There is a revolution in Kenya that parallels the banking system and the broadband revolution but is something entirely its own: the cellular revolution.

As President Barack Obama put it in a November 2010 speech, the Constitution of India and the United States Constitution “begin with the same revolutionary words.” Those words, of course, are “We the People.”

This past week the now hydra-like Greek debt crisis reared yet another one of its re-growing heads. Anti-austerity protests returned to Athens as Greek ministers attempted to acquiesce to the demands of European Union leaders who thought that the problem had already been dealt with. The continuation of the Greek recession, now entering historic periods of length and severity at five years and a 16 percent decrease from pre-recession GDP, should not be seen as a surprise.

2012, by all accounts, will be a year for the history books.

Last column, I wrote about the events in the Middle East as a sort of “grand game” between Israel and the United States against Iran. Recently, some commentators and writers have gone as far as to insinuate that what we are seeing is an attempt to destabilize and overthrow a regime that is, in some fashion, legitimate.

A Look Inside A Kenyan Landfill

A great deal has been written on President Obama’s continuation of many of the Bush administration’s policies in regards to terrorism. Growth in the size and operational tempo of special warfare units, the extensive use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) against terrorist targets worldwide, and the National Security Agency's (NSA) ongoing warrantless surveillance programs – all of these began with President Bush.

It’s official. The war that has topped headlines for half of my life is officially being drawn down, and within a few more years, it will probably be over. I am talking, of course, about the war in Afghanistan.

You have to admit: The current crop of Latin American socialist leaders is the gift that just keeps on giving.

This month, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev sent a bill to the Duma calling for the reinstatement of direct gubernatorial elections by the people of Russia’s provinces.

The past year has been a most tumultuous one for the nations of the eurozone, from the sunny shores of debt-ridden Greece to her disgruntled northern neighbors. The seventeen-member union has approached the brink of disaster and backed down seemingly several times a day for months, exhausting lenders and spectators, while inciting political unrest throughout the region.

This week, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran asserted that Iran was ready for negotiations on its nuclear (weapons) program. Indeed, he insisted that it always had been, and that European and American declarations to the contrary were, in fact, “excuses.”

On December 6 this past year, I was anxious to get to Goma, a city in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), to witness the nation’s presidential election.

On December 17, 2011, North Korea lost Kim Jong-il ­– its “Dear Leader” – to a heart attack. Without missing a beat, North Korea’s state-run media anointed his third son Kim Jong-un as the “Great Successor” and placed the fate of the North Korean people squarely in his 28-year-old hands. One look at North Korea’s pudgy new protagonist is enough to make me worry not only about the fate of the North Korean people, but about the future security of the East Asian region as a whole.

Some of the snapshots from Chile’s ongoing student movement depict a lighthearted mobilization. Led by the charismatic Camila Vallejo, the students have used Twitter and Facebook to stage kiss-a-thons and superhero-themed costume protests. But other images have been more violent.

The recent failure of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction (JSCDR) to reach an agreement on the reduction of the federal deficit may turn into a full-blown military budget crisis with enormous, unforeseen consequences for national security if the United States does not act soon.

Antarctica is home to more than emperor penguins and a few dozen humans with science citizenship barricaded in small hermetic bases. It is also host to an estimated 200 billion barrels of hydrocarbons, alongside large quantities of gold, silver, uranium, and many other rare metals underneath a pristine ice cap still virgin of commercial exploitation. Securing a territory with such a rich underground, in whole or in part, would bless any country with durable energy security and, thereby, increased political independence in the international arena.

Consider the flying toilet. The term comes from the Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya. Within the slum, there is often less than one latrine per 50 shacks, with each 12-foot by 12-foot shack containing, on average, eight people. Kibera sits on government land that never fully transferred legally to its pre-independence residents, and, as such, the government treats residents as squatters with no right or entitlement to legal, social, or economic protection. A complete lack of governmental presence within the slum means that at night, with no street lights and collections of roving thugs (and, at times, predatory policemen looking for a shakedown), using toilets can become dangerous. In response, shacks stock up on plastic bags, defecate or urinate into them after dark, and fling them from their windows out into the streets to bake in the morning sun.

Anyone remember the FTAA? Probably not. The Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) was supposed to be revolutionary. But today, the FTAA is dead in the water.