Obviously, the seizure of 15 British marines and sailors and the Iranians' use of them as pawns in a propaganda game is a deadly serious business. Yet there's also plenty of farce amid the danger:

The Iranians also blundered in diplomatic talks by giving the British their own compass reference for the place where they said the 14 men and one woman had been seized. When Britain plotted these on a map and pointed out that the spot was in Iraq’s maritime area, the Iranians came up with a new set of coordinates, putting the seizure in their own waters.

Whoops. Turns out, though, that the border issue isn't as black and white as either side claims. King's College of London's Richard Schofield, an expert on the Iran-Iraq border, explained in a telephone interview that although "basically, there is a boundary" nowadays along the Shatt al-Arab, that's not the case further out in the Persian Gulf where the British sailors and marines were taken prisoner. Below is the map presented by the UK Ministry of Defense (MoD):

That's what lends the claims of gadfly Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, a whiff of plausibility. Murray, who also headed the Maritime Section of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office from 1989 to 1992, writes on his website that "there is no agreed maritime boundary between Iraq and Iran in the Persian Gulf," a milder version of his earlier argument that the boundary used by the MoD "is a fake with no legal force."

Murray is missing the point. True, as Schofield says, "the boundary that [the MoD] showed further south was a little disingenuous, because it doesn't have the same legal force or weighting, by any means, as the Iran-Iraq boundary." Explains Schofield, "It's more just a provisional indication of what Iraq's territorial water claims might be." But what's good for the goose is good for the gander; if there's no clear border, then Iran doesn't have a case, either. And as Kaiyan Kaikobad, an associate professor of international law at Durham University, observes in the LA Times, "If you can show that over a reasonably long period of time, that this was the line that both countries actually agreed on, there's lots of rules in international law that allow that line to become not only a de facto line, but a de jure line." So the MoD could be right after all.

Rather than seizing the opportunity to chalk the whole thing up to a misunderstanding about maritime law, though, the Iranians keep digging themselves into a deeper diplomatic hole, and the British are happy to hand them the shovel. It's clear from the Iranian actions that this isn't really about territorial waters, in any case. After all, the Iranians could have politely notified the British Navy that their boat was in the wrong spot, and the two sides could have worked it out like gentlemen. Instead, we get an absurd hostage situation and a diplomatic crisis. So what's it about?

UPDATE: Be sure to read Craig Murray's response.

Despite Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen's 20-year crusade to appease Vietnamese territorial demands, all while suppressing widespread indignation at home over the concessions, a quiet storm of discontent continues to brew over the historically Cambodian Mekong Delta in southern Vietnam, home to more than one million ethnic Khmer Krom. With the help of a small but vocal Western diaspora, the "Khmer from below" (if we translate from the Vietnamese) have grown increasingly savvy in voicing their nationalist demands, which range from re-unification with Cambodia to full independence.

Last Wednesday, in anticipation of a visit by Vietnam's president, Nguyen Minh Triet, about 50 Buddhist monks staged a rare public protest near the Vietnamese embassy in Cambodia. The monks' immediate concern was with Hanoi's alleged defrocking of dissident monks around the Mekong Delta. The Cambodia Daily reports:

Son Hai, a 26-year-old monk who claimed he recently fled Vietnam, said the monks timed their protest with the president's two-day visit to attract maximum attention. 'We want to meet [Nguyen Minh Triet] face-to-face and ask him to stop defrocking monks and pressuring the Khmer Kampuchea Krom,' he said."

Hanoi's efforts to "Vietnamize" the Khmer Krom have long alarmed human rights groups and are the subject of Rebecca Sommer's widely screened 2006 documentary, "Eliminated without Bleeding."

As Blake noted yesterday, Pakistan's government is touting a new plan to mine its porous border with Afghanistan. Hamid Karzai dismisses the notion as an empty gesture at fighting the Taliban, and he may be right.

It's far easier for Pakistan to talk about minefields and border fences than to actually crack down on known Taliban operatives in places like Waziristan. But it's a clever gesture on Musharraf's part. Why? Because Karzai has to reject the idea. The Durand Line that forms the border between the two countries cuts right through Pashtun tribal areas. Endorsing a plan to mine the border would mean accepting the border, something Afghanistan has never done.

And so the bickering between Musharaff and Karzai continues. Bush may have to invite them for another White House dinner soon.

Every day, men from all over Africa take the perilous journey through the continent and the open seas in search of a better life in Europe. They leave behind their families, paying hundreds of dollars for a square inch of space on a boat off the coast of West Africa.

