Here's an interesting statistic: the second-highest rate of gun ownership in the world is in Yemen, a largely tribal, extremely poor country. The highest is in the United States, where there are almost as many guns as people: around 300 million guns for 311 million people.
Many years ago, when I was young and handsome, a friend inveigled me into taking a small role in a film he was making - a proper film, with a real budget and a commercial release, though mercifully it never got much attention.
They made some progress at the annual December round of the international negotiations on controlling climate change, held this year in Qatar. They agreed that the countries that cause the warming should compensate the ones that suffer the most from it.
It's as if the world's leaders were earnestly warning us that global warming will cause the extinction of the dinosaurs. They've actually been dead for a long time already. So has the Middle East ''peace process''.
You probably haven't given much thought to the problems in Mali, but United Nations Secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon has, and his advice on military intervention in the West African country could be summed up in two words: forget it. Although, being a diplomat, he actually used a great many more words than that.
In other parts of the world, separatist movements are usually violent (e.g. Kashmir, Sri Lanka, the various Kurdish revolts) and they sometimes succeed (South Sudan, Eritrea, East Timor). Whereas in the prosperous, democratic countries of the West, they are generally peaceful, frivolous and unsuccessful.
"There is no middle ground, no dialogue before rescinds this declaration," said pro-democracy advocate and Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei.
After the loss of 10 million American lives in the Three-Mile Island calamity in 1979, the death of two billion in the Chernobyl holocaust in 1986, and now the abandonment of all of northern Japan following the death of millions in last year's Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, it is hardly surprising that the world's biggest users of nuclear power are shutting their plants down.
Let's be fair: there does seem to be some sort of pattern here, but it is not very consistent.
Syria now has a new government-in-exile that allegedly unites all the groups seeking the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad's murderous regime. But if this is the best that they can do, Assad will still be in power next year, and perhaps for a long time afterwards.
World View columnist Gwynne Dyer writes that there are yet more reasons to be aware of our cosmic insignificance.
It's hard to know how much impact New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's comments about climate change after superstorm Sandy had on the US election.
"Everybody knows how this will end," wrote Nahum Barnea, one of Israel's best-known journalists, in the newspaper Yediot Aharonot recently. "There will be a bi-national ." ...
By the end of Wednesday, we will know who will be the president of the United States for the next four years. We already know who will be the leader of China for the next 10 years, although Xi Jinping will not be officially installed in power until a few days later. But some would argue that that is the more important event.
More or less at opposite ends of the world, two very long wars are coming to a negotiated end, with no victors and no vanquished. In the Philippines, President Benigno Aquino signed a peace agreement with the leaders of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front on October 16 after more than 40 years of war. In Norway, the next day, Colombia's Government began talks with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia People's Army (Farc) rebels to end a war that has lasted for over 50 years.
Six years in jail and an average fine of more than a million dollars: that was the punishment given to six Italian scientists this week for getting their earthquake advice wrong. So what will the expert geologists and vulcanologists in Italy say the next time they are asked about the likelihood of an earthquake?
Stockton-On-Tees, a small city in northeastern England, has only one claim to fame: the first railway tracks were made and laid in the city in 1822, and the first train ran on those tracks in 1825. But it might one day have another claim, also related to transportation: a locally based start-up company called Air Fuel Synthesis has just produced the first petrol from air and water.
This month is the 50th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis (October 16-28, 1962), so we are hearing a great deal about the weeks when the world almost died. But the past is a foreign country, a place where everything was in black and white and men still wore hats, so it's just scary stories about a long-gone time.
"I wish to make it clear before I cross-examine the three claimants that the ," the British Government's defence lawyer, Guy Mansfield QC said. Damn right they did. One, Paulo Nzili, was beaten so hard he went deaf, and castrated in public with the same pliers used to geld cattle.
The major powers have all had their nuclear weapons on permanent alert, ready to launch in minutes or hours, for the past 40 years. Changes in the level of political risk, even the end of the Cold War, have had little or no effect on that.
