On June 11, the Nicaraguan Parliament voted in favour of building a $US40 billion ($NZ51 billion) canal across the country, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
The news on the population front sounds bad: birth rates are not dropping as fast as expected, and we are likely to end up with an even bigger world population by the end of the century.
Fool me once, shame on you (the Taliban regime in Afghanistan helped al Qaeda to plan 9/11. We must invade).
You certainly can't say that Iranian elections are boring.
As I write this, Nelson Mandela is still with us.
It's certainly not another version of the ''Arab Spring''; Turkey is a fully democratic country.
All students of geopolitics are familiar with the legend that Egypt has privately warned all the governments upstream on the Nile that it will start bombing if they build dams on the river without its permission.
Sometimes, in diplomacy, a translator is not enough. You need a code-breaker. This is very much the case with the latest round of diplomatic statements about the civil war in Syria, currently the biggest armed conflict anywhere in the world. So here they are, deciphered.
Keeping a file of random clippings is an old-fashioned thing to do, but sometimes it offers you unexpected connections. Sometimes it's a connection that you don't even want to see. But there it is, so what are you going to do about it?
Shinzo Abe, now six months into his second try at being prime minister of Japan, is a puzzling man.
The first time Nawaz Sharif became prime minister of Pakistan was almost 25 years ago. His second term was ended 14 years ago by a military coup that drove him into exile. Now he's back, a good deal older - but is he any wiser?
The story so far: Cody Wilson, who describes himself as a ''crypto-anarchist'' and almost certainly wears a Second Amendment belt-buckle, had a bright idea early last year.
After making two major air strikes in and near Damascus in three days, Israel informed the Assad regime on Tuesday it was not taking sides in the Syrian civil war. But of course it is.
John Bellinger is the last person in Washington you'd expect to criticise President Barack Obama for making too many drone strikes. It was he who drafted the (rather unconvincing) legal justification for targeted drone killings when he was legal adviser to the secretary of state in George W. Bush's second administration, and he still supports them.
Of course human beings have always fought wars. Of course a quarter of the adult males in the typical primitive society died violently, in wars and in fights.
First of all, dismiss all those news stories saying that the Assad regime has started using chemical weapons against its own citizens, and that this has crossed a ''red line'' and will trigger foreign military intervention in Syria.
George W. Bush wasn't lying about Iraq after all, and those of us who said that he was owe him an apology. Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction. We just didn't read the small print.
Last month, as the anti-Muslim violence in Burma spread from Rakhine state in western Burma to the central Burmese city of Meiktila, Aung San Suu Kyi sat among the generals on the reviewing stand as the Burmese army marched past on Armed Forces Day.
There have been no elections in Somalia since 1967 and there won't be any this year either.
Margaret Thatcher was the woman who began the shift to the right that has affected almost all the countries of the West in the past three decades.
