A collection of West African countries, each with their own problems, have banded together to protect human and civil rights. They succeed more than they fail.

Putin’s position is rather similar to that of England’s King Henry II, who ordered the assassination of that martyred cleric by accident, so to speak, and was then covered by shame and regret for his murder.

Winning an election is now the only way of achieving political legitimacy almost anywhere in the world.

Very few of today’s Muslims in India (or Pakistan or Bangladesh, for that matter) are descended from Central Asian conquerors. Most are descended from native-born Hindus who were forcibly converted to Islam, or changed their religion later to escape the Hindu caste system or the higher taxes paid by non-Muslims, or even sometimes for genuinely religious reasons. In a truly secular India, it wouldn’t matter, which is why the country’s founders insisted that it should be secular. But that’s not what Narendi Modi wants, and Modi is winning.

Popular anger was great even before the 2.75-kilotonne explosion last week. The currency has collapsed, most people’s savings have been wiped out, the country has defaulted on its debt, and there are no jobs for youth.

Donald Trump will need a fake crisis because otherwise the coronavirus is going to kill him politically.

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya is not demanding to become president if she wins. She just wants the 700 opposition supporters and activists arrested since May, according to the Belarus human rights group Vyasna, to be released.

There is the same constant tug-of-war between the rational actors and the ultra-hawks in Tehran as there is in Washington, Moscow, and Beijing, but most of the time the grown-ups are in charge.

The idea that China is 'the central threat of our times,' as Mike Pompeo put it on July 21, is laughable. It’s a formidable competitor economically, although demographically speaking it has feet of clay.

So what relevance could Polish politics have for the forthcoming election in the United States? Quite a lot, actually, starting with the very similar ways in which the two countries are polarized politically.

Saturday was the 25th anniversary of the massacre of Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) in Srebrenica towards the end of the 1992-95 war in Bosnia.

It is still hard to believe that an ultra-nationalist British government that won the Brexit referendum on a wave of anti-foreign rhetoric will really keep these promises.

For Benjamin Netanyahu, a large-scale annexation of the occupied territory would eliminate the mythical ‘two-state’ threat that has been his greatest political asset.

Government ads urging people to get out and vote barely mention that the new constitution will ‘reset the clock’ for Putin. That means he will be entitled to run for two more terms as president.

When governments impose sanctions they usually explain that they had to 'do something,' but the new sanctions will hurt ordinary Syrians very badly.

Putin's essay is an almost desperate plea for the preservation of the international order embodied in the rules of the United Nations and especially of the Security Council.

Think of this as just another 1962, but in miniature and without bullets.

The likeliest outcome is that Turkey backs off, there is a ceasefire of some sort that freezes the lines, and there is a de facto division of Libya with a Haftar-led Russian client state in the east.

So unless Bouterse can launch another coup (which seems unlikely, since he is now 74), he will shortly be off to spend the rest of his life in prison.

How far ahead is this calamity? We probably have at least a decade or two. Will we end all our greenhouse gas emissions in that time? Probably not. 'Cutting' our emissions isn’t enough.

This week, the Chinese People’s Congress in Beijing, the regime’s rubber-stamp parliament, will pass a special law banning subversion, separatism, acts of foreign interference and ‘terrorism’ in Hong Kong.

The current levels of income support could not be sustained long term without a significantly higher rate of tax.

A few dozen volunteers and mercenaries tried to land on the Venezuelan coast near Caracas a week ago. Six were killed, all the rest were arrested.

There are many clever people working on all the problems that threaten our future, and that for some of them at least, solutions will arrive in time.