Some of the ambiguity has been resolved for two of the names on our list of world leaders who may or may not be dead. One of them is now almost certainly dead. One is no longer a leader. 

Pakistani Taliban sources have now confirmed that their leader, Hakimullah Mehsud, died of wounds from a drone strike last month. According to the sources, Mehsud died Sunday while militants were trying to move him to Karachi for treatment. 

Nigeria's parliament also voted to empower Vice President Goodluck Jonathan to take over for absentee President Umaru Yar'Adua until he can return from Saudi Arabia, where he is being trated for a kidney ailment.  Yar'Adua's health condition remains a mystery. 

With more than 99 percent of the vote counted, there seems to be little doubt left and that Viktor Yanukovych has defeated his one-time Orange Revolution foe Yulia Tymoshenko in Ukraine's presidential election. But, never one to avoid drama, Tymoshenko has not conceded yet leading opponents and supporters alike to wonder if she plans to take to the streets again. 

Not likely says the BBC's Richard Galpin: 

At a news conference in Kiev on Monday, a team of election observers from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe was blunt in its assessment of Ukraine's post-election landscape.

"Yesterday's vote was an impressive display of democratic elections. For everyone in Ukraine, this election was a victory," said Joao Soares, the team co-ordinator.

"It is now time for the country's political leaders to listen to the people's verdict and make sure that the transition of power is peaceful and constructive."

Those two sentences alone may have been enough to cut the ground from underneath Mrs Tymoshenko's feet.

Challenging the election result in the courts or on the street without the cover of credible allegations of fraud would be a tough sell even to her own supporters.

This time around, there isn't a whole lot of daylight between Tymoshenko and Yanukovych's positions, and it would be hard to imagine her being able to drum up the same level of fervor for an opposition movement.

The frequent stories of grusome beheadings and seemingly rand mass-murders coming out of Mexico's drug war can make the country sound like its on the brink of anarchy. But as Alexandra Olson points out, by regional and historical standards, the country's violence is not unusually high:

Mexico's homicide rate has fallen steadily from a high in 1997 of 17 per 100,000 people to 14 per 100,000 in 2009, a year marked by an unprecedented spate of drug slayings concentrated in a few states and cities, Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna said. The national rate hit a low of 10 per 100,000 people in 2007, according to government figures compiled by the independent Citizens' Institute for Crime Studies.

By comparison, Venezuela, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala have homicide rates of between 40 and 60 per 100,000 people, according to recent government statistics. Colombia was close behind with a rate of 33 in 2008. Brazil's was 24 in 2006, the last year when national figures were available.

Mexico City's rate was about 9 per 100,000 in 2008, while Washington, D.C. was more than 30 that year.

Of course, all of that is cold comfort to residents of Ciudad Juarez, which had a mind-boggling homicide rate of "173 per 100,000 in the city of 1.3 million, or more than 2,500 murders last year."

Mexico's relative national stability combined with what can only be described as out of control carnage in the drug war zone, supports Jorge Castaneda's argument that Mexico should be looked at not as a state under seige, but as a country increasingly embroiled in a military quagmire inside its own borders.

Things seem to be going from bad to worse in Sri Lanka, as president Mahinda Rajapaksa continues to crack down following his disputed election victory last month: 

General Fonseka, a retired four-star general who lost to President Mahinda Rajapakse in the January 26 vote, was seized by military police who stormed the office of his People's Liberation Front (JVP).

“They forcibly took away General Fonseka while he was having a discussion with three other senior opposition leaders,” a JVP spokesman said.

“He was dragged away in a very disgraceful manner in front of our own eyes,” added Rauff Hakeem, leader of the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress.

Fonseka had vowed to challenge the elections results in Sri Lanka's supreme court, but may now be dragged in front of a judge on charges of plotting a coup.

The Sri Lankan government had hoped that the election -- the first one since the end of the country's decades long civil war -- would put the country on a path to normalcy, but it's only serving to confirm the worst fears about the government's instability and Rajapaska's authoritarian tendencies. 

It turns out that deporting someone from the United States, even if you're not a federal official or law enforcement officer, is not all that hard:

Wearing a fake badge and a shirt imprinted with "U.S. Federal Agent," Gregory Denny, 37, turned up at the Hemet home of Craig Hibbard, a distant cousin, on Jan. 15, said Lt. Duane Wisehart of the Hemet Police Department.

Displaying what turned out to be a pellet gun, Denny reportedly handcuffed Hibbard's wife, Cherrie Belle, and told the couple she was being deported, Wisehart said. Denny allegedly drove Belle, 28, to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection station in Murrieta.

