Celia Dugger has a good piece in this morning's Times about the diamond trade in Zimbabwe. The story is, predictably, depressing.

In the mid-1950s, a photographer named Robert Frank, lately emigrated from Switzerland, drove around the United States to see and to join his new country. He shot pictures. The results, or his choices among them, were published in a book of eighty-three photos called The Americans, which was an immediate and lasting success. The book was not only a unique way for a newcomer to learn about his new home: in some ways it showed a social candor that was as yet unusual in photography. In his introduction to the book, Jack Kerouac wrote: "Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film." We can still look over Frank’s shoulder and see that poem in the making.

More atrocious details from the Guinean junta's recent crackdown on protesters—of women knifed, whipped, and raped repeatedly by soldiers—surfaced in the Times yesterday. Until recently, the former French colony of approximately 10 million had a reputation for being among the most stable of its West African neighbors.

The Washington Post takes stock of Obama's environmental record to date and finds it pretty lackluster. I don't quite agree.

The basic logic behind a cap-and-trade system or carbon tax is to put a price on one of the major hidden costs, or externalities, created by fossil-fuel use: namely, the greenhouse-gas emissions that are causing climate change. But global warming isn't the only hidden cost of our fossil-fuel economy. There are also the health impacts from air pollution. The devastation caused by mountaintop-removal mining in Appalachia. Arguably, the military costs involved with maintaining a presence in the Middle East.

Of all the questions about climate policy, one of the biggest is whether a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases will even work. Will it actually and tangibly reduce emissions? The only real-world example we have is the EU's Emissions Trading System, set up in 2005.

Satipo, Amazon Basin, Peru--On the fourth floor of the National Museum in Lima, there's a photo exhibit of Peru's long "dirty war" against the leftist Shining Path guerrillas during the 1980s and '90s. A series of wall-sized photographs illustrate two decades of bombings, roundups, secret arrests, and massacres that left 70,000 dead.

If the news reports are accurate, Senator Ken Salazar of Colorado has been tapped by Barack Obama to head up the Department of Interior. Let's hope he knows what he's getting into. After the last eight years, the Interior Department has become fairly dysfunctional, and this may end up being one of the most difficult jobs in the Obama administration—not to mention one that gets remarkably little attention. 

On a hot spring evening in early May--the kind that elicits nervous global-warming jokes--a crowd of powerful and wealthy people are gathered at a cocktail party in the banquet hall in the Hart Senate Office building on Capitol Hill, sipping wine and talking carbon.

Gaborone, the capital of Botswana, doesn't come up in the news very often. And why would it? There's no war or ethnic strife. The city is poor, but not outlandishly so--in fact, thanks to a stable government and a lucrative mining industry, Botswana is one of Africa's rare economic success stories. All the same, Gaborone has a problem: What was once a town of 17,000 people in the 1970s has ballooned into a city of 186,000 today, and is expected to swell to 500,000 by 2020--a staggering increase by any measure.

Existential Crisis