Just before Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia in 2008, Vuk Jeremic, the Serbian foreign minister, warned that in Africa alone "there are about 50 Kosovos waiting to happen".
Monkey see, monkey do. Soon after France's National Assembly passed a law making it illegal to wear a full-face veil in public, British MP Philip Hollobone announced a private member's Bill last weekend that would make it illegal for people to cover their faces in public in Britain.
Did Paul Kagame really stop the genocide in Rwanda 16 years ago, or did he just interrupt it for a while?
Eighty years ago, just after World War 1 and with the world rapidly sliding towards the next, the French philosopher Julien Benda wrote a book called The Treason of the Clerks - "clerks" in the medieval sense, educated men, intellectuals, who despite their high calling chose to serve the State rather than Truth.
The Georgians took down the last statue of Stalin last week. There used to be thousands of such statues all across the old Soviet Union, but the Communists themselves tore almost all of them down after the great dictator and mass murderer died in 1953.
General Stanley McChrystal deserved to be fired as the United States commander in Afghanistan, because he and his staff were openly contemptuous of their civilian superiors.
United Nations Secretary-general Ban Ki-moon has called for an end to the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip.Britain, France, Germany and Russia have done the same. After Israeli commandos killed nine peace activists last week aboard a ship that was trying to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza, even United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the blockade "unsustainable and unacceptable". But how can it be ended?
After he signed the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty in 1979, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat said: "The only matter that could take Egypt to war again is water."
"The Government does not want to negotiate, so I think many more people will die," Red Shirt leader Sean Boonpracong said in Bangkok on Monday.
There has not been a coalition government in Britain since World War 2, but it may have to get used to them.
Victory in the United Kingdom general election will prove a poisoned chalice for whoever eventually "wins", and may give rise to electoral reform, says Gwynne Dyer.
"If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans," said the world's most famous theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking, late last month.
"The real problem in Cyprus is not that the status quo is unsustainable," said Phedon Nicolaides of the European Institute of Public Administration in an article in the Cyprus Mail last September.
Recently, three Americans with special status - they have commanded missions to the moon - made their dismay about the country's space programmes public.
First, a tragedy that almost sinks beneath the weight of a huge historical coincidence.
The international agenda is jammed with high-level meetings on nuclear weapons: a United States-Russian treaty on cutting strategic nuclear weapons last week, a Washington mini-summit on non-proliferation this week, and a full-dress review of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) next month.
There was an unpleasant incident in Cordoba cathedral late last month.
I make this comparison only on the clear understanding that I am not referring to any specific mother-in-law of mine, past or present.
"Whether you are in a Moscow subway or a London subway or a train in Madrid or an office building in New York, we face the same enemy," United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, responding to the twin suicide bombings on the Moscow metro system that killed 39 commuters last Monday.
By the time Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu left Washington last Wednesday night, after postponing his departure twice, there was general agreement in the American media that his visit had been disastrous.
