Imagine you are a junior officer in a West African army. You joined the army at 18, you worked hard, you went to the United States four times for various training courses, but somehow the promotions never came. You have just turned 40, and in 10 or 15 years you will have to retire on a captain's pension. What to do?
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".
The number of Tibetans burning themselves to death in protests against Chinese policy has grown very fast recently: the first self-immolation was in 2009, but 22 of the 30 incidents happened in the past year.
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.
Last year, Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel warned: "Nobody should believe that another half-century of peace in Europe is a given. If the euro collapses, Europe collapses. That can't happen."
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?
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.
In the midst of the Taliban attacks in central Kabul on Sunday, a journalist called the British embassy for a comment.
We have just had the second Nuclear Security Summit, in Seoul. It got surprisingly little attention from the international media although 53 countries attended.
Reporter: "What do you think of Western civilisation, Mr Gandhi?" Mohandas Gandhi: "I think it would be a good idea."
Faced with renewed allegations that Muammar Gaddafi had poured up to 50 million ($NZ79.9 million) into his French presidential campaign in 2007, French President Nicolas Sarkozy finally lost it.
I am not making this up. They're going to paint Calcutta (Kolkata) blue.
Last Wednesday, just as Chinese Vice-president Xi Jinping arrived in the United States for a four-day visit, US President Barack Obama told an audience of American workers in Milwaukee: "Manufacturing is coming back!"
As the Syrian opposition abandons nonviolent protest for armed resistance, many people think this means President Bashar al-Assad and his Baathist regime are in even deeper trouble than before.
Four decades ago, Norman Borlaug, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on raising crop yields worldwide (the "green revolution"), said: "I have only bought you a 40-year breathing space to stabilise your population."
The answer to a question often depends on how you ask it, and Alex Salmond is doing all he can to get a "yes".
The most important thing in Taiwanese politics is always left unsaid. When I interviewed Ma Ying-jeou in 2008, just before he won the presidency for the first time, he was happy to talk about the details of his plans for better relations with the People's Republic of China: direct flights, more trade and the like.
"The Security Council cannot go about imposing solutions in crisis situations in various countries of the world," said Vitaly Churkin, Russia's ambassador to the United Nations, as the UN began discussing what to do about the Syrian crisis last Friday. He needn't worry.
I go to France quite often, but after this article is published, I may be liable to arrest if I set foot in the country.
