ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN
MOSCOW -- The Russian capital has just witnessed the extraordinary sight of Alexander Solzhenitsyn -- the dissident and once-exiled author of The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich -- receiving what amounts to a state funeral, with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin acting as chief mourner.
JERRY BROWN
SAN FRANCISCO -- California's former and perhaps future governor, Jerry Brown, says it took him 13 minutes to get here from Oakland, where he was mayor for eight years and now lives. He came on BART, the transit system launched by his father Pat, who was Democratic governor for two terms until beaten by Ronald Reagan in 1966, which ended a political career that began in 1928 when Pat ran unsuccessfully, as a Republican, for the state Assembly.
ELECTIONS
For Sen. Barack Obama, winning Florida is not essential, but it's strategically important. In 1988, then Vice President George H.W. Bush's chief strategist, Lee Atwater, when told that the Democrats could not win the presidency without California, answered, ''That is exactly why I want it.'' If Obama carries Florida on Nov. 4, there is no way Sen. John McCain can become president.
SOVIET PRISONERS
A few years back, when Alexander Solzhenitsyn was living in Vermont and gathering testimonials from those who had spent time in Soviet prison camps, Marcus Melnik forwarded him information about his personal story and corresponded briefly with the Nobel Prize winner.
UNITED NATIONS
Some 20,000 participants are gathering this week in Mexico City for the 17th International AIDS Conference to explore why, despite decades of intense efforts in combating AIDS, the epidemic remains as daunting as ever. Last year, 2.7 million people were newly infected with HIV, and two million died from AIDS. Today, 33 million people live with HIV worldwide.
I haven't read Robert Novak's column in 10 years. Back in 1998, he made a comment on CNN -- what it was is not material here -- that I considered beyond the pale. I decided I could henceforth do without his opinions and insights. He impressed me as a distinctly disagreeable man. And that was well before he outed covert CIA agent Valerie Plame.
On a hot summer day, my 22-year-old daughter paused from reading the local paper. She proclaimed that rising oil prices were good for America. How so? I asked.
CRIME IN LATIN AMERICA
The loud cheers that have met the Brazilian film Elite Squad (Tropa de Elite), soon to be released in this country, provide as good an image of attitudes toward the rule of law in Latin America as any sociological treatise. The film is a disturbing semi-fictional account of the activities of a police battalion in charge of fighting drug traffickers in the slums of Rio. It has become a phenomenon in Brazil, where 11 million people have seen the film, either at the cinema or through illegal copies...
POLITICS
I t's awfully early for John McCain to be running such a desperate, ugly campaign against Barack Obama. But I guess it's useful for Democrats to get a reminder that the Republican Party plays presidential politics by the same moral code that guided the bad-boy Oakland Raiders in their heyday: ``Just win, baby.''
SENATE
Senators are great glad-handers, not just with their constituents but with each other. Every time a vote is called, they mill around in front of the rostrum, grabbing hands and shoulders, or patting each other's back. But, as my colleague Dana Milbank noted, it was a poignant moment last week when Ted Stevens of Alaska, indicted for accepting unreported favors from an oilman friend, walked over to Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who uses a wheelchair because of age and illness, in search of support...
PRESIDENTIAL RACE
Apparently, Barack Obama sells. According to The New York Post, the July 21 New Yorker magazine issue with the satiric cover cartoon of Barack as an Islamist and wife Michelle as an armed militant sold 75,000 newsstand copies, compared with an average 43,000. Time magazine, the leading newsweekly, says its five covers this year featuring Obama, Hillary Clinton or both sold either ''significantly'' above average or above average. (Its single John McCain cover sold below average.) Time's 2006 Obama...
IMMIGRATION
Pray that you never need an advocate as much as those caught up in the Agriprocessors immigration raid in Postville, Iowa. A lot of people are feeling soiled by the raid, which officials at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement initially bragged was the largest such operation in immigration history. Almost 400 people were scooped up and shuffled in shackles to a fairground designed to hold cattle.
`What is it about George W. Bush that makes you want to serve him?'' I have gone forward and back for awhile now trying to figure out where today's rant should begin, but I find that I cannot get past that question. It was posed by Monica Goodling, an aide to then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, to job seekers at the Department of
Cuba's July 26th anniversary has always been an occasion for the glorification of Fidel Castro and the revolutionary process he initiated in 1953 at Santiago's Moncada garrison. This year at Moncada, as last year in Camagüey, Raúl Castro spoke in his brother's place, hewing to many of the themes that for decades have been standard for the event.
FOCUS ON ISRAEL
Predicting the course of events in the Middle East is like trying to look into the future of a chess game in which a hundred players make moves over a dozen boards. The number of possible outcomes became even greater after Wednesday's announcement by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that he will resign following his party's upcoming primaries.
EUTHANASIA
Most inhumanities start small, like the beginning of a tsunami, but then build, as they head toward inevitable and unstoppable destruction.
CULTURE
Let me begin by raising a glass of champagne to the official closing of the math gap. It turns out that girls do not lack the math gene. Nor are they math-phobic. Nor is there any ''intrinsic'' difference -- thank you, Larry Summers -- between the abilities of girls and boys to succeed in the numbers business. There's no reason at all for inequality. In fact, there's no longer inequality.
