KIRKUK, Iraq - Lt. Hiwa Raouf Abdul is not supposed to be in Kirkuk. The oil-rich city, which many fear is teetering on the brink of civil war, is off-limits to Kurdish Peshmerga militia members.And yet, on Tuesday, the slender, 26-year-ol…

By Sarah Delaney and Craig Whitlock Washington Post Foreign Service Saturday, February 17, 2007; A01 ROME, Feb. 16 -- An Italian judge gave approval Friday for what will be the first overseas criminal trial of CIA officers involved in a co…

UNITED NATIONS, New York: The UN secretary general, Ban Ki Moon, said President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan had broken a personal pledge he made last month to give entry permits to a UN human rights team, and Ban urged the Sudanese leader to r…

Iran has arrested 65 men suspected of being behind a deadly bombing that killed members of the elite Revolutionary Guards in a southeastern border province, the student news agency ISNA said Friday, according to a Reuters report from Tehra…

Reviewed by Reza Aslan Sunday, February 18, 2007; BW07AMERICAN ISLAM The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion By Paul M. Barrett Farrar Straus Giroux. 304 pp. $25 By most estimates, Islam is now the largest non-Christian religion in the Uni…

Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations’ new secretary general, on Friday warned that an unprecedented global surge in UN peacekeeping operations had left its leadership “impossibly overstretched” and unable to cope without serious reform.In an am…

A German neo-Nazi publisher was yesterday sentenced to five years in prison for inciting racial hatred and denying that the Nazis murdered six million Jews.Ernst Zündel, who was extradited from Canada to face trial in Germany in 2005, rece…

Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, appointed a loyalist strongman accused of widespread human rights abuses as president of Chechnya yesterday after abruptly sacking his predecessor.The appointment of 30-year-old Ramzan Kadyrov, a lion…

MOSCOW, Feb. 15 -- President Vladimir Putin promoted Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov to the post of first deputy prime minister Thursday, an elevation that immediately intensified speculation that Putin might favor him as his successor."Iva…

For some it is a sign that the conservatives are preparing to move into opposition. For others, it represents the right's attempt to reclaim satire from the cosy clasp of the liberal elite.This weekend Rupert Murdoch's Fox News Channel, ho…

James Buchan Saturday February 17, 2007Guardian The Yacoubian Building by Alaa al Aswany 255pp, Fourth Estate, £14.99 The Yacoubian Building is the sort of dense neighbourhood novel which, though quite out of style when set in London or Pa…

Eric Hobsbawm Saturday February 17, 2007 Today it is possible to see the civil war, Spain's contribution to the tragic history of that most brutal of centuries, the 20th, in its historical context. It was not, as the neoliberal François Fu…

PARIS, Feb. 14 -- The European Parliament on Wednesday approved a report admonishing 15 European countries and Turkey for helping the CIA transport terrorism suspects held in secret or for failing to cooperate in the parliament's investiga…

The bombings opened a bitter rift among Spaniards. At a general election three days later, voters threw out the ruling conservative People's Party and brought in a Socialist government with José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero as prime minister. T…