Great job on this blog! At least we know some one does care about what's happening in other countries.

First time I have seen this exposure to world inform concerning US. Please keep this web page.

Go Hugo! Hugo Chavez also said he wanted to help poor americans with free heating oil for the winter.that ought fry Dubya. A leader willing to do more than lip service,and a photo shoot with his sleeves rolled up.no wonder he's a threat. It's rare that any paper prints info about that other world, the one outside of the USA.

Chavez's idea of the Oil Company acting as a redistributor of wealth isn't that crazy or far fetched. What he's talking about is ownership of the oil company by millions of "shareholders". Only in this case the average Venezeulan gets a share just by being alive. In Alberta, Canada, huge oil royalty revenues are being shared amongst the population with special bonus checks from the government this fall ... There's no big out cry about socialism there. Far from it.

In a way its not that different from George Bush talking about a nation of "owners". Only the nation shares in the ownership of its resources....

What benefit are ordinary American's getting from the big profits of American Oil Companies? The opportunity to provide them with more tax breaks and research grants?

"When asked about Venezuela's oil company, Chavez didn't deny that it loses money."

Oil is over $60US per barrel and the oil company is losing money? That alone is quite an accomplishment!

I've got my fair share of problems with modern media, but look at these stories - only #1 is newsworthy. Stories 4 and 5 aren't news; of course an anti-U.S. despot makes anti-U.S. comments and of course a tribal society king has multiple wives. Story 3 doesn't seem to have hard facts behind it, and story 2 is a logical consequence of the bombings.

What these stories DO have is feature potential - how do different kind of socities react differently to terrorist attacks, and why? Have local women always complained about multiple wives in Swaziland, or is this a new example of free speech? Why doesn't anybody reliable keep track of civilian casualities in Iraq - because it's impossible given the circumstances, or for some other reason?

That's where thses stories could become news, but feature reporting takes a bit of time. Here's hoping someone is pursuing quality angles to these stories that may not merit immediate reporting in U.S. outlets, but could still be valuable.

I am about to get a check from the State of Alaska for royalties from the sale of oil. Hard to see how different this is from what Hugo is crowing about.

The real issues here are the effects of deflation especially on home prices. Remember its consumer spending that has driven the economy. And the lack of reporting on Iraqi casualities has astonded me. I recall some early reporting on how Iraqis were dying less often after the invasion than they were under Saddam. Sure seems like noone is making those claims anymore.

13 wives, its enough to make ones head hurt just contemplating the ins and outs. When does it become a harem?

Nobody knows in America
Puerto Rico's in America!

Isn't it curious that last week's 'shootout' by FBI agents killing Puerto Rican nationalist (and fugitive) Filiberto Ojeda Rios, 72, received 'top-o'-the-fold' on-line coverage from BBC, yet it was very hard to find coverage from U.S. MSM. This was an event with domestic AND international repercussions that took place here at home. Or, do many among us, including the media, unconsciously carry some baggage here.

..".would steer the continent away from policies of "social exclusion," his label for U.S. priorities of free trade and electoral democracy."

I won't argue with the free trade part, but what kind of evidence do you use to claim that the US gov cares about electoral democracy. The historical evidence shows something else: the US decides who they want to be the leader of foreign countries: if elections yield the "right" kind of leaders (those who are pro-business), then we are all for democracy. If democratic elections bring the "wrong" kind of leaders (those who favor people over money) then anything goes: election manipulation (Beirut), support of coup d'etat (Venezuela), assassination (Chile), and if all else fails: invasion (Panama, Iraq). So, please, spare us the mantra. Know your history.

When the American media insulates us from foreign news, we are unable to understand and provide context to important issues that shape this country. How can we intelligently discuss CAFTA or immigration without knowing the personalities, culture and current events that shape the Carribean and Latin America. To compensate for our ignorance, we assume that our government has all the answers, and bindly accept their proposed solutions.

This post brings up the interesting question of what is newsworthy and what criteria news organizations use to determine what they do or don't cover. It's an inherently subjective decision but it would be interesting to know what stated standards for relevance and significance the Post has, if any, or what they think the appropriate balance between foreign and domestic reporting is, and what their justification is. Is this based on editorial instinct, market research of reader interest, a numerical relevance scale?

Great job, Jeff, especially about the Iraq body count thing. It's really a (bad) joke the way the American media don't report anything about Iraqi dead. We'd (apparently) rather see flags waving in the corner of Fox TV.

Call me a sexist pig but I found the Swazi thing sort of amusing. Fact is the girl probably has it better as King Toot's wife than having to slog it out in the fields; she can probably help her family and village too. It would be nice if one of his wives could become 1/100th as famous as Princess Di and do an AIDS push or something. But of course, wrong color, wrong continent... at least for now. Maybe Bono should visit.

Keep up the good work!

Kudos to the invaluable Jeff Morley for keeping a reality check lifeline to the rest of the world for the Post. That said, other than the Iraqi deaths, these seem like odd picks for the uncovered stories.

[As for #1 - The numbers seem more like an adjustment than a popping of a housing bubble. 5% loss in value over 15 months - if that happened here (and it might well soon), I'd be neither surprised nor that crushed.]

My picks for "uncovered stories" by the US press would still be ones where they self-censored news about our own country.

#1 - How the neocons happily sold out our foreign policy to Iran and played right into their hands. This story went nowhere here. Why is that?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1224075,00.html

#2 - How the Senate promised Phase II of the Iraq Intelligence hearings - about the White House's *use* of the info, and then promptly forgot about it after the election. Not a peep about that in the US media. Why is that?

#3 - How 50% of the country favors impeachment if the president lied to the country about the threat from Iraq, and that 57% of us say he indeed did just that. The total lack of coverage of these points of view seems like an organized attempt by the media-Washington establishment (see charter member Judy Miller) to leave the average American assuming he must just have his facts wrong, since nothing is happening on that front.

http://democrats.com/bush-impeachment-poll-1

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/PollVault/story?id=885745

#4 - David Safavian who? If a top Clinton Administration official had resigned on a Friday and was arrested for obstruction of justice and lying to federal investigators on a Monday, would it not have dominated the front page for weeks? Ask ten of your neighbors who this man is. If two of them know, I'll buy you lunch. This story was one-day-and-out two weeks ago, with a brief cameo appearance deep in a recent Jack Abramoff piece.

#5 - The content of the Iraqi insurgency. Night after night, the president reports that we are "fighting an ideology of terror in Iraq" - and our obsequious state-run media feeds these mantras to us undigested. Yet study after analysis after General's off-the-cuff comment confirms that over 90% of the insurgency is simply a Sunni-Shiite struggle for power. These people no more know where Topeka is than have any desire or plan to attack the US homeland. Yet Mr. Bush keeps telling us that we are "fighting them there so that we do not have to fight them here". WHOM? FIGHTING WHOM? Does the media ever ask? Do they ever put the president's latest disinformational comments into the context of known facts? Not a chance.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0923/dailyUpdate.html

Conclusion: I have long heard the axiom "truth is the first casualty of war", but does our passive media have to work overtime to enforce it? Apparently they feel they have to. I wonder why?