This week, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran asserted that Iran was ready for negotiations on its nuclear (weapons) program. Indeed, he insisted that it always had been, and that European and American declarations to the contrary were, in fact, “excuses.”

On December 6 this past year, I was anxious to get to Goma, a city in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), to witness the nation’s presidential election.

On December 17, 2011, North Korea lost Kim Jong-il ­– its “Dear Leader” – to a heart attack. Without missing a beat, North Korea’s state-run media anointed his third son Kim Jong-un as the “Great Successor” and placed the fate of the North Korean people squarely in his 28-year-old hands. One look at North Korea’s pudgy new protagonist is enough to make me worry not only about the fate of the North Korean people, but about the future security of the East Asian region as a whole.

Some of the snapshots from Chile’s ongoing student movement depict a lighthearted mobilization. Led by the charismatic Camila Vallejo, the students have used Twitter and Facebook to stage kiss-a-thons and superhero-themed costume protests. But other images have been more violent.

The recent failure of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction (JSCDR) to reach an agreement on the reduction of the federal deficit may turn into a full-blown military budget crisis with enormous, unforeseen consequences for national security if the United States does not act soon.

Antarctica is home to more than emperor penguins and a few dozen humans with science citizenship barricaded in small hermetic bases. It is also host to an estimated 200 billion barrels of hydrocarbons, alongside large quantities of gold, silver, uranium, and many other rare metals underneath a pristine ice cap still virgin of commercial exploitation. Securing a territory with such a rich underground, in whole or in part, would bless any country with durable energy security and, thereby, increased political independence in the international arena.

Consider the flying toilet. The term comes from the Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya. Within the slum, there is often less than one latrine per 50 shacks, with each 12-foot by 12-foot shack containing, on average, eight people. Kibera sits on government land that never fully transferred legally to its pre-independence residents, and, as such, the government treats residents as squatters with no right or entitlement to legal, social, or economic protection. A complete lack of governmental presence within the slum means that at night, with no street lights and collections of roving thugs (and, at times, predatory policemen looking for a shakedown), using toilets can become dangerous. In response, shacks stock up on plastic bags, defecate or urinate into them after dark, and fling them from their windows out into the streets to bake in the morning sun.

Anyone remember the FTAA? Probably not. The Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) was supposed to be revolutionary. But today, the FTAA is dead in the water.

Dr. Wahhab or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love (Or At Least, Not Fear) the Islamists

Now you see, in Kenya the most seemingly innocuous organizations, teams, or associations usually have a much darker underbelly than you would expect.

A growing sense of anxiety has begun to simmer in the eurozone as the year’s dramatic events put the single currency in an increasingly precarious position. Earlier this month, Silvio Berlusconi’s announcement that he would step down and allow technocrats to try to salvage the Italian economy seemed extraordinary. Now, however, pundits are looking fondly at the days when they could bite their nails over the collapse of individual countries as the euro itself appears to be in mortal danger.

At the recent Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit in Honolulu, President Obama continued his march towards massive free trade expansion, and the most prominent headlines from the summit had to do with a the radical new proposal for a mega free trade area—the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership (TPP).

Pamoja FM's and Jah-Army's Day of Change

Syria's Suspension

The February 2008 election of Raúl Castro has brought some market-oriented reforms to the country, most notably a new law that will allow Cubans to buy and sell property for the first time since 1959.

The situation has grown so dire that it has forced Berlusconi, who has dominated Italian politics for decades and survived over 50 votes of confidence, to announce that he will resign after austerity measures are passed.

As the geopolitical chessboard of Asia evolves, it is becoming clear that Myanmar is an increasingly critical piece. Still Myanmar’s future is both crucial and uncertain.

It’s 4:30 am in Kibera, and a train had fallen off the tracks.

Qaddafi's Death on Display

Here’s the thing about dictators: as sticky as they are when they’re in power, it’s even harder to deal with them once they’re gone.