All political careers end in failure, a British politician once said. Even so, politicians rarely fail as spectacularly as did Silvio Berlusconi, who at long last resigned Saturday night, to the cheers of his countrymen (“la commedia è finita!” writes an Italian friend) and the approval of stock markets around the world. Read on »

BENGHAZI, Libya - Young men in fatigues hang around outside the offices of the Transitional National Council, carrying rifles and flashing V (for victory) signs at visitors. Inside, older men in leather jackets sit on sofas drinking tea, while temporary officials cope with clashing appointments and race up and down the hallways. It’s just how one imagines the Smolny Institute, Lenin’s St. Petersburg headquarters, in 1917: amateur, enthusiastic, disorganized, rumor-filled and slightly paranoid, all at once. In Smolny, though, there were no ringing cellphones to add to the general cacophony. Read on »

On paper, it isn’t easy to reproduce the oddity of the Occupy the London Stock Exchange rally that took place on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral last weekend. It’s all very British — people are cooking pots of porridge on the sidewalk — yet reverent homage is being paid to the original Occupy Wall Street protests, too. The London demonstrators have even adopted the “human mic” used in New York’s Zuccotti Park — the crowd in front repeats whatever the speaker says, so that the crowd in back can hear — despite the fact that megaphones and microphones have not been banned in London. The effect, as can be heard on a Guardian online video, was something like this: Read on »

NYAMATA, Rwanda - The white altar cloth in the Catholic Church of Nyamata is still stained brown with blood. Shoes, dresses and trousers worn by families massacred within the sanctuary lie, gently decaying, atop the pews. The hole in the church’s iron door, blown open years ago by a grenade, will never be repaired: The Catholic Church of Nyamata is now a museum, a memorial to the thousands of people murdered here in April 1994, at the peak of the Rwandan genocide. Read on »

On Sept. 11, 2001, the post-Cold War era that had begun so euphorically on Nov. 9, 1989, came to an abrupt end. The “long decade” that stretched from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the fall of the World Trade Center was marked by military spending cuts, domestic political scandals and a general sense that American foreign policy was adrift. President George H.W. Bush spoke of the “New World Order” but had no policy to fit the clever phrase. President Bill Clinton had a clutch of policies, but he never found a neat way to describe them. Read on »

Finally, the Libyan revolution is ending the way it was supposed to. “A few sharp victories, some conspicuous acts of personal bravery on the Patriot side and a colorful entry into the capital,” as Evelyn Waugh would have put it. That was the Western policy for the war — except that the war went on longer than it was meant to, and it might not be over yet either. On Monday, the rebels reached Green Square and declared victory. On Tuesday, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the regime’s dauphin, was riding around Tripoli in an armored convoy, declaring that reports of his capture were premature and that the rebels had been drawn into a clever trap. On Wednesday, the rebels were inside the Gaddafi family compound. Read on »

Riots in the British capital have hit inner-city Tottenham, suburban Ealing, gritty Hackney, chic Notting Hill. Windows have been smashed, video cameras stolen and cars set ablaze. Young men in hooded sweatshirts congregated on street corners and charged the police. “Copycat” riots have followed across the country, from Bristol to Nottingham. And nobody really knows why. Read on »

In the past 48 hours, Anders Behring Breivik has been described as a racist, a white supremacist and an anti-Islamic fanatic. News reports of his arrest are now accompanied by analyses of Europe’s failure to absorb its immigrant population, commentary on the rise of far-right political parties, discussions of the threats posed to Muslims living in Europe. Having mistakenly assumed at first that the story of terror in Oslo belonged to the narrative of the war on terrorism, we are now placing it firmly within the equally familiar narrative of white racism and anti-Islamic fanaticism. Read on »