If there is one man in Africa who combines kindness, authoritarianism of right and rationed proportions with, nevertheless, a deep commitment to democracy, business proficiency learnt on his now large-scale farms, political nous that outsmarts all competitors, a demanding Christi

Was the cultured and sophisticated Italian writer Oriana Fallaci speaking for the large numbers of working-class people who end up being the ones who usually play host to immigrants when she wrote in the leading liberal newspaper Corriere della Serra of her experience of trying t

The British have a problem.

It has been two years since a mass of demonstrators brought down the centrist government of Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovich.We do not hear much about Ukraine these days, mainly because the foreign journalists, not having too much to do, have gone home or to other hot spots.

There are three schools of thought in American foreign policy: two you have heard about and a third that is relegated to the background.The first and arguably the most prominent is the neoconservative.These people, in the days of the Soviet Union, were the rabid anti-communists w

We in the world outside the US do not have a vote in the US presidential election in November.

“Brazil has a great future, and always will,” said Charles de Gaulle, the president of France in the 1960s.In truth, it is not difficult to be cynical about Brazil.It is a large land of both great potential and many lost opportunities, and yet whenever I visit it, as I have regul

Life, said Martin Luther King “is a long and desolate corridor with no exit sign”.He must have said that when his spirits were flagging as most of the time he was optimistic about making the world a better place.I was reminded of this when reading a new report, “Freedom in the Wo

Recently, the so-called Quadrilateral Coordination Group — comprising representatives from Afghanistan, Pakistan, China and the US — met in Kabul to hold discussions on a roadmap to peace in Afghanistan.A former senior Taliban official said that “military confrontation is not the