The United States was not the only country to name a new leader this week. In Bhutan, an insular nation of about 600,000 people located high in the Himalayas, a new king was crowned. 28-year-old Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, an Oxford-educated bachelor, was crowned as Bhutan’s fifth king - now the world’s youngest reigning monarch. Bhutan also has the distinction of being the world’s youngest democracy - having held parliamentary elections last March for the first time ever. (...)

On the two biggest issues that propelled him to the White House—the economy and the Middle East—Obama is surrounding himself with people whose influence is baleful.

Don’t say you weren’t warned: If President-elect Barack Obama follows through with the initial direction set out by his transition team and senior advisors in key policy areas, the Democratic party will be, understandably, voted out of power within four short years.

Obama has assembled a team of “pragmatists,” “centrists,” “managers” and “deal-makers”-so naturally progressives such as myself are going to grouse. Then again, he never actually promised to pursue any particularly progressive agenda (“change,” “hope” and “fired up” notwithstanding). Our grousing on that score can reasonably be dismissed as classic left-wing kvetching. (...)

Syrians, who were horrified to hear that there was something called a "Syria branch" for al-Qaeda. These people looked like ordinary Syrians. They came from places like Aleppo, Homs and Damascus. One was a 24-year-old smuggler of gasoline between Syria and Lebanon. Another was a dental expert (...)

Last May, an exhibit sponsored by the government of the Mexican state of Sinaloa compelled civic leaders in Culiacán, the capital, to denounce the artist Rosa María Robles and demand that the show be closed down. Comments left in the visitors’ book weren’t as harsh. After wandering aghast through installations that featured bloodied toilets and suspended children’s outfits pierced by dried cow tongues or long, knobby rubber penises, viewers wrote things like “It gave me nausea, but it made me think” and “This was very hard; it made me want to cry.” A few even thanked Robles for the exhibit. (...)

The world has abused its rivers and their workers - cities have turned their backs on the waterways, or gaze out at them but don’t go near, let alone in, the water. It is time to reclaim and respect the river
By Ed Emery
The Cam in Cambridge is one of the most congested stretches of river in the world, devoted to the pursuit of leisure and pleasure. Here students discover the poetic beauty of Archimedean physics as they learn to pole a punt. Overcoming their fear (while falling into the (...)

At this point in the republic’s history, do elections matter?

No. They’re not going to change anything. First of all, we have to get the republic back before it can matter. It’s gone. About three or four years ago, during the reign of [Attorney General Alberto] Gonzales, they got rid of the only nice thing England had left us, which was Magna Carta, due process of law. These were the things that, when we invented the republic, the republic rested upon ... and the Constitution. It’s all gone now. (...)

Gordon Brown and other European leaders are secretly preparing an unprecedented campaign to spread GM crops and foods in Britain and throughout the continent, confidential documents obtained by The Independent on Sunday reveal.

The documents - minutes of a series of private meetings of representatives of 27 governments - disclose plans to "speed up" the introduction of the modified crops and foods and to "deal with" public resistance to them. (...)

The Syrian government has condemned a deadly US military raid near the Iraqi border as “terrorist aggression.” The Bush administration has remained mum, stoking fears it could be trying to provoke further conflict in its remaining months in office. We speak to Robert Dreyfuss of The Nation magazine and University of Oklahoma professor Joshua Landis. (...)

n the dying days of the Bush administration, yet another presidential claim in the "war on terror" has been proved false by the withdrawal of the main charge against six Algerians held without trial for nearly seven years at Guantanamo prison camp.

George Bush’s assertion in his 2002 State of the Union address — the same speech in which he wrongly claimed that Saddam Hussein had tried to import aluminium tubes from Niger — was that "our soldiers, working with the Bosnian government, seized terrorists who were plotting to bomb our embassy [in Sarajevo]." Not only has the US government withdrawn that charge against the six Algerians, all of whom had taken citizenship or residence in Bosnia, but lawyers defending the Arabs — who had already been acquitted of such a plot in a Sarajevo court — have found that the US threatened to pull its troops out of the Nato peacekeeping force in Bosnia if the men were not handed over. (...)

