SYRACUSE, N.Y., Feb. 6 (UPI) -- It is 8:50 p.m. EST on Super Tuesday. I have just gotten off the phone with former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe Gen. Wesley Clark. During the long night other leading figures give me comment about the primaries being held.

LONDON, Feb. 1 (UPI) -- New Zealanders are informal, generous and pioneering, a spirit embodied by Edmund Hillary.

PRAGUE, Czech Republic, Jan. 10 (UPI) -- Her defining moment is not really the tear she almost shed. The defining moment was her loss in Iowa. The show of emotion in New Hampshire was just a result of that metamorphosis. For many, Hillary went from being cold and calculated to being human.

PRAGUE, Czech Republic, Jan. 7 (UPI) -- "He is charming, but glib. Saakashvili needs to step up to the plate if the Rose Revolution is to meet its promise. It is not enough to want to be in the European Union. You have to meet standards of democracy. That is his challenge," a ranking Democrat wrote to me in response to the presidential election results in the Republic of Georgia.

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia, Jan. 4 (UPI) -- I have been telling the European political classes that U.S. elections are complicated. I have been explaining to them that U.S. presidential primaries can take unexpected turns. And so Democrats and independents in Iowa, a state that is 97 percent white, delivered the best in U.S. political theater -- they gave Sen. Barak Obama of Illinois a convincing victory.

VIENNA, Jan. 2 (UPI) -- As a child I was fascinated by sport heroes. There was baseball’s Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron; track and field’s Wilma Rudolph; soccer’s Pele; swimming’s Mark Spitz and the incomparable all-round athlete Babe Didrikson Zaharias. Other athletes also held the mantle high. But today, from U.S. baseball to international biking -- and even tennis -- greed, dishonor and arrogance are the new credo.

MALMO, Sweden, Dec. 31 (UPI) -- "Musharraf will bring us to the brink," Pakistan's Ambassador Asif Ezdi said to me privately in Berlin in December 2002. I looked doubtfully at Ezdi. It was a year after Sept. 11; Musharraf was an ally of the United States. I did not recognize how prescient Ezdi's words would be.

BUDAPEST, Hungary, Dec. 26 (UPI) -- In 2007, there were 19 presidential and 49 parliamentary elections, at least two notable referenda and several inner-party leadership fights. It would be impossible to cover them all in my column. So here is my personal and incomplete synopsis of the voting year.

BADEN-BADEN, Germany, Dec. 7 (UPI) -- He accompanied Gorbachev through Glasnost and Perestroika. His eloquent – if sometimes evasive – answers during the famous press conferences of the 80’s became a hallmark of U.S.-Soviet rapprochement. Last week, this zeitgeist - Dr. Vladimir Lomeiko - celebrated his 70th birthday.