“Stop calling me a mustachioed cockroach,” said Alexander Lukashenko. “I am still the president of this country.” But that doesn’t sound very presidential, does it?

“Assessing the people of America’s past by today’s standards would compel us to cast the majority of our heroes as villains.” That seemed to be the line taken by Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas last week in his opinion piece for the New York Times. It caused great outrage, the Opinion Editor had to resign, and Cotton was roundly abused for ‘defending slavery’.

“A glance at the history of nuclear weapons manufacture shows that all 11 countries that wished to build bombs did so within three to 10 years,” wrote Yossi Melman, intelligence and strategic affairs correspondent for Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, on Sunday. So why, he asked, has Iran failed to do it in over thirty years of trying?

If you wanted evidence that reasonably competent government – not great, not corruption-free, just not awful – produces good results in the end, here it is.

Few people outside of Poland care about the outcome of last Sunday’s presidential election there, but maybe they should. Andrzej Duda is practically a Polish clone of Donald Trump, who will also be seeking re-election less than four months from now – and Duda squeaked out a victory.

“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown,” says an old friend to Jack Nicholson as the mother is killed, the little girl is handed over to the bad guy and the police wash their hands of it at the end of the