In Beijing, where I am now, it is 94 degrees and super humid — and I know we just won’t have the smack of thunder and rain to break the mood like DC just had.

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack has backed up and apologized to the recently resigned/fired USDA Georgia Rural Development Director Shirley Sherrod. And he’s offered her a new job, in his words “a unique opportunity” — the outlines of which have not yet been made public.

While much of the news from South Asia in the past few days has dealt with this week’s Kabul conference on Afghanistan’s future, the New York Times published a fascinating piece yesterday on the importance of water as a source of tension between Pakistan and India.

I am a believer in strong relations with Great Britain — which has been a key ally and partner of the US for many decades and with which America has deep historical and cultural connections.

(This is the full rather than edited version of Shirley Sherrod’s comments at a recent NAACP dinner) I can’t believe that Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack is taking even a moment to “reconsider” his intemperate and uninformed firing of Georgia State USDA rural development director Shirley Sherrod for ‘alleged’ racially-tinged remarks.

. . .try the single scoop of ultra “Awfully Chocolate” ice cream in a Chinese take out box. Expensive but still affordably exotic. I got this in the Raffles City Mall in Dongzhimen.

Tomorrow morning, 8:00 am, Vice President Joe Biden will be meeting with his successor as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry.

On Foreign Policy‘s Middle East Channel today, George Washington University professor and Middle East Channel co-editor Marc Lynch has an incisive piece critiquing the recent surge in calls to bomb Iran or allow Israel to do so.

This is a guest note by Fadi Elsalameen, managing director of Palestine Note. Elsalameen shares this post with us from Ramallah where he is today. Fayyadism is not Authoritarianism In Nathan J.

I was shocked to watch the sun rise this morning — and actually saw the sun, not some gauzy, cotton candy like Beijing permanent haze. And now we see lots of blue. This is rare I’m told at this time of year.