It was a show, staged for the benefit of the two main participants, and they both got what they came for. They were bound to get it, since they had the power to define the meeting as either a success or a failure.

Over the past decade, this hard-line approach has delivered an annual average of 10 per cent economic growth in Ethiopia, far higher than in South Africa or Nigeria.

The Putin regime condemned the episode as "fake news," and will have much more credibility the next time it needs to deny killing a critic, writes columnist Gwynne Dyer.

No promises, but this actually could happen. And if Trump and Kim did get the Nobel Peace Prize for it, so what? It’s meant as a reward for saints, but it works just as well as bait for scoundrels.

Powerful opponents of the Ortega-Murillo family within the Sandinista party have been systematically weeded out of the government.

The 15 per cent slowdown is not necessarily an indicator that the whole northern branch of the current is on the brink of shutting down. But then again, it might be.

There is actually a good chance that the new coalition will survive, at least for a while, because it is based on the ancient principle that 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend.' The enemy the two parties have in common.

If he acts now, he would give the country a second chance to become what it could be: a prosperous, spectacularly multi-cultural Asian version of Switzerland (without the mountains, of course).

Iran is a country the size of Alaska, two-thirds of it is mountain or desert, and it has 80 million people, lots of industry and good science and technology. Invading it would make the Vietnam war look like a tea party. So any ground fighting between Iran and its enemies would be more likely to happen in the countries between them: Syria and Iraq.

What really drives Trump’s hatred of the deal, in all likelihood, is simply the fact that it was one of Obama’s major successes—what Macron referred to as 'domestic reasons.' It fits a pattern.

The Kim dynasty inherited a devastated country at the end of the Korean War in 1953. Its cities were levelled and at least a million people had been killed. The Chinese troops who had helped North Korea went home after the war, but the American troops stayed in South Korea. Moreover, the Americans had nuclear weapons and would not promise not to use them—and there was no peace treaty, just an armistice.

Former South Korean president Park Geun-hye was sentenced to 24 years in prison last week, former South African president Jacob Zuma is facing corruption charges, and former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva began serving a 12-year jail term for corruption.

Eugenio Scalfari doesn’t mind the fact that the Vatican subsequently denies what he reported the Pope said, and that Francis himself tacitly goes along with that denial. It’s a game that both men play, and the accuracy of Scalfari’s reports is amply demonstrated by the fact that Francis keeps giving him more interviews despite his alleged ‘mis-reporting’ of previous ones.  

Is Iran actually supplying missiles to the Houthis that are being fired at Saudi Arabia? If so, then the United States, Saudi Arabia’s main ally, has an excuse to attack Iran.

'Now mass media are everywhere, and even the dictators have to pretend that they are in power by the will of the people,' writes Gwynne Dyer.

Although Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte occasionally talks about abolishing the Congress and leading a self-appointed 'revolutionary government,' he is unlikely to be able to carry it off, because by then he won’t be popular any more. The Philippines will not prosper under his rule.

'Self-driving vehicles will no doubt occasionally make mistakes that hurt human beings, but computer programs are bound to be less erratic on the roads than human beings.'

And stand by for Trump to alienate all of America’s main allies by sabotaging a treaty they worked very hard to achieve. Since he has swallowed Saudi Arabia’s argument that Iran is an 'expansionist' power that must be stopped, even direct military clashes between the U.S. and Iran, especially in Syria, become a lot more likely.

The era of adult supervision in the White House is coming to an end, and Donald Trump is more and more 'free to be Donald.'

'Trump’s main goal is to look good—to get a ‘win’—and Kim’s advisers will have told him to let Trump win something.'

One of the big winners in last Sunday’s Italian election was the Five-Star Movement, whose 31-year-old leader Luigi di Maio has promised to stop sending out rescue boats to save migrants from drowning when their flimsy craft sink halfway across the Mediterranean.

Xi is not likely to 'do a Mao' and unleash chaos in China. He is intelligent and he works hard. But the mistakes will accumulate nevertheless, and stagnation awaits.

The great unanswered question is: how would a post-Putin Russia revive the democratic experiment it embarked on in 1989-91, in the face of certain opposition from the oligarchs who benefit so greatly from current arrangements? We may find out in the 2024 election, when Putin again comes up against the two-term limit.