On an ironically clear and placid day in August 2007, a three story tall cooling tower at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant collapsed, goring a massive hole in the center of the structure and spewing asbestos, rotting wood, plastic panels, and thousands of gallons of water onto the bank of the Connecticut river. It later emerged that several employees had expressed concerns about the tower, and that, in the days before the collapse, others heard odd noises from within the structure.

In Libya, a lethally unbalanced leader has decided not to reform his government or heed the calls of his public that he should have been term-limited out long ago, but instead has bombed, machine-gunned, and rolled tanks out against his own citizens.

A deadly, serious struggle is under way in Libya and throughout much of the Middle East and North Africa between ageing authoritarian regimes and their citizens who have had enough of institutionalised human degradation.

After two decades of failed political moves, the Palestinian Authority represented by its top leadership are hoping to avoid the inevitable: paying a heavy price for corruption of all kinds, alienating the Palestinian people, and failing to negotiate an end to Israel’s occupation.

Threatened and undermined by the Al Jazeera-Guardian Palestine Papers leak, and dismayed by wrongly siding with Egypt’s ousted dictator Hosni Mubarak, the Palestinian Authority is employing desperate political maneuvers.

After almost thirty years, President Hosni Mubarak is gone.

For the people of Egypt and especially those with the courage to have taken to the streets it is no doubt a day that is impossible to put into words. For the rest of us, a day of awe, celebration and inspiration.

Some, however, have probably not summoned up too broad a smile today – the other non-democratic regimes of the Middle East for instance. Interestingly, Israel too belongs on that list of the "not-exactly-thrilled".