Sunday digest

- These are Cuba's "Damas de Blanco", or "Ladies in White", who peacefully protest every Sunday in Havana. They are the mothers, wives and daughters of political prisoners rounded up by Castro and jailed for up to twenty years for crimes such as collecting signatures to lobby support for a referendum on Cuba's political system. Despite the authorities' best efforts, harassment and intimidation have not deterred these courageous women.

A very important look at dissent under Castro in 2006, here.

- This morning on FOX News Sunday, a panel discussed the myriad of ways that the American aviation system is vulnerable to attack nearly five years after 9/11 (see here.) Although I think it's tremendously important to better mobilize public support for more spending on transportation security (especially here in Canada where issues like the right kind of government babysitting programs seem to be more important than national security), and the media has an important role to play in that, I have some difficulty when the press are overly specific about the exact weaknesses. Any terrorist wanting to know how to get around the system currently in place just had to watch FOX today to get a pretty good idea of what they ought to do in order to have pretty decent odds of success. In my view, that's irresponsible coverage.

- On that note, a reminder here that you can't have any liberties or freedoms for the government to infringe upon if you're a victim of a fatal terrorist attack.

- It's becoming obvious that the US is going to be in Iraq until at least the end of the decade, unless the cut-and-run crowd (the Democratic leadership plus Chuck Hagel) get their way. Colin Powell's Pottery Barn analogy - "you break it, you buy it" - is looking increasingly prescient concerning Iraq. Myself, I continue to take the same position as Liberal Party of Canada leadership front-runner Michael Ignatieff, which is that given what we knew at the time, regime change in Iraq was both justified and necessary. As difficult as it gets, it's tremendously important that the considerable progress made thus far not be undone by maniacs like this .