While Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was in Beijing schmoozing with world leaders during the opening ceremonies of the Olympics on August 8, Russian troops, tanks, and bombers were launching a surprise attack on neighboring Georgia.

On August 3, the world lost Nobel Prize laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the conscience of the Cold War. Convicted in 1945 of criticizing Joseph Stalin’s regime, Solzhenitsyn spent years in a Soviet prison camp, nearly succumbing to disease and other hardships. After his release, Solzhenitsyn began publishing materials describing the horrors of the Soviet prison camps, or gulags. His most famous book, The Gulag Archipelago, led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970.

Western political leaders and media pundits expressed outrage at the friendly reception accorded Zimbabwe’s defiant dictator, Robert Mugabe, by fellow African leaders at the recent annual summit of the African Union in Egypt.