Regions & Nations

Looking for a sign of when the multipolar moment suddenly seemed real? You could do worse than mark the day when Brazil and Turkey -- two of the world's most avidly internationalist emerging powers -- joined together this May to announce they had stepped in to broker a nuclear-fuel swap deal with Iran that potentially -- though sadly not actually -- paved the way toward a peaceful solution to the standoff. Turkey and Brazil aren't superpowers, nor are they permanent U.N. Security Council members. But just as U.S.

Aguek Deng is the only doctor at the government hospital in Kuajok, southern Sudan's newest state capital.

On October 19, Bulbul Deng was detained at a government checkpoint as he traveled by bus back from a medical appointment in Khartoum to his home in Abyei, a region situated in the heart of Sudan. At the checkpoint, Deng says the men onboard were forced to lie face-down on the ground, while the Sudanese government soldiers, carrying wooden sticks and AK-47s, asked who among them had fought against the government in violence that destroyed part of Abyei in 2008.

After the 18-year-old Saudi equestrian Dalma Malhas won a bronze medal in show jumping at the first Youth Olympic Games in Singapore in August, she was singled out for praise by Jacques Rogge, chairman of the

My hotel on the outskirts of Puebla, a city of 1.3 million in central Mexico, looks out over a rolling golf course lined with palm trees and beyond that a busy highway flanked by Mazda and Mercedes car dealerships. The historic downtown has colonial Spanish architecture. Newer areas of the city boast gated subdivisions, Home Depot outlets, and strip malls. I came to attend a technology conference, "Ciudad de las Ideas," now in its third year and featuring such international luminaries as Malcolm Gladwell and Chris Anderson as speakers.

In the coming weeks, the United States may well be joining a new round of nuclear negotiations with Iran. But, rather than working to promote their success, most commentators seem to be consumed with explaining their anticipated failure. And their follow-up policy prescriptions seem designed to do more harm than good. Take Karim Sadjadpour's article, "The Sources of Soviet Iranian Conduct," in the November issue of Foreign Policy.

Writing from Mexico City

At a market stall in southern Sudan, Darfuri trader Omer Saleh, 45, turned up the volume on his small battery-operated radio. Radio Dabanga, he said - the Dutch-based service that transmits Darfur news by local journalists through shortwave frequencies into Sudan - "is the only way I can know what is happening at home."

Half a world away in New York, Ahmat Nour, president of the Darfur People's Association of New York, said he listens to the Radio Dabanga broadcasts every day: "I download the two episodes and listen to them through the Net as soon as I finish work."

At a market stall in southern Sudan, Darfuri trader Omer Saleh, 45, turned up the volume on his small battery-operated radio. Radio Dabanga, he said - the Dutch-based service that transmits Darfur news by local journalists through shortwave frequencies into Sudan - "is the only way I can know what is happening at home."

Half a world away in New York, Ahmat Nour, president of the Darfur People's Association of New York, said he listens to the Radio Dabanga broadcasts every day: "I download the two episodes and listen to them through the Net as soon as I finish work."

In late May, some 16 miles down a dirt road from the main town in the isolated tribal region of North Waziristan, a missile from an unmanned Predator drone slammed into a house owned by local tribesmen and killed Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, a founding member of al-Qaeda and its top operational leader in Afghanistan. His wife and several of their children were also killed.