How would you feel if someone just told you to pack your suitcase because you’re traveling to Europe on Sunday? Wouldn’t you want to know the purpose of the trip so that you can prepare and plan ahead? Imagine attending a class without an instructor handing you the syllabus. How will you know what assignments and projects are required for you to pass the course?

Have you experienced excessive thirst, frequent urination, hunger and fatigue regularly of late? Have you found out that you have reduced weight remarkably? Well, just check your blood sugar before you feel excited and thrilled about the way you have succeeded in losing weight. If your blood sugar is elevated, your doctor might have diagnosed you as a diabetic.

Take into account what is going on around the world of late. Look at what is rapidly happening throughout our world. Lifestyles have been changed, cultures diminished, and environments brought down to rubble over man's own desire of greed.

Darsait roundabout has come in for much criticism and frustration, and rightly so. Before we let our frustrations take over and jump into the deep end, we must first analyse the source of the problem.

It was Napoleon, when asked to explain the lack of great statesmen in the world, said: “To get power you need to display absolute pettiness, to exercise power you need to show true greatness.” As demonstrated in one my favorite movies of all time, “The Contender”, such greatness and pettiness are rarely found in one person.

About a year ago, at the amphitheatre in Qurum, I listened to a talk by Sheikh Hamza Yousuf. As he spoke, tears welled up in my eyes as he brought me to shame, for that day a beggar had come to my home and I had turned him away.

IN the first months of the Arab Spring, foreign journalists got well-merited credit for helping to foment and publicise popular uprisings against some of the region’s rulers. Satellite TV stations such as Al Jazeera Arabic, in particular, struck at the roots of power in Arab police states, by making official censorship irrelevant and by competing successfully against government propaganda.

When tragedy and upheaval strike, financial markets sell off. It’s not so much that the world has changed in any fundamental way: rather, investors hate uncertainty.

BY now you have probably heard about Hamza Ali Al Khateeb. He was the 13-year-old Syrian boy who tagged along at an anti-government protest in the town of Saida on April 29. He was arrested that day, and the police returned his mutilated body to his family a month later. While in custody, he had apparently been burned, beaten, lacerated and given electroshocks. His jaw and kneecaps were shattered. He was shot in both arms. When his father saw the state of Hamza’s body, he passed out.

WHEN he was alive, ambassador Richard Holbrooke was effectively gagged, unable to comment on what he saw as missteps of the Obama administration that he served. But as America faces a crisis in Pakistan after the killing of Osama bin Laden, it’s worth listening to Holbrooke’s counsel — from beyond the grave.

Past three years have been a disaster for most Western economies. The United States has mass long-term unemployment for the first time since the 1930s. Meanwhile, Europe’s single currency is coming apart at the seams. How did it all go so wrong?

CHILE celebrated 200 years of independence in 2010. Only 20 of the 198 countries on Earth have reached that age. Therefore, it has been, for Chileans, a time of assessment and of asking ourselves a very simple, yet profound, question: have we done things right or wrong?

DOES Imran Khan know something that we don’t, for a change?

It’s eastward ho. The significance of two separate free trade and services agreements India signed with Japan and Malaysia in the space of three days from February 16 go beyond bilateral ramifications and reinvigorates New Delhi’s nearly two-decade-old “Look East” policy. The agreements came at a time when the Doha round of talks on a multilateral trade accord has been virtually moribund.

Back in 2009, when President Obama announced his political compromise plan for a “surge” in Afghanistan there were complaints from both “hawks” and “doves” alike. And so it came as no surprise that he would hear the same complaints this week as he announced the “beginning of the end” of the “surge”.

The world has watched the financial bailouts in the West over the last two years. In the US, these bailouts demonstrated that too big to fail means that the taxpayers foot the bill. Similarly, European taxpayers will be paying for bailouts of Greece and Ireland for years to come; even larger European bailouts may be looming on the horizon.

Her release brought joy and a rare glimpse of hope to the long-suffering people of Myanmar. Now, two months after democracy heroine Aung San Suu Kyi was freed from house arrest, the euphoria has faded, but hope remains.

Nine years after the journalist Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and beheaded by Al Qaeda militants, a new inquiry has concluded he was almost certainly killed by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the man currently in US custody and accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks. The investigation also found that of 27 men connected with the killing, more than half remain at large.

