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Yesterday, a shorn and shaven Radovan Karadzic faced his first day in court at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

The Karadzic arrest has been hailed as a pivotal turning point in Serbia's path to EU cooperation and accession. But although Karadzic was captured in Serbia, his crimes were in creating the ethnically divided state that is Bosnia. And in Bosnia today, the story remains less than comforting.

In a compelling call for a revitalization of international efforts in the still-fractured country, Paddy Ashdown, former head of the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia, explains:

Bosnia's predominantly Serb entity, Republika Srpska, Karadzic's creation, has seen the vacuum where will and policy should be. Its premier, Milorad Dodik, is now aggressively reversing a decade of reforms. He has set up the parallel institutions and sent delegations to Montenegro to find out how they broke away….

Meanwhile, in European capitals the growing view goes like this. We invested 13 years of hard work and huge resource in Bosnia. Now it is stable and peaceful and we are rather tired. Kosovo has proved it is possible to divide a country. What matter if Bosnia becomes another Cyprus?…

This is folly of a very dangerous order. What happens to the Muslim populations who have moved back to Republika Srpska, even to Srebrenica, if they are handed back to an exclusively Serb-dominated regime? What happens to Bosnia's shining star, the multi-ethnic, markedly successful sub-entity of Brcko, hemmed in by Republika Srpska? Is it to be handed over, too? I do not believe Bosnia is likely to go back to conflict; most of its people are just too war-weary. But the one event that could change that calculation in favour of blood would be to return to the old Karadzic/Milosevic plan to divide Bosnia.

But minus those few returnees and that one "shining star," Bosnia is divided, functioning largely as two separate, ethnically split states. Yes, it's a sad fact -- one that U.N. peacekeepers allowed to materialize between 1992 and 1995, and one that any international efforts will be hard pressed to undo.

It's no wonder the celebration over Karadzic's arrest in Bosnia has been short-lived. For as Bosnian novelist Aleksandar Hemon concludes in an excellent NYT op-ed, "Justice is good, but a peaceful life would have been much better."

AFP/Getty Images

This week's arrest of the Bosnian-Serb war criminal Radovan Karadzic has made headlines almost as big as those announcing the arrest of Slobodan Milosevic back in 2001. The shocking photos of Karadzic disguised as a bearded Dr. Dabic have painted the whole story ridiculous; statements from Brussels highlighting the arrest as a milestone trumpet the news that Serbia has really chosen a European future; and re-reported accounts from Bosnian Muslim victims have added an element of remorse for the fact that justice had not been brought sooner. But a lesser story today, that of Dinko Sakic, illustrates the long-term significance of Karadzic's overdue arrest.

Sakic, the last living commander of Jasenovac, the Croatian World War II concentration camp, died this week. Long after fleeing to Argentina, where he lived a rather vocal life in support of Croatian nationalism, Sakic was eventually tried and found guilty of killing thousands of Serbs and Jews -- but not until 1999, decades after his crimes were committed and years after those very crimes were used by Croat and Serb leaders alike to stir up nationalist fervor and inter-ethnic fear during the last bloody days of Yugoslavia.

Fortunately the losses at Srebrenica and Sarajevo will not go the way of Jasenovac, whose significance and death toll still remain in question. Thanks to the work of the ICTY, the former Yugoslavia's crimes of the 1990s have been investigated and documented in great detail, leaving far less room for future finger-pointing and fear-mongering. And with the EU promising future membership to all the countries of the Western Balkans, they'll need all regional stability they can get.

For more reflections what Karadzic's capture means, check out FP's interview with Richard Holbrooke, the man who did as much as anyone to bring peace to Bosnia. He's thrilled:

I got the news on a train from New York to Washington. I’ve rarely been so excited about any news event in a positive sense. The world gets so much bad news, and to bring this man to justice, this terrible man, ranks right up there with capturing Saddam Hussein.

Iran is far from a free and open society, but apparently its control of the Internet is not as pervasive as one might think.

Created by the OpenNet Initiative (ONI) -- an Internet surveillance monitoring partnership between the Citizen Lab, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, the Advanced Network Research Group at the Cambridge Security Programme, and the Oxford Internet Institute -- this week's Tuesday Map plots the top 6,000 Persian language blogs according to the links among them, showing both those blocked (left) and visible (right) inside Iran.

Each dot represents a blog, color-coded by content (yellow and green for reformist, secular and expatriate bloggers; purple for Persian poetry; green for popular culture, and red for religious and/or conservative bloggers) and scaled by the number of links to the blog from other sites. 

