Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman nailed it right away: "Basically, the Republicans we'll blow up the world economy unless you give us exactly what we want, and the president said, OK. That's what happened."
Three pieces about Muslims in the same paper on the same day (The Independent, July 25). The first is a local colour piece about how there are a lot more Middle Eastern tourists in London this summer. Why?
Panic makes people stupid. It would be very stupid, for example, for the former editor of a British national newspaper, facing probable criminal charges for bribing policemen and illegally accessing the voice-mail of several thousand people, to put her computer and various incriminating papers in a large plastic bag and dump them in a garbage bin in a parking garage within a few metres of her London home.
The flags have been waved, the anthem has been sung, and the new currency will be in circulation next week: the Republic of South Sudan has been launched, and is off to who knows where?
Gandhi, born a Hindu, once said: "I am also a Christian, a Muslim, a Buddhist and a Jew."
Here we go again.
"The graveyards are full of indispensable men," growled Charles de Gaulle, but French history would have been very different if he had died in 1940 (no Free French government, probably a Communist takeover attempt when France was liberated in 1944) or even in 1960 (no quick exit from Algeria, no Fifth Republic). There are a few people whose absence would really make a difference.
The deadline is now July 3. That's when the European Union's finance ministers meet again, and by then the Greek parliament should have passed legislation mandating 28 billion of spending cuts and tax rises over the next five years. If it goes through, each of the 10 million Greeks will ultimately be about 2800 ($NZ4,900) poorer.
It's beyond satire. US Defence Secretary Robert Gates, telling The New York Times what he had learned during his long tenure under presidents Bush and Obama, explained that "I will always be an advocate in terms of wars of necessity. I am just much more cautious on wars of choice."
"We are getting into very risky territory," said Christiana Figueres, head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, last week. But she acknowledged we may have to go there anyway.
The "Prague Spring" of 1968 was a gallant attempt at a non-violent democratic revolution, but it was crushed by Soviet tanks.
President Ali Abdullah al-Saleh, in power in Yemen for the past 33 years and under siege for the past three months, left the country on Saturday night with a large piece of shrapnel lodged just below his heart.
The arrest of the former Bosnian Serb military commander, Ratko Mladic, for the murder of 7500 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995, helped Serbia's campaign for membership in the European Union.
The economists, the statisticians and the investment bankers have done their work, and everybody in the financial world now has more or less the same picture of the future in their minds.
You couldn't fall further or faster than Dominique Strauss-Kahn. He was not only the head of the International Monetary Fund; until a week ago, he was almost certainly within a year of being elected president of France.
Ding, dong, the witch is dead. Osama bin Laden, the author of the 9/11 atrocity in the United States and various lesser terrorist outrages elsewhere, has been killed by American troops in his hideout in northern Pakistan. At last, the world can breathe more easily. But not many people were holding their breath, anyway.
It's safe to say that we will never see an alliance between Israel and al Qaeda. Yet Syria's government-controlled media hint that this evil alliance exists as it grasps at any explanation, however implausible, that might discredit the anti-government protests that have shaken the Baath Party's half-century grip on power.
The war in Ivory Coast is over, or so we are told. Former president Laurent Gbagbo, who clung to the presidency even though he won only 46% of the vote in last year's election, has been dragged from his bunker after two weeks of battle that devastated the capital, Abidjan.
"I wonder whether in this situation it makes sense to remain within the European Union," Italian Foreign Minister Roberto Maroni said two weeks ago, in a crude attempt to blackmail other EU countries into taking more of Italy's illegal immigrants.
Something remarkable happened in Mexico last Wednesday. Tens of thousands of Mexicans gathered in the main squares of cities across the country to demand an end to the "war on drugs".
