In Juba yesterday, I sat down with John Duku, a onetime diplomat for the southern Sudanese ruling party who now works as a civil society activist. Over a freewheeling, 90-minute discussion, John, who's lived in Europe and Kenya and speaks a particularly vivid form of English, didn't answer my questions about the upcoming referendum so much as entertain -- with a string of metaphoric answers that mixed Africa with the West, the profound with the mundane.

It all left me slightly baffled, but it was more interesting than 99 percent of the interviews I conducted during my short time as a reporter in Washington, D.C., earlier this year.

John, on whether southern Sudan would be willing to trade the disputed territory of Abyei, a key sticking point in negotiations between northern and southern parties, for other concessions:

"Abyei is part and parcel of southern Sudan. You can't ask me what Abyei means to me. What does your ear mean to you? What does your leg mean to you? You have one body; you would not accept it to be cut up."

John, on allegations that northern Sudan was being less than transparent in evenly splitting oil revenues with the south, as required by the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement:

"We have this bottle of Fanta here. You say you will give me half. But then you take it to the other room and say, 'Let me divide it here.' And then you come back with this small thing (points to his Fanta, three-fourths consumed) and say this is your share. We are getting 50 percent of what, I don't know."

John, moments later, invoking the same allegations against the North:

"I am an African. I know a chicken has two legs, two thights, two breasts. I can come to you with the thigh of a chicken and say, 'This is your share of the chicken.' Maybe you have never seen a whole chicken. But me, I know that is not even one quarter of a chicken."

Finally, John, artfully sidestepping my question on whether a post-referendum southern government would include a larger role for political parties other than the ruling Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM, and currently all powerful):

"There is this saying we have in many different languages here. They say, 'You don't name a child before it's born.' In the West, you have this technology of ultrasound. You know if it is a boy or a girl. We don't have ultrasound. We don't know what child is coming. So we don't make these decisions until the baby is born."

I landed yesterday in southern Sudan, where voters are scheduled to decide on Jan. 9 whether their semiautonomous region should split off from the north to form a new, independent nation. (A recent poll suggests the south will vote to secede.) The north-south narrative in Sudan is a complicated one, framed by decades of bloody war and ongoing tussles over a five-year-old peace agreement, yet it almost always gets simplified to "Arab north vs. African south," or "Muslim north vs. Christian and animist south."

The religious differences are just the beginning. To the traveler, northern Sudan feels like Egypt while the south is reminiscent of Uganda or Kenya. To the policymaker, the south is the friend of the United States while Khartoum is sponsored by the Arab world. You can drink with abandon (and many do) in Juba - beer, gin and whiskey trucked up by the case from Uganda - while Khartoum, the national capital in the north, enforces sharia law. It is easy to emphasize the disparities, which seem to make secession a foregone conclusion.

So I was somewhat surprised to see, riding from the airport into the boomtown southern capital of Juba, most signs and billboards printed in English and Arabic. I was even more surprised to hear my taxi driver answer his phone, "Marhaba? Tamaam." I got into another car that was blasting Lebanese pop music and heard cell phone busy messages in Arabic and I began to wonder why I never thought of Arabic as the lingua franca of the south just as it is in the north.

Arabic was taught in the government schools, of course, until war destroyed the education system in the 1980s and 1990s. Linguists have even defined a dialect called Juba Arabic, a local pidgin dating to the 19th century. A friend in Juba tells me that the southern president, Salva Kiir, often seems more comfortable speaking in Arabic than in English.

It was the simplest of impressions formed in my first hours in southern Sudan. Yet it offered a reminder that this has long been one nation, if just barely, and if that changes it will mean something is lost.

It's autumn in Egypt, and there's a definite chill in the air.

The past two weeks have brought major setbacks for free speech advocates. With parliamentary elections due in November, the apparent crackdown is as troubling as it is predictable.

First came the firing of perhaps Egypt's most outspoken independent editor, Ibrahim Eissa, from al Dostour, a once-feisty newspaper that recently was bought by a political party leader. As Eissa told Foreign Policy, his dismissal had been in the works for weeks, but appeared to be triggered by his plans to publish an article by opposition leader (and Nobel Peace prizewinner) Mohammed El Baradei that was critical of President Hosni Mubarak.

The Foreign Policy headline asked whether Eissa's dismissal meant "the death of Egypt's free press," and argued:

With the 82-year-old Mubarak laying the groundwork for his son Gamal's succession to the presidency and Egyptian parliamentary elections scheduled for November, Eissa's dismissal appears to be part of a larger effort to mute Egypt's most vocal anti-government figures before this leadership transition.

Any hope that this was an overreaction - and that Eissa's firing was a one-off incident - seemed to vanish this week. First, the Egyptian telecommunications authorities issued tough new rules on text-messaging, requiring companies that want to send mass texts to obtain licenses. The move was a direct challenge to opposition groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, which is outlawed in Egypt but whose members ran as independents in the 2005 elections, used text messages to rally supporters - and shocked Mubarak's regime by winning 20 percent of the parliamentary vote.

Now companies that want to send mass texts must pay some $88,000 for a government license - and an additional $88,000 in insurance in case they violate the terms. You can bet the regulators will be very careful about whom they issue licenses to. One free-speech group filed suit today to block the move, saying the government had overstepped its authority, but Egyptian officials deny any political motivation.

Regardless, the Al Masry Al Youm daily says the move puts Egypt in some dubious company:

The new restrictions are not dissimilar to those recently enforced in other countries, such as Iran, Cambodia, Burma and Thailand, all of which have banned SMS messages in an effort to curb popular mobilization and collective action on the part of their political opponents.

