Summaries here and here and here.

Chaos abides.

The little-known city of Baquba is emerging as one of the hotbeds of resistance in Iraq, with clashes breaking out every day.

The violence in this city 30 mi. northeast of Baghdad is also now spreading elsewhere around Diyala province.

[snip]

An Iraqi army colonel told reporters in Diyala last week that that U.S. troops had arrested 10 Iraqi soldiers suspected of sectarian killings. There was no official U.S. comment.

[snip]

The influence of each group changes often. “Each day I wake up I don’t know who is in control of my city,” said a religious sheik in Baquba who asked to be referred to as Sheik Ahmed. “One day it is the Americans, the next day a militia, the next day a resistance group.” Article

Related:

Day-to-day life here for Iraqis is so far removed from the comfortable existence we live in the United States that it is almost literally unimaginable.

[snip]

Imagine the worst day you’ve ever had in your life, add a regular dose of terror and you’ll begin to get an idea of what it’s like every day for a lot of people here. Article

More follow-up on the mass food poisoning incident in the south.

In other developments, the head of a hospital that treated police officers who fell ill after a Sunday evening meal at their base said spoiled food served at a mess hall was the cause.

Dr. Matheel Alwan, the head of Kut General Hospital, said samples of the yogurt and of the hamburgers served at the police base in Numaniyah had been sent to Baghdad to see which of them were contaminated. “It was either spoiled hamburger, or spoiled yogurt,” he said.

Kut hospital admitted 53 of the estimated 350 to 400 policemen for treatment, and pumped the stomachs and immediately released many others, Alwan said. They were suffering from severe vomiting with traces of blood, dehydration and diarrhea - typical symptoms of food poisoning, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The final policeman treated was discharged Tuesday, Alwan said. Article

Short of massive changes in the security and infrastructure segments (accompanied by massive indigenous monetary backing and tax and fee waivers), any agrrements on Iraqi oil (remember that?) won’t come to fruition for literally years, if then. International oil concerns will remain skittish (though less so involving the Kurdish north unless the situation in Kirkuk and Mosul should totally erupt), being cognizant of the effects and costs of the much less widespread instability in Nigeria, for example (see Noted In Passing, below).

“I see very strong interest from U.S. energy companies in Iraq,” Ambassador Samir Shakir Mahmood Sumaida’ie told Dow Jones Newswires after a speech in Houston.

The companies “have visited me at the embassy and expressed that interest,” while “waiting for things to be put in place,” he said.

The passage of a new investment law in the next two or three weeks and a new hydrocarbons law “within this year” will create the right conditions for major U.S. investments, he said.

[snip]

In the speech Monday, which was hosted by the Bilateral U.S.-Arab Chamber of Commerce, Sumaida’ie advised oil executives to “get a foot in the door” in the areas that are currently safe, and “work your way outward.” Article

Summary here.

Top-notch overview.

…Afghanistan remains one of the poorest countries in the world. The only dynamic part of the economy is narcotics, which has skyrocketed this year. There may be as much as 60 percent more production this year as compared to last year, largely because of a decline in security in certain major opium-producing regions and the spread of production to every single province in Afghanistan, which never happened before.

Also, from the indicators I was able to gather during my most recent trip at the end of July, early August, it appears that even the kind of bubble economy that blew up in the cities as a result of the international pressure and the flow of aid money is starting to collapse. People are starting to say there is a decline in construction, a decline in demand for fruits and vegetables, a decline in employment. Largely again, this has to do with security. A number of Afghan businessmen who had come back from outside the country and made investments have now left again because there have been high-profile kidnappings of rich people–which people usually say are carried out by people in police uniforms–killings, robberies and so on.

There have been some NATO military achievements in Afghanistan recently, haven’t there?

Our military commanders know this is not primarily a military battle. What the military does is to move into an area, defeat the enemy, then the enemy moves somewhere else–back to their base areas in Pakistan where they’re in complete safety and shelter and can recruit new recruits, refund, retrain and so on, reequip themselves. And then what comes in after the military? We have a government that is extraordinarily weak, corrupt, and ineffective. We have a very much underfunded reconstruction effort. So it means that unless we really seriously increase our support for the Afghan government for reconstruction, there’s a vacuum after our military victory. So there’s no way to transform those actual victories into strategic success. One of the top military commanders I talked to in Afghanistan, an international commander, said his basic assumption was that we need to double our resources. Article

Developments here.

Analysis related to Japan and South Korea.

Related, with some later information:

South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun feared the move could “spark a nuclear arms build-up in other countries” but Japan, the only nation to suffer atomic attack, has pledged that it will not develop nuclear weapons in response.

New Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told the Japanese parliament: “Possession of nuclear arms is not an option at all for our country.” Article

Non-proliferation and disarmament are terms which have been excised from the lexicon of the woebegone G. Walker adminsitration.

The Bush administration made things worse. First, it rejected the policy of controlling armaments through treaties, which had been followed by previous presidents since 1918. Second, it proposed to use military - even nuclear - force in a pre-emptive attack to prevent proliferation. This policy was used as a pretext for attacking Iraq and may now be used on either Iran or North Korea. More pre-emptive war will produce suffering and chaos, while nothing is done about India, Israel and Pakistan. So we are left with a policy of vigilante bravado for which we have sacrificed the proven methods of weapons control. Article

What’s up.

The more one contemplates this expression of the mindset of the woebegone G. Walker administration, the more disturbing it becomes.

