Last week, I wrote about the result of “elections” in Belarus: Having failed to achieve a majority, President Alexander Lukashenko beat up the other candidates, arrested journalists and falsified poll results to take power. Belarus’s transition from communism to democracy has not merely failed: It has never taken place at all. Read on »

On Sunday, the nation of Belarus held presidential elections. On Sunday evening, the police officers of Belarus handed out their verdict. By midnight, tens of thousands of people had been chased out of the main square in central Minsk, hundreds had been arrested and hundreds more severely beaten. Young people limped away from demonstrations with broken arms, bloody heads. Seven out of nine Belarusan presidential candidates were in jail. One of them, Vladimir Neklyayev, was beaten unconscious and then dragged away from the hospital, wrapped in blankets. As of this writing, he is still missing, locked up in an unknown location. Read on »

LONDON - In the photograph that appeared the following day, her mouth was open, her eyes were wide, and she seemed to be shouting as her car window shattered. But those who know her insist that the Duchess of Cornwall – Camilla Parker Bowles, wife of Prince Charles – was not frightened by the demonstrators who attacked her car during a demonstration-turned-riot in London late last week: She was angry. Read on »

By now, I think we have learned that Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has vast ambitions. Among them is the end of American government as we know it. On his Web site he describes the leaked U.S. diplomatic cables in dramatic and sinister terms, evoking the lost ideals of George Washington and claiming that they demonstrate a profound gap between the United States’ “public persona and what it says behind closed doors.” Alas, the cables don’t live up to that promise. On the contrary – as others have noted – they show that U.S. diplomats pursue pretty much the same goals in private as they do in public, albeit using more caustic language. Read on »

I am sure the Russian people will be shocked – shocked! – to discover that U.S. diplomats think the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, “plays Robin to Putin’s Batman.” Italians will be equally horrified to learn that their prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, is considered “feckless, vain and ineffective as a modern European leader,” just as the French will be stunned to hear President Nicolas Sarkozy called “thin-skinned and authoritarian.” As for the Afghans, they will be appalled to read that their president, Hamid Karzai, has been described as “an extremely weak man who did not listen to facts.” Read on »

In Afghanistan a couple of years ago, I flew in one plane with a Portuguese pilot and another plane with a German pilot. I met a Turk who worked in NATO’s Kabul headquarters and a Dutch woman who lived on a NATO base in the south. During the course of a very short visit, I also met Frenchmen, Czechs and, of course, Americans. When the International Security Assistance Force leaves Afghanistan in 2014 or thereabouts – as last weekend’s NATO summit has agreed – NATO’s soldiers can return home having proved, if nothing else, that the Western military alliance still exists. Read on »

Throw your Euro-stereotypes out the window: Last weekend, a Greek government which has cut public-sector pay and lowered pensions won a clear victory in local elections. Despite strikes and violence, despite the fact that Greece’s debt is still growing and more cuts are coming, there will be a Socialist mayor of Athens for the first time in 24 years. (And yes, in Greece the Socialists favor budget cuts and the conservatives oppose them.) Read on »

Alaska is darker in winter, colder all year and less densely populated than any other state. Alaskans are unique, too: They enjoy a higher level of per capita federal spending than anyone else in the union, as well as a state constitution that they think allows them to defy the Supreme Court. Yet for all of its anomalies – or perhaps because of them – Alaska’s current electoral morass might well be a harbinger of the Republican Party’s future. Read on »

Here is the bad news: Last week, terrorists linked to an al-Qaeda cell in Yemen disguised powerful explosives as printer cartridges, inserted them into packages, and smuggled them onto cargo planes bound for the United States. The packages are clearly the work of someone with expertise: The president’s counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, has declared that “The individual who has been making these bombs . . . is a very dangerous individual, clearly somebody who has a fair amount of training and experience.” Read on »