Across Africa, a war is being waged on women - but we are refusing to hear the screams. Over the past fortnight, I have travelled into the secretive shadow world that mutilates millions of African women at the beginning of their lives, and at the end. As girls, they face having their genitalia slice...

In the endless babbling torrent of news, it's easy to miss the small signs of how a culture - and a country - changes. For me, a marker almost as sweet as a black man in the White House flickers into Britain's cinemas today. Clint Eastwood is the quintessential icon of the old America: an icy Everym...

Israel is about to make a misjudgement as disastrous - and deadly - as the attack on Gaza. In a few days, it looks likely to re-elect Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister once again. This is a man calling for the violent re-occupation of Gaza to "liquidate" its elected government. This is a man who ...

The tears are finally drying - the tears of the Bush years, and the tears of awe at the sight of a black President of the United States. So what now? The cliché of the day is that Barack Obama will inevitably disappoint the hopes of a watching world, but the truth is more subtle than that. If we wa...

Club Tropica is closed, and its shutters are rusting. In the 1980s, George Michael captured a hedonistic moment and a hedonistic decade when he sang about a Club where "drinks are free,/ Fun and sunshine - there's enough for everyone." But today the Wham! poster boy - all silk shorts, olive skin and...

Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy - backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China - is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder ...

Can we declare 2008 over a few weeks early, before even more of the world economy collapses? If we hit the fast-forward button, maybe we can skip the plague of locusts, the slaying of the first-born, and the rain of frogs. But before we mumble a premature Auld Lang's Sine, I have a suggestion. Every...

This spring, I took a month-long road trip across a country that we - you, me and everyone we know - are killing. One day, not long into my journey, I travelled over tiny ridges and groaning bridges on the back of a motorbike to reach the remote village of Munshigonj. The surviving villagers - gaunt...