World View

NATO's recent summit in Chicago was mostly about how to get Nato troops out of Afghanistan without causing too much embarrassment to the Western governments that sent them, and a little bit about how to ensure that the Taliban do not take over again, once the Western troops leave.

The second president of the United States, John Adams, predicted in 1780 that "English will be the most respectable language in the world and the most universally read and spoken in the next century, if not before the end of this one".

After 11 demonstrators were killed outside the Ministry of Defence in Cairo early this month, Mohammad al-Assaf, a member of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), expressed his astonishment that anybody might suspect the military of wanting to rig the forthcoming presidential elections in Egypt.

I wanted you to be the first to know. It has just been revealed by the Combating Terrorism Centre at West Point Military Academy in the United States I am on a very short list of journalists (eight in Western countries, and seven others in India, Pakistan and Arab countries) to whom Osama bin Laden wanted to send "special media material" on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the United States. To what do I owe this honour?

The Oslo Accords, signed in 1993, were supposed to lead, through a "peace process", to the final solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: two sovereign states living side by side in peace. It would have been a sulky, grumpy peace, and the Palestinians would only have got a tiny, overcrowded, impoverished and completely demilitarised country, but at least they would have had a state at last.

President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan has been having some fun with language recently. He has come up with a new name for the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), the party that has formed the government of South Sudan since it finally got its independence from Sudan last July.

"It is never easy to persuade those who have acquired power forcibly of the wisdom of peaceful change," Aung San Suu Kyi once remarked.

We have just had the second Nuclear Security Summit, in Seoul. It got surprisingly little attention from the international media although 53 countries attended.

After Mohamed Merah died in a hail of French police bullets last Thursday, people who had known him talked about "a polite and courteous boy" who liked "cars, bikes, sports and girls".

Reporter: "What do you think of Western civilisation, Mr Gandhi?"

Mohandas Gandhi: "I think it would be a good idea."