One can hardly understand why the Europeans have forgotten their recent bloodstained past ever so quickly. About 60 years ago or so, Europe was the main battleground for the Second World War, in which over 60 million people were killed. Most of us have also seen on television how the war brought several European cities to the ground. All this happened due to the emergence of Nazism in Germany and Fascism in Italy — one was led by Adolf Hitler, the other by Benito Mussolini. And the world was certainly right to unite against those two diabolical movements which endangered then not only the Europeans, but humanity at large and so it was the duty of the whole international community to fight against them by all means, especially after the Nazis began annihilating the Jewish community in a very brutal and unprecedented manner. Read More...

Somalia is deeply split into many rival territories held by tribal or Islamic groups, each backed by substantial militias. The 'government' does not control much of the country and is incapable of imposing order. In such a desperate situation, the only agenda of a government should be to seek some form of national reconciliation, while recognising that a failed nation state has to be rebuilt. Read More...  

Dubai: A 790-word opinion article by a female Saudi writer, Nadine Al Bdair, might start a fierce legal and social confrontation between traditionalists and reformists. Read More...  

Khartoum: A 16-year-old south Sudanese girl was lashed 50 times after a judge ruled her knee-length skirt was indecent, her lawyer and family said in the latest case to push Sudan's Islamic law into the spotlight.  Read More...  

Turkish officials have denied that Ankara informally asked Sudanese President Omar Hassan Al Bashir to cancel his plans to visit Istanbul on November 9 for a key summit of the Standing Committee for Economic and Commercial Cooperation of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC). Al Bashir risked arrest for crimes against humanity because he is the first sitting head of state to be indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague. In fact, the ICC's decision on March 4 to issue a warrant should not be dismissed, and while several countries have hosted Al Bashir since his indictment, war crimes committed in Darfur stand as a serious challenge to Khartoum. What can be done to end the Darfur massacres and save Sudan from itself. Read More...  

Anthropology can help decipher underlying political logic when powerful social movements identify and shape a certain vision of oppression. Often, the discipline digs deeper than any brilliant political theory, as it mobilises those who are alert to perceived injustices. In The Making of a Human Bomb, Nasser Abufarha, the founder and chair of the Palestine Fair Trade Association based in Jenin, Palestine, discusses his people's "martyrdom" operations (suicide attacks), which were launched against Israel during the Al Aqsa Intifada between 2000 and 2006. Read More...