World

Madeleine Albright, the former US Secretary of State, once called Slovakia "the black hole at the heart of Europe," which seems a harsh judgement on five million Slovaks.

It has not been a good week for Israel's Prime Minister Binyamin 'Bibi' Netanyhu, chief decision-maker in the war in the  Gaza Strip that has already cost at least 35,000 civilian deaths.

"History repeats itself -- the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce," said Karl Marx. He was talking about European history, of course, and here it comes again, a century later, doing a tribute act to the 1920s.

Extreme nationalism always looks foolish or even deranged to those who have not caught the virus, but in India it's now official.