Crossing into Abkhazia from Georgia proper is a strange experience. On a dusty asphalt expanse the buses and taxis from the Georgian town of Zugdidi stop, suspicious wayfarers are siphoned off by the Georgian border administration for further questioning, and a troop of passengers begins a weary march over the Inguri River towards the Abkhaz checkpoint. The bridge is perhaps 800m long, capped at either end by crumbling white obelisks commemorating its construction in Soviet times, and peopled by strange breeds of in-betweeners: locals trot to and fro with horses and cart, offering their services to those with luggage, such clumsy practices rendered necessary by the total breakdown in infrastructure and the anti-tank blocks the Georgians have erected. Below fisherman stand knee deep in the gravel banks, casting their lines into the river, apparently unaware of the political no-man’s land they occupy. At the far side, under an old pillbox, men lounge indeterminately extorting cigarett ...

Early on the morning of Friday 9th October President Barack Obama was woken up with the news that he had won the Nobel Peace Prize, the third American President to do so, and the first to win in the award in less than a year of office. The official citation praised ‘his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples’, and affirmed that ‘Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play’. But there seemed to be some confusion over why exactly he’d received the prize – was it for work already done or merely a gesture of support for the principles that Obama has pledged to uphold? The White House Press Office said through one its spokesmen that Obama saw the award as ‘a call to action’. And the Nobel Committee stated shortly after the announcement that it was a sort of ‘vote of confidence’ in Barack Obama’s international ...

Can there really be occasion to go and see Sean Mathias’ production of Waiting for Godot? For most, the play infamously described as a piece ‘in which nothing happens, twice’ needs only to be watched just the once, its drawn out pauses and circular dialogue creating an exercise in waiting for the end. Yet this is a play that has famously reinvented itself in a variety of different settings – apartheid South Africa, San Quentin prison, in New Orleans suffering post-Katrina and as Susan Sontag’s production in war-torn Sarajevo, dubbed ‘waiting for Clinton’. It has also experienced its fair share of controversy. Censored in Britain until the mid-1960s for unconscionable references to erections and prostates, the first year of its production saw the annual Drama Awards invent a new category of prize for it – Most Controversial Play of the Year (never awarded since) – so as not to offend a mutinous West End establishment should it be accorded any greater honour. The play ...

"Where there is oil, there will be blood" wrote Upton Sinclair in his novel Oil; but increasingly forecasters in the energy industry are pointing to the gathering storm clouds as oil dries up and raises a host of questions for energy security. The International Energy Agency predicts an oil supply crisis by 2013; Shell has seen fit to revise that figure upwards, but only to 2015. This year Chevron is expected to announce the largest losses in a decade when it publishes its annual profits in May. Meanwhile OPEC countries are seen to be withholding supply beyond cuts determined by the group in September of last year in an effort to boost the oil’s flagging price. And the price itself, having somersaulted from $147 in June last year to the bottom of the proverbial barrel in late 2008, has seen a typically volatile commodity surpass itself in its movements. Enter "peak oil". Peak oil is, quite simply, the point at which oil reserves being used up are no longer matched ...

The Italian Senate on Wednesday passed a law allowing a significant extension of state power over immigrants. The law has already caused scandals and is set to rekindle the protracted and messy debate on the state of immigration in Italy and the EU. It envisages the creation of police records for all homeless and vagrant people and authorises ronde padane or local crime-watch groups to patrol their localities in order to enforce it (and nearly allowed the 50,000 or so that support the policy, mostly from north-east Italy, to do so armed). It set a state fine for those without a valid visa at between 80 and 200 euros a day, a four-fold increase on the former sum and a move that had been explicitly denied by Berlusconi only days previously. The Premier smoothly back-tracked to admit that he had not been ‘keeping up to date’. But most controversially, the law envisages an amendment that now allows doctors to report illegal immigrants seeking medical attention to the authorities. The ...

On exchange recently in America for a semester at Princeton, I experienced some of the more dubious aspects of a college that prides itself on being the most traditional of the Ivy League (and has, incidentally, lifted some of the most remarkable architectural gildings of Oxford and Cambridge to heighten its claim). But leaving aside the persistent managerial overtures of my ‘staircase representative’, the inanity of beer pong and the wholly questionable annual Quidditch game (‘A Tradition since 2006!’) I found myself immensely enjoying life at university in America. The main ethos of Princeton – and most other American universities is that the university is there not just to administer to your academic work, but to strive to improve every facet of student life. Princeton is swimming in cash - a free gym is located in the middle of campus; another just for athletes not far away. The health centre is open 24 hours a day and run by university staff, so that whether returning ...