Former Sen. John Edwards was supposed to speak in Denver at the Democratic National Convention. His wife, Elizabeth Edwards, was to speak also. Poverty was their focus.

But they are not here because John Edwards had an affair. Will the Democrats now forget about poverty?

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is on a book tour, where she is being hounded by activists and questioned about her pledge that “impeachment is off the table.” She responded on the TV talk show “The View” that “If somebody had a crime that the president had committed, that would be a different story.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind might have provided the evidence she doesn’t want to see.

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It was like an action movie: A young man held at night in a hotel, threatened with prison. He is to be shipped off to war in the morning. His friends desperately trying to find him. The “down” button on the elevator had been disabled. He considered jumping from the window. When his friends arrive, they encounter military personnel patrolling the grounds. One sneaks in, gets his friend out, and they drive off into the night.

This was real life for 17-year-old Eric Martinez, a student at Aldine High School in a poor neighborhood of Houston. He responded to an Army recruitment pitch, called the Delayed Enlistment Program.

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TALLINN, Estonia — When I arrived in Estonia last week — a former Soviet republic that lies just south of Finland — everyone had an opinion on Barack Obama’s speech in Berlin. The headline of the British Daily Telegraph we picked up in Finland blared “New walls must not divide us,” with half-page photos of the American presidential candidate silhouetted against a sea of 200,000 people.

One of the first people I met in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, was Abdul Turay, the editor in chief of The Baltic Times, an English-language weekly that covers Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the three Baltic nations. Granted, he’s not a typical resident for this country of largely fair-haired, light-skinned people: Turay is a black Briton whose parents come from the West African nations of Liberia and Sierra Leone. And he is Muslim. While Estonia has no mosques, he notes with pride that the Quran has just been translated into Estonian, and to the publisher’s surprise, it’s been an instant best-seller here.

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While the presidential candidates trade barbs and accuse each other of flip-flopping, they agree with President Bush on their enthusiastic support for nuclear power.

Sen. John McCain has called for 100 new nuclear power plants. Sen. Barack Obama, in a July 2007 Democratic candidate debate, answered a pro-nuclear power audience member, “I actually think that we should explore nuclear power as part of the energy mix.” Among Obama’s top contributors are executives of Exelon Corp., a leading nuclear power operator in the nation. Just this week, Exelon released a new plan, called “Exelon 2020: A Low-Carbon Roadmap.” The nuclear power industry sees global warming as a golden opportunity to sell its insanely expensive and dangerous power plants.

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