I had the opportunity today to sit down in Kabul with Mohammad Yasin Osmani, the head of Afghanistan’s High Office of Oversight and Anti-corruption.

In American parlance, Osmani is Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s “Corruption Czar.”  He is responsible for overseeing the fight against corruption in the Afghan government.
It is a daunting task.  Osmani’s office is less than a year old, and he says it is only 30 percent staffed.  It also is at the center of a storm of international criticism.
I asked him about a recent article in The Times of …

One year ago, young supporters of Barack Obama at colleges across the country poured into the streets to celebrate his presidential election victory.  Hundreds of supporters in the college town of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, gathered in jubilation, shouting “Obama is my president!” and “Yes, we did!”  Just down the road at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, college students sat glued to their televisions and screamed with excitement when Mr. Obama’s victory was announced.Today, I walked down the same street at the University of North Carolina at Chapel …

The World Health Organization (WHO) says you should get vaccinated. At least 5,000 people around the world have died from the H1N1 virus, mostly in the Western Hemisphere since April 2009

Election officials in Afghanistan have a lot to consider about how to eliminate — or at the very least minimize — voter fraud in the country’s November 7 presidential runoff.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a television interview that the United Nations wants to replace more than half of the country’s 380 district election heads as one way to make the second round more credible.
But the U.N. spokesman in Afghanistan told me today that staffing is just one of the many things Afghan election officials have to consider in the …

Afghan election officials have ordered a runoff between President Hamid Karzai and his closest rival, former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah.  It is scheduled for November 7.
The announcement comes a day after the U.N.-backed Electoral Complaints Commission released its report detailing instances of fraud in the August 20th election.
International officials in Kabul have told me for weeks now that they had contingency plans in place to deal with the aftermath of the fraud investigation.
Analysts had discussed the likelihood of a runoff for some time, but in the back of everyone’s mind, …