It is imaginable that Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's strongman ruler since 1998, will lose the presidential election next Monday. Opinion polls show that his challenger, Henrique Capriles, has closed the gap between them to only 5% or less of the popular vote. If Mr Chavez loses, would he hand over power peacefully?
"Double tap" is what mobsters do when they put somebody down. One bullet in the heart, one in the head.
One of the first scenes in the ridiculous but thoroughly nasty film Innocence of Muslims shows angry Muslims running through the streets smashing things and killing people. So what happens when a clip from the film dubbed into Arabic goes up on the internet?
Never mind the constraints of the miserable present: the shrinking budgets, the lost opportunities, the collapsing morale. Thinking is free, so let's think really big.
It is no surprise that we will have a record minimum of ice cover in the Arctic Ocean at the end of this summer melt season.
Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is not well served by some of his supporters.
Forty-Eight hours after South African police killed 34 striking miners last Thursday, Julius Malema showed up at the Lonmin platinum mine north of Johannesburg to assign the blame.
Two months ago, the United States Department of Agriculture forecast the biggest maize (corn) harvest in history: 376 million tonnes.
Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi's spokesman did not mince words. He said that the "retirement" of all the senior military commanders in the country represented the completion of the Egyptian revolution. And guess what?
How much do tyrants fear mockery?
Russian television contacted me the other day, asking me to go on a programme about the race for Arctic resources.
At last somebody in an official position has said something. United Nations human rights chief Navi Pillay has called for an independent investigation into claims Burmese security forces are systematically targeting the Rohingyas, a Muslim minority community living in the Arakan region.
One of the best tax-avoidance tactics in the late Roman Empire was to sell yourself into slavery. You didn't really have to work as somebody's slave, of course - it was more like rock star Hotblack Desiato being "dead for a year for tax reasons" in Douglas Adams' wondrous confection The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - but with the legal status of slave, you were exempt from taxation.
In war, moral power is to physical as three parts out of four, said Napoleon, and the past few days have seen a sudden and drastic shift in the balance of moral power in Syria.
Abraham Lincoln was right: you can fool all the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time. Unfortunately, his dictum is irrelevant to modern Italian politics. In a democratic country with a number of different parties, like Italy, you only have to fool about one-third of the people all the time to get and keep political power.
It was 42degC in St Louis, Missouri, last weekend, about the same as in Saudi Arabia. Along the United States Atlantic coast, it was cooler, but not much: 41degC in Washington DC, just short of the city's all-time record.
Kofi Annan does the best he can. At least he's back in harness, doing what he does best: trying to make peace where there is no hope of peace.
There was no law against genocide in the early 1940s; it only became an internationally recognised crime after the worst genocide of modern history had actually happened. Similarly, there is no law against "ecocide" now. That will only come to pass when the damage to the environment has become so extreme that large numbers of people are dying from it even in rich and powerful countries.
The United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Syria has suspended its peace mission.
The forthcoming United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro (Rio+20) on June 20-22, has brought out the usual warnings of environmental doom. They have been greeted with the usual indifference: after all, there are seven billion of us now, and we are all still eating.
