Last May, with considerable trepidation, I wrote an article about what seemed to be extraordinarily high rates of rape in Africa.
When someone pulls a rabbit out of a hat, it's natural to be suspicious. Magicians are professionals in deceit - and so are diplomats. But sometimes the rabbit is real.
''Each time one of us thinks 'I'll just stand aside and things will happen without me and I'll wait', then he is helping this disgusting feudal system that sits like a spider in the Kremlin,'' said Alexei Navalny, often billed as Russia's top opposition leader, as he sat in a courtroom in Kirov in July awaiting conviction on embezzlement charges.
''Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me'' - so the British Parliament decided it didn't want to be shamed by following another prime minister into another unwinnable war on the basis, yet again, of shoddy intelligence reports.
Over the past two weeks we have seen the following computer system crashes:
"The world has failed us,'' said Ecuador's President Rafael Correa.
It's a silly question, obviously, but it still has to be asked.
The Australian boat people are getting to be a problem.
Edward Snowden is safe from American ''justice'' for the moment, and he will certainly go down as the most effective whistle-blower in history.
The most important hamburger in the history of the world was cooked (but only half-eaten) in London on Monday.
''I will not go into exile like Bettino Craxi was forced to,'' Italy's former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi said, as he awaited the outcome of his final appeal against a four-year prison sentence for tax fraud.
Two massacres committed by the Egyptian army in one week.
Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe, is 89 years old, but he is running for another five-year term in the elections on Wednesday.
As it happens, I was in Detroit this month. I went to see the art and the architecture, domains in which Detroit is still one of the richest cities in the United States. It's broken, and it's broke, and now it's officially bankrupt too.
Genocide is always a difficult crime for courts to deal with, and all the more so when it happened 42 years ago.
If you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, so they say, it will hop right out again. Frogs aren't stupid. Well, OK, but they're not THAT stupid.
Edward Snowden, a former contractor to the US Central Intelligence Agency, has been trapped in the transit lounge of Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow for more than two weeks, while the United States Government strives mightily to get him back in its clutches.
If the people in charge of the various opposition parties in Egypt had any strategic vision, they would not have launched the mass protests that caused the army to oust president Mohamed Morsi on July 4.
Egypt and Turkey have the same basic political problem. Democracy can work, despite huge ideological differences, but only if everybody is willing to be very tolerant of other people's ideas and values.
History does not exactly repeat itself: the final outcome of the American intervention in Afghanistan will not be the same as the end result in Vietnam.