Last Sunday's Boston Globe carried an alarming 4,000-word front-page article about President Bush and the Constitution. It seems that Bush has asserted the right to ignore "vast swaths of the law" simply because he thinks that these laws are unconstitutional.

The article is specifically about "signing statements," in which the president offers his interpretation of an act of Congress as he signs it into law. This was an innovation of the Reagan administration, intended to give courts something other than a law's legislative history -- that is, Congress's side of the story -- in any future dispute. Bush often signs a law and at the same time says that parts of it are unconstitutional. Sneaky!

Constitutional Cafeteria

JUST over a quarter-century ago, five Iranian college students hit upon the idea of seizing the American Embassy in Tehran and staging a sit-in. Among them were Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is now Iran's president, and Habibollah Bitaraf, the current energy minister. The takeover of the embassy did not play out exactly as its student planners envisioned — indeed, Mr. Ahmadinejad himself initially opposed the move — but as a symbolic step, it not only isolated Iran from the rest of the world, it also rallied millions of Iranians to the idea of a strictly Islamist future. The ensuing hostage crisis made a big splash internationally, but perhaps its most important and lasting consequence was local: it gave the mullahs the leverage to take full power.

It is an old political strategy: identify a foreign enemy, provoke a crisis and wrap yourself in the flag. Today's confrontation with Iran over nuclear research is an example of how, as the saying goes, history rhymes.

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What does all this have to do with today's nuclear standoff? The embassy occupation in 1979 was viewed by most Americans as a challenge to our world authority and a statement by the Iranian revolutionaries that they wanted to take Islamist rebellion beyond Iran's borders; in fact, it was primarily a well-orchestrated confrontation intended to place the mullahs firmly in power.

Today, as the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, presides over an increasingly restive, unhappy population, his pit bull, President Ahmadinejad, has picked a new fight with the United States of America. Even many Iranians who oppose the theocracy now favor joining the nuclear club; it adds to national prestige and arguably enhances Iran's security. In openly pursuing nuclear power and defying world opinion, the old revolutionaries are shoring up their stature at home by appealing to nationalism and to fears of foreign invasion or attack.

And why shouldn't they? It worked before.

Playing to the Home Crowd in Iran, by Mark Bowden

There appears to be a specific correlation between the price of oil and the pace of freedom.

As Energy Prices Rise, It's All Downhill for Democracy, By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

There are few more enticing visions than that of the free and equal internet. Instead of a central authority or company deciding what anybody can put on a website or offer as a service, anything goes.

Almost as remarkable is the way that the internet – or the way that most people experience it – has steadily sped up. Things have changed from the days of narrowband modems and sites that would only load painfully slowly. Consumers in many countries now have extremely fast broadband connections that can stream video clips faithfully.

It is too soon to impose net neutrality | FT

Over time, our criticism of the US has accumulated many new themes as an idiom of resentment against our US-centric leadership and as an expression of nationalism under the impact of the Iranian revolution and the rise of religious extremism. Post-9/11, it has merged with the rising wave of anti-Americanism in the Islamic world.

Yet the dynamics of US-Pakistan relations and the discriminatory US approach to India and Pakistan have been at the heart of our feelings towards America. A brief history will explain the issues.

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Will the US agree to cooperate with Pakistan in the field of civilian nuclear energy? No, not now and even less so in future. Does this make the relationship any less valuable for us? Not as long as it continues to serve some other important national interests of ours. In a strange irony both Pakistan and US have historically been part of the problem and part of the solution for each other and this paradigm is unlikely to change.

DAWN - Opinion; May 3, 2006

Former CIA director speaks out on energy policy.

President Bush's call for America to end its "oil addiction" sparked a debate about whether the goal is attainable — or even desirable.

Some say that policies to promote energy independence would hinder prosperity. They claim that attempts to meet this goal after the 1970s' oil shocks were expensive failures. These assertions are wrong.

Key to long-term success is to shift to plentiful alternative fuels now

Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis – proposed in a 1989 essay, elaborated in a 1992 book – was the most influential attempt to make sense of the post-cold-war world. In a new afterword to "The End of History and the Last Man", Fukuyama reflects on how his ideas have survived the tides of criticism and political change.

It begins:

In the seventeen years that have passed since the original publication of my essay, "The End of History?", my hypothesis has been criticised from every conceivable point of view. Publication of the second paperback edition of the book The End of History and the Last Man gives me an opportunity to restate the original argument, to answer what I regard as the most serious objections that were raised to it, and to reflect on some of the developments in world politics that have occurred since the summer of 1989.

Let me begin with the question: what was the "end of history"?

After the end of history, by Francis Fukuyama

You know it's hard out here for a pimp. It's even harder, let me tell you, for a whore.

Los Angeles Times: A writer unblocked

Will the next CIA director be willing to challenge CIA careerists and continue the reforms of the dysfunctional bureaucracy?

The Agency Problem

How the search-engine giant moved beyond mere morality.

Google in the Garden of Good and Evil