Somalia is a place most Americans would like to forget about.  The disastrous mission there in the 1990s left many Americans and many times more Somalis dead and little accomplished.  Dan Joseph, the chief of the Africa desk at Voice of America has co-authored a book, Inside Al-Shabaab following governance in Somalia is went from bad to worse to today’s stalemate.  2 things have changed in the past 15 years, more American drones in the sky and more American Special Forces boots on the ground.

The present state of America’s diplomatic romance with North Korea seems to have both sides playing hard to get.  Although there is still talk of another Donald Trump-Kim Jong Un summit, just getting second-level diplomats in the same room is off the table for now.  What does this mean?  Bruce Bennett of the RAND Corporation, one of America’s top Korea-watchers has lots of insights, if no clear answer to the what’s next question. Meanwhile, Bennett says evidence suggests the North Koreans are stalling while they make their nuclear arsenal even stronger.

It was called America’s Main Street, the Mother Road and the Will Rogers Highway, US Route 66, the highway that ran from Chicago to Santa Monica, from NM’s eastern border with TX to its western edge at AZ.  It was well-traveled and well known, but it took singer pianist Nat King Cole to put Route 66 on more than just roadmaps.  Photographer Terrence Moore traversed Route 66 many times, took his pics, got his kicks and shares the pleasures with us.

When reporter Kathleen McLaughlin first went to China, she needed regular doses of blood plasma, but in China at that time, the odds on any medication were only about 50-50 that it was both safe and effective.  So she smuggled in her own, but as a reporter for the Guardian, she  wondered, what’s the impact of defective Chinese medicines around the world.  In Tanzania, where malaria is a widespread problem, those 50-50 odds were leaving a lot of patients ill-treated or dead.  

New Mexico and Louisiana are polar opposites in climate.  Louisiana is wet and NM is bone dry. But their public schools face very similar problems caused by deep poverty and complicated diversity. Julia Kaufman of the RAND Corporation has been monitoring school reforms in Louisiana.

Today’s America has come to this: teaching in the public schools, like harvesting green chiles, is a job nowhere nearly enough Americans want to do -- especially in low-paying states like New Mexico.  So, there are established pipelines for foreign teachers, but what should be a win-win for everybody – mostly good, dedicated teachers, being paid better than they would be at home -- has been corrupted.  Lauren Villagran of Searchlight NM tells a story of indentured servitude.

It was a blue, blue year in New Mexico’s electoral politics, as Democrats swept all the big statewide and Federal races.  In most of the races, the Democrat not only won, but won big, but it was 2 very tight races that may have delivered the most interesting messages.  New Mexico’s premier political pollster Brian Sanderoff on the 2018 elections in New Mexico.

If elections are close, and the vote count runs late, and a lot of Republican trees fall from the House of Representatives after many folks watching returns on TV have gone to bed, how loud is the political sound?  Will the late Blue Wave change anything about Washington politics. Veteran political pollster and analyst John Zogby considers what happened in the midterm elections.

As he turned into the homestretch of his second and final season as California’s Governor, Jerry Brown created a suitable occasion to celebrate an important aspect of his work: a Global Climate Action Summit,  Mark Hertsgaard of The Nation covered the event and spoke with Brown and considers how Green Was this Governor?  And then there’s the question many of the Summit attendees were pondering -- how long will Green Spring politics survive in the coal, gas and oil-fired winter of Donald Trump?