The French military cannot seem to stay away from Africa. Two years ago, French helicopter gunships entered the standoff in Ivory Coast and French aircraft pummelled the Libyan army.

“In other days France was the name of a country. We should take care that in 1961 it does not become the name of a nervous disease.”

-- Jean Paul Sartre, preface to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth.

It’s hard, so many decades later, to make my way back to my Cold War youth, that time when the history of humanity was, as LIFE magazine so classically put it, “The Epic of Man.”  But hey, that was the era when we still thought dinosaurs were lumbering beasts, an electric typewriter was the leading edge of high-tech, and if, like my wife, you happened to live in El Paso, Texas, in the early 1950s, your TV set had nothing on it because the signal for the programs had yet to make it over the mountains.

The Vision Document of AAP* brings no surprises. It puts down in black and white what its main protagonists have been saying for the last two years.

I was sitting with my friend Roy Singham, the founder of Thoughtworks two months back, discussing the need for social networking tools for organisations. Roy told me the exciting news that Aaron Swartz, the creator at age 14 of RSS feeds and one of the key figures in today's Internet world, was working on precisely such tools. It was a profound shock to learn that Aaron has committed suicide. At 26, Aaron leaves behind what very few people can achieve even in a lifetime.

The Delhi gangrape case has led to country-wide outrage, with young women and men still pouring out on to the streets to protest against the widespread culture of sexual violence.

The Palestinian resistance enters a new phase with the founding of the Bab Al Shams village. From now on it will create faits accomplis to resume in practice what is rightfully theirs.

Photos: Baby Siqueira Abrão

‘Military diplomacy’ sounds like an oxymoron. Diplomacy is about culture and finesse –graduated gratification of desire- military is about roughing it out and instant success.

The Line of Control for the media on both sides is this romantic, dangerous, exciting territory that brings to play by its very mention nationalist jingoism, macho patriotism as we scribes –Indian and Pakistani--struggle to give it a form and substance.

Prime Minister Dr.Manmohan Singh last week unveiled a new Science, Technology and Innovation Policy (henceforth STI for short) at the centenary-year Indian Science Congress in Kolkata.