News, again, from Bangladesh is bleak. It's early to tell whether a regional or global humanitarian response will be warranted. Although this typhoon occurred on nearly the same date as the epic 1970 storm that claimed up to half a million lives, no reports are approaching this level of devastation, thankfully.

But still, look at the picture of the elephant pushing the bus out of the tree.

That's why I'm writing about this today. Because news coverage of the Bangladeshi storm threatens to join the chorus of "daily bus plunge" stories (although the bus in this story appears to be involved in an intimate relationship with an elephant). The daily bus plunge -- that endless, daily cavalcade of bad news that substitutes for "world news" in most American news sources -- hasn't gone away, and it makes the job of messengers on global issues from CARE to WWF more difficult every day. Look at the International Herald Tribune's cover photo of helpless Bangladeshis huddling in the storm's wake.

Contrast it with this AP photo from the Times of India of a storm survivor holding her grandchild, named "Cyclone," outside a scene of wreckage.

Images like this can make us understand something better, draw the right conclusions or plunge readers down a road of negative conclusions. I cringe as global politics increasingly becomes more threatening to America and more difficult to understand. And I wince at the idea that ordinary Americans will need to build a pretty sophisticated understanding of global politics to draw informed conclusions about our next leaders and our next conflicts.

Take for example what is unfolding now in Pakistan. This link actually takes you to a piece from more than two weeks ago -- before Pakistan underwent a declared emergency and the wheel really began to come off our closest nuclear-armed ally in the Islamic world. The cover line for this story was "The most dangerous nation in the world isn't Iraq. It's Pakistan." Since this story ran, things have grown much more dangerous in Pakistan. The images have been equally devastating. It's easy to see how the confusing swirl of images and news from Pakistan over the last two weeks has left Americans wondering who our friends are in the region.