Sometimes, the most revealing aspect of the shrieking babble of the 24/7 news agenda is the silence. Often the most important facts are hiding beneath the noise, unmentioned and undiscussed. So the fact that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), is facing trial for alleged sexual crimes is – rightly – big news.

While regime change from within is sought in Egypt, the more sedate investigation into the lessons of the Iraq war draw to a close at Westminster. This week, the Chilcot inquiry completes its questioning of witnesses. Soon it will make a judgement on a venture aimed at bringing about regime change in the Middle East through a military campaign conducted from without.

ASTRONOMERS announced last month that, contrary to previous assumptions, the orbiting body Eris might be smaller than Pluto after all. Since it was the discovery in 2005 of Eris, an object seemingly larger than what had been considered our smallest planet, that precipitated the downgrading of Pluto from full planet to “dwarf,” some think it may be time to revisit Pluto’s status.

A “plastic soup” of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said.

After the Great Recession, Europe has embarked on a Great Regression. Wages, pensions, unemployment insurance, welfare benefits and collective bargaining are under attack in many areas as governments struggle to reduce debts swollen partly by the cost of rescuing banks during the global financial crisis.

Africa’s negative image has, in fact, a remote origin as it appears closely linked to the dynamics of colonial conquest and rule at first and, at a later stage the dynamics of the existing forms of imperialism and exploitation.

After the ouster of Tunisian president who ruled for over 23 years, the fall of Egyptian regime is highly significant.

First in Tunisia and now in Egypt, the people have spoken and made clear that they do not want to live under authoritarian rule and are fed up with regimes that hold power for decades. In the end, the voice of the people will be decisive. The Arab elites, Egypt’s neighbouring countries and the world powers should understand this and take it into account in their political calculations.

Ramadan Aboul Hassan left his house one night about three weeks ago to join a neighbourhood watch group with two friends and did not return. The next time their relatives saw the three men they were emerging from a maximum security prison, 400 miles from home, run by Egypt’s military. Some family members said they bore signs of torture, though others denied it.

For sheer blood-curdling menace, the televised address by Saif Al Islam Gaddafi takes some beating. His broadcast to the Libyan nation included the threat that his father’s regime would “fight until the last man, until the last woman, until the last bullet ... instead of crying over 200 deaths we will cry over hundreds and thousands of deaths”.

It is shocking to think how recently, and how obsequiously, the leader of Tripoli was being feted in the capitals of Europe.

It exploded like a thunderclap in every newsroom in the land. Rupert Murdoch’s response to the vilification of his newspapers was to sacrifice the very first title he had bought in Britain.

Samantha Power took the podium at Columbia University on Monday night sounding hoarse and looking uncomfortable. In two hours, President Obama would address the nation on Libya and Power, the fiery human rights crusader who now advises Obama on foreign policy, did not want to get out in front of the boss.

Samantha Power took the podium at Columbia University on Monday night sounding hoarse and looking uncomfortable. In two hours, President Obama would address the nation on Libya and Power, the fiery human rights crusader who now advises Obama on foreign policy, did not want to get out in front of the boss.

MY foreign friends always tell me when they visit that the comment they hear most often from taxi drivers, shop owners and others is “In Syria, there is security”.

I have had the privilege of working in the Sultanate of Oman as teacher of English from 1979 to 1987. I went there from my native country Pakistan and moved to America where I am now residing with my family. I spent all eight years of my work in Oman in Sumail, Dakhliyah. Apart from teaching students in government schools at secondary level, I also used to give private lessons to my Omani friends working as teachers or officers in the Armed Forces.

There are a number of myths that have been put out about the situation in Libya. The first is that this is somehow an attack on Islam. Nothing could be further from the truth. “Islam is a religion, observed peacefully and devoutly by over a billion people. So let’s give voice to those followers of Islam in our own countries.”

On March 12, around midnight, less than a day after a devastating earthquake tore through the Tohoku region of Japan, causing a tsunami that killed thousands and left many more homeless, 25 trucks bearing 50 tonnes of supplies arrived in front of the City Hall in Hitachinaka, in the east-coast Ibaraki prefecture.

IN a country synonymous with the buttoned-down corporate army that keeps its huge economy humming, getting Japan to ditch its suits is an uphill task. A summer power crunch in Tokyo exacerbated by the crisis at the Fukushima nuclear plant, however, is forcing the government to ask the impossible.

IT has become fashionable to refer to the 18-day Egyptian uprising as the “Facebook revolution,” much to the dismay of the protestors who riveted the world with their bravery in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. But revolutions do not happen in cyberspace, even if they start there.