Add to all this the decision by Nilesat, the parastatal satellite television authority, to stop broadcasting four cable channels, following the ban less than a month ago on two channels that authorities said were inciting sectarian conflict. (Al Masry Al Youm said that the Saudi channel Orbit, in particular, had angered officials by broadcasting a program called "Al-Qahira Al-Youm" - "Cairo Today" - that was "known for its criticism of the Egyptian government.")

Government efforts to crack down on free speech are almost always ham-fisted, and at a time when many Egyptians are reeling from high food prices and feeling helpless over President Mubarak's plans to anoint his son as his successor, it's hard not to think that these moves will only further alienate an already disenchanted nation.

Photo by Gulf News

Lock up your wives and daughters. Abandon the tennis courts and bus stops. Lament your plummeting property values.

The bachelors have invaded.

At Discovery Gardens, a luxury apartment complex in Dubai, single male residents are proliferating like weeds. According to a hair-raising investigation by the Gulf News website - headlined "Discovery Gardens Strains Under Bachelor Influx" - one unnamed company bought 12 buildings in the complex directly from the developer, the state-backed Nakheel giant, and now houses more than 1,600 workers there.

These workers - often young, underpaid single men from India, Pakistan and other poor southern Asian countries - for years lived in the shadows of the property boom that their labor created. Now, with Dubai's notoriously out-of-control economy having nose-dived, their employers can afford to house them in the glitzy complexes once marketed exclusively to expats. Apartments at Discovery Gardens, where one-bedrooms were selling for as much as 100,000 dirhams (about $27,000), are going for about half as much.

Gulf News spells out the consequences with distressing frankness:

If the trend goes unchecked, residents fear, the sprawling 26,000-apartment complex which used to be marketed by the developer as a community living space will soon come to wear the look of a workers' accommodation.

Really, you buy in a place with 291 buildings, 200 retail shops and 60,000 residents - and the last thing you expect is that it'll turn into a dormitory.

Residents say the men, with their utter lack of wives and children, have shattered the family atmosphere of the complex. Preetham Ghosh, a father of two, tells the site: "We do not feel safe to let children play in the garden unsupervised. There is only one watchman for seven to eight buildings, and no security locks at the entrance. With all these strange men roaming around, it is not at all safe for children."

A Syrian engineer says: "My wife is complaining that she is being stared at by a group of men who are living in the adjacent building. Now she does not feel comfortable taking our kid to the bus stop in the morning as these men wait for their company transportation at the same place."

The scourges themselves are shameless in their enjoyment of the pleasant space and common facilities. "Four or five of us used to share a room in Rashidiya. Now it is two people per studio and it is very convenient," one man says. "Moreover, we are able to enjoy some of the facilities like basketball and tennis courts."

Bachelors on the basketball courts. I mean, is nowhere in Dubai safe anymore?

On my last morning in Baghdad, Awad and I sped through the streets of an empty city. We flew along smooth roads and hugged the grassy medians. Palm trees whizzed past. A few men casually swept sidewalks, a couple of children sat on doorsteps. Metal grates hung like eyelids over sleeping storefronts. The sky was bright and quiet.

I marveled at how peaceful - even pretty - Baghdad looked. I was accustomed to a city of numbing traffic, choked by military checkpoints, accessorized with blast walls and razor wire. A wrong turn on the streets of that Baghdad could mean a two-hour detour or worse. This was a different place. At 6 a.m. on a Friday, the traditional day of rest in the Muslim world, Baghdad hadn't yet opened its eyes and faced  the challenges of everyday.

"This is like the old Baghdad," Awad said.

After a month back in the city - the first time I'd been there since mid-2008 - I saw clearly that Baghdad is safer. On a patrol one night last week with U.S. forces near Sadr City, I chatted with shopkeepers and residents in near-darkness, in a neighborhood I wouldn't have wanted to visit on my last trip. I rode in the back of an Army Humvee as we rumbled past lit-up outdoor cafes buzzing with people. My Iraqi colleagues had always told me Baghdad was a nighttime city, a fun place to be after dark, in the old days. This was the first time I could imagine it.

Yes, the city is safer. But it isn't safe. In the 30 days ending Sept. 29, there were 21 mortar and rocket attacks in Baghdad, many aimed at the Green Zone, compared with 13 in the previous 30 days, according to the U.S. military. At our well protected house in central Baghdad, we became accustomed to hearing distant and not-so-distant explosions and the "duck and cover" sirens blaring from the U.S. Embassy in the Green Zone, about a mile and a half away. One night a mortar shell landed in the neigborhood, crashing into a shed that policemen sometimes used, but which that night thankfully had been unoccupied.

Roadside bombings and suicide attacks are less frequent, but they still happen. Getting caught in one, as a former McClatchy staff member did last month, can mean a life-changing injury. Avoiding one, as the child of another of our staffers did when she decided to put off an errand, often is little more than dumb luck - the fates interceding to spare you.

That morning I flew out of Baghdad, and a few hours later Iraq moved closer to ending a seven-month political stalemate with a deal that would help Prime Minister Maliki secure a second term. It seemed like a victory for continuity, for keeping Iraq on the path it's on. But the security gains are tenuous. The Center for Strategic and International Studies argues in a lengthy new report that "the Iraq War is not over, it is not 'won,' and any form of stable end state in Iraq is probably impossible before 2020." In fact, with a new leader same as the old, can the Iraqi political establishment prove strong and inclusive enough to extinguish the embers of the insurgency?

U.S. officials have been sounding hopeful. Brig. Gen. Ralph Baker, commander of U.S. forces in Baghdad, said last week, "Once this government forms, you'll see the level of violence that's been occurring over the last couple of months wane. There'll be less of a perception that there's an opportunity that exists to drive a wedge in between."

The perception among ordinary Iraqis, meanwhile, is that there's still a long way to go before they can reclaim the Baghdad of old.