From there, they battle rough weather conditions, malnutrition and trauma for several days on an open, overcrowded boat, in hopes of seeing the shores of Spain or Italy. Many of them, however, don't make it. Last week a overloaded fishing boat  from Senegal capsized twice while sailing to Spain's Canary Islands, leaving at least 80 passengers dead.

The tale is sadly typical of migrant boats making their way to Europe. Many of the boats are ill-equipped for the journey, and rescue workers and police often intercept the journey and escort them back to shore. The migrants are then helped back to health, detained and either released or deported to their country of origin. For those sent back, the experience doesn't necessarily deter them. One man on his second attempt to reach Europe from Nigeria says, "I am, of course, very afraid of making this boat journey again but there is no other way. I and other Africans like myself feel we have no choice. I have to try and make a better life, I pray that God will see me through." As Austin Wainwright, a worker with the Spanish Red Cross, relates, the journey is harrowing, but far too many Africans "would rather die trying to make it to Europe than to stay in their country."

Europe has responded to illegal immigration by introducing patrol boats, planes and helicopters off the shores of Mauritania, Senegal and Cape Verde. Also, last month, the EU introduced new measures to deal with illegal immigration, including allocating 40 million euros to boost job creation in Africa. Improving the African economy is a great idea. Unfortunately, nobody has found a magic formula for Africa yet, and 40 million euros is nowhere near enough.

The debate over building a U.S.-Mexico border fence often ignores one key issue: the fence that's already there. It's a disjointed mishmash of various barriers, structures ranging from wooden fences to high, steel mesh walls. 

Peter Skerry argues in the most recent issue of FP that these disjointed barriers reveal America's ambivalent and conflicted attitudes about immigration. I wonder what he would make of this new use for a section of the fence south of San Diego: the first-ever game of international border volleyball.

Some nations are just doomed from the start, often because their borders are not squiggly enough. That's the conclusion of a recent NBER study by Harvard economists Alberto Alesina and Janina Matuszeski and NYU's Bill Easterly. 

The researchers developed an equation for measuring the "squiggliness" of national  borders using grids, coming up with (ln (box count) = a + b * ln (box size)), which they argue roughly corellates with how "artificial" or "natural" a state is - that is, how well a country's borders reflect existing regional, ethnic, historical, geographical, and linguistic fault lines. They also developed another measure to determine to what extent borders "partition" ethnic groups.

The researchers then set out to find whether artificial states with straight, partitioning borders do any worse than natural states with squiggly borders. The findings? The names of the “most artificial” states according to both the "squiggly" and "partition" measures - Chad, Ecuador, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Guatemala, Jordan, Mali, Morocco, Namibia, Niger, Pakistan, Sudan, and Zimbabwe - should give you a clue (hint: a lot of them show up on FP's Failed State Index). Yup, less squiggly countries turned out to do worse all around: they are poorer, more prone to unrest, governed poorly, and have higher infant mortality rates. 

A group of Israeli soldiers ready themselves to cross the border into Lebanon.

Ask the existing EU members about the prospect of Ukraine joining their club, and you get a resounding "call us in 20 years".  But the remoteness of the prospect--and likely Russian objections--haven't stopped the hoping and the planning. Witness the recent Yalta conference of the optimistically named group YES (Yalta Europe Strategy), a committee aiming to guide Ukraine into Europe.

The shadow of the 1943 Yalta conference, where some say the Cold War began, hangs over these talks, and it's clear that decades behind the Iron Curtain left a lot of Ukrainians looking westward. Not everyone is optimistic about the time frame of accession, and some doubt it will even happen. Still others seem to think that pre-accession measures are worth it, even if Ukraine's entry is still decades in the future. From one unexpected leader at the conference:

I am not sure that in 10 to 15 years Ukraine will be a member of the EU. But we need these reforms: democracy, a market economy and the rule of law."  --Victor Pinchuk, one of the Ukraine's richest men and the son-in-law of ousted President Leonid Kuchma

Think building an impermeable wall along the U.S.-Mexico border is a pipe dream? Not so, says Rep. Steve King (R-IA). In fact, he's "designed" one of his own. King grew up in what he calls a "law enforcement family." So he presumably knows a thing or two about illegality. And Tuesday, when he took to the House floor to talk about immigration - the illegal kind - King carried with him a model of the wall he has engineered, presumably in his spare time. Reports The Hill:

But it got really interesting when King broke out the mock electrical wiring: "I also say we need to do a few other things on top of that wall, and one of them being to put a little bit of wire on top here to provide a disincentive for people to climb over the top."

He added, "We could also electrify this wire with the kind of current that would not kill somebody, but it would be a discouragement for them to be fooling around with it. We do that with livestock all the time."