The first mistake of the Ukrainian revolutionaries was to abandon the agreement of February 23 to create a national unity government, including some of the revolutionary leaders, that would administer the country until new elections in December.
It's a ''treacherous attack'' and a ''dirty conspiracy'', claimed Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose image as a devout Muslim and an honest man is the key to his political success.
From a Ukrainian point of view, the priority is not to throw their revolution away again like they did after the Orange Revolution 10 years ago.
When a government announces it is going to launch an ''anti-terror operation'', that generally means that it has decided to kill some people.
Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Peace Prize winner and champion of Burmese democracy, declared last June she would run for president in the 2015 election.
John Kerry has been US Secretary of State for precisely one year, and he has already: 1) rescued President Obama from his ill-considered promise to bomb Syria if it crossed the ''red line'' and used poison gas; 2) opened serious negotiations with Iran on its alleged attempt to build nuclear weapons; and 3) taken on the job of brokering an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord.
Confession is good for the soul, and my soul is certainly in need of improvement, so here is a confession. I got it wrong in my article ''Climate safety net holed'' (ODT, 20.1.14). I couldn't be happier about that.
It has taken a little longer than it did after the 1848 revolutions in Europe, but on the third anniversary of the Egyptian revolution we can definitely say the ''Arab Spring'' is finished.
''The protest mood in Ukraine is at a higher temperature than ever before,'' said Vitali Klitschko, the de facto leader of the anti-government protests that have filled central Kiev for the past two months, in an interview with The Guardian on Tuesday.
It would be interesting to know just what titbits of information the US National Security Agency's eavesdropping has turned up on United Nations Secretary-general Ban Ki-moon.
Bad news on the climate front. It is clear we are likely to break through all the ''do not exceed'' limits and go into runaway warming later this century.
General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who led the coup against Egypt's elected president last July, has one of the finest collections of military headgear in the entire Middle East.
The good thing about volcanoes is that you know where they are.
If Russia spent as much on intelligence agencies as the United States does - $US52.6 billion ($NZ63.7 billion) in 2013, according to the ''black budget'' published by The Washington Post last August - would it have been able to stop the suicide bombers who killed 31 people in two attacks in Volgograd early this week?
It's always dangerous to declare ''mission accomplished''.
After a decade when the struggle for equal rights for gay people made great progress, it looks like the counter-revolution is under way.
Purges in communist states have rarely stopped with the execution of one senior party member, especially when he has been tortured into ''confessing'' at his show trial that he was planning to stage a coup using ''high-ranking military officers'' and other close allies.
And now for something completely different: a spy story that isn't about Edward Snowden's disclosures and the US National Security Agency's surveillance of everything and everybody.
The Central African Republic (CAR) is one of the poorest and most inaccessible countries in the world. It is the size of France, but has only four and a-half million people.
Saturday, when China declared an ''air defence identification zone'' (ADIZ) that covers the disputed islands called Senkaku in Japanese and Diaoyu in Chinese, the media has been full of predictions of confrontation and crisis.