Today, U.S. intelligence officials will give closed-door briefings to members of Congress about North Korea’s role in building a reactor in Syria. (Israel, it’s been confirmed, destroyed that nuclear facility with their air-strikes last September.)

Why are the briefings taking place now? This morning the New York Times’s David Sanger speculated that Vice President Cheney is trying to scuttle the six-party disarmament talks by highlighting Pyongyang’s proliferant behavior. Others have floated more intriguing theories. For example, Jon Wolfsthal, an analyst from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, thinks the Bush administration is releasing the information at this time to rescue its tentative deal with the North Koreans by letting them off the hook. “If it turns out we have them dead to rights -- that we have enough information on our own -- then we can eliminate this as a point of contention,” he says. “Maybe we don’t need to negotiate transparency with North Korea because we already know enough.” 

Political turmoil and the retreat of freedom have managed to make people hungry even in places where many previously were not. Heading the U.N.’s list of countries where people are most undernourished, for instance, is Zimbabwe. When the country became independent in 1980 it had, according to the Index of Economic Freedom, “extensive natural resources, a diversified economy, a well developed infrastructure, and an advanced financial sector,” as well as networks of productive farms. But the increasingly repressive regime of strongman Robert Mugabe has destroyed property rights, allowed favored government officials to seize control of farm lands, and been hostile to Western investment, in the process transforming the country “from the breadbasket of Africa into a starving, destitute tyranny,” according to the Index of Economic Freedom.

In many places, hunger is prevalent even though natural resources are plentiful. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where two-thirds of the country’s 62 million people are undernourished, citizens lived amid constant chaos after war broke out in the mid-1990s and the country became a battle ground for troops from eight nations in the so-called African World War, in which more than 5 million people died mostly from starvation and disease. Tragically but perhaps not surprisingly, despite abundant resources including copper, cobalt and diamonds, as well as “enormous agricultural potential” according to the United Nations, the DRC is one of the world’s poorest countries, where production of food has declined some 40 percent since war broke out.

My own experience as mother started out in the overprotective mode. Fine when they are tiny tots and need to be watched, but thankfully by the time they were young adolescents, I had calmed. Living in one of the most populated parts of a large city, was an opportunity for each to develop independence and for me to develop trust.

Starting with being allowed to go to the bus stop alone around age 7 and go down to the little store in the next building to buy a snack or last minute grocery need, then going to the park or further adventures on foot or by bus. They both started to develop a sense of their place. They new which neighbors would always have an eye for them, which were a little off their kilter and which to avoid as much as possible. They developed playground friendships with whoever might be playing in the park (almost always under their own parents watchful eyes.)

I am sure there were parents that thought, my poor kids must be terribly neglected when their mother or father wasn't at the park with them most days. Safe simply must be balanced with freedom.