As we reflect on the current crop of tyrants facing imminent doom — their fate sealed from time immemorial in the immutable words of the Almighty, we recall images of the grotesque and the sublime, and with rising expectation await the impending hour.

HISTORY is, alas, largely made by men. In Libya, it is men, and mostly young men, who are trying to oust a dictator who swears that he will die on Libyan soil.

At 14:46 on March 11, Japan was hit by one of the most powerful earthquakes in recorded history. We are now making all-out efforts to restore livelihoods and recover from the series of tragedies that followed the Great East Japan Earthquake. The disaster left more than 28,000 people dead or missing, including foreign citizens.

RIP, the European Dream. Born in Rome March 1957; died at the unlovely Franco-Italian border railway station of Ventimiglia, April 2011. OK, d’accord, ist ja gut, bene, the demise of the European adventure has been forecast many times before.

WASHINGTON’S military strategy in Afghanistan now aims to avoid the appearance of defeat for America, but for Afghanistan it is a recipe for unending civil war.

In the first flush of the Arab Spring many attempts were made to draw historical parallels with previous revolutions. Some looked back to the spring of 1848, when a wildfire of revolt swept through Europe, starting in Sicily but leaving few countries untouched.

PRESIDENT Obama insists that protecting civilians is the only military objective in Libya and air power is the only means we will use to achieve it. But the Libyan government’s attacks on civilians continue, and air power alone will not stop them.

THE 1950s and ’60s brought many new things to American offices, including the photo copying machine, word processing and — perhaps less famously — the first National Secretaries Day, in 1952. Secretaries of that era envisioned a rosy future, and many saw their jobs as a ticket to a better life.

AMID the flag-waving and the street parties to celebrate the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton yesterurday, bigger questions about the relevance of the monarchy to modern Britain lurk like uninvited guests. Extravagant living in a time of austerity abrades public sensibilities; unearned privilege is resented, while snobbery and elitism are seen as dangerously outmoded.

After earthquake and tsunami disaster, many foreign dignitaries, including French President Nicolas Sarkozy and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, have expressed their solidarity with Japan. “The Japanese are indomitable and courageous,” Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard said when she visited an evacuation shelter in the afflicted region.

For those with eyes to see, the daylight between the foreign policies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama has been shrinking ever since the current president took the oath of office. But last week made it official: When the story of America’s post-9/11 wars is written, historians will be obliged to assess the two administrations together, and pass judgement on the Bush-Obama era.

People of Pakistan woke up on Monday morning to be told the news that Osama bin Laden had been killed. But this news did not come from any of their leaders — not the Pakistani president, not the Pakistani prime minister, nor the Pakistani army chief. Instead this news came from US President Obama, when he appeared on television and informed the world how the US had been gathering intelligence about a town two hours north of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.

He was the chairman of the board who plotted grand strategy but who stayed mostly aloof from day-to-day management of the multinational of terrorism named Al Qaeda. And one over-arching element of that strategy obsessed Osama bin Laden until the end: how to stage a new 9/11-scale strike that this time would finally drive the Western infidels from Arab world.

Accident at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant has done more than spew radiation into the air and sea and force tens of thousands of people to evacuate their homes.

He is the vérité film-maker whose subjects have included the South African far-right leader Eugene Terre’Blanche, Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss and America’s most notorious female serial killer Aileen Wuornos.

IN late February, as the Libyan opposition gained strength, the regime of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi predicted there would be “rivers of blood” and “hundreds of thousands of dead” because of the uprising. At the time, little stood between him and this chilling threat.

In 1892, word of a sensational discovery spread across Australia and beyond. Two men digging for gold in the Western Australian desert had collected 540oz of the precious metal in a single afternoon. Fortune-hunters converged on the remote spot from all over the world, almost quadrupling the population of the “Golden West” within a decade.

Facebook, it seems, doesn’t always practise what it preaches. For years, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, has extolled the virtue of transparency, and he built Facebook accordingly. The social network requires people to use their real identity in large part because Zuckerberg says he believes that people behave better — and society will be better — if they cannot cloak their words or actions in anonymity.

Truly, we live in the age of the ego. I exist, therefore I am important and newsworthy. How to reconcile worries about privacy with the tidal wave of personal data churned out on Twitter and social media? Surely, one cancels out the other.