In the final days of the election, many Republicans seem to have given up the fight for power. But that doesn’t mean they are relaxing. If you want to see real Republican elbow grease, check out the energy going into chucking great chunks of the $700 billion bailout out the door. At a recent Senate Banking Committee hearing, Republican Senator Bob Corker was fixated on this task, and with a clear deadline in mind: inauguration. "How much of it do you think may be actually spent by January 20 or so?" Corker asked Neel Kashkari, the 35-year-old former banker in charge of the bailout.

When European colonialists realized that they had no choice but to hand over power to the indigenous citizens, they would often turn their attention to stripping the local treasury of its gold and grabbing valuable livestock. If they were really nasty, like the Portuguese in Mozambique in the mid-1970s, they poured concrete down the elevator shafts. (...)

Last weekend heavy storms crashed through Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the world. The wind, rain and lightning killed a number people initiallly, but the subsequent flooding took a much larger toll, in both lives and property. The hard-hit Hadramaut region is home to the ancient walled city of Shibam, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, nicknamed the "Manhattan of the desert". The structures in Shibam and neighboring villages are mud-brick construction, and were damaged badly by the rain and flooding, many collapsing when their foundations were undercut. (...)

What are the chances, however, that the son of an African immigrant could graduate in the top tiers of the best French university and be elected president of the republic at age 47? Not great. In a speech in Philadelphia, Obama pointedly remarked that “in no other country on earth is my story even possible.” As Weill points out, the way Obama addresses the question of race is more straightforward and more honest than what you’ll hear among the French. When his ex-pastor’s statements caused an uproar, Obama spoke out. He stressed the importance of refusing to “simply wish [racism] away, to condemn it without understanding its roots.”

France is not nearly as straightforward about race. Even though the country has a huge problem, people pretend it doesn’t exist until a scandal forces them to pay attention to the elephant in the room. A recent soccer match was a case in point. During the game between France and Tunisia, kids with French nationality who came from Tunisian backgrounds insulted and disrespected the French national anthem. That got the nation’s attention, but the result was just a new collection of platitudes and condemnations.

No other color in modern history has carried such gravitas when it comes to associations with masculinity, femininity and politics. The color pink a vessel for weighty subject material, indeed. Especially when you consider the fact that it has only been around in its proper form for less than 500 years. Who knows what the future for this light shade of red will hold, but this info graphic created by Voltage Creative covers the last hundred years of politics and pop culture in all things pink. (...)

During the campaign, the media has largely respected calls to treat Bristol Palin’s pregnancy as a private matter. But the reactions to it have exposed a cultural rift that mirrors America’s dominant political divide. Social liberals in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in “red states” generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion. (...)

Recent information has caused me to trim my sails a bit on the notion that Petraeus is angry about this raid. It was probably constructed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and not Cheney’s office. Evidently there are real issues at the border and Petraeus has been warning the Syrians that they must do more. His interest in going to Syria in the fall of 2007 was as much to read Syria the riot act about compliance as it was to seek intelligence sharing, although that had been a principal subject of the Sharm al-Shaykh meeting between Mu`alem and Rice in May. Bashar al-Asad is no mood to give anything to Bush or Rice in the closing months of their administration.

Satellite intelligence probably picked up smugglers (...)

Iraqi secret police believed that the notorious Palestinian assassin Abu Nidal was working for the Americans as well as Egypt and Kuwait when they interrogated him in Baghdad only months before the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Hitherto secret documents which are now in the hands of The Independent — written by Saddam Hussein’s brutal security services for Saddam’s eyes only — state that he had been "colluding" with the Americans and, with the help of the Egyptians and Kuwaitis, was trying to find evidence linking Saddam and al-Qa’ida. (...)

Ralph Nader is a man of political substance trapped in an era of easy lies. He pierces the fog of propaganda with hard facts and reason, but the smoke rolls over him and he dsappears from public view. A lesser man might go crazy or get the message and give it up. Nader instead runs for president again, as he is doing this year, campaigning in fifty states and addressing crowds wherever he finds them, smaller crowds this time but still eager to feed on his idealism. Ralph is not delusional. He knows the story. He is stubborn about the facts and honest with himself. (...)

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Since the first self adhesive stamp (the Penny Black, made in 1840 featuring the bust of Queen Victoria) stamp designs have been one of the most highly visible designs in society, one that is particularly important since it represents the nation it comes from.

Today we are featuring some stamps from around the world that you will probably never come across, and if you did you would be quite happy because of their value, along with info about the history of stamp design. (...)