George Orwell, the author of “Animal Farm” and “1984”, was the first person to use the phrase “Cold War” in a 1945 newspaper article, written just after the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.He argued that “the surface of the Earth is being parcelled off into three great

Over 200 years, we have watched with a mixture of fascination and horror the explosion of population in most parts of the world.In the 1960s and 70s, many people were convinced that it was the single most important issue of our times.Government aid agencies, especially in the Wes

“ISIS [Daesh] is not an existential threat to the United States,” President Barack Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic magazine recently. What becomes clear in that long article, much of it Obama’s own words, is that Obama shies away from the idea that war can make b

During the Cold War, barely a week would go by without some reportage or debate on nuclear weapons.Not today. Yet, most of the nuclear weapons around then are still around.It would be alright if they were left to quietly rust in their silos.

We were standing in Hiroshima, looking at a stone wall.All there was to see was a shadow of a man. It had been etched into the wall at the moment of his obliteration by the blinding light of the first atomic bomb.Olof Palme, then prime minister of Sweden, stared hard at it.

A woman for the next secretary general of the United Nations?Well, it is a lot more complicated than that.

President Barack Obama observed: “ISIL [Daesh] is a direct outgrowth of Al Qaeda in Iraq that grew out of our invasion — which is an example of unintended consequences — which is why we should generally aim before we shoot.”Many of us looking at the horror of the Iraq war, waged

If worst comes to worst and Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff is deposed and her widely beloved predecessor, Luiz “Lula” da Silva is discredited, they will long be remembered for the “Bolsa Familia”.This is a government programme that cut Brazil’s once appalling poverty rate by h

The Brazilians have an elected president. They must keep her. If Dilma Rousseff is pushed to resign, democracy has failed. Two years ago she won re-election handsomely. That is the source of her mandate.