What We’re Reading

Elizabeth Allen

The New Republic has an excellent roundtable on U.S. policy towards Sudan, with essays by Elizabeth Rubin, Eric Reeves, and Andrew Natsios. Among the advice given includes this warning by Alex de Waal: “[Obama] should not be tempted to make threats [towards Khartoum] he cannot enforce — or at least not enforce without the kind of commitment of money, armed force, and political capital that his predecessor did in Iraq.”

Preeti Aroon

“Abu Ghraib MP Slain in Bid for Redemption,” by Josh White for the Washington Post. Santos Cardona, who with his dog Duco appeared in photos of detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib, was killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan on Feb. 28. He had been trying to reclaim his good name. Abu Ghraib, by the way, recently reopened after an extreme makeover.

Elizabeth Dickinson

Who doesn’t like to read a harrowing account of pirating on the lawless seas? In April’s Vanity Fair, William Langewiesche tracing the thrilling path of a recent hijacking. The French luxury boat in question was captured in the Gulf of Aden last year, but as you’ll read in “The Pirate Latitudes,” that’s just the beginning of the story. 

Rebecca Frankel

“The Armageddon Waltz.” What would “Karl Kraus, Habsburg Austria’s H. L. Mencken” say about the United States and its handling of the financial crisis wonders Frederic Morton in The New York Times. In addition to vividly portraying Vienna’s capacity for merriment even during hard times, Morton points out the pitfalls of passing ill-conceived legislation.    

Andrew Polk

As the 50th anniversary of the Tibetan uprising approaches, Western media has devoted plenty of copy to examining remaining tensions in the region, but apparently they’ve all gotten it wrong. According to a report in China’s People’s Daily entitled “Fifty Years of Democratic Reform in Tibet,” the Chinese government has helped to rescue the Tibetan people from the “cruel political oppression and corporal punishments” of their theocratic past and delivered the “abolition of serfdom [and] the liberation of serfs and slaves.” That’s good to know.

Greg Shtraks

In China Brief, Chris Zambelis discusses China’s position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While China has slowly become a player in Middle East diplomacy — many Arab leaders look to the Asian superpower as a welcome counterbalance to the U.S. role — China has increasing economic ties with Israel and as most of the Israeli exports to China are in the field of high tech and weaponry, it’s a situation that should give the United States, the largest supplier of Israeli arms, some pause.

KHALED DESOUKI/AFP/Getty Images