The recent elections in Zimbabwe were always likely to be problematic. Despite the hope of former South African president Thabo Mbeki in 2007 that his mediation efforts would lead to an vote that was “conducted…
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Displaying 11276 - 11300 of 11410 articles
Nearly two months after his unexpected victory in the first round of the Iranian presidential elections of June, Hassan Rowhani has finally assumed office and brought a formal end to the contested eight…
Yemen is once again at the centre of a major terrorist threat. The Yemeni government has announced the uncovering of a major Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) plot aimed at the country’s critical…
A new round of public consultation has begun on proposals to increase the sentencing for the owners of dogs who carry out fatal attack from seven years to life. Such moves are prompted in part by the huge…
Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon, has bought iconic newspaper The Washington Post for US$250m. Cash. The first question to ask, then, in age where newspaper readership and sales are plummeting…
E-readers have been a regular sight on public transport for years now but until recently, little has been known about the impact they are having on the publishing industry and readers alike. For the first…
The stand-off in Egypt continues. A sit in by supporters of deposed president Mohamed Morsi has been put on notice that they will be cleared out by force if necessary. The protesters for their part have…
In the week that saw the British press rightly condemning the use of Twitter to send violent threats to several women, the Home Office started to use the social media site to publicise operations to carry…
It was a key moment in the Cold War: 50 years ago, on August 5, 1963, US and the Soviet Union signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty banning nuclear tests in the atmosphere, underwater and in outer space (but…
The horrific neglect and subsequent death of Daniel Pelka at the hands of his mother and step-father raises a number of questions about safeguarding procedures and practice. We are told teachers were concerned…
Somewhere around 2010, the concept of trolling arrived in the national consciousness with a flurry of news stories: the hateful tweet Tom Daley received about his father during the Olympics; the defacement…
Despite the use of virulent anti-Western rhetoric during the 2011-12 presidential campaign and the subsequent protests, Vladimir Putin has been careful not to push himself out on a limb from which it would…
Recent days have seen a string of terrible road and rail accidents: train crashes in France, Spain and Switzerland, a coach crash in Italy and, without the same international publicity, the usual steady…
On the flight home from World Youth Day in Brazil, Pope Francis gave an unscheduled, no-holds-barred interview to the journalists travelling with him. He spoke on a wide range of topics including the role…
It is about 100 years since the then-imperial powers of Britain and France first demarcated the boundaries between Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Mandate Palestine. Now, it looks like those borders are…
The Council for Assisting Refugee Academics (CARA) helps academics at risk of persecution, discrimination or violence so that they can carry on their work. CARA was established in 1933 by leading British…
A constitutional monarch is purely ceremonial and plays no part in politics. But in the UK it isn’t quite as simple as that. The first problem is that we have no constitution. Things haven’t changed much…
A nation that was fiercely proud of its rail system is in mourning, following the worst train disaster seen in Spain for more than 70 years. A high-speed RENFE train derailed as it approached the northern…
Crime fiction has become a truly global genre. Books based in Reykjavik, Oslo, or Barcelona now vie with home-grown works set in more recognisable, down-at-heel locations like Manchester or Northampton…
When US Secretary of State John Kerry announced that talks about talks to revive peace negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians would begin soon in Washington, veteran commentators greeted the…
It was not so long ago that the name of Bo Xilai was largely unknown outside of China. Although his father is one of the “eight elders of the Chinese Communist Party” and he had grown to be one of the…
China’s foreign minister has advocated a system of cyber rules in response to accusations regarding online operations. The US echoed the call, with National Security Advisor Tom Donilon saying that dialogue…
Jane Austen was a writer who knew the importance of having money - one of her characters declares that “an annuity is a very serious business”, and all her plots revolve round the need to have means enough…
As the world holds its breath, hundreds of thousands - maybe millions - of protestors will take to the streets of Egypt’s big cities today in what has been widely billed in the international media as a…
The not-guilty verdict for George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin has sharply divided America, new polling published by the Washington Post and ABC News has found. Some 86% of African Americans…