Worth reading

• NYU's Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank on declining support for Al Qaeda in the Muslim world, with special attention to the Muslim community in London (New Republic).
  

• Roger Winter on the recent fighting in Sudan's Abyei town, and the threat it poses to north-south peace (Enough). The Economist has more on the same.
  

• Andrew Cawthorne on the difficult-to-understand Eritrean regime (Reuters).
  

• Michael Bratton and Mwangi Kimenyi on the importance of ethnicity for Kenyan voters in last year's elections (Afrobarometer).
  

• Michael Tomasky adds his voice to the pro side in the debate over Jim Webb as a Vice Presidential pick. (Guardian).
  

• The Economist on Kuwait's parliamentary elections, and why its neighbors in the Gulf, with their higher growth, don't envy Kuwait's more open democracy. Nathan Brown discusses the poor showing of the moderate Islamist Muslim Brotherhood in the elections (Carnegie Endowment).

• The Economist on Georgia's parliamentary elections.

• The State Department has put out its country reports on "advancing freedom and democracy" in 2007, briefly listing the human rights / democracy problems in the countries of the world (not including the U.S.), vaguely describing the small ways in which the U.S. government is trying to change things, and staying quiet on strategic relations with the governments in question.