Nothing to add to evidence to inquiry. Dossier not case for war.” (Alastair Campbell, Twitter, May 12 2011.) “Alastair Campbell said to the inquiry that the purpose of the dossier was “not to make a case for war”. I had no doubt at the time that this was exactly its purpose---” (Major-General Michael Laurie’s letter 0f 27.1.10 to the Chilcot enquiry, released last Thursday, 15 months later.)

SIXTY-THREE years ago, a 13-year-old Palestinian boy was forced to leave his home in the Galilean city of Safed and flee with his family to Syria.

Author who wrote a bestselling guide to picking up friends has a new book in the shops. Neil Strauss’ Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead considers his interviews with the famous, mostly pop stars, and teases out lessons in life from them. Cher believes we should trust our instincts. Jerry Lee Lewis is in favour of not dwelling on the past. Merle Haggard thinks we should live in truth.

Everyone is expected to bow before the majesty of law but the Karnataka mess shows that ingenuity can turn it into a hapless witness.

IN recent days, after weeks of delays and closed-door meetings, rebel leaders here have announced a slate of new appointments, including a defence chief and a minister for reconstruction and infrastructure.

Zabul Province, one of Afghanistan’s poorest, is mainly known for being a transit route for Taleban insurgents and Nato supply convoys. But recently Zabul, in south-eastern Afghanistan, has become important for another, better reason: as a small but overlooked corner of the Afghan war that offers a glimpse of what a stable future might look like as Afghans take over their own security and administration by 2014.

IT is a power struggle that is causing a power shortage — one that has begun to slow China’s mighty economic growth engine. Balking at the high price of coal that fuels much of China’s electricity grid, the nation’s state-owned utility companies are defying government economic planners by deliberately reducing the amount of electricity they produce.

President Obama has subtly shifted Washington’s public explanation of its goals in Libya, declaring now that he wants to assure the Libyan people are “finally free of 40 years of tyranny” at the hands of Muammar Gaddafi, after first stating he wanted to protect civilians from massacres.

THE Palestinian leadership is more committed than ever to obtaining statehood through the United Nations General Assembly. But despite this commitment, there is worry that success in New York might not necessarily mean success in Nablus or Hebron.

OVER the past six months, I’ve written three columns about Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former Russian oligarch who has been in prison since 2003, charged, tried, convicted — and recently reconvicted — on transparently bogus tax and embezzlement charges.

The hit-and-miss struggle of German health authorities to identify the contaminated food behind one of the deadliest E. coli outbreaks in recent years underscores the difficulties of following a pathogen through the complex food supply chain, as well as deficiencies in even the most modern health systems in diagnosing this deadly illness.

THE arrest of the former Bosnian Serb supreme commander Ratko Mladic, and his likely extradition to face trial for war crimes at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague, is cause for grim satisfaction throughout the western Balkans. It is also an uncomfortable reminder of a particularly terrible moment in British foreign policy. We should never forget that the killings at Srebrenica were the culmination of a three-year campaign of ethnic cleansing, which began in the spring of 1992.

IN the months since Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s resignation, his successors have signalled a shift in foreign policy by reaching out to former adversaries.

FAR away from the battle to contain the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, investors are increasingly edgy about a related issue: the fate of Tokyo Electric Power, the stricken plant’s operator.

WHY do certain dictators survive while others fall? Throughout history, downtrodden citizens have tried to throw off the yoke of their oppressors, but revolutions, like those sweeping through the Arab world now, are rare.

There was something about Maqbool Fida Husain that almost every journalist who met him in his forced exile days noticed, unfailingly. What’s more, most of these scribes ended up creating the edifice of their stories on this particular facet. But then, there was an irony here.

Egypt’s economy, whose inequities and lack of opportunities helped topple a government, has now ground to a virtual halt, further wounded by the revolution itself.

WE have buried another journalist. Syed Saleem Shahzad, an investigative reporter for Asia Times Online, has paid the ultimate price for telling truths that the authorities didn’t want people to hear.

IT is not uncommon for politicians, media figures and the general public to claim — without question — that those serving in the armed forces are heroes. Military service is unique, and the challenges faced by service members are unlike those of other professions. Violent death is a real possibility while wearing a service uniform. But does this make everyone who served a hero?

