BAGHDAD -- U.S. troops are conducting security sweeps in the Shiite stronghold of Sadr City for the first time in three years, part of a revamped plan to pacify the capital. Yet the Mahdi Army militia of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has n…

SINGAPORE: Some countries have strategic oil reserves; others stockpile rice or wheat. The island nation of Singapore has emergency reserves of imported sand.The sand is there to secure Singapore's insatiable demand for concrete, a reminde…

BAGHDAD -- For three years, thousands of members of a militant group dedicated to overthrowing Iran's theocracy have lived in a sprawling compound north of Baghdad under the protection of the U.S. military.American soldiers chauffeur top l…

The EU foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, today urged Syria to help stabilise Lebanon and Iraq during a visit that marked a thaw in EU relations with Damascus.Mr Solana said the EU supported Syria's long-held goal of regaining the occupi…

It has been a year since "Ma Ellen," the first woman elected president in Africa, began to lay a solid foundation for her country. Johnson-Sirleaf has shown that one of her principle themes is elevating women in all sectors of society. And…

Some Iraqi cities, including the oil- producing enclave of Basra, buy electricity from Iran. The Iraqi government is relying on Iranian companies to bring gasoline from Turkmenistan to alleviate a severe shortage. Iraqi officials are revie…

ON THE whole, life in Uganda has been improving. In the past year, the Lord's Resistance Army, a sadistic rebel militia which had made a hell out of the north of the country for two decades, retreated to Congo and has been drawn into peace…

Three years ago the Israel-Palestine Centre for Research and Information (IPCRI), a think-tank in Jerusalem, conducted studies of some school textbooks on both sides. It found gradual improvements over previous years, but still a lot of pr…

The men belong to a new militant Islamic organization called Fatah al Islam, whose leader, a fugitive Palestinian named Shakir al-Abssi, has set up operations in a refugee camp here where he trains fighters and spreads the ideology of Al Q…

The four most significant objectives identified by the administration in January were: approval of an oil law that would set guidelines for nationwide distribution of oil revenues and foreign investment in the immense oil industry; reversa…

JERUSALEM: A government-appointed committee examining Israel's failures during last summer's war in Lebanon is to publish an interim report in the second half of April apportioning personal responsibility to top officials, heightening unce…

JERUSALEM: An up-to-date Israeli government register shows that 32.4 percent of the property held by Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank is private, according to the advocacy group that sued the government to obtain the data.The …

PESHAWAR, Pakistan ― Along the Afghan border, not far from this northwestern city, Islamic militants have used a firm foothold over the past year to train and dispatch suicide bombers against American and NATO forces in Afghanistan.But in …

MOSCOW, March 13 ― A United Nations observer mission in Georgia on Tuesday opened an investigation into missile attacks in three remote Georgian villages, and the initial evidence suggested that Russian helicopter gunships were involved.Th…

Rufina Amaya, the woman who was often identified as the last, or only, survivor of the massacre at the village of El Mozote, died last week. She was not, strictly speaking, the only survivor of that monstrous event, but she appears to have…

UNITED NATIONS, March 13 -- Sudan's president has rejected the core elements of a plan to send U.N. peacekeepers to Darfur to help protect civilians from a government-backed campaign of violence.The move set the stage for a renewed push by…

Rwandan fighters are covertly crossing into neighbouring Congo in an attempt to hunt down militia responsible for the 1994 genocide.Several hundred Rwandans have secretly infiltrated the Congolese army's new "mixed brigades", amalgams of r…