From Bloomberg:

Uganda will drop the death penalty and life imprisonment for gays in a refined version of an anti- gay bill expected to be ready for presentation to Parliament in two weeks, James Nsaba Buturo, the minister of ethics and integrity, said.

Thursday October 8, 6:30 a.m., the phone rings. I pick up sleepily. "My family! My family! Magda … my family!" I hear sobbing and low, sad groans on the other end. It is our babysitter, Maricel, originally from the Philippines, where two typhoons--"Ondoy" and "Pepeng," as they are known locally--have caused floods that, over the last few weeks, have killed hundreds, left hundreds of thousands homeless, and inflicted damage estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Genocide is much discussed and poorly understood. It is regularly decried, yet little is done to prevent it. It is seen to be one of the most intractable of modern phenomena, a periodic cataclysm that erupts seemingly out of nowhere, often in distant places--Indonesia, Guatemala, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur--where ethnic conflict or hatred is said to have spun out of control. So we can do little about it. Bill Clinton said as much while Serbs were slaughtering Bosnians: "Until these folks get tired of killing each other, bad things will continue to happen."

One could now accurately write that headline more than once a day, unfortunately. But this one stands out for me, mostly because he came from roughly where I grew up, and also because he was an acquaintance of someone close to me. His mission in life was to provide poor people with clean water and other basic infrastructure, and he died for it.

At the opening of this morning's special Security Council session on nukes, Barack Obama opened his remarks with this dramatic vision:

As I said yesterday, this very institution was founded at the dawn of the atomic age, in part because man's capacity to kill had to be contained.  And although we averted a nuclear nightmare during the Cold War, we now face proliferation of a scope and complexity that demands new strategies and new approaches.  Just one nuclear weapon exploded in a city -- be it New York or Moscow; Tokyo or Beijing; London or Paris -- could kill hundreds of thousands of people.  And it would badly destabilize our security, our economies, and our very way of life.

That scenario is not nearly as unimaginable as it should be, which is why we're here today.

Thus far, nothing very surprising is happening here. Obama has been sitting patiently through speeches by leaders from non-permanent Security Council member countries like Austria, Vietnam, Uganda and Burkina Faso (most of whom are running over their 5-minute time limits--though not quite in Qaddafi-esque fashion, thankfully. The King of Kings of Africa is not here this morning, by the way.) Clearly, that's not how Rahm Emanuel, who's looking a little antsy, would like to schedule the president's time. But that's exactly why today's session is so important, if only in a symbolic sense. I suspect many Americans, and even media commentators, underestimate the importance to Obama of nuclear nonproliferation. A speech in Prague certainly isn't as sexy or attention-grabbing as a debate over troop increases. And the hard work of nonproliferation involves a lot of dull meetings and treaties. But Obama really seems to mean it.