More about Benazir Bhutto

Fatima Bhutto, Benazir Bhutto's niece, does not have a high opinion of her aunt, to put it mildly, and worries here about what her return means for the future of Pakistan.

...and Some Very Bad News

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued its report, and the news is even worse than many of these scientists expected. This is the most important issue the world faces right now. I wish that I could believe we're up to meeting the challenge.

The BBC has posted a draft of the executive summary of the report here.

Some Good News (At Last) About Ruler of the Sky

My Genghis Khan novel Ruler of the Sky will finally get reissued in the U.S. My agent just informed me that a company called Boyston Books, located in Manhattan, wants to bring out a new edition, and they have obtained hardcover and trade paperback rights.

In the meantime, if you read German, check out this edition; Ruler has just been reissued yet again in Germany.

The Quiet Coup

I am a bit late in getting to this, but Frank Rich's New York Times column of last Sunday, about coups in Pakistan and the US, resonated with Naomi Wolf's even more alarming piece at the Huffington Post about growing restrictions on travel and what they might portend.

Rich writes, "Wrong track is a euphemism. We are a people in clinical depression. Americans know that the ideals that once set our nation apart from the world have been vandalized, and no matter which party they belong to, they do not see a restoration anytime soon."

Benazir Bhutto

Over at his blog at the Atlantic's site, Matthew Yglesias reminds us that "smart correspondents have made the point that one of the...oddities of western press coverage of Benazir Bhutto is that you tend not to hear about how she's a huge crook. Corruption in a middle-income country, of course, is nothing new and Pakistan in general is not a paragon of good governance. Still, the best of my knowledge Bhutto and her husband [Asif Zardari] stand out as unusually corrupt by Pakistani standards, which is precisely how she wound up ejected from power."

Yglesias links to an article by the New York Times's John F. Burns, published on January 9, 1998--a long piece, but extremely illuminating.