From ABC Rural:

The United Nations has hailed the potato as a potential solution to solving the looming global food shortage.

With wheat and rice supplies declining, the UN is encouraging low-income countries to grow more potatoes to cover the food shortfall.

It's also declared 2008 as the International Year of the Potato to try and raise awareness of how important the humble spud is to agriculture and the economy.

The International Year of the Potato also happens to have a fantastic website, from which I learned many facts dispelling my previous assumption that the potato consisted simply of "empty carbs." For instance,

They have the highest protein content (around 2.1 percent on a fresh weight basis) in the family of root and tuber crops, and protein of a fairly high quality, with an amino-acid pattern that is well matched to human requirements. They are also very rich in vitamin C - a single medium-sized potato contains about half the recommended daily intake - and contain a fifth of the recommended daily value of potassium.

Nutritious, delicious, and potentially life-saving.

Will tomorrow finally be the day that ends 20 long years of war and terrorism in Northern Uganda? According to Reuters,

Uganda's fugitive guerrilla Joseph Kony will meet mediators on Saturday on the Sudan-Congo border and may even sign a final peace deal, a rebel negotiator said on Wednesday.

But the leader of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) still wants more details on how Uganda's government plans to use traditional reconciliation rituals to help him avoid prosecution for war crimes by the International Criminal Court.

But after spurning the peace process a month ago, ostensibly for very much the same reasons, Kony's credibility -- already at the level of an indicted mass murderer -- is, to say the least, suspect. Moreover, it is unclear how the "peace vs. justice" stalemate has advanced in the last month: the Ugandan government -- and even some of Kony's victims -- are willing to drop the ICC indictments in favor of means of traditional justice, but the ICC insists that Uganda is legally obliged to hand over Kony. Kony is calling for a "workshop" to address the issue, but it is unlikely that he will be appeased by anything less than getting the ICC out of the picture entirely.

In a new report, the ENOUGH project proposes the option of offering Kony exile -- while using ICC indictment as a credible stick to end his nefarious influence in the region. ENOUGH is rightly skeptical of Kony's intentions, and the report prioritizes restoring peace and security over securing a formal peace deal with Kony, which, in light of his past unreliability, seems a very sober strategy.

Spencer Ackerman says it well, "The Burmese Junta does what juntas everywhere do...using the catastrophe that killed perhaps as many as 100,000 people -- a death toll too large to be comprehensible -- as a shakedown opportunity." Tragic, but true. Consider this:

"Burma's ruling military junta today impounded United Nations food shipments bound for the storm-ravaged Irrawaddy Delta, and U.N. officials said they would suspend further aid to the country in response.

Two planes carrying about 76,000 pounds of high-energy biscuits landed in Rangoon today, but were forced to offload into a government-controlled warehouse, said Paul Risley, a spokesman for the U.N.'s World Food Program in Bangkok. Risley said UN officials were told that only Burma's minister for social welfare could release the aid for distribution.