Today's Story Line:

The earthquake in Turkey illustrates how media coverage skews aid donations. In four days, the Red Cross had all the aid it asked for, and then some. But 200,000 refugees in Congo got zip.

Who's in charge of Kosovo? Ethnic Albanians are flexing their muscles.

The Taliban would like to be in full control of Afghanistan but internal and external forces are working against them.

The police in Canada and the US have long been a bedrock of support for gun control. So why may Canada's cops now withdraw their support?

- David Clark Scott, World editor

REPORTERS ON THE JOB *THE DAGESTAN-KOSOVO CONNECTION: Yesterday, Monitor correspondent Scott Peterson was hurrying on foot down a Kosovo hillside after being forced to leave his car four miles from the blockade keeping Russian soldiers out of Orahovac. He stopped short when his interpreter said, "Wow!" He pointed to two teenagers scribbling on the road with chalk: "Kosovo is not Dagestan." Scott and his interpreter were impressed by the fact that the ethnic Albanian boys knew about the conflict in Dagestan on Russia's southern flank and related to it. They were saying that the Russians would not enter Orahovac without resistance. There may be another kind of solidarity: In both places Muslims are opposing Russian troops.

*A CLARIFICATION: A few American readers took offense at our phrase, "typing for tacos" in Tuesday's story on Mexico's public writers. The Monitor's Howard LaFranchi says in his first draft he used the phrase, "typing for their daily bread." But that, he felt, was a cultural misfit. "I don't think it's degrading to say people work for tacos. It's more common than bread on US dinner tables. We all eat tacos here."

PRESS CLIPPING *HOW DO YOU LIKE THEM APPLES? French farmers are angry over high US tariffs and low prices for their products in French supermarkets. The apples were dumped at this McDonald's because a union leader is being held in connection with the ransacking of another McDonald's under construction.

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