India's government this week publicly objected to any Chinese firm or consortium being given contracts related to the building of the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline. About 735 kilometers of the proposed pipeline will pass through Afghanistan and another 800 through Pakistan. The gas sales agreement for the pipeline is slated to be signed this April, and India's stance may complicate matters. The Asian Development Bank has insisted on a role for Chinese firms, since these have "experience in building such long pipelines in a short time."

The neocon conspiracies can't be far behind now. Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (proudly billing itself "A Global Think-Tank") notes the suddenness with which the moniker "Jasmine Revolution" has been adopted (and mostly by intellectuals abroad, not protesters in Tunis). But he notes the differences between Tunisia and Georgia ("Rose"), Ukraine ("Orange") and Kyrgyzstan ("Tulip"). Requisite Sorosphobobia is already in evidence. Dr. KR Bolton asks in Foreign Policy Journal: "Tunisian Revolt: Another Soros/NED Jack-Up?" But his screed makes no mention of George Soros or National Endowment for Democracy programs in Tunisia—only in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan.

Sixty years ago, on Jan. 12, 1951, the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, took effect, its text for the first time defining the crime of genocide under international law, establishing punishments and the responsibility of signatory nations to act against it. The world has nonetheless witnessed several genocides since then.

Three UN peacekeepers in Ivory Coast were injured Jan. 11 when their patrol was ambushed by forces loyal to president Laurent Gbagbo in the main city of Abidjan. The West African country has been divided since the incumbent Gbagbo has refused to cede power to rival Alassane Ouattara following the contested Dec. 28 presidential election. The UN is recognizing Ouattara as the winner. Gbagbo supporters meanwhile told AlJazeera that UN troops fired on them in the violence that followed the elections—a claim the UN denies.

The right-wing chattering and blogging classes are squealing with unanimous denial that Jared Loughner was influenced by their recent effluence of ultra-bellicose thunder. Timothy P. Carney on the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog takes issue with Paul Krugman's sensible call in the New York Times ("Climate of Hate," Jan. 9) for partisans to refrain from "eliminationist rhetoric." Writes Carney:

Although no other evidence is given, Fox News on Jan. 9 quoted a Department of Homeland Security memo stating that Jared Lee Loughner—primary suspect in the previous day's shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson—is "possibly linked" to American Renaissance, a self-styled far-right think-tank that DHS says promotes views that are "anti-government, anti-immigration, anti-ZOG [Zionist Occupational Government], anti-Semitic."

The New York Times on Jan. 6 ran a story, "US Sends Warning to People Named in Cable Leaks," finally giving some play to a critical issue in the WikiLeaks affair that neither supporters nor detractors of Julian Assange have been quick to examine: the impact of the leaks on dissidents under authoritarian regimes. But the story is more noteworthy for what it omits than what it reports:

The biblically-obsessed are already calling it a prophecy of the End Times. (Examiner.com, Jan. 4) (Actually, contrary to the breathless and spelling-challenged spewings of the paranoid, there is no reference to birds falling from the sky in Revelations. It is in the far less sexy pseudepigraphic Apocalypse of Elijah.) But does anyone else out there find the official explanations singularly implausible? From the PBS News Hour, Jan. 4: