Worth reading

• Gerard Prunier on Sudan (Open Democracy): "Sudan is in a fix, and there is no exit."

• Kenya makes this month's Harper's Index (subscription):

• Number of Kenya's 210 members of parliament who have been given cabinet positions in the new administration: 93
  
• Projected annual budget of the new cabinet, as a portion of Kenya's total government revenues: 1/8
  

• Simon Rich's animal conversations shouldn't be nearly as funny as they are (New Yorker).

• Atul Gawande on itches. I'll never scratch mosquito bites the same way again. (New Yorker).

• David Gilmour on Italian revolutionary hero Garibaldi and his legacy(NY Review of Books, subscription):

  Naples still has the appearance of a capital, more so than Athens or Lisbon and perhaps even Madrid. Its political existence was destroyed by a guerrilla leader of genius, a world-famous hero, a romantic nationalist who incarnated the zeitgeist of the mid-nineteenth century. And the world applauded him. Without Garibaldi, Naples would now be the capital of a state at least as successful as Portugal or Greece—or Spain without Catalonia and the Basque provinces. Instead, while its region has the highest homicide rate in Europe, it has become the most violent city of Italy, the drug capital of Europe, the toxic waste dump of the West, and a world center of illegal arms trafficking. Even if Senator Rossi had been accurate with his Egyptian jibe, its health could hardly have been worse than it is now.