It is easy to find an excuse to comment on this subject. Just open up any American newspaper these days. The Washington Post’s lead column, for example, is entitled «Toxic Brew for the GOP.» This is about the ideology of the politicians who are bound to win control of the U.S. Congress in November’s midterm elections.

How to call them? Republicans? Generally speaking, yes. Conservatives from the so-called Tea Party? Absolutely. Incidentally, these are related organizations but with some major differences. Are they small town Americans? Yes, they are that, too.

However, among the many labels applied to this political wave in the panicked op-eds of U.S. newspapers, the most precise would be the «attack of the primitives.»

A day after he traveled to Sochi on the Black Sea to meet President Dmitry Medvedev, Bono joined the rest of the band onstage at Moscow’s Luzhniki stadium. The show was U2’s first-ever in Russia; the group had been one of the few major international acts who hadn’t played in the country, where Western music is hugely popular.

As the band took the stage, the skies opened with torrential rain — especially ironic since «Beautiful Day» was among the first songs. Most of the 50,000-plus crowd stayed dry, though, since the seating area at the stadium — used primarily for soccer — is covered by a roof. The band, as well as the throngs of fans in the dance-floor area, weren’t so lucky. Only the drum kit seemed reliably protected from the rain, while Bono, Edge and bassist Adam Clayton played under the raindrops and got soaked in the process.

There is a hole in the map of Central Asia where Kyrgyzstan used to be. A country once considered an outpost of relative tolerance and democracy in a region of dysfunctional authoritarian regimes is today a deeply divided, practically failed, state. If the international response to its descent into political chaos is not swift and bold, the consequences will be disastrous.

After years of mismanagement and corruption President Kurmanbek Bakiyev was ousted in April by a provisional government that has not succeeded in establishing its authority over the country. An explosion of violence, destruction and looting hit southern Kyrgyzstan in June, killing hundreds and deepening the gulf between ethnic Kyrgyz and Uzbek communities.

«My name is Samantha Smith. I am ten years old.»

So began the simple letter that ultimately made a little girl from Maine an international ambassador for peace in the early 1980s.

Smith, born in Houlton in 1972, was living in Manchester when she sent her famous letter to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov in 1982.

She died 25 years ago today while coming home to Maine, forever linking her to the people of Lewiston-Auburn.

An inexperienced crew operating a Bar Harbor Airline flight from Logan Airport made an errant approach to the Auburn-Lewiston Regional Airport during a rainstorm.

Recently a number of both Russian and US media reported that the Pentagon was planning to open another US military base in Kyrgyzstan. According to The Washington post reports, that facility will be set up in the south of the country, near the town of Osh. However, Kyrgyz authorities immediately denied the reports. As Farid Niyazov, head of the Kyrgyz Presidential Administration Informational Coordination Center, put it, «All issues regarding a further stay of the American or other countries’ military contingents in Kyrgyzstan will be settled by our new parliament to be elected on October 10th, 2010».

Washington’s reset of relations with Moscow may have produced uncertain results, but on one issue the Kremlin and the White House are in agreement: Neither wants a war with Iran to take place. Their attempts to avoid military conflict are commendable, but not when one country is holding an entire region hostage to its hateful policy, and is only a few steps away from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

The assumptions of the current U.S. administration are as clear as the policy of their Russian counterparts, even though Washington and Moscow reached their conclusions from very different starting points.

Last week, Col. Gen. Alexander Zelin, commander of the Russian air force, announced that Moscow had deployed a state-of-the-art S-300 (SA-20 Favorit variant) long-range air-defense system in Abkhazia, a region of the Republic of Georgia that Russia has occupied since the August 2008 war.

Since then, Russia has recognized breakaway Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent republics. According to Gen. Zelin, the task of the air-defense system is «to prevent violation of Abkhaz and South Ossetian airspace and to destroy any aircraft intruding into their airspace no matter what their purpose might be.» On Saturday, Gen. Zelin announced that the Russian air force had resumed flights from the Abkhazian capital of Sukhumi.

Russia has been going out of its way for years now to demonstrate its growing might to the world and have the latter recognize and appreciate it. All these efforts might result in either voluntary recognition by the West of Russia as a world power indeed or in this recognition of Russia under coercion. Both these outcomes stem from the conviction of the Russian elites that there actually exist a list of world powers and that Russia is automatically on this list simply because it is a vast country with nuclear weapons and impressive albeit so far hypothetical potential for economic development.

Twenty years ago, on August 13, 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev, the first and only president of the Soviet Union, signed a decree exonerating all the victims of Stalin’s repressions.

The move was largely symbolic — an attempt by Gorbachev to restore his reputation among the intelligentsia, his political base during the early days of perestroika, whose faith in Gorbachev had declined dramatically by the summer of 1990.

In the Soviet Union of the 1980s, former political prisoners were not pariahs. They enjoyed the same rights as any other Soviet citizen. Gorbachev’s decree was not so much about restoring the rights of citizenship, but rather providing material compensation for past suffering.

The Islamization of Chechnya and Attempts to Stoke Nationalism Mean That the Troubled Republic Has Less of a Resemblance to a Russian Federal Subject

At the end of last week Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov announced that he would forfeit his title of «president,» and that the five other North Caucasus presidents would be following suit. Analysts cannot agree on whether the Kremlin is pressuring regional heads to shed another vestige of regional autonomy — their own distinctive titles — to further tighten up its coveted «power vertical.» But as nationalist sentiment is stoked in Chechnya and Islamization in the republic grows, the Kremlin will hardly be displeased to see Kadyrov being so deferential.