World View

"These are my principles, and if you don't like them ... Well, I have others.'' (Groucho Marx)

After the Syrian army recaptured the city of Palmyra from Islamic State a week ago, US State Department spokesman John Kirby admitted that the liberation of the ancient city was a ‘‘good thing''.

Finally, after Aung San Suu Kyi founded the National League for Democracy in 1988, after she won the 1990 election by a landslide, after the military ignored the results and put her under house arrest for 15 of the next 21 years, after a difficult five-year transition since 2011 where the return of democracy to Burma was often in doubt, after 54 years of military rule, the woman Burmese just call "The Lady' is in power.

A British journalist compared the huge American delegation (800-1200 people) that is accompanying President Barack Obama on his first visit to Havana to Japanese soldiers stumbling out of the jungle to discover that the war ended a generation ago.

He wasn't standing on an aircraft carrier with a banner saying "Mission Accomplished'' behind him, but Russia's President Vladimir Putin was a lot more credible than former US president George W. Bush when he declared his country's military intervention in the Middle East a success.

If the US Congress had not imposed a two-term limit on the presidency in 1947 after Franklin D. Roosevelt's record four electoral victories, President Barack Obama would be a safe bet for a third term next November.

The French left does political correctness and moral outrage much better than the American left, so the row over what Algerian novelist and journalist Kamal Daoud recently said about sex in the Arab world has been bigger and louder in France than in the United States. But it is equally stupid in both places.

Opening the National People's Congress in Beijing last weekend, Prime Minister Li Keqiang set China's growth target for the coming year at 6.5%-7%, the lowest in decades. Only two years ago, he said 7% was the lowest acceptable growth rate, but he has had to eat his words. He really is not in charge of very much any more.

What would you call a country that called for "a structure under which can dwell in peace, in safety and in freedom ... a kind of United States of Europe'' at the end of World War 2 (Winston Churchill, 1946), but refused to join it when its European neighbours actually began building it (European Economic Community, 1957)?

"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent,'' said John Maynard Keynes (or maybe it wasn't him, but no matter).

Here we go again.

Zika, the mosquito-borne virus spreading through the Americas that has been linked to thousands of babies born with underdeveloped brains (microcephaly), is just the latest new disease to spread panic around the world.

"Europe has forgotten that history is fundamentally tragic,'' said Manuel Valls, the French Prime Minister.

Sending Colombia's 51-year-old civil war has taken a long time.

Five years ago this month, the "Arab Spring'' got under way with the non-violent overthrow of Tunisia's long-ruling dictator, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.

Last week, a Thai cosmetics company called Seoul Secret launched a new beauty product, Snowz, and got locally famous Thai actress Cris Horwang to appear in the promotional video.