EARLY one morning, 50 years ago today, while his wife, Mary, slept upstairs, Ernest Hemingway went into the vestibule of his Ketchum, Idaho, house, selected his favourite shotgun from the rack, inserted shells into its chambers and ended his life.

AMERICA’S fiscal woes are placing the country on a path of growing strategic risk in Asia. With Democrats eager to protect social spending and Republicans anxious to avoid tax hikes, and both saying the national debt must be brought under control, we can expect sustained efforts to slash the defence budget.

THE GCC countries boast current account surpluses (i.e. positive balance of trade in goods and services as well as net investment income from external assets and net transfers) that are not dampened by capital account deficits (i.e. inflows and outflows of different forms of capital such as portfolio investment, direct capital investment, short-term banking flows), thus leading to a considerable increase in foreign reserves.

ON Sunday, millions of people on another continent are observing the 50th anniversary of an event few Americans remember, the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. A slight, goateed man with black, half-framed glasses, the 35-year-old Lumumba was the first democratically chosen leader of the vast country, nearly as large as the United States east of the Mississippi, now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo.

He is the vérité film-maker whose subjects have included the South African far-right leader Eugene Terre’Blanche, Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss and America’s most notorious female serial killer Aileen Wuornos.

Who would have thought it? The answer is nobody. If anyone had said at the beginning of the year that, by March, the Arab world would not only be in uproar but would have peacefully got rid of two of its longest serving rulers, that the UN would have sanctioned a US-led military intervention in a Muslim country and that the world’s second largest economy would have been overwhelmed by a tsunami, they would have been dismissed as a sad delusionist seeking what they might dream of, but not what they could reasonably predict.

The revolution which has taken place in Egypt recently did not come out of the blue. It has not been orchestrated by internal political powers such as the opposition parties or the Muslim Brotherhood as claimed by the former Egyptian regime.

SENIOR American and Nato officers in Afghanistan have wanted Ahmed Wali Karzai gone — set aside, retired, out of the country or worse — for many years now. His killing by a close family associate on Tuesday may have granted their wishes. But what now follows the death of the most powerful political broker in southern Afghanistan may be much worse than Karzai ever was.

Leaking the report to the press, to which neither Turkey nor Israel is a side, bearing only the signatures of its Chair Palmer and Vice-Chair Uribe, and before it was officially submitted to the UN Secretary General on 1 September, is quite thought-provoking in this sense. Yesterday I spoke in a frank manner to the UN Secretary General Mr. Ban Ki-moon on this subject.

One area where the United States indisputably leads the world is incarceration. There are 2.3 million people behind bars, almost one in every 100 Americans. The federal prison population has more than doubled over the past 15 years, and one in nine black children has a parent in jail. Proportionally, the US has four times as many prisoners as Israel, six times more than Canada or China, eight times more than Germany and 13 times more

In the first flush of the Arab Spring many attempts were made to draw historical parallels with previous revolutions. Some looked back to the spring of 1848, when a wildfire of revolt swept through Europe, starting in Sicily but leaving few countries untouched.

The curtain seems to be closing on one of the strangest, yet longest-lasting shows in the world, the political career of Silvio Berlusconi, who has dominated Italian life for 17 years while playing an astonishing number of roles: TV tycoon, soccer team owner, prime minister, criminal defendant, international playboy.

Two weeks ago, President Barack Obama held a Twitter Town hall, where the president responded on camera to questions from Twitter users. That was novel, everyone said, and exciting! And at least the president responded to the tweets in complete sentences, out loud, with some semblance of dignity.

IN the two weeks since the leader of Afghanistan’s peace process was assassinated, an intense power struggle has opened among the nation’s ethnic groups — and within them — as well as among other powerful factions here, laying bare a crisis that is buffeting President Hamid Karzai from every side.

The peculiarity of the latest election results is they will please no major national party. Instead, three regional outfits — the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal, the AIADMK in Tamil Nadu and the so-called NR Congress named after its relatively unknown leader, N. Rangasamy, in Puducherry — will be satisfied with the outcome.

Until now, and with few exceptions, the West has nurtured two distinct communities of foreign-policy specialists: the development community and the democratic community. More often than not, they have had little or no connection with one another: development specialists dealt comfortably with dictatorships and democracies alike, believing that prosperity can best be created by concentrating exclusively on economic issues and institutions.

WASHINGTON’S military strategy in Afghanistan now aims to avoid the appearance of defeat for America, but for Afghanistan it is a recipe for unending civil war.

Early in the financial crisis, a major emerging-market investor told me: “This is not a global, but a semi-global financial crisis.” He was right: it really was a crisis of the United States, Europe, and Japan. Among emerging markets, only Eastern Europe was badly hit. Indeed, the crisis marks the emerging economies’ overtaking of the major Western countries, with huge consequences for global power, finance, politics, and economics.

IT was the day after 9/11. Airspace was still closed to civil flights. British intelligence chiefs had flown by military aircraft to Washington to confer with their American counterparts. After their discussions had been concluded, they repaired to the British embassy and there talked late into the night. One of those present was Eliza Manningham-Buller, then deputy head of the British Security Service and responsible for its intelligence operations and subsequently its chief.

Visit London nowadays and you will notice something strange going on: the worse the British economy tanks, the more fervently Prime Minister David Cameron’s ministers and Tory economists insist that draconian spending cuts are good for economic growth.

Nine years after the journalist Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and beheaded by Al Qaeda militants, a new inquiry has concluded he was almost certainly killed by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the man currently in US custody and accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks. The investigation also found that of 27 men connected with the killing, more than half remain at large.

Accident at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant has done more than spew radiation into the air and sea and force tens of thousands of people to evacuate their homes.

Egypt, the largest and most important country to overthrow its government during the Arab Spring, is careening toward a disastrous parliamentary election that begins on November 28 and could bring the country to the brink of civil war.

A newly assertive Turkey offered on Sunday a vision of a starkly realigned Middle East, where the country’s former allies in Syria and Israel fall into deeper isolation, and a burgeoning alliance with Egypt underpins a new order in a region roiled by revolt and revolution.

Until about two years ago, few in Yemen or the Arab world had heard of Anwar Al Awlaki, the American-born propagandist for radicalism whose death President Obama celebrated as a major blow against Al Qaeda.

EUROPE is drowning and needs a lifeline. A series of marathon meetings this week yielded a new set of proposals, but what they depend on is cash — and lots of it, perhaps trillions of dollars — to save Greece and the European banking system and to prevent financial contagion from spreading to Spain, Italy and even France, which would destroy the euro zone as we know it. Where to turn for help? The answer is obvious: China.

IT’S called a street, but it’s really a neighbourhood. Al Sarim Street in Tripoli, the Libyan capital, falls between low-lying Nasr Street and elevated Al Jumhuriyya Street. Its older buildings date from the Italian colonial era. Most were built as single-storey homes on the upper side of the street. I used to drive down this street daily on my way home from my law firm nearby.

AS the world population clock ticks past 7 billion, alarm bells are ringing. The gathering force of public protests is the popular expression of an obvious fact: that growing economic uncertainty, market volatility and mounting inequality have reached a point of crisis.

TOGETHER with our Nato allies and coalition partners, the United States, France and Britain have been united from the start in responding to the crisis in Libya, and we are united on what needs to happen in order to end it.

With the creation of a new government, Libya’s leaders should finally be able to focus on organizing the transition from the authoritarian state that they inherited to the more pluralistic one they envisage. But are they really able and willing to achieve that goal?