Although most blocked blogs are "secular/reformist" in nature, ONI notes:

[T]he majority of these [secular/reformist] blogs are not blocked. Also, a handful of blogs from religious, pro-regime parts of the network are blocked as well. A preliminary analysis of these indicates content (like anti-Arab bias and discussion of "temporary marriages") that, while not unfriendly to the Islamic Republic, might nevertheless be embarrassing to it."

For a closer assessment of the Iranian blogosphere, check out this more detailed map and case study from the Internet and Democracy project at the Berkman Center.

ROBERT ATANASOVSKI/AFP/Getty Images

Seven years ago, it was Albanian-Macedonian tensions that brought the Republic of Macedonia to the brink of war, but given what happened in the days surrounding Macedonia's parliamentary elections last Sunday, it now appears that Albanian-on-Albanian violence poses the greatest threat to Macedonian stability.

Compared with other former Yugoslav republics, Macedonia has been quite the success story. Its declaration of independence from Yugoslavia was followed by years of relative peace. Violence flared up in 2001 when Albanian guerrilla forces launched attacks on the majority Slavic Macedonian authority, but within the year the respective Macedonian and Albanian leaderships had signed on to the Ohrid Agreement, upping protection and rights for Macedonia's 25 percent ethnic Albanian minority.  

And for the most part, Ohrid seems to have worked. Today, Macedonia is an EU candidate country, and it fell just short of a NATO membership invite (no thanks to its neighbor to the south). But rifts within the Albanian community -- between the Albanian Democratic Union for Integration (DUI) and the Democratic Party of Albanians (DPA) -- could launch the country back into pre-Ohrid bloodshed. And if that's the case, the death count has already begun.   

Violence started in the weeks leading up to Sunday's elections with clashes between DUI and DPA members but culminated yesterday when a man with a Kalashnikov reportedly threatened voters at a polling station in the majority Albanian town of Aracinovo while his men stuffed the ballot box. Other sources report that Macedonian police in Aracinovo shot three men, killing one and injuring two in a clash with six armed individuals. The DUI announced that the injured men were party members, accusing the DPA and the police of collaborating to stir up trouble. 

That the violence has largely been contained within the Albanian community is a good sign, but intra-Albanian tensions could nonetheless hamper Macedonia's future government.

The Balkans, once Europe's "powder keg," has just been crowned "one of the safest [regions] in Europe" by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in its report Crime and Its Impact on the Balkans.

According to the report (full pdf), the region has relatively little problem with conventional crime. In fact:

Croatia has a lower murder rate than the United Kingdom. The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia had less homicide per capita than Portugal or Sweden. Romania was safer than Finland or Switzerland."

But that doesn't mean Croatia is all kittens and roses. Rather than taking the form of street crime, the report explains, the region's ugly transition from communism and years of war has lingered on in the form of organized crime networks and illicit trade. The region's two biggest problems today are trafficking of drugs and humans (predominantly sex trafficking).

About 100 tons of heroin enters the region each year, of which 85 tons are sold on to the West for a gross annual flow worth $25 to 30 billion -- more than the annual GDPs of Albania, Macedonia, and Moldova put together.

On the human trafficking front, the UNODC calls the Balkans an "epicenter" of trafficking in Europe. While the report repeats an outside estimate that 120,000 women and children are moved through the region each year, it quickly points out the utter lack of information on the real magnitude of the problem. (For insight into the world of sex trafficking and those trying to fight it, check out this story and this recent essay in FP).

Take-away message: The Balkans may be Europe's new Mayberry, but only if you're not vulnerable, young, and female.

Already bored with Google Earth? Is Google Transit just too mundane? Then it's high time to go the way of the Phoenix and check out Google Mars:

Google Mars

In collaboration with NASA researchers at Arizona State University, Google Maps has created an interactive map of our neighboring planet, complete with "elevation," "visible," and "infrared" view options, as well as markers indicating space craft landings, dunes, craters, and ridges.

While Google Mars is a pretty cool concept, and its mapping has certainly come a long way from those of the 19th century astronomer Percival Lowell, it appears Mars as a planet doesn't offer quite the diversity of satellite images provided by Earth's mountains, oceans, deserts, and plains.

Google actually admits that without color alteration, "Mars pretty much looks like butterscotch." And according to the principal investigator for the Phoenix Mars Lander mission, images sent back from the spacecraft, which landed on Mars's toffee-like surface this weekend, show a "barren landscape that is kind of lumpy."

