MAD MAX TIME:

Eastern Chad is now home for over 250,000 refugees, most of them in camps run by the UN and associated NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations). About 20 percent of the refugees are Chadians, fleeing the increasing violence between Chadian security forces and various rebel factions. Some of the guys with guns are just bandits. These gangs, plus raiders from Darfur, and many of the Chad rebels, prey on the refugee camps, as well as the relief organizations. For example, relief organizations, despite hiring locals as armed guards, have had some 30 of their vehicles stolen. Food supplies and equipment are also taken regularly. The UN wants to send in peacekeepers to guard the refugee camps and the movements of relief supplies and aid workers. The Chad government doesn’t want foreign peacekeepers, but it unable to provide security along the Sudan border. There’s not exactly a war going on along the frontier. It’s more like a breakdown in law and order, and dozens of groups of armed men wandering around stealing whatever they can. These guys are not interested in fighting. If they encounter security forces, or another armed group, they may exchange some fire, and if the other guy doesn’t flee, just move on.

Sigh.

IRAQI PARLIAMENT APPROVES NEW CABINET: That seems like good news. Things seem to me to be proceeding pretty much in accordance with this prediction from last year.

UPDATE: More thoughts here and here.

ALPHECCA NOTES A RARITY: positive media coverage of the NRA convention.

MILBLOGS: A Guantanamo roundup, plus a report from Korea.

THIS IS COOL:

Those “never say die” robots on Mars — NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity — continue to chalk up science at their respective exploration sites.

Looming large for the Opportunity rover at Meridiani Planum is Victoria Crater — a grand bit of territory that’s roughly half a mile (800 meters) in diameter. That’s about six times wider than Endurance Crater, a feature that the rover previously surveyed for several months in 2004, gathering data on rock layers there that were affected by water of long, long ago. . . .

“All of the cameras continue to work remarkably well and are continuing to acquire beautiful images,” said Cornell astronomer Jim Bell, the panoramic camera payload element lead for the Mars Exploration Rovers. “They have proven to be extremely robust to the extreme conditions on the Martian surface … large temperature swings, fine dust everywhere, large cosmic ray flux,” he told Space.com.

Since the twin rovers independently landed on Mars in January 2004, Spirit’s cameras have taken about 82,000 pictures. Opportunity has taken about 71,500 pictures, for a combined downlinked image data volume of about 19 gigabytes. About 54,400 of Spirit’s images and 49,500 of Opportunity’s are high-resolution panoramic images, Bell said.

It’s always nice when things work better than expected.

MICHAEL NOVAK didn’t much like The Da Vinci Code.

GOOD NEWS FOR RAMONA DIXON: “The tumor is benign.”

I HAD EMAILED CLAIRE BERLINSKI for an update on goings-on in Turkey, but to no avail. Claire responds:

No, Glenn, I’m in Paris right now — otherwise I would surely be keeping you posted. David, meanwhile, is in Iraq, where evidently, contrary to all expectation, the only excitement to be found is a local sheep going into labor. He and I have both noticed that we have but to leave a country for all the excitement to begin. Given that we are both journalists, this is something of an odd karmic liability.

We’ll both be flying back on Tuesday, and I’ll tell you what we see when we get there. I would remark, though, that the phrase “rallying spontaneously” seems unlikely to me to be correct. This is the Turkish Republic we’re talking about, large rallies are never more spontaneous than Al Gore doing the Macarena. I wish I could tell you more, but right now I’m no closer to it than you are. Stay tuned, though, I’ll let you know when I’m back on the scene.

Changing the subject, I have been at times been tempted to respond to those who disagree with my assessment of the moral climate of the Netherlands, but if the invalidation of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s citizenship does not persuade them, they are not susceptible to persuasion, so I may as well save my time and breath. Still, I think the event should be noted, and I note it thus.

I look forward to hearing more. And maybe we should pay Claire and David to visit places that need pacification!

PERSONALLY, I think it’s fine if professors want to pose topless. (Photos probably NSFW, though not terribly titillating). I think they should be more reluctant to call student bloggers “unAmerican” just for criticizing them over their political views, though.

