Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s tale of rural Scottish change between the world wars is anything but narrowly focused. It speaks to our universal sense of injustice and fairness.
Recent years in Lebanon have been marked by protests against corruption and ineffective governance.
Reuters/Aziz Taher
With such an even split among the public and political leaders, here are five reasons why now is not the right time to be putting boots on the ground in Syria.
Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who the French authorities say helped plan the Paris attacks.
Reuters
It beggars belief that there are people who have attached themselves to groups seeking to escape this barbarity. Their objectives are the very antithesis of those seeking sanctuary.
Will the terror attacks in Paris impact on Australia’s commitment to coalition military efforts to stop the spread of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria?
US Secretary of State John Kerry (L) and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov after an international conference on Syria, in Vienna, from which Australia was excluded.
EPA/Hans Punz
Australia – despite its major military commitment fighting Islamic State – was excluded from the Vienna weekend talks seeking a peace path for Syria because of an objection by Russia.
Assembled at the cost of billions of dollars, Iraq’s army has never amounted to much – and it’s not the first foreign-built military to fail so spectacularly.
The Metrojet Airbus A321 that crashed in Northern Sinai.
Reuters
Investigating an air crash is a delicate and complex task at the best of times – and Flight KGL9268 came down in one of the world’s most difficult regions.
Sinai: a whole lot of trouble ahead.
Mohamed Abd El Ghany
Whatever caused the crash of a Russian airliner over the northern Sinai, it’s finally brought the world’s attention back to a critical security crisis.
Laden with animals, conspiracy theories and apocalyptic visions, Muhammad Fanatil al-Hajaya’s poetry reflects how many Arabs – urban and rural, rich and poor – view the world.
Hardly an enthusiastic upholder of human rights, Qatar has been welcomed as a participant in R2P – even though that obligates it to do basically nothing.
Senior Associate Fellow on the Middle East at RUSI; Associate Professor in Politics & International Relations; Deputy Director of the Centre on US Politics, UCL