When Gary Berntsen sat down for dinner last year with the CIA’s executive director, Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, the agency’s No. 3 tried to talk him out of resigning from the National Clandestine Service. Foggo even offered him a university position as a placeholder until the CIA’s new director, Porter J. Goss, could fix the broken personnel system and other issues that frustrated him, according to Berntsen.

But the Capital Grille meal quickly degenerated when Berntsen told Foggo that not only was he planning to resign but he intended to write a book about his experiences.

Foggo, according to Berntsen, stated flatly that Goss wanted no more books published by current or former CIA officials. Actually, according to a statement Berntsen filed last week in his ongoing lawsuit against the agency, Foggo’s language was a little more colorful: “Mr. Foggo stated ‘we will have no more books. I will redact the [expletive] out of your book so no one will want to read it.’” Article

The instability in and around Nigeria’s oil and gas production continues apace.

Armed youths in Nigeria’s restive Niger Delta seized a flow station run by oil company Shell and took 60 workers hostage, causing a production loss of some 12,000 barrels of oil per day, the company has said.

[snip]

More than 30 oil workers have been kidnapped this month alone and 14 soldiers have reportedly been killed.

Twenty-five of those kidnapped one week ago have been released but the whereabouts of seven expat workers remains unknown.

No group has claimed the abduction of the seven foreigners — four Scots, a Malaysian, an Indonesian and a Romanian — who worked for the oil service firms Oceaneering and Sparrows, sub-contractors to ExxonMobil. Article

Google’s acquisition of YouTube may herald a deep pockets bonanza for copyright lawyers.

ADD ONE TO THE AVIANS

A new bird species found in South America.

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FAINT SECRETS

Sensitive information can be sent optically under the main data stream.

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BY HIS MIND ALONE…

…he zaps those aliens. Pretty darn amazing in actuality.

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99.9% HUMAN

Remember, they’re just embryos. There are no plans (and little probability of viability) for growing them past the embyonic stage.

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OLD RAT

Interesting in its own right, but also noted particularly for fans of the Kim Possible cartoon series.

Still more data on the North Korea situation to explore.

Kim Jong-il—like his father, Kim Il-Sung, before him—has kept his tiny, impoverished country afloat all these decades precisely by stirring up trouble and provoking confrontation (to justify his totalitarian rule), then playing his bigger neighbors off one another (to keep the tensions from spinning out of control and into his borders). His quest for nukes was propelled by a desire for the ultimate protection, mainly against an American attack. But now that he has them, he can be expected to play his games of chicken more feistily—and with still more opportunities for miscalculation.

[snip]

A plan of economic pressure or sanctions depends crucially on cooperation from China. Without Chinese food, fuel, and other forms of aid, Kim Jong-il’s regime would soon crumble. And that’s the problem: The Chinese don’t want the regime to crumble, for their own security reasons. It’s a delicate matter to punish Kim just enough to affect his actions but not enough to trigger his downfall. The question is whether pressure from other countries—or the Chinese leaders’ own anger at Kim’s defiance of their warnings not to test—will lead them to walk this line and decide whether such a balancing act is possible.

[snip]

The current predicament is the outcome of three missteps: a major strategic blunder by President Bush (who refused to negotiate with the North Koreans when they were practically begging for talks and their course was still easily reversible); an only slightly less gigantic blunder by Chinese President Hu Jintao (who thought he could bring the North Koreans in line with minimal arm-twisting); and severe miscalculations, from start to finish, by Kim Jong-il (who thought Washington would have leapt at negotiations by now and who, apparently, didn’t think his nuclear test would cause quite such excitement).

So, here we are. The two major powers in this confrontation are led by blunderers; the provocateur is a chronic miscalculator. It doesn’t look good. Article

And more:

Now the question is whether the United States, China and South Korea can agree on steps to compel Pyongyang to reverse course. A failure could result in greater risk of North Korea selling nuclear technology or material, a regional arms race and miscalculations that could lead to a new Korean war.

Until now, the separate strategies of the three countries have failed to slow North Korea’s nuclear march.

The United States insisted North Korea participate in six-party talks but at the same time used sanctions and other forms of pressure - only to let a weapons program incubate and grow. South Korea’s “sunshine policy” of engagement provided the North with aid, investment and tourism, but got nothing in return. China, the North’s main supplier of energy and food, thought Pyongyang would heed its warnings not to roil the waters of East Asia.

North Korea trumpeted its new deterrent as “a great leap forward,” casting itself as victorious. But analysts say pressure on the Hermit Kingdom will build, making Pyongyang a likely loser as well.

“Everybody’s a loser,” said Moon Chung-in, a political scientist at Yonsei University in Seoul and a frequent adviser to South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun. “North Korea succeeded in gaining nuclear weapons, but now it will get all kinds of sanctions from neighboring countries.”

[snip]

Under the watch of the Bush administration, North Korea dropped out of the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, booted nuclear monitors, strengthened its missile capabilities and reprocessed nuclear fuel, giving it enough plutonium for up to 10 or more warheads.

[snip]

The nuclear test highlighted the fact that China never wanted to exercise its leverage to forestall the test. Indeed, some analysts say top Chinese leaders have a greater stomach for a nuclear-armed North Korea, with the turmoil it brings, than for the collapse of the Kim regime, which could take away a key friendly buffer state and send refugees into China. Article

One consequential point unmentioned thus far relates to the use of plutonium in the weapon, as even in the case of a partial detonation contamination of groundwater is a significant long-term possibility (probably even moreso, as a successful multi-kiloton detonation fuses and seals surrounding rock and strata). It goes without saying that environmental and ecological safeguards cannot be presumed to be items anywhere near high on any politico-military enforcement list in the DPRK.