Current affairs

Sarah Palin, the Republican candidate for vice president of the United States, finally submitted to a television interview after intense coaching from top-level White House advisers. Never in U.S. history has a candidate for high office had to absorb so much in so short a time.

A few Georgian battalions - trained to fight terrorists, not to manoeuvre against a powerful Russian army! - undertook a militarily deficient offensive against Tskhinvali in South Ossetia on August 8.

It's looking more than just grim. A vast river system in Australia, the Murray-Darling Basin, seems terminally affected by drought and decades of environmental abuse. Cosmetic measures have been suggested by the Australian authorities dealing with water conservation and extraction.

BORDEAUX -- Our glamorous, doe-eyed Minister of Justice, Rachida Dati, is the talk of France again - this time over her surprise pregnancy. Always controversial, she has now added spice to the gossip by politely declining to reveal who the father is.

Sarah Palin…a choice that left this woman voter with a mouth wide open. I had just finished listening for the second time to Obama's magisterial acceptance speech from the night before when the press started leaking the news that Sarah Palin might be John McCain's vice-presidential running mate.

U.S. Republican presidential candidate John McCain made an impulsive decision last week to select Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate. He told his militant supporters that she is "exactly what we need".

Not everyone agrees with him.

Already at an early stage of the Georgian crisis, the European Union assumed a very public role as a mediator when president Nicolas Sarkozy of France, the holder of the rotating EU presidency, travelled to Moscow and Tbilisi.

U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama strengthened his hand in several important ways by choosing Senator Joseph Biden as his Democratic vice presidential running mate.

How are the two putative candidates in the US Presidential race treating the evangelical vote thus far? In one answer: seriously. If the evidence is anything to go by, the evangelical vote will still prove thumping come November. Figures

A cease-fire went into effect in Gaza in June, offering some respite from the violence that has killed hundreds of Palestinians and five Israelis in recent months. It will do nothing, however, to address the underlying cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Washington - In a recent interview, Homeland Security czar Michael Chertoff thundered that the "struggle" against terrorism is a "significant existential" one-carefully differentiating it, apparently, from all those insignificant existential struggles we have waged in the past.

Tokyo - Because Americans are more proactive than the Japanese, they are likely to avoid the same kind of deep slump as we had for almost a decade. Nonetheless, with the value of their key assets-their homes-diminished, they will become a land of cautious consumers.