Last week, CNN aired ‘Czar Putin”, a report on Vladimir Vladimirovich’s accumulation of power since his ascension to the Kremlin in 2000. Coinciding with the Russian Parliamentary Elections held over the weekend, the program gave attention to something many engaged in that region have known for a long time – Russia’s window of opportunity for a healthy democracy is closing fast, if not already shut tight. While Putin has methodically morphed fledgling democratic institutions into something much closer to dictatorship, the scarier aspect of Russia is the popular approval of his Presidency, fueled by resurgent Russian nationalism. A recent...

By accepting a donation of about $130,000 in carbon offsets from the publicity-starved – and San Francisco based! – Planktos International, the Vatican this summer became the world’s first “carbon neutral” nation. The offsets will go toward planting trees in Hungary and will no doubt have a beneficial, but tiny and temporary, impact on the area’s economy. Hmmm… Not wholly unlike the effort’s impact upon climate change which, as we’ve recently been told, is unavoidable and will be, by any measure, catastrophic. However, as tempting as it is to… • deprecate Planktos’ flagrant PR-mongering • dismiss their primary business model...

Is there a more charged American event in the past 50 years than September 11th? Probably not... Yet we have surprisingly little to say about it. Other than an excellent book by Ken Kalfus, there has not been much by way of a national expression of what September 11 meant to us (unless you consider Jonathan Safron Foer and Adam Sandler cultural barometers... and god help you if you do). Perhaps that's because we haven't quite healed; or maybe it's because we're not yet quite sure what really happened. Regardless, from this vacuum of dialog has emerged a panoply of...

An alarming, potentially disastrous agricultural mystery has unfolded quietly over the past few months. Honeybees – the United States chief pollinator – have been leaving their hives in droves, never to return. Beekeepers across the country have declared up to 70% losses in their colonies, and there is currently no clear answer as to why. Honeybees – a rare example of a non-native species which has proven itself useful – account for up to 100% of the pollination of some crops. Almonds, for example, are pollinated entirely by honeybees – and California, where the vast majority of the US almond...

Variations of the word “confidence” appeared in the Bush’s State of the Union six times. At times, one could not help envisioning Bush prancing down an Austrian path singing “I Have Confidence” on his way to the von Trapp family home. And like Frauline Maria as she approached the gate, Bush demonstrated anything but confidence in his State of the Union address by admitting defeat, failing to make bold proposals, and…by backing away from the word “reprocessing.”

Attempts to operate intelligence gathering and sharing systems in obscurity put the entire homeland security mission at risk. Since 9/11, several scandals have suggested that public backlash can scotch programs. The solution is not to tighten the secrecy around these programs: almost nothing the government does is kept secret for long. Rather, federal and state officials must bring legislators, civil liberties groups, and the public into a wide-ranging political discourse on the appropriate level of domestic surveillance in a time of terrorism. Robust public debate, legislative oversight, and checks on agents will give our domestic intelligence efforts—which most observers consider necessary—a certain level of trust and resiliency to weather the snafus inevitable with new or newly-tasked bureaucracies.

Here's a (now-extinct) SAT analogy for you...

President Bush's open and public support of Fatah in the recent Palestinian elections is to Foreign Policy as _______________ is to Business.

The Iraqi election results were released yesterday, more than a month after the election itself, and with early objections from Sunni groups unaddressed (at least publicly). While the Shia bloc did not obtain an outright majority, and will therefore have to govern in a coalition government or poach Assemblymembers from other parties, the Prime Minister will almost surely be a religiously leaning Shiite. Sunni slates won 55 seats; Kurdish parties 58. Two semi-surprises: former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's secular coalition won only 25 seats. Allawi, you will remember, was the most clearly American-backed candidate.

The second semi-surprise is that Ahmed Chalabi, whom some administration figures proposed as the "strongman" Iraq needed after the US invasion, and his list received exactly ZERO seats in the new Iraqi assembly.

The New York Times has one of their neat interactive graphics here.

Why confusing?