The trial of the pope's former butler and the letter of a senior archbishop are but two episodes revealing the deep dysfunction at the heart of Pope Benedict's city-state, says Michael Walsh.

Pyongyang looks and feels different under Kim Jong Un's leadership, but how much do new buildings, markets and facades reveal about the direction of policy? Charles K Armstrong, who recently visited North Korea, reflects.

When the United States led the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001, it planned to extend its power from Afghanistan to the wider region. Today, the actions of leading states - Russia, Pakistan, and China among them - are contributing to a very different outcome.

Georgia goes to the polls today for tightly contested parliamentary elections. Despite an horrific prison abuse scandal on the eve of the vote, Mikheil Saakashvili believes his party has done enough to win; Bidzina Ivanishvili and his Georgian Dream party hope their energetic campaigning means otherwise. In reality, it is the post-election politics in Georgia that will matter, says Denis MacShane.

Behind Georgia's prison-abuse scandal lies a large-scale, self-funding penal system whose effects - not least psychological - pervade the society, says Gavin Slade.

The exposure of violent abuse in the Georgian prison system has shocked its people and rocked the government of Mikheil Saakashvili. The intense focus on zero-tolerance and mass incarceration in the criminal-justice system is a key to understanding why it happened, says Gavin Slade.