Gwynne Dyer

Once upon a time, a US president was appalled by the actions of a murderous Arab dictator.

"The general offensive has begun," said Seydou Ouattara, the military spokesman of the man who claims to be Ivory Coast's legitimate president, Alassane Ouattara, last Monday. "We've realised that this is the only way to remove ."

They have committed themselves to a war, but they have no plans for what happens after tomorrow night.

One of the incidental pleasures of the past few weeks has been watching the Western media struggling to come to terms with the notion of Arab democracy.

There is an extraordinary disconnect between what the experts write about oil prices, and what is likely to happen out in the real world.

In his first public comment on the unfolding drama in Egypt, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, worried aloud last week that the right analogy may be the Iranian revolution of 1979: "Our real fear is of a situation ... which has already developed in several countries including Iran itself - repressive regimes of radical Islam."

Communist Party congresses are generally tedious events, and the recent 11th congress of the Vietnamese Communist Party is no exception.

If all the food in the world were shared out evenly, there would be enough to go around.

What does it mean when the United States, Britain, France and Spain upgrade the diplomatic status of the Palestinian delegations in their capitals, as they all did in the past year? When the number of countries recognising Palestinian statehood now exceeds 100?

Fake elections in Egypt, Burma and Belarus. A massive earthquake in Haiti, devastating floods in Pakistan, and a volcano in Iceland that killed nobody but inconvenienced millions.

President Barack Obama seems to be working under a serious misapprehension.