Barack Obama raised a record $55 million in February, beating rival Hillary Clinton’s total and ensuring a big-spending battle for the Democratic presidential nomination in the months ahead.

With little prospect for change in Cuba on the horizon, inklings of discontent have begun to surface on the Communist-ruled island that analysts say could spread unrest or incite mass migration. more stories like this * Fidel Castro says Raul in...

Sri Lanka’s government is one of the world’s worst perpetrators of enforced disappearances, US-based pressure group Human Rights Watch (HRW) says. An HRW report accuses security forces and pro-government militias of abducting and...

Public protests are frowned upon by Malaysia’s mildly authoritarian government and often broken up by the riot police. So when a group of opposition party members and activists wanted to send a message to Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi...

The Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, did not bat an eyelid when he asserted at New York’s Columbia university that there were no homosexuals in Iran. He was not joking either. He had been asked about the execution of gays in Iran....

Viktor Bout, an international arms dealer known as the “merchant of death” for his colourful and unscrupulous dealings in every troubled hot spot from Africa to the Middle East and Afghanistan, was arrested yesterday at a five-star hotel in...

Computer tycoon Bill Gates has been toppled from his 13-year standing as the world’s richest man. The founder of Microsoft has been pushed into third place on the Forbes rich list, despite a fortune of £29billion and a £1billion increase in his...

ohn McCain secured the Republican presidential nomination as the ultimate survivor - winning it eight years after his first failed attempt and decades after cheating death in the Vietnam War. Easy to laugh and easy to anger, McCain carries with him the...

- Wall Street’s so-called “vulture” debt investors aren’t exactly racing to buy billions of dollars of complex U.S. mortgage-related bonds that have sunk in value amid the troubles in global financial markets. That’s a bad...

Well, that was the worst possible outcome for the Democrats - and for all those, in America and beyond, yearning for change after eight failed years of Republican rule. The results of Tuesday’s contests in Ohio and Texas promise a slow disaster...