On April 5, a little-known Russian Senator and diplomat, Mikhail Margelov, published an article called "The Arab World Is Changing," in which he argued that Russia is well-placed to act as mediator in the war in Libya, but it should think hard about the political risks. "We have too much going on in our own country," he wrote. "We have elections coming up." Two months on, the junior diplomat is starting to look prophetic. With the war at ...

Don't spend more than you make. Don't buy things you don't need. Save for a rainy day. If Americans had followed these simple rules over the past decade, there would be no financial crisis, no worst-since-the-1930s recession, no acrimonious Washington debate over what to do about it. Now we seem to be starting to rediscover thrift. Debt levels are falling. Consumer spending is down. The savings rate is on the rise. Great, right? Not exactly. The sudden sobering up of ...

My fellow citizens: I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors. I thank President Bush for his service to our nation, as well as the generosity and cooperation he has shown throughout this transition. Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath. The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still ...

The angry, aggressive crowd formed within minutes of my arrival. Dozens of Muslim men, all in ankle-length galabias, came together in the middle of the dusty dirt path leading to the Church of the Two Martyrs in this poor Christian and Muslim village some 130 miles south of Cairo. They were determined to block access to what has become a sectarian sore: a church overrun by Muslim locals and desecrated, an act that has prompted desperate ...

What was Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos smoking? Colombia has long been an obedient lieutenant in the U.S.-led war on drugs, yet there was Santos musing out loud — at a presidential summit, of all places — about the possibility of exporting bales of marijuana to California dopers. "I would like to know," he said on Oct. 26, "if the eighth-largest economy in the world and a state that's famous for high technology, movies and fine wine, ...

Keiko Fujimori is running for President of Peru under a shadow that will never dissipate: her father. He is at once an important reason for the viability of her candidacy as well as a cautionary tale, the lessons of which she must insist she has learned. Alberto Fujimori was President of Peru from 1990 to 2000 and was credited with, among other things, the revival of the economy and the brutal suppression of the leftist uprising that made ...

In the early afternoon of Sept. 11, 1973, with Chile's presidential palace in the pall of a coup d'tat's smoke and gunfire, President Salvador Allende, the world's first democratically elected Marxist President, bid his country farewell in a radio address and, after ordering the palace defenders to surrender, entered the Independence Hall alone. What happened next is the subject of myth and mystery. The official version, cobbled together from bits and pieces of testimony, and an autopsy conducted ...

It was launched by President Nicolas Sarkozy's government three months ago with much hype and patriotic ebullition — a series of 100-plus town hall meetings across France to debate what it means to be French in the 21st century. And even after opponents on the left and right alike criticized the initiative as a Machiavellian way of casting immigrants, their French-born children and especially Muslims as a threat to France's national identity, government officials defiantly took the ...

Abu Rida barely has time to talk. As he carefully attaches a home-made folding stock onto a dilapidated AK-47 assault rifle, the barrel-chested arms dealer quotes prices to a group of young men looking to buy guns and ammunition. Every few seconds his cellphone rings, as yet another customer places an order or inquires about the latest deals. The turmoil in neighboring Syria has been good for business, as Abu Rida and other black-market arms ...

It looked at first like the chance of a lifetime, if not a millennium. On April 10, when Polish President Lech Kaczynski and his entourage died in a plane crash in eastern Russia, the flood of grief from the Russian people struck such a chord in Poland that the long history of war, betrayal and oppression between the countries finally seemed to turn a corner. For the first time since anyone could remember, the two nations' leaders ...