From the New York Times…

A three-judge panel has tentatively ordered California to reduce the population of its desperately overcrowded prisons by as much as one-third, or as many as 55,000 prisoners, over the next three years. The ruling was an extreme step — but a necessary one. Like many states, California is putting too many people behind bars for too long, and it doesn’t have the money to build more facilities.

From the AP…

Rebels from the Lord’s Resistance Army sent torture victims — including a man whose back was sliced with a machete — to warn the people of this Congolese town they would be next.

The town’s three policemen fled and there was no response from the military and U.N. peacekeepers to the increasingly panicked pleas for help. That’s when residents realized they were on their own.

“We were sending warnings and begging for help practically every day for two weeks. And nothing happened,” said community leader Nicolas Akoyo Efudha. “We finally understood that we were abandoned — in danger and without protection.”

So Akoyo called a town meeting and told everyone to bring whatever weapons they had: pre-World War II rifles, homemade shotguns, lances, swords, machetes, hunting knives, bows with sheaths of poisoned arrows.

The women came armed with kitchen knives and log-sized wooden pestles used to pound yams into flour.

Since then, the residents of Bangadi have successfully driven off two attacks by the Ugandan rebels, who have killed at least 900 people in this remote northeastern corner of Congo over the past seven weeks.

It is commonly said that Africa suffers from too much tribalism. But the truth is that Africa don’t have enough tribalism. What passes for tribalism in Africa is really nothing more then racism.

A racist looks down on another ethnic group and favors his own when the cost of doing so are not all that great. A tribalist will fight for his tribe and listen to his tribal leaders. He will consider his own life as being worth little compared to the greater good of his tribe. A tribalist can be a racist, but just because one is a racist does not make you a tribalist.

The more you read about current African affairs, the more you will realize that there are plenty of racists in Africa and not many tribalist. An ethnic group that actually sticks together and helps each other out when the times gets tough is a rare thing in Africa. And when one does, they wield power all out of proportion to their numbers. Look at Rwanda for example.

From Danger Room….

Is the CIA’s controversial drone war on Pakistani militants actually being flown out of Pakistan itself?

That’s the apparent bombshell dropped Thursday by Senator Diane Feinstein, during a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing. Depending on who you ask, it’s either a king-sized security breach, or a ho-hum replay of the press has already reported.

The fact that some media people may have already figured that out is irrelevant. Anybody with any brains has already figured out that Pakistan and the US had some kind of secret back door deal. And by the same token, everyone who had any brains understood why everything was being kept hush hush, and it was not to hide anything from the US people. By shooting her mouth off she made Obama’s job harder.

I believe that the American people have a right to know who their country is fighting and killing. But I don’t believe they have a right to know where the attacks are being flown from. Keeping such information hidden has always been part of warfare.