All of a sudden their husband's dead and maybe a child is dead and they have absolutely nothing - and they're heading through the desert at night.

Our nearly century-long experiment in banning marijuana has failed as abysmally as Prohibition did... In contrast, legalizing and taxing marijuana would bring in substantial sums that could be used to pay for schools, libraries or early childhood education.

Look, we'll have to confront the pathologies of poverty at some point. We can deal with them cheaply at the front end, in infancy. Or we can wait and jail a troubled adolescent at the tail end. To some extent, we face a choice between investing in preschools or in prisons.

All of a sudden their husband's dead and maybe a child is dead and they have absolutely nothing - and they're heading through the desert at night.

Guilt-tripping people does not work; they tend to be turned off.

The news media's silence, particularly television news, is reprehensible. If we knew as much about Darfur as we do about Michael Jackson, we might be able to stop these things from continuing.

Every year 3.1 million Indian children die before the age of 5, mostly from diseases of poverty like diarrhea.