OxBlog

Wednesday, May 19, 2004

# Posted 10:16 AM by Patrick Belton  

TODAY'S READING MATERIAL ROUND-UP: Christopher Hitchens is responding to Seymour Hersh's New Yorker piece, and ends by noting
So a Sarin-infected device is exploded in Iraq, and across the border in Jordan the authorities say that nerve and gas weapons have been discovered for use against them by the followers of Zarqawi, who was in Baghdad well before the invasion. Where, one idly inquires, did these toys come from? No, it couldn't be. …
On India, the editor of the Hindu, currently a journalism fellow at the Kennedy School, calls Sonia's rejection of her proferred crown an 'ennobling moment for Indian democracy', even though another perspective might see in it an unwarranted legitimation of precisely the nativist claims the BJP was making against her during the campaign - which, in turn, do not ennoble Indian democracy, particularly. Also on India, TNR's Sunil Khilnani reviews Nehru's legacy of state secularism, and in the Wapo, Sebastian Mallaby points out that interpretations of the past election notwithstanding, the poorest of the poor in rural India area are actually doing rather better thanks to the last growth spurt:
People don't seem to have noticed that, whereas India's poverty rate stuck obstinately above 50 percent during the low-growth 1960s and 1970s, it is now falling precipitously: To 36 percent in the government's household survey of 1993-94; to 29 percent in the next survey, six years later. The idea that the countryside has not benefited is simply spurious. In the interval between the two most recent surveys, rural poverty fell from 37 percent to 30 percent.
A number of commentators take the opportunity of the fiftieth anniversary of Brown to comment on racial equality in today's America. The centrist DLC uses the anniversary to endorse the No Child Left Behind Act, while the San Francisco Chronicle tells the story of black schoolchildren who were the first to enter previously segregated schools.

Elsewhere, Slate's William Salletan introduces 'Kerryisms', triumphantly proclaiming 'This one can't talk, either!' The NYT Book Review looks at books on China, books on integration, and Somalia. The New York Review of Books looks at Saul Bellow and Osama. In the Prospect, Lord Falconer and friends discuss Labour's constitutional reforms. And The Onion takes a trip to my beloved Dearborn, Michigan.
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