Reuters:

The United Nations Security Council will hold a special meeting on Saturday on the crisis between Israel and the Palestinians, the U.N. press office said.

The meeting was set for 7 p.m. EST (2400 GMT).

Israel launched a ground offensive in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, sending tanks and infantry into battle with Hamas fighters who have defied eight days of deadly air strikes with salvos of rocket fire into Israeli towns.

UPDATE: More from the Associated Press:

[Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon] said in a statement that he was "deeply concerned over the serious further escalation" of violence in Gaza. The statement said Ban had spoken with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert "and conveyed his extreme concern and disappointment" at the invasion. ...

Ban continued to urge key world leaders to intensify efforts to achieve an immediate Israeli-Hamas cease-fire that includes international monitors to enforce a truce and possibly to protect Palestinian civilians.

On a personal note: I grew up in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war. My mother is Jewish American, my father was Christian Lebanese. I lived through the kind of terrible strife that is all too common in the Mideast and I recognize the intricacy (and intractability) of the situation there.

The wide disparity of views in the blogosphere demonstrates how difficult it is to find moral clarity when bombs start falling. But one thing is indisputable: civilians on all sides always bear the brunt of these flare-ups.

After witnessing so many of these bloody paroxysms I hope and pray that I live to see an end to the seemingly endless cycle of Mideast violence.<!--break-->

Last month, I wrote about a heinous attack on Afghan schoolgirls and linked to this NYT story.

The police in Kandahar have arrested 10 Taliban militants they said were involved in an attack earlier this month on a group of Afghan schoolgirls whose faces were doused with acid, officials in Kandahar said Tuesday.

The officials said that the militants, who were Afghan citizens, had confessed to their involvement in the attack on the schoolgirls and their teachers on Nov. 12 and that a high-ranking member of the Taliban had paid the militants 100,000 Pakistani rupees for each of the girls they managed to burn.

Here's a video about the incident (hat tip: Huffington Post):

And here's another video about the effects of these attacks:

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Yesterday I attended an Internet and Politics conference convened by Harvard's Berkman Center. Berkman's mission is to "explore and understand cyberspace; to study its development, dynamics, norms, and standards." I was on a panel to discuss various aspects of online mobilization. I relayed some of my experiences working with Hillary Clinton and the challenges (and opportunities) for campaigns and organizations communicating, fundraising and organizing using the web.

Toward the end of the panel discussion, I said there's a tendency to expect too much of the medium and that despite the dramatic growth of the Internet as a political tool, we have a long way to go before it becomes a lever of true power for individuals and a mechanism for sweeping reform. As an example, I recounted the horrific story of Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow, a 13-year-old Somali girl who was gang-raped and then stoned to death in a packed stadium as "punishment" for adultery, an unfathomably cruel fate for this innocent child.

I noted that if we can't stop something like that using the Internet, then we should acknowledge the medium's limitations. I was being a bit hyperbolic of course - I realize that it'll take a lot more than technology to address the atrocities that take place across the globe and to deal with the savage elements of human nature. But the point stands that a critical measure of the Internet's role is how effectively it is used to combat violence, poverty, hunger, and the many ills that plague our planet. That question is addressed in depth in CauseWired, a new book by Tom Watson (a friend and fellow blogger). Tom offers insight into how a new generation is using technology for advocacy and activism, covering everything from Kiva and DonorsChoose to Facebook Causes and other aspects of the new "wired philanthropy." <!--break-->One universal aspect of effective activism is raising awareness and there's no doubt that the web is an ideal tool to do that, something I wrote about in a recent post about the Internet-enabled global conversation:

For the first time, we are thinking aloud unfettered and unfiltered by mass media gatekeepers. Events, information, words and deeds that a decade ago were discussed and contextualized statically in print or through the controlled funnel of television and radio, are now subjected to instantaneous interpretation and free-association by millions of citizens unencumbered by the media's constraints, aided by the optional - and liberating - cloak of anonymity.

This is transformative, not just because it is a web-driven enhancement of traditional political and social mechanisms (as we've seen with organizing and fundraising) but because it is a radically different way that the world processes information and understands itself. If there's one thing that makes the 2008 election an inflection point, it is this: that the context, perception, and course of events is fundamentally changed by the collective behavior of the Internet's innumerable opinion-makers. Every piece of news and information is instantly processed by the combined brain power of millions, events are interpreted in new and unpredictable ways, observations transformed into beliefs, thoughts into reality. Ideas and opinions flow from the ground up, insights and inferences, speculation and extrapolation are put forth, then looped and re-looped on a previously unimaginable scale, conventional wisdom created in hours and minutes.

There's no better example of the web's awareness-raising function than this post from Dispatch's Mark Goldberg in honor of the 60th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights:

Witness is an international non-profit organization that uses video and online technologies to shine a light on human rights abuses around the world. For the 60th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights, Witness staff discuss some of the videos and images that have touched them over the past few years. At the end of the video, viewers are asked what image has opened our eyes to human rights. ... What images most symbolize human rights to you? Send an email to undispatch AT gmail.com and we will update this post with your response. Please indicate if you would like to keep your response anonymous.

I strongly encourage you to read Mark's entire post, to see the accompanying videos and images, and to submit your own. They are a moving - and disturbing - reminder of what we are up against. Let's hope that as the Internet becomes more central to communication and organization, it will enable us to work together to finally bring this kind of brutality to an end.

As the global financial crisis deepens, one question being debated is how the world will deal with urgent environmental issues.

On the one hand, we can seek a "green transformation" through public investment:

In the face of economic catastrophe, yesterday's controversial assertion has become today's conventional economic wisdom. That lack of regulation is one root of the current depression is not only the view of liberals and moderates, but also of sensible conservatives. And the need for public investment to fight the depression is no longer in doubt either. There are really only two tools in the conventional economic toolbox to fight a depression: lower interest rates, and public investment. Given that real interest rates are close to zero, that doesn't leave a whole lot of alternatives. ...

The bottom line is that we have about $275 billion a year we could productively invest in a green transformation, rising over the course of 20 years to $475 billion, and then dropping down to $265 billion for a decade after the transformation was complete, to pay off the last of the "green debt." Those subsidies would make up for any difference in cost between green energy and dirty energy.

On the other hand, governments can resort to short-term economic fixes over long-term environmental solutions:

The world must avoid a "cheap and dirty" fix for the economy that could undermine the fight against global warming, the U.N.'s top climate official said on Sunday.

Yvo de Boer said the world risked a second financial crisis if governments reacted to economic slowdown by building cheap, high-polluting coal-fired power plants that might then have to be scrapped as climate impacts hit.

"What concerns me most is that the financial crisis will lead to a second set of bad investment decisions," he told a news conference before Dec. 1-12 talks involving 186 nations working on a new climate treaty.

"I hope that the second financial crisis is not going to have its origins in bad energy loans," he said.

Let's hope we have the foresight to heed De Boer's warning.
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