GOT A PHONE CALL FROM MICHAEL YON tonight. He’s back from Afghanistan, and says he’s really happy to be back in the States. He also reports that the Bill Roggio item I linked earlier is exactly right, and that the opium crop in Afghanistan is swelling. He’s a big fan of some of the alternative crop efforts there, though it’s hard for me to imagine that many crops could compete economically with opium. I’m still not sure why the United States doesn’t start buying the stuff from farmers, which at the very least would drive up prices and put the squeeze on the warlords. Anyway, it was nice to hear that he’s doing well, and we’ll try to get him on another podcast soon. (Our earlier interview with Yon, if you missed it, is here.)

UPDATE: Mark Kleiman rains on my buy-the-opium idea: “It’s an old idea. We tried to buy Khun Sa’s crop in the late 60s. It never works. The market defeats it every time.”

Dang, supply-and-demand! Well, an even better solution would be drug legalization, of course. Then they could sell to Pfizer, not to organized crime. Kleiman has more here.

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE GREEN LINE: Michael Totten blogs from the West Bank. And don’t miss the post-script.

CANNIBALISM IN CONNECTICUT? “Ah, it’s sad, this message that there’s no such thing as a liberal hawk. I wonder what Hillary’s thinking about all this.”

THE RIGHT-WING EXTREMISM seems to be getting out of hand.

HP UPDATE: Well, I finally got to someone at HP last night (my slowness, not theirs) and the computer is on its way back for repairs. They were quite nice. Am I getting special blogger-treatment? Possibly, but I’ve gotten several emails like this one from Gary Wishon: “My HP laptop was picked up FedEx on Tuesday and I was using it again on Thursday PM. With a follow-up call 2hrs after arrival. I’d buy HP again anytime–and have.” And I didn’t get any horror stories like I keep hearing about Dell (though I note that my own experiences with Dell have been mostly good). I’ll keep you posted.

Meanwhile, I’ve demoted the HP to family-room duty and done what I’ve meant to do for a while, putting a dedicated audio PC in the studio. I ordered one of these machines from Sweetwater Sound, and it came today. Had a minor setup glitch, called their support number, and got it taken care of with minimal hassle thanks to a guy named “Mikey.” He even gave me some useful advice on configuring my M-Audio interface box with the computer, which is cool. The new computer is much quieter, which is nice.

UPDATE: Heh.

MORE ON TURKEY:

Turks have had enough of their government’s unwillingness to take responsibility for its actions and its incitement. What some Turks are asking, though, is why the U.S. media is paying so little attention to the crisis. This isn’t just an instance of Turks being Turkey-centric. But it seems that when Islamists threaten to make inroads, U.S. media is all over the story. But when liberals fight back, there is silence. This is not only true in Turkey, but extends to general media sympathy toward Islamism.

Yes, it does seem that way.

BILL ROGGIO REPORTS ON AFGHANISTAN:

The news reports of a major Taliban offensive in southeastern Afghanistan are inaccurate, as Coalition offensives and Taliban attacks have been lumped together to give the impression of a coordinated Taliban assault in multiple provinces. A reading of the various reports indicates that while the Taliban has launched a major strike on a police station and government center in Helmand province and a small scale attack on a police patrol in Ghazni, as well as two suicide attacks against U.S. contractors in Herat and an Afghan army base in Ghazni, the fighting in Kandahar was initiated by Afghan and Coalition security forces during planned operations. Over 100 have been reported killed during the fighting, with 87 being Taliban. Well over half of those killed were killed during the Coalition offensives in Kandahar.

He’ll be reporting from Afghanistan starting next week, as he’s heading over on an embed. Read the whole thing, and this report from StrategyPage has more.

THE BLOG WEEK IN REVIEW PODCAST is up, featuring me, Austin Bay, Eric Umansky, and Tammy Bruce. Topics include the NSA call-tracking program, Egypt, Iran, and more. Shockingly, Eric and I wind up agreeing a lot.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Some pretty good news, according to Mark Tapscott:

National Journal’s Peter Cohn is reporting an agreement among Senate and House negotiators to cap spending in the emergency spending bill for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and Gulf Coast hurricane recovery to $94.5 billion.

The total would include, according to Cohn, the $92.5 billion originally requested by President Bush and approved by the House of Representatives, plus an additional $2.3 billion to fund avian flu preparations. The National Journal is a subscription-only publication, so I can’t provide a link to the full article.

Keep your eye on the ball. Er, and your hand on your wallet.

I THINK THIS IS GOOD NEWS: “Tens of thousands of Turks are rallying spontaneously in favor of secularism and liberalism.”