I think when hundreds of thousands of lives are on the line, you might have to set aside some principles.

The news media's silence, particularly television news, is reprehensible.

The fact that people will pay you to talk to people and travel to interesting places and write about what intrigues you, I am just amazed by that.

The U.N. Population Fund has a maternal health program in some Cameroon hospitals, but it doesn't operate in this region. It's difficult to expand, because President Bush has cut funding

Neither Western donor countries like the U.S. nor poor recipients like Cameroon care much about Africans who are poor, rural and female

If the U.S. wants to help people in tsunami-hit countries like Sri Lanka and Indonesia - not to mention other poor countries in Africa - there's one step that would cost us nothing and would save hundreds of thousands of lives. It would be to allow DDT in malaria-ravaged countries.

American airstrikes...create risks, especially if our intelligence there is rusty. The crucial step, and the one we should apply diplomatic pressure to try to achieve, is for Maliki to step back and share power with Sunnis while accepting decentralization of government. If Maliki does all that, it may still be possible to save Iraq. Without that, airstrikes would be a further waste in a land in which we've already squandered far, far too much.