Congress and the Administration have launched a series of space policy reviews in 2009, regarding in particular Nasa's exploration policy, the loosening of ITAR regulations and space security. On each of these issues, the U.S. government may adopt more international-leaning policies in 2010.

This contribution consists in analyzing the unifying or opposing relations between the central State-power and the southern part of central-Saharan populations, mainly Arabs and Tuaregs, within the relational framework of colonial and Malian armed forces.

On November 5th 2009, a cocaine-loaded Boeing 727 aircraft arriving from Venezuela was discovered torched and emptied on a makeshift airstrip in the Malian desert (Gao region). The sahel-saharan area is clearly a contact zone between very distant worlds.

The move away from a planned economy and the apprenticeship of capitalism, which is sometimes uncontrolled in the real estate sector, have led to a series of imbalances between cities and the countryside. It is possible to think that the worst imbalances (in terms of the human and environmental costs of urbanization), which were wittingly accepted for a long time in order to allow the country to open up and to promote break-neck growth, are tolerated less and less and becoming politically intolerable. Urbanization has definitively and deeply modified daily life in China and the expectations of the population, even if these are not expressed in the ballot box. This article assesses China's unprecedented urbanization movement and describes the changes in China's rules of the game, together with the emergence of a more-or-less chaotic real estate market.