When he was told there was no warrant for her in the computer system, Denny apparently returned to the couple's house and instructed her husband to purchase a ticket for her online to her home country, Wisehart said.

Police were told Denny drove the woman to San Diego International Airport, where he flashed his fake badge to get through security. He allegedly escorted her to the departure gate, uncuffed her and watched her board a plane to San Francisco en route to Manila, where she remains.

So all you need is a t-shirt and a fake badge to escort a prisoner into an airport? Denny doesn't seem all that bright -- he reported to a local police station still wearing his t-shirt and identifying himself as a federal marshall -- but he does seems to have flummoxed several federal agencies in this caper.

I suspect this is going to make a number of people consider whether they have any relatives they'd like to send on a long trip somewhere.  

In case you just thought that Iran launched a rocket today just to remind everyone about their rockets, they also sent up some unfortunate animals on a scientific mission: 

On Wednesday, Press TV said, the Iranian Aerospace Organization said live video transmission from latest launch would “enable further studies on the biological capsule — carrying a rat, two turtles and worms — as it leaves Earth’s atmosphere and enters space.”

I'm pretty sure Laika already covered this ground in 1957. Then again, if the rat starts training the turtles in martial arts, it will all have been worth it. 

It seems that North Korea's "50-day battle" against illegal economic activity (read: economic activity) is not surprisingly causing further instability. From the Times:

It was at the end of last November that the Government announced a drastic revaluation of the won in an apparent effort to crack down on the country’s burgeoning free market economy. All North Koreans were required to swap old won notes with new ones at an exchange rate of one to 100, knocking two zeroes off their value. Because of a cap of 100,000 won per family ((€526 at the official exchange rate), anyone with significant holdings of cash had their savings wiped out. 

Since then, reports of inflation and food shortages have trickled out of the isolated country via traders and smugglers in China, as well as North Koreans close to the Chinese border who take the risk of keeping illegal mobile telephones. According to such informants, quoted anonymously in the Seoul-based DailyNK news website, there has been “an explosion in the number of casualties resulting from popular resentment at harsh regulation of market activities by the security apparatus across North Korea.”

Agents of the People’s Safety Agency (PSA), which is conducting a so-called “Fifty Day Battle” against illegal enterprise, were reported to have been attacked and driven away as they sought out market activity in the city of Pyongsung in North Pyongan province. In the once prosperous industrial city of Chongjin on the country’s east coast, a steel worker named Jeung Hyun Deuk was reported to have killed an agent of the National Security Agency named Cho.

Even Kim Jong Il acknowledged in a recent statement that there are  "still quite a number of things lacking in people’s lives." If Dear Leader is indeed responding to popular resentment, things must be getting pretty bad. 

A brand new round of "Obama is neglecting Europe" hand-wringing has been set off by the president's decision not to attend a planned U.S.-EU summit in Madrid in the spring. The decision seems understandable -- the president racked up a record number of frequent flyer miles during his first year with 10 foreign trips to 21 nations including six trips to Europe and he's already scheduled to travel to Portugal in the fall for a NATO summit. Though, once again, the administration's timing is unfortunate with a now-embarrassed Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero visiting Washington this week. 

But, as the Wall Street Journal reported, the flap has also revealed that even after the ratification of the Lisbon treaty and the installation of Herman von Rompuy as President of the European Council, the administration still isn't sure who their main European interlocutor is supposed to be:

U.S. officials also said there is confusion over whether the summit will be hosted by Spain, which currently holds the EU presidency, or Brussels, where the EU has its headquarters. The State Department official pointed to the changing structure of the EU since the implementation of the Treaty of Lisbon in December. This year's summit, he noted, will be the first since the treaty formally established an EU political president in Brussels and empowered the EU bureaucracy to be the principal negotiating body for the European states.

As a result, the official said, the State Department was still in consultations with the Europeans over whether the summit was being hosted by Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, whose government heads the rotating EU presidency, or EU Council President Herman Van Rompuy and European Commission President José Manuel Barroso, both of whom are based in Brussels. Another U.S. official said that this confusion has fueled U.S. hesitance to commit to the meeting.

The Times added:

European officials admitted Tuesday that there is a difficult transition under way as the first president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, and the new European head of foreign affairs, Catherine Ashton, move into their jobs and fill out their staffs. In the meantime, since the work must be done, Spain, which holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, is taking an important role in planning the European Union’s agenda and summits.

Henry Kissinger's famous question, "If I want to call Europe, who do I call?" still seems to be unanswered.