Suddenly, an event manager in London is having a very bad night. Fifty sold-out shows to refund.
Just at this moment, the O2 Arena page reads, “Michael Jackson - THIS IS IT!” I bet it won’t for much longer.

US defeats Spain in the Confederations Cup, 2-0.

Georg Hoffmann of PrimaKlima has turned away from climatology for a moment to carry out an interesting statistical analysis of the Iranian election results. Bizarrely, the percentage split between the incumbent and the closest rival remained entirely stable throughout the count - an R2 value of 0.999. But even more bizarrely, the lead for Ahmadinejad [...]

The Georgian opposition is generally described as a loose alliance, united mainly in their distaste for current president Mikhail Saakashvili and their somewhat greater distaste for Russian domination. In the latter they are in harmony with the vast majority of Georgians, while the former is not so clear. But they are divided on many more [...]

The Russian judge was unimpressed by both the technical merits and the artistic program of the UN resolution to extend the observation mission in Georgia’s breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. 0.0 all around, or Géorgie, nul point.
Since 1993, UN observers had worked both sides of the lines to keep tabs on troop movements [...]

Via The Monkey Cage, an interesting article on the lessons hardline regimes may have learned from the Orange Revolution. Here are his four lessons:
1) If you are going to fix the results of an election, give yourself a big margin of victory. Otherwise, a little electoral fraud can credibly be argued to have swung the [...]

I’m in Senegal for a couple of weeks, on business.
Pretty much everything I wrote about French in Burundi in this post last year applies to French in Senegal. All educated Senegalese speak French; most speak it really well; they’ve also picked up a lot of distinctly Gallic tics of gesture and conversational patterning. [...]

It’s polling day in Iran and

I’ve been asked to crosspost this from my blog…
Resistance - The Essence of the Islamist Revolution is Alistair Crooke’s survey of modern Islamist thought. It would be clearer to say it is a couple of books occupying the same space; one would be a history of Islamist thought since the origins of the Iranian Revolution, [...]

Story on the geopolitical angle from Foreign Policy today. And it’s better than any story you’re likely to find in a major newspaper, too.