Recommended Reading: July 2

"U.S. Prodding UN Security Council to Punish Mugabe" - Nothing will come of this, of course. (I'm looking at you China, South Africa, and Russia.) Still, I'm glad to see the U.S. is finally doing something. "Betancourt, U.S. Contractors Rescued from FARC" - This is unbelievable. I read an article yesterday (which I now wish I would have posted) about how the FARC is getting its @$$ kicked in Columbia. This just adds on to that decline. These were the highest profile hostages they had and hostages are rapidly becoming one of their few remaining strengths (along with $300 million/year in drug money, which eases the pain I'm sure.) On another note, the decline of the FARC just goes to show that Hugo Chavez really can pick the right ponies to back: Socialism, the Castro brothers, and now the FARC. Suck it, fatty! "Do We Need a Wartime President?" - Fareed Zakaria says, "no," and, once again, explains that we have horribly overreacted to the threat of Islamic terrorism. "China Inspired Interrogations at Guantanamo" - Something else we've imported from China. How quaint: "The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of 'coercive management techniques' for possible use on prisoners, including 'sleep deprivation,' 'prolonged constraint,' and 'exposure.' What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners." "Plea for Aid to Avert Starvation" - World Bank President Robert Zoellick is asking world leaders to commit to increased food aid to help avoid severe starvation all over the world. "South African Addicts Turn to AIDS Medications to Get High" - Africa is messed up.