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...
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...
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....
The world of blogging, and particularly political blogging, has grown massively in the past few years. As blogging itself reaches its tenth birthday, it seems the phenomenon can only increase in importance. Sites such as Harry’s Place and Guido...
British Education Secretary Alan Johnson’s announcement this week that head teachers are free to ban schoolchildren from wearing the niqab (full Muslim veil) misses the most significant point. As in the British High Court ruling last month,...
On the Saturday before Christmas 2004, the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in Britain’s East Midlands was in a state of siege. Children who had come with their parents for a pantomime were bewildered at the sight of 400 enraged protestors threatening...