Maria Shriver promotes it, Hillary Clinton talks it up in commencement speeches, and the guy who thought it up won a Nobel Peace Prize: microfinance may the world's fastest-growing and arguably trendiest form of lending a hand.

If the news hasn't yet reached you through the media...

Using tracking data from Flightaware.com and Google Maps, this Flickr user has already plotted the exact course of the USAir flight that landed in the Hudson today. (Click on the map for full size.)

This isn't a commercial pilot. This isn't just a regular...

I'm sitting here at Momentum watching Alex Gibney, director of Taxi to the Dark Side, talking about waterboarding, Gitmo, and how America descended into a country willing to torture and even kill people, even if they're innocent (as many Gitmo and Abu Ghraib internees have turned...

In 1973, Victor Jara was Chile's leading singer/songwriter, the local equivalent of Bob Dylan and more.

When Gen. Augusto Pinochet's coup came -- September 11th, 1973 -- tens of thousands of people considered threats to the regime -- activists,...

I noticed something in Obama's and Clinton's choices of language in the Cleveland debate last night, something the newest ads from each campaign manage to illustrate precisely.

Clinton increasingly describes herself as a "fighter" who will "stand up" for people. Checking the transcript, Clinton used the word "fight" or...

Walking the beach in Bocagrande a couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across some Colombian teenagers burying a male friend in the sand.

The Colombian kids, being just like kids everywhere, were giving the guy a large pair of sand breasts and giggling naughtily. Like they were the first ones...

I'm not sure this came out exactly the way the Colombian authorities intended:

Colombia: The Only Risk is Wanting to Stay.

Either it needs work, or somebody inside the Tourism Board is trying to sneak out a warning to others.

I'd say the former, though....

As a lifelong fan of the crudely named and endlessly frustrating Cleveland Indians, I couldn't help but smile to see that folks in Colombia are also willing to turn fellow human beings into mascots for a team that never wins the title.

Ladies and gentlemen, the last-place Cartagena Indians:

I'm traveling around South America for a couple of months, and every day is filled with stuff I never would have imagined otherwise. (Btw, my Spanish isn't very good yet, but estoy aprendiendo. Deal with it.) I'll try to share a few glimpses of what I find here.

You...

Here's a bit from the latest report on the Democratic Republic of the Congo from the International Rescue Committee:

"It was not uncommon to hear accounts of armed groups seizing young women from farms or water points and enslaving them and raping them for one to three months,"...

The floods in Tabasco have left countless people homeless. Nobody knows how many yet. Although 60-70,000 people are in shelters so far.

Certainly hundreds of thousands of people are affected, their homes cut off by the water, flooded, partially destroyed, or simply washed away entirely.

Roughly 20,000...

Whatever you think of the White House or its war strategies, here's a way to help the wounded and disabled veterans who are arguably the Americans most directly on the receiving end:

Nineteen-game Jeopardy!...

Five years ago, the Australian dollar was about worth about US $0.55. (You can look this up here.)

It was hovering around US $0.75 the last couple of times I was down there.

I...

[Added Saturday, Oct. 27th: looking back in advance of a CNN gig tomorrow, the word "cause" in that headline was poorly chosen. I meant "a" probable cause, not "the" probable cause, as you can see from the concluding sentence, but the phrase "contributing factor" or similar would have been much...

That's an actual current Reuters headline.

Princeton professor Eric Maskin shares this year's Nobel Prize in economics with two colleagues; the trio are pioneers in the field of mechanism design theory, which is dedicated to finding ways to make markets work more efficiently and fairly.

Maskin dares to say...

Watching CNN, Friday, 11:14 am PT, as they're coming back from a commercial.

"Three of the stories we're working on..." the anchor intones, highlighting these:

• Al Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize,
• Ted Kennedy undergoes surgery, and
• "Eight search warrants have been served in the...

February, 1998-- I'm standing at one of the Jeopardy! contestant podiums, which are wider and deeper than they look on TV. The black plastic buzzer feels cold in my hand. Though glowing with color from remote-controlled spotlights, the room is remarkably quiet and still.

I can't see my opponents...

Courtesy of the AP, here's a glimpse of Bush's notes at his press conference yesterday, published over at Arianna's place:

I took a few minutes with Photoshop, and now here are the same notes, rotated and made a little clearer, as if...

Hard to believe it, but a television news anchor just displayed some genuine integrity and humility. Whatever the cause -- be it behind-the-scenes discussions, pressure from activists, including this site's founder, or genuine contrition, Chuck Roberts just issued the following apology while interviewing Ned Lamont (transcript mine, via...