Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

"Threats to UN's survival are empty: even from the US, because all members need the UN for different reasons and all make use of it in different ways. They would reinvent it if they didn't have it. The UN is indispensable to the US and to others if only as a scapegoat for their own failings and as an agency of last resort to do the jobs they don't want to do." Alison Broinowski

"If New Orleans is starting to look like a Third World landscape, it is because this IS a strip of the Third World in America’s own backyard. Mississippi, with over 20% of its people living in poverty, is one of the poorest states in the Union. While many of the wealthy have been able to slip out under their own power, the poor have been left to fend for themselves. George W Bush’s response has been described as pathetic and cowardly; it is My Pet Goat II. It is now emerging that Federal funding to repair and improve levees and other emergency services was cut because of priority given to the Iraq war." Stephen Smith

"Revelations last week by Richard Clarke - Bush's counter-terrorism guru until just before the Iraq invasion - could destroy the Bush presidency. I asked Webdiarist Kerryn Higgs, a Australian living in New York who's been glued to live TV coverage of Clarke's evidence to the September 11 inquiry, to report the controversy." Kerryn Higgs