason to suspect that this round of North Korean bravado may go awry from the usual pattern -- but that nonproliferation is in much better shape this time.

And with much talk (including some out of this here typing machine) of China's influence on Pyongyang, Fred Weir wonders whether Russia could play a role in halting North Korea's nuclear program -- or whether Moscow is too "perplexed and even scared" of the impoverished and desperate Hermit Kingdom.

Forget the "prophet of doom." Gideon Rachman suggests that a short story about goat prices in Somalia could have been the best predictor of the economic meltdown. And to his question of who could play the goat in the movie -- might I suggest Betty, the erstwhile companion of jailed former Congolese warlord Laurent Nkunda?

Reuben Brigety and Sabina Dewan of the Center for American Progress have authored a new report proposing a "National Strategy for Global Development" to go along with the customary National Security Strategy. The report urges using the Millennium Development Goals as the basis for the United States' development strategy -- now that's progress I can believe in.

The Wall Street Journal makes the supremely trenchant point that Cuba -- Cuba! -- is on the Human Rights Council. Well, sheesh, somebody should have just told the Obama Administration before they joined the Council. There's no telling how American presence could help improve the body...

(image from flickr user CharlesFred under a Creative Commons license)