As the presidential election enters its final days, the battle over taxes remains front and center. Both Mitt Romney's plan and prominent deficit reduction proposals rely on "broadening the base" by eliminating tax expenditures, like deductions and credits, that act as spending through the tax code.

One-and-a-half years into Syria's civil war, the latest chapter is the armed hostility between Syria and Turkey, once a friend of the Assad regime. A century ago, it was Western powers that dismantled and carved up the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Today, Turkey can place itself in the driver's seat of shaping the borders of the emerging Near East map.

Barack Obama and Mitt Romney agree on at least one thing: that this election is “a choice between two different paths for America,” as the president put it. Yet when it comes to the economy, many of the basic reasons for our sluggish recovery and the ideas needed to address it have been missing from the debate. Instead, we have been given a choice between the clearly mistaken supplyside tax cuts and deregulation championed by Romney, on the one hand, and the wellmeaning but timid proposals of Obama, on the other.

Dusk can feel like an apocalyptic time of day to arrive in Nigeria. As your flight descends into Lagos's Murtala Muhammed International Airport, you could be forgiven for having second thoughts as plumes of haze from constant oil fires in the Niger Delta rise into the sky. Nigeria is not for the faint-hearted.