Rightwing politician Geert Wilders, whose film the Dutch government is currently considering banning, has said there is no such thing as moderate Islam. His view is an extreme one, but how many times have we read or heard calls for moderate Muslims to...

Britain’s leading civilian in Basra after the fall of Iraq today publishes an indictment of Whitehall and Washington failures in the aftermath of the invasion. When Sir Hilary Synnott accepted an invitation to be Iraq’s “King of the...

Hugo Chávez regards Colombia as the “Israel of Latin America”, but does his reaction to its bombing of a rebel Farc camp in Ecuador make Venezuela the Iran of the region? Attitudes towards US-backed Colombia and its socialist neighbour...

Batul Abdul Hussein thought her son, Wesam Saleh, was one. On Feb. 13, 2007, as U.S. and Iraqi troops began enforcing a new security plan to quell violence in Iraq, the 25-year-old policeman left for his night shift. He never made it home alive. As his...

A funny thing happened in November when Britain launched a righteous protest over Sudan’s arrest of a British schoolteacher accused of insulting Islam by letting her students name a class teddy bear Muhammad. The Sudanese ambassador was summoned;...

East is East and West is West, and the difference between them is starting to turn up even on brain scanners. New brain research is adding high-tech evidence to what lower-tech psychology experiments have found for years: Culture can affect not just...

Oil prices reached a record close, surging above $104 after OPEC decided Wednesday to keep its production unchanged. The cartel ignored calls from President George W. Bush to pump more oil into an ailing economy. OPEC rebuffed its top consumer, arguing...

Pakistani newspapers are cautiously optimistic about the outcome of Monday’s key elections in the country. While hailing the polls as mostly fair and free of violence, they say President Pervez Musharraf and the political parties need to...

THE Vatican has been accused of “tampering with the dead” after the body of Italy’s favourite saint was exhumed from its tomb. Padre Pio, who exhibited stigmata on his hands and feet throughout his life, died in 1968 and was laid to...

China’s Prime Minister, Wen Jiabao, said Wednesday that curbing fast-rising inflation and preventing economic overheating were the country’s top fiscal priorities for 2008. He also announced plans to begin overhauling the bureaucracy by...