Apparently the lumpiness, which orbiting space crafts detected back in 2002, is a sign of underground water ice. But now NASA's Phoenix lander is back to explore the next big question: "But does the ice melt?"

If the answer is yes, then at least we're not alone.

ROBERT ATANASOVSKI/AFP/Getty Images

For months, Greece has been threatening to veto Macedonia’s admittance into the EU, all because the two can't agree on the name issue.  But with violent outbreaks pock-marking Macedonia in the weeks before its June 1 elections, it appears the tiny Balkan state might just knock itself out of contention before Greece even gets the chance.

Last month, Macedonia’s parliament moved to disband and hold snap elections after months of deadlock (and the occasional headlock) over reform issues and rights for its 25 percent Albanian minority.

Since the beginning of the campaign last Sunday, a member of the Democratic Party of Albanians (DPA) has been stabbed to death and members of the rival Democratic Union for Integration (DUI), have been beaten, shot at, and had their offices attacked. In the latter cases, the DUI has blamed the violence on DPA supporters.

EU leaders have expressed concern over Macedonia’s pre-election troubles, saying that "violence has no place in an election campaign."  

This seems like an awfully understated response on the part of the EU, for whom Macedonia is quite close to the front of its new membership queue.  A candidate country since 2005, Macedonia is on track for EU membership in the coming years. But if the country can’t better control its pre-election tensions, is it really ready?  After all, as Bulgaria has shown, EU membership is not just going to make crime and corruption disappear.  But on the flip side, the promise of an EU future may be the only thing keeping countries like Macedonia on track toward an eventually stable government.

So back to Greece and its veto-happy approach to its northern neighbor. Is prolonged regional instability really worth it for one little modifier?

The smaller the renegade province, the bigger the pawn -- at least so it seems in the world of post-communist geostrategic positioning.  Just as the dust has begun to settle around the Kosovo independence issue, Georgia’s breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia now find themselves front and center in the separatist question lime light.

In recent months, the U.S. has pushed for Georgian memebership in NATO, rebel pockets and all; while Russia has upped its ties with both of Georgia's de facto independent states. And just this week, the EU threw in its two cents, declaring support for Georgian territorial integrity.

With Moscow-Tbilisi tensions running high, let’s take a look at what Abkhazia and South Ossetia really have to offer...beyond their mad drone-downing skills:

Map by Phillipe Rekacewicz - UNEP/GRID-ARENDAL

According to this week’s Tuesday Map of Georgia’s environmental and security issues from the IDMC (Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre), the two rebel provinces come complete with two refugee camps (orange triangles), two nuclear waste sites (yellow markers), and one “large aging Soviet industrial complex still generating pollution” (red circle).

Abkhazia does have a beautiful coast -- so beautiful, in fact, that the most famous Georgian of them all incorporated it into Georgia proper back in 1931, setting the province on course for decades of ethnic tension and the economic isolation. Beautiful or not though, this week's map shows that much of Abkhazia's shore line is actually chock full of “pesticides and/or heavy metals (mainly inherited from the Soviet period)” (yellow patches).

All in all, I can see why neither Georgia nor Russia will give up their influence over this diamond in the rough -- what country wouldn't forsake regional stability for a few more nuclear waste sites?

Samuel Aranda/Getty Images

Boris Tadic, Serbian president and leader of the coalition “For a European Serbia,” declared victory after elections Sunday in which his party took an estimated 103 of the national assembly’s 250 seats.

True, yesterday’s large pro-Europe voting turnout did come as a pleasant surprise to Serbia’s EU supporters. In light of Kosovo’s recent, and polarizing, declaration of independence, analysts were predicting a slight lead for Serbia’s ultra nationalist Radical Party (SRS), despite some pretty serious efforts on the part of the EU to win over Serbian voters.

But “victory,” this election was not. If anything, Sunday has shown just how little has changed in Serbia this year -- despite Kosovo and despite the EU.

Once again, the SRS, whose founder currently stands trial at the Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, garnered its standard 29 percent of the vote, while the democratic bloc again proved too uninspiring to pull Serbia out of its muck of power hungry political personalities. Just as in Serbia's elections in January of last year (a vote that produced a strained government lasting less than ten months), its two dominant parties again find themselves courting strange bed fellows to form a majority coalition.  And ironically, this year, it’s a small coalition of Milosevic’s Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) and a party of stodgy retirees (PUPS) that will play the role of kingmaker.

