What was initially billed as a celebration of the importance of religious and cultural tolerance and understanding turned into something a bit harder edged when the 56 nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) held a major conference in...
Last week, Germany, in its capacity as president of the EU, attempted to outlaw Holocaust denial in the EU. In the end, the resolution that emerged was the classic result of hard-fought compromise - that is to say, nobody got what they wanted....
Liberian information minister Laurence Bropleh continues to make a stalwart but surprising defence of his government’s targeting of the Monrovia Independent newspaper for publishing an obscene photograph of another cabinet minister. Disgraced...
Two resolutions, one introduced in the House in January and in the Senate in March, seek to recognise the events of 1915 as genocide, but the passage of either could jeopardise the US’s political relationship with Turkey. The resolutions are...
The two, the editor and guest editor of the Clare College student magazine, had been questioned by police after an issue of the magazine dedicated to satirising religion appeared. The magazine consisted mostly of a critique of the New Testament,...
Ever since Peter Brooke as Northern Ireland Secretary of State made his 1990 statement that Britain had no selfish strategic interest for remaining in Ireland most people have come to accept that Brooke called it pretty much as it was. Northern...
Loreena McKennitt has become well-known in the UK for all the wrong reasons. The Canadian singer has become embroiled in an unseemly fight over privacy and freedom of speech after her former friend, Niema Ash, published a frank memoir of her time...
We are going to Moscow on Thursday evening. There are a few meetings arranged there. I could have gone at the very beginning of the week but was absolutely overloaded with the usual work in the office. Stas [Stanislaw Mikhailovich] is thinking...
‘The abduction of Alan Johnston in Gaza is cruel and terrifying. However, we don’t honour persecuted journalists and writers around the world by increasing censorship. We maintain our freedoms by continuing to speak and write about...
When Ariel Sharon declared his intention to withdraw Israeli settlers from Gaza in 2004, the Palestinian leadership was quick to declare its readiness to manage security and political affairs in the Gaza Strip. After Israel’s withdrawal in 2005, a...
‘I doubt that literature has ever triumphed over repression. I think of Hitler in his bunker, with a pistol at his temple and with the Red Army only a few blocks away, and I have to admit that the overthrow of a tyrant is not a literary enterprise....