Since 2002, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) has been governing Turkey with remarkable success in economic terms. Indeed, its record is almost unique in Turkey’s modern history, comparable only with the rule of the Democratic Party (DP), which came to power in the 1950s, at the start of multi-party parliamentary democracy in Turkey, and ran the country

IN 2008 my battalion was tasked with a mission to clear one of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia’s last bastions in one of Iraq’s most troubled regions. Two weeks before the mission, my battalion commander sternly ordered that every soldier was to keep it secret from family, friends and Facebook.

IF you want to see why torture doesn’t work, you need look no further than Ayman Al Zawahiri who was regularly beaten in the jails of the US-backed regime in Egypt two decades ago. There, he claimed, he and his fellow prisoners were kicked, hit, hung over doors, whipped with cables, given electric shocks and had wild dogs loosed upon them.

JULY will mark two milestones in America’s sometimes-tortured relations with Asia. One is the beginning of the end of the nearly decade-long struggle in Afghanistan — the longest war in United States history — as President Barack Obama announces the first troop withdrawals.

THE trial of surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge has begun in Phnom Penh on Monday. The fact that the case has even made it this far is a minor miracle to those of us who were in Cambodia during the 1990s, when the defendants’ amnesties seemed secure.

IN Deborah Brown’s family lore, the American South was a place of whites-only water fountains and lynching under cover of darkness. It was a place African-American people like her mother had fled. But for Deborah, 59, a retired civil servant from Queens, the South now promises salvation.

This month marks the 40th anniversary of Henry Kissinger’s secret trip to Beijing, which launched the process of mending a 20-year breach in diplomatic relations between the United States and China. That trip, and president Richard Nixon’s subsequent visit, represented a major Cold War realignment. The US and China put aside their intense hostility in a joint and successful effort to contain an expansionist Soviet Union.

For months now, a fight over sovereign-debt restructuring has been raging between those who insist that Greece must continue to honour its signature and those for whom the country’s debt should be partly cancelled. As is often the case in Europe, the crossfire of contradictory official and non-official statements has been throwing markets into turmoil. Confusion abounds; clarity is needed.

IN a recent commentary, I drew on the interim report of the high-level trade experts group, appointed by the governments of Britain, Germany, Indonesia, and Turkey, which I co-chaired, to explain why concluding the World Trade Organisation’s ten-year-old Doha Round was important. The column was reprinted on a blog maintained by CUTS International (Consumer Unity and Trust Society), the most important developing-country NGO today, leading to an outpouring of reactions from trade experts. The faucet is still open, but the debate has already raised critiques that must be answered.

THE global economy is in the midst of its second growth scare in less than two years. Get used to it. In a post-crisis world, these are the footprints of a failed recovery. The reason is simple. The typical business cycle has a natural cushioning mechanism that wards off unexpected blows.

EARLY one morning, 50 years ago today, while his wife, Mary, slept upstairs, Ernest Hemingway went into the vestibule of his Ketchum, Idaho, house, selected his favourite shotgun from the rack, inserted shells into its chambers and ended his life.

THE meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant has sent political aftershocks racing around the globe. More often than not, however, the shocks have been ideological, with no basis in science.

Since February 28, we have been witnessing, or maybe have also taken part in, the many protests and sit-ins that have been organised or rightly “disorganised”, but have we taken time to reflect on where we are going with our seemingly incessant demands for more of the same; money and more money.

Isn’t it marvellous that all these governments are determined to do “something” about Colonel Gaddafi? For example Hillary Clinton said she supported military action once the Arab League — made up of countries such as Bahrain, Syria, Yemen and Saudi Arabia — backed the air strikes.

Dear President Hu,

The assassination of the governor of Punjab Salman Taseer is a great loss for the Pakistani nation, the Pakistan People’s Party, President Asif Ali Zardari, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and the government. He was brave, courageous and daring—a great man who spoke for the rights of the people including minorities.

WHEN President Obama hosts the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, in Washington later this month, North Korea is certain to be high on the agenda. But as in the past, Beijing is likely to use its leverage with Pyongyang only if a major war threatens.

Amid the myriad public interest lawsuits filed against the deposed government of Hosni Mubarak, the volume of which is beginning to rival the flow of the Nile, the attorney Samir Sabry contributed a novel ripple. Sabry, known mainly as the slick lawyer for star belly and infamous tycoons, is suing to force the government to erase the Mubarak name from every public institution across the land of Egypt.

IT wasn’t exactly Veni, Vidi, Vici for Christine Lagarde. Yet, her appointment as the new Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) did not raise any eyebrows nor spring any major surprise.