But the take away message from Sunday's results is not one of Milosevic’s inescapable legacy or of inevitable stagnation. Rather, it’s the recognition that Serbia’s future will not be determined from the outside -– by break away provinces or EU promises -- but will be decided by Serbia itself. 

Inner change was the message of Serbia’s magnetic former prime minister Zoran Djindjic, a leader with tremendous potential, cut short by his tragic assassination in 2003. But if inspiring leadership in Serbia could happen once, it can happen again –- just probably not from today’s batch of leaders.

Armend Nimani/AFP/Getty Images

Citizens of Serbia will head to the polls again on Sunday, this time to elect a new parliament (the last one held together less than a year).  It looks to be a close election, with the pro-European Democratic coalition polling just behind the nationalist Serbian Radical Party (SRS).

According to Belgrade’s bookies, odds fall in the nationalists' favor. In the PM race, most people are putting their money on either the current caretaker prime minister, Vojslav Kostunica or Tomislav “the Undertaker” Nikolic (no, not The Undertaker, though Nikolic, whose nickname stems from his former profession as a cemetery overseer, is not much better).

If Sunday’s elections follow the gamblers’ gut, Serbia’s future will not be bright.  Although staunchly opposed to Milosevic back in the 1990s, Prime Minister Kostunica has proved just as power hungry, and just as willing to play on Serbia’s Kosovo myth, as was Milosevic himself. And a Serbia with Nikolic at the helm would be even uglier. Nikolic is adamant that he’s “no Milosevic,” but only because Milosevic wasn't nationalist enough for his taste. Needless to say, both men oppose European integration as long as most of Europe continues to recognize Kosovo.

Ironically,  a pro-Europe prime minister could only come out of a coalition that includes the leftist parties and the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) -- Milosevic's former party. SPS isn't quite what it used to be, but its inclusion still shows how weak the pro-Europe forces in Serbia's politics are.

Nikola Solic-Pool/Getty Images

Saddam Hussein may have been A-okay exterminating thousands of Iraqi Kurds and destroying the oil economy of an entire country, but apparently life in prison was a little more than his hard shell could handle.  

The pan-Arab paper Al-Hayat (English version of its news site here) has printed excerpts from the prison diaries of Iraq’s prolific former dictator, written during his stint in custody between 2003 and 2006. In his prison time writings, Saddam describes the hardships he faced, including the personal struggle of asking for things -- like the time he asked for a flower. "It was a serious sacrifice from me to ask for the first time in my life,” he wrote.

Also, while he probably should have been more concerned about his impending execution, Saddam's main worry was actually contracting an STD . . . from his clothesline. Upon learning that his laundry was hung on the same line as the clothes of his U.S. military guards, he wrote:

I explained to them that they are young and they could have young people's diseases…  My main concern was to not catch a venereal disease, an HIV disease, in this place… What can the Americans and other invaders... bring to an (invaded) country apart from dangerous diseases?"

I knew the man was backward, but how early '90s -– if you can’t get AIDS from a toilet seat, you surely can’t get AIDS from a clothesline.

The 130-mph winds and 12-foot-high waves of Cyclone Nargis have already left at least 22,500 dead and another 40,000 missing along Burma's Andaman coast and Irrawaddy river basin, but the worst may not be over. Caryl Stern, head of the U.S. fund for UNICEF, said of the days to come, "Our biggest fear is that the aftermath could be more lethal than the storm itself."

Burma's paranoid, isolationistic junta has actually asked for international assistance in the face of this mounting disaster, but according to The Irrawaddy, a Burmese newsmagazine run out of Thailand, government cooperation with international relief groups is still questionable in practice.

As seen in this week's Tuesday Map(s), though, the biggest issue on the ground may simply be standing water -- miles and miles of standing water.

These images from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite show just how much of Burma's coastal plain is now under water.

On April 15, the image shows clean-cut river tracks and a visible shoreline:

NASA

The May 5 image, however, is clearly a different story:

NASA

And this map, created by UNOSAT (the Operational Satellite Applications Program of the U.N. Institute for Training and Research), shows the flooding's impact on Burma's citizens along the Andaman coast:

UNOSAT

As you can see, standing flood water (red-pink areas) has unfortunately closely followed the denser populations (red/orange dots) of this agricultural region. And that's why the cyclone's toll has been so astoundingly high.

AFP/Getty Images

I figured something was up when Congressman Eliot Engel (D-NY) kept calling Kosovo "Kosova" (the Albanian pronunciation) at the most recent House Committee on Foreign Affairs hearing on the Balkans. Turns out Engel's swapped the last "o" in Kosovo for a central boulevard in the heart of Pec, a majority Albanian city in western Kosovo that was once the seat of the Serbian Orthodox Patriarch (back in the 15th century, that is).

