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The freshly scrawled graffiti depicting Mohammed Morsi as a pharaonic Saddam Hussein tells the tale of high hopes dashed with record speed: Barely six months after becoming Egypt's first democratically elected president, the Islamist is widely accused of abandoning pledges of inclusive government for doctrinaire and authoritarian ways....

Egypt's Supreme Judicial Council has agreed to supervise a referendum on a draft constitution, a legal adviser to President Mohamed Mursi said on Monday, although some judges have called for a boycott.

The two highest appellate courts went on strike, and Islamist leaders of the constitutional assembly rushed to complete the charter by the end of the day.

Myanmar authorities on Friday revised downward the death toll from this week's ethnic violence in the country's west after warning that the strife risks harming the country's reputation as it seeks to shift to democratic rule.

...The truth is that there is no single explanation. One answer is that last year's wave of political uprisings, the so-called Arab Spring, is responsible. After all, protests began in Egypt, which last year became the most populous Arab democracy, and spread to Libya, which became the largest by area.

U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney held up Poland's transition from Communism to democracy as an example for the rest of the world while saying on Tuesday that Russia had faltered on the path to freedom.

Having pressed the new Egyptian president, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Sunday sought to mobilize what influence the United States still has with the army chief whose key role in post-Hosni Mubarak Egypt is splitting the country between those who see the military as a threat to democracy and those clinging to it as a guarantor of stability.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday held up Mongolia's sometimes messy politics as a democratic model for Asia, and implicitly criticized political restrictions in China.

Perhaps most of all, it was like a bucket of ice water over the heads of Mali's 15.4 million people, who saw two decades of democracy collapse in just a few hours into what is rapidly becoming an ungovernable hole and a haven for al-Qaida-linked terrorists.

Crowds of joyful Libyans, some with tears in their eyes, parted with the legacy of Muammar Gaddafi on Saturday as they voted in the first free national election in 60 years.