ON Sunday, millions of people on another continent are observing the 50th anniversary of an event few Americans remember, the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. A slight, goateed man with black, half-framed glasses, the 35-year-old Lumumba was the first democratically chosen leader of the vast country, nearly as large as the United States east of the Mississippi, now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo.

I REMEMBER the first time the concept of another world entered my mind. It was during a walk with my father in our garden in Sri Lanka. He pointed to the Moon and told me that people had walked on it. I was astonished. Suddenly that bright light became a place that one could visit.

THE launch of the newly restructured Oman-Japan Friendship Association was announced in the media the other day. I am especially delighted to note that the time-honoured organisation is now led by H. H. Sayyid Haitham bin Tariq Al Said, Minister of Heritage and Culture under the wise guidance of His Majesty Sultan Qaboos bin Said.

Early in Eugene Jarecki’s documentary, Reagan, you hear the voice of Ronald Reagan saying, “Someday it might be worthwhile to find out how images are created — and even more worthwhile to learn how false images come into being.”

When I mentioned the “trials” of Zine Al Abidine Ben Ali, the former Tunisian ruler’s lawyer threw his hands in the air, an expression of cynicism and laughter on his face. “These weren’t judgements, they weren’t even real cases — they were a joke,” Akram Azoury says of the Tunis courts which last month, after just one-and-a-half hours of deliberations, sentenced Ben Ali and his wife Leila Traboulsi to 35 years’ imprisonment and the equivalent of £48m in fines, and then, last week, to another 15-and-a-half years.

Even in a country whose people are known for walking in lockstep, a national consensus on the proper code of behaviour has emerged with startling speed. Consider post-tsunami Japan as the age of voluntary self-restraint, or jishuku, the antipode of the Japan of the “bubble” era that celebrated excess.

One revolution ended on Friday. Another may soon begin. In a moment that may prove as decisive to the Middle East as the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, 18 days of protest hurtled Egypt once again to the forefront of politics in the Middle East.

Perhaps foreign policy doesn’t matter in US elections. President George H. W. Bush orchestrated a peaceful unwinding of the Cold War that united Germany within the west. A Europe united became whole and free. Hundreds of millions of people benefited. They still do. This was one of the finest hours of American diplomacy

The revolution which has taken place in Egypt recently did not come out of the blue. It has not been orchestrated by internal political powers such as the opposition parties or the Muslim Brotherhood as claimed by the former Egyptian regime.

President Obama defended the American-led military assault in Libya on Monday, saying it was in the national interest of the United States to stop a potential massacre that would have “stained the conscience of the world”.

IT is not just Greece that is struggling with a yawning budget deficit. We (Britain) of course are doing so, as indeed is much of the developed world. But now that Britain has begun to get things back on track the biggest fiscal deficit among the larger nations is that of the US – biggest, that is, in relative terms at around 11 per cent of GDP, and the US has done nothing about it.

A REVOLUTION resembles the death of a fading star, an exhilarating Technicolour explosion that gives way not to an ordered new galaxy but to a nebula, a formless cloud of shifting energy.

Nearly two decades after fleeing her native Croatia, the squat, hardworking woman known as Issabell Basic lived a quiet life in this small town, firing up her Jeep Cherokee each day for the 25-minute commute to her job making Hot Pockets.

Lucy Adeniji – an evangelical Christian and author of two books on childcare – trafficked two girls and a 21-year-old woman from Nigeria to work as slaves in her east London home. She made them toil for 21 hours a day and tortured them if they displeased her. The youngest girl was 11 years old.

The peculiarity of the latest election results is they will please no major national party. Instead, three regional outfits — the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal, the AIADMK in Tamil Nadu and the so-called NR Congress named after its relatively unknown leader, N. Rangasamy, in Puducherry — will be satisfied with the outcome.

It is indeed significant that the Indian Supreme Court’s Central Empowered Committee (CEC) has called the ravaging of Bellary in Karnataka the worst-ever mining violation which it had been told to probe since the panel was created on May 9, 2002.

IT took just 32 seconds to extinguish faith in the airship and the hydrogen that once buoyed the Hindenburg, which erupted in a fatal inferno 70 years ago.

DEEP below the workshops in Baghdad’s cramped, run-down jewellery district, unemployed men spend their days scouring the city’s sewer system for the one thing they say can bring them money: flakes of gold.

When Defence Secretary Robert Gates devoted his final policy speech this month to berating Nato and our European allies, he was engaging