Lots and lots of stuff coming in 0.821 in a few minutes, which should actually resolve the lion's share of the balance problems believe it or not. I'm super surprised myself. Not that there won't be tons of problems still on that front, but it's a huge number of strides forward.
In terms of international incidents getting you in ways that you don't want, that's supposed to happen to some degree, but not to the degree that it is currently possible. There are some key safety valves that are missing on that at the moment, I've discovered. Didn't have time to add those in yet today.
Regarding choosing your racial leader, I'm going to be waiting 2-3 weeks on that. The reason being that I want to really do it right and get the full screen in there for choosing your custom difficulty level stuff, as well as doing BestBuy.com-style comparisons of your leaders and their attributes. Anything less is just going to feel fiddling, in my opinion. It's an important issue, but in the short term it takes a back seat for me.