Sewell Chan, NYT:

It felt a bit surreal on Sunday, during a visit to Pec … to encounter a main boulevard named for Representative Eliot L. Engel, a Democrat who represents parts of the Bronx and Westchester and Rockland Counties.

Engel has been a strong advocate for Kosovo and introduced the House Resolution supporting its unilateral declaration of independence last February. According to Chan:

The makeup of Mr. Engel's constituency may help explain his advocacy for the province… The Albanian population in the Bronx took root in the 1970s, Mr. Engel remembered. "A lot of them were superintendents when they came,” he said. Groups of relatives or friends would save up money and buy a building, which they would manage. The population surged again in the 1990s fueled in large part by the Kosovo crisis and prompting efforts to organize Albanian-Americans."

New York Albanians are quite the force to be reckoned with. According to Stacy Sullivan in her book Be Not Afraid, For You Have Sons in America, one Kosovar Albanian roofer in Brooklyn helped raise $30 million to fund and outfit the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) -- and largely with American-made guns. At least loopholes in American gun laws have worked out well somewhere.

Jed Jacobsohn/Getty Images

It's been almost 10 years since the Kosovo crisis, and 15 since the wars in Bosnia and Croatia -- long enough for the world to have "more or less turned its back" on the region, former FP managing editor and negotiator of the Dayton Peace Accords Richard Holbrooke recently complained in the Washington Post.

The world may have moved on to bigger and bloodier conflicts, but one former NBA star is staying his ground. Serbia's Vlade Divac, a versatile center in L.A. and Sacramento before his retirement in 2005, has taken on the refugee crisis that continues to plague his home country. Under the banner of "You Can Too," Vlade and his wife have been raising awareness and money to improve the lives of Serbia's 6,748 refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs).

The refugee problem today is a fraction of what it once was (almost 530,000 registered with Serbia at the end of the Kosovo war), but those who remain live in deplorable conditions. Tension between locals and refugees often ran high during my stay in Belgrade last year, with the refugees serving as a constant reminder of the Kosovo war and its messy aftermath. To make matters worse, refugees from Kosovo are still deemed IDPs, rendering them ineligible for the kind of international aid available to officially recognized refugees. They will remain IDPs until a U.N. resolution decides Kosovo's final status (read: never).

But the Divacs are not discouraged. Since launching their campaign last September, they have raised 1 million euros –- enough to provide new homes to 75 families, or about 400 people.

What about today's hot spot? Current stats show that Iraq has produced more than 2 million refugees and 2.7 million IDPs. With UNHCR efforts underfunded and with few displaced Iraqis planning to return home, perhaps the NBA should start ramping up its Middle East recruitment. After all, someone's got to clean things up when the dust settles.

After a record-setting week, the price of rice dropped 3 percent following announcements yesterday that the United States had accelerated its rice planting and that, more importantly, major rice exporters Thailand and Brazil would not impose export bans.

The news may be a drop in the bucket compared to the world-wide "silent tsunami" of inflated food prices (last month saw a 57 percent increase), but as this week's Tuesday Map shows, Thailand's decision to stay in the game was very much needed:

Three of Asia's top rice exporters shown above (China, India, and Vietnam) have already cut their rice exports this year, leaving neighboring importers high and dry. And according to the U.N. World Food Program's executive director, who spoke with FP during her recent visit to Washington, the countries who have the greatest potential for massive unrest, suffering, or starvation are "import-dependent countries, because we're seeing a strain on their capabilities to obtain enough food to meet their needs."

But the global food crisis is unfortunately not limited to import-heavy countries. The WFP estimates that more than 100 million people around the world could soon be without food. The problem has already reached great enough proportions that 33 countries have already seen hunger-driven, social unrest.  

Today, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced he would chair a U.N. task force to create and carry out a response action plan. Let's just hope his efforts don't prove too little, too late.

Two weeks ago, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker announced that diplomats and staff could finally move into the massive, new U.S. embassy as early as May. But thanks to a gross underestimation of housing needs, some embassy staff will be forced to remain in their trailers until more rooftop-protected housing can be secured inside the compound.

Apparently this snafu resulted from housing figures, calculated in 2005, that failed to predict the more than doubling in embassy staff that occured between the start and end of the embassy's construction.

