During Britain’s recent election campaign, someone asked David Cameron, the Conservative leader who is now prime minister, for his favorite joke. He replied, “Nick Clegg.” During that same election campaign, Nick Clegg, now the deputy prime minister and a Liberal Democrat, accused Cameron of “breathtaking arrogance.” “In this country,” Clegg declared, unsubtly alluding to his opponent’s aristocratic background, “you don’t inherit power, you have to earn it.”

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The pirates attacked the merchant ship at early on the morning of May 5. The crew locked themselves in the engine room with a stock of food and water. A naval destroyer came steaming to the rescue and demanded that the pirates give up the ship. When they refused, the destroyer attacked with guns and cannons and, after a brief firefight, the pirates surrendered. Had this been a story from a children’s book — the kind with a skull and crossbones on the cover and a foldout treasure map inside — the pirates would then have walked the plank. But it wasn’t. This was 2010. The merchant ship was not a schooner but a Russian tanker, carrying 86,000 tons of crude oil worth $52 million. The pirates were not colorful figures with cutlasses but Somalis led by professionals who knew what this cargo was worth.

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For the time being, the markets have been pacified. For the moment, the riots in Athens have subsided. Only “hundreds” of demonstrators came out over the weekend, fewer than the rioters who killed three people during a violent petrol bomb attack on a bank last week. But this temporary truce in Greece has been bought at a high price — by which I don’t just mean that it was expensive.

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President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad campaigned in Uganda and Zimbabwe. Behind the scenes, his flunkies twisted arms and offered favors. For weeks, feelers were sent out to all kinds of unlikely allies. What was the diplomatic prize at stake? Nothing less than a seat on the United Nations council on human rights.

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Here is a riddle: What would the Tea Party movement look like if it were British, privately educated and had once worked as a ski instructor in Austria?

The answer: It would look like Nick Clegg, leader of the British Liberal Democratic Party — and possibly the beneficiary of the biggest revolution among British voters in decades. For those who don’t follow these things, the Liberal Democrats are Britain’s historically insignificant third party. In its current incarnation, the Liberal Democrats date from the late 1980s, when the Labor Party was a near-Marxist monolith, the Tories were the party of Margaret Thatcher, and there was a lot of space in between.

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WARSAW - Did you know that volcanic ash can bring down airplanes? I didn’t know. Nor did I know that there were volcanoes in Europe capable of spewing so much of the stuff into the atmosphere. But since last week, when airports in Britain — and then Germany, France, Poland, Austria, Switzerland and Scandinavia — began to shut down because of the ash emitted by Eyjafjallajokull, an unpronounceable volcano in Iceland, an army of experts has arisen to explain how floating lava dust damages engines.

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WARSAW – Last Saturday, the Polish president, the Polish national bank chairman, the chief of the Polish general staff and a host of other military and political leaders, some of whom were my friends and my husband’s colleagues, died in a tragic plane crash in the forest near Smolensk, Russia, not far from where 20,000 Polish officers were secretly murdered by Joseph Stalin 70 years ago. Yet this time around, nobody suspects a conspiracy. Read on »

In this era of commerce and trade, it often happens that countries that might once have gone to war play out their antagonisms through other means. The immigration debate plays this role in Mexican American relations. Read on »

WARSAW – The stylist looked over my clothes. “Yes, this is exactly the sort of thing I thought you would have in your wardrobe,” he said, eyeing my modest collection of suits with barely disguised disdain. He picked up a blue jacket gingerly, as if the dye might rub off in his hands. “This is a very … difficult color,” he said. He grimaced, and removed it to another chair. Read on »

My fellow disappointed conservatives, former conservatives, and disgusted conservatives, it is time for all good Republicans to come to the defense of David Frum and to endorse his critique of radical right-wing talk-show rhetoric. If you’ve left the party in disgust, call up your friends who are still members and get them to do it for you. Read on »