This post, which originally appeared at The Havana Note, is a guest note by Tom Garofalo, a consultant for the New America Foundation/U.S.-Cuba Policy Initiative.

This kind of story needs to be getting less frequent — not more prevalent. Easy killing of unarmed people will undermine Israel, and it must turn this around. Israel sets the temperature in its region. Israel is a superpower — and is over-reacting to rock-throwing Palestinians.

Financial reform legislation has been signed by President Obama — and whether some critics want to accept it or not, this is another huge success for the administration.

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.