THE HAGUE: The windows of Fatou Bensouda's office high up in the International Criminal Court's headquarters in The Hague offer her a sweeping view of orderly Dutch flatlands. But her attention is turned to her native Africa, on the chaos …

PATTANI, Thailand: Some are already calling it war, a brutal Muslim separatist insurgency in southern Thailand that has taken as many as 2,000 lives in three years, with almost- daily bombings, drive-by shootings, arson and beheadings.It i…

LAGA, East Timor: The Nobel laureate and prime minister of East Timor, José Ramos-Horta, told a cheering crowd in his hometown Sunday that he would stand in presidential elections in April, vowing to help return peace and stability to the …

BAGHDAD, Feb. 25 ― A female suicide bomber wearing a vest packed with explosives and ball bearings blew herself up at a Baghdad university today, killing at least 40 people, and strewing fingers, pens, purses and bloody textbooks all over …

Alastair Crooke, who spent nearly thirty years in MI6, the British intelligence service, and now works for Conflicts Forum, a think tank in Beirut, told me, “The Lebanese government is opening space for these people to come in. It could be…

To look at the situation today, first, on the military side, as you know, the Ethiopian troops are still backing the TFG in Somalia. About a third of the Ethiopian troops have already withdrawn. I understand that it will be done in two mor…

Somali government and Ethiopian forces are hoping to stamp out a nascent insurgency in Mogadishu before the arrival of African Union peacekeepers, amid concern that the opportunity to stabilise Somalia is rapidly narrowing.Uganda is due to…

It has been known for several weeks that U.S. Special Operations troops have operated inside Somalia and that the United States carried out two strikes on Qaeda suspects using AC-130 gunships. But the extent of U.S. cooperation with the re…

ROME, Feb. 24 ― Romano Prodi was given a second chance to lead Italy’s government on Saturday, though allies and enemies worried that his still-fragile coalition would remain divided and vulnerable to another collapse.“It’s a weak solution…

NIXON AND MAO The Week That Changed the World. By Margaret MacMillan. Even as he was celebrating that triumph, the new chief executive and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, were planning a comparably dramatic giant leap in di…

For Muslims and non-Muslims alike, the stock image of an Islamic scholar is a gray-bearded man. Women tend to be seen as the subjects of Islamic law rather than its shapers. And while some opportunities for religious education do exist for…

BAGHDAD, Feb. 24 ― Moktada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric and founder of the Mahdi Army militia, discovered recently that two of his commanders had created DVDs of their men killing Sunnis in Baghdad. Documents suggested that they had …

In Diyala, the vast province northeast of Baghdad where Sunnis and Shiites are battling for primacy with mortars and nighttime abductions, the U.S. government has contracted the job of promoting democracy to a Pakistani citizen who has nev…

ROME, Feb. 23 It wasn't love or even any real faith that they could stick together long. Rather, it seems, a singular frightening thought pushed nine bickering parties to agree late on Thursday to come together again: that Silvio Berluscon…

Israel is negotiating with the United States for permission to fly over Iraq as part of a plan to attack Iran's nuclear facilities, The Daily Telegraph can reveal.To conduct surgical air strikes against Iran's nuclear programme, Israeli wa…

While the Eisenhower is ostensibly assisting US operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is the looming threat of Iran that increasingly occupies its attention.Recent tensions between America and Iran over Teheran's attempts to develop a nuc…

ANKARA, Turkey, Feb. 23 -- A politician was charged Friday with inciting hatred and threatening public safety after suggesting that fellow Kurds would rise against the state and fight if Turkey ever attacked their Kurdish brethren in neigh…

A LONG WAY GONE Memoirs of a Boy Soldier.By Ishmael Beah. The great benefit of Ishmael Beah’s memoir, “A Long Way Gone,” is that it may help us arrive at an understanding of this situation. Beah’s autobiography is almost unique, as far as …

In one of the most momentous cases in its 60 years, the UN's highest court will deliver judgment on Monday upon Bosnia's demand to make Serbia accountable for the slaughter, terrorising, rape and displacement of Bosnian Muslims in the earl…

Eight men accused in South Africa of plotting a coup in Equatorial Guinea which was partly financed by Mark Thatcher, the son of the former British prime minister, had the charges against them dismissed today.Magistrate Peet Johnson, sitti…

BAGHDAD: A son of Abdul Aziz al- Hakim, who heads Iraq's dominant Shiite political bloc, was seized Friday by U.S. forces in southern Iraq as he tried to re-enter the country after visiting Iran.The son was identified as Ammar al- Hakim, a…

Six months after a UN-brokered ceasefire ended Israel's war with Hizbullah, scepticism about the role of 10,000 UN troops is growing among the population of south Lebanon.The scepticism comes amid signs that the militant Shia group is retr…

Some policemen on the sweep advertised their Shiite sympathies. Infiltration by militias has always been a major problem for the Iraqi security forces, and particularly the police, viewed by many Sunnis in the capital as de facto Shiite mi…

American forces in Iraq are in danger of having their line of supply cut by guerrillas. Napoleon once said that "an army travels on its stomach." By that he meant that the problem of keeping an army supplied is the prerequisite for the ver…

When Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française was published in English last year, something was left out. Just a few lines omitted from the introduction to the French edition that had appeared two years previously. Nothing to diminish the remark…

At the same time Blair was speaking in London, the Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, announced in Denmark that its 460 troops under British command in Iraq will return home by August. In Lithuania, a Defense Ministry spokeswoma…

So the donors―Western governments and charities―think that on balance they should continue to improve farming, health care, education and access to water in the rural areas where 85% of Ethiopians live. There are signs that the government'…

A UN human rights investigator has likened Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories to apartheid South Africa and says there should be "serious consideration" over bringing the occupation to the international court of justice.The…

In reality, southern Iraq is a quagmire that has defeated all British efforts to impose order, and Blair was pressed by his military commanders to get out altogether -- and quickly. The departure has only been slowed, for the moment, by th…

Reuters is to launch a consumer-targeted African news and information portal that will include a continent-wide network of local bloggers.Reuters Africa aims to bring together a range of financial news, breaking general news and features t…