A man, a plan -- a new Ivory Coast. Eric Walberg looks at the rationale behind the Western intervention

Few around the world watching the drama unfolding in Ivory Coast rout for the incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo, who to his credit held reasonably fair elections last year, but then promptly ignored the results, suddenly claiming that those who voted for his rival Alassane Ouattara were not really citizens of Ivory Coast at all. With even the cautious African Union against him, his demise was inevitable.

An epic drama is unfolding after the Wikileaks founder gave himself up to Scotland Yard, but will Assange suffer the fate of Ellsberg or Pollard?

It was United States president Woodrow Wilson who called for “open diplomacy” — number one of his fourteen points in 1918 — so that “diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.” He would surely approve of Wikileaks’ efforts at open diplomacy, though current US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has called them “an attack on America’s foreign-policy interests” and indeed on “the international community”, though she failed to specify which particular community members were the victims, or what they were the victims of.

In the US mid-term elections, Republicans picked up approximately 65 seats in the House for a 237-198 majority, and six seats in the Senate — including the Illinois seat formerly held by President Obama and that of liberal icon Russell Feingold of Wisconsin — for a 49-49 tie in the Senate,

Canada’s international do-gooder image was shattered when it lost its bid for a UN Security Council seat, amid back-stabbing, maple syrup bribes, and Israeli-dictated cover-ups, bemoans Eric Walberg

What is United States President Barack Obama’s new National Security Adviser to make of the latest news from AfPak, asks Eric Walberg

16/10/10--In the past 10 days, 150 NATO-bound oil tankers were torched in Pakistan, mostly by Taliban but some apparently by their own drivers, who siphoned and sold the fuel and then destroyed the evidence of their theft. Win-win for locals, none of whom are naive enough to believe killing more of their brothers is a good idea. 500 oil tankers and containers that left Port Qasim in Karachi for Kandahar did not even reach the AfPak border. This, while the key Khyber Pass was closed, holding up thousands of supply trucks that did make it intact, after Pakistan shut the border in protest against the almost daily, illegal and unsanctioned US air strikes that have killed 1800 Pakistani civilians.