To make matters worse, a portion of the staff that will remain in the trailers, currently parked behind Saddam Hussein's former palace (turned U.S. command center) will not be provided with rooftop reinforcement. They will receive some "enhanced protection," though (read: sandbags).

Without rooftop coverage, the Green Zone's looking like an awfully rough place to be these days.

This week's Tuesday Map illustrates the fragile and spotty nature of Africa’s "Internet Weather" -- or "teledensity" as tracked by Internet monitoring technology.

Researchers at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, tracked Internet connectivity at points in more than 40 African countries, whose populations make up more than 80 percent of the continent's inhabitants. Their findings (pdf) are sad, though not surprising: "Africa's network performance is over 10 years behind that of Europe and the U.S. and falling further behind," and among African countries "performances in developing regions are a factor of 5-20 times worse than that in developed regions."

This video maps daily connectivity and explains each dot's meaning (in a funny British accent):

Hat tip: Today's Tuesday Map has been made possible by the PingER (Ping End-to-end Reporting) project of the Internet End-to-end Performance Measurement (IEPM) group at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC).

ALEXANDER JOE/AFP/Getty Images

A shipment of ammunition, rockets, and mortar bombs en route from China to Zimbabwe has been denied passage from the South African port of Durban to the shipment's landlocked destination. 

On Friday, South Africa’s High Court barred the transport of weapons aboard the An Yue Jiang, arguing that the shipment would be used by Zimbabwe's president of 28 years, Robert Mugabe, against members of the opposition party. Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, temporarily in self-imposed exiled, declared himself the victor of the March 29th elections. Since then, journalists and activists alike have reported that hundreds of opposition supporters have been detained, beaten, or tortured (warning: illustrations may be unsettling).

Although the An Yue Jiang is expected to return to China, a South African paper, News24, reports that a second arms shipment from China is scheduled to arrive by air in order to "expedite the delivery and to circumvent the controversy around last week's shipment by sea." The story also claims that both orders, placed by the Zimbabwean government, were finalized just days after Zimbabwe's elections.

The arms shipments brings to light the hazards of China's growing role in the world's poorest and most unstable continent. According to Serge Michel in the current issue of FP, in the last seven years, "trade between China and Africa jumped from $10 billion to $70 billion." But the resulting projects highlight the competing interests of Chinese-African cooperation:

Take, for example, the dam being built at Imboulou in Congo. Officially, it's a huge success: It's expected to help double national electricity production by 2009... [But according to a project engineer] the quality of the cement being used is sub-standard, the Congolese workers are so poorly paid that none of them stays longer than a few months, and, above all, the drilling has been so poorly done that half of the dam sits on a huge pocket of water that continually floods the site and could cause it to collapse one day."

From weapons to shoddy cement, the Chinese-Africa deal is looking more like a recipe for disaster every day.

After rumors spread last Friday that Putin had divorced his wife in favor of a medal-winning rhythmic gymnast, the outgoing president seemed surprisingly good-humored about the whole thing. To a crowd of journalists in Italy he said,

In other publications of the same type, the names of other successful, beautiful young women from Russia are mentioned. I think it won't be unexpected if I say that I like them all — just as I like all Russian women."

But as it turns out, Putin's last laugh was to pack a slightly bigger punch. That same day, Moskovsky Korrespondent, the tabloid that broke the story, was shut down. National Media Company, the media house under which the tabloid ran, denied any suggestion that the suspension stemmed from political pressure, claiming instead the paper had closed so that they could develop "a new concept." Incidentally, the paper’s editor-in-chief has resigned.

Perhaps National Media should consider a Russian version of Hunting Illustrated as its "new concept." It might put the company back on the big man's good side.

TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images

The Russian tabloid Moskovsky Korrespondent has spread rumors that outgoing Russian President Vladimir Putin has left his wife, Lyudmila Putina, in favor of the younger, sprightlier rhythmic gymnast Alina Kabayeva (left).

Kabayeva, known for her medal-winning flexibility, would be quite the catch.  Since winning the gold for rhythmic gymnastics (yes, that’s the one with the hula-hoops), the Uzbek native has not only appeared in this music video but now currently serves as a parliament member in the lower house of the Duma –- representing Putin's party, of course.

Today, however, at a meeting with Italian leader Silvio Berlusconi, Putin flatly denied the story as containing "not a single word of truth." That's just as well for Miss Kabayeva. This is what Lyudmila has to say about life in the happy Putin home:

He never praises me and that has totally put me off cooking...   He has put me to the test throughout our life together. I constantly feel that he is watching me..."

 Guess once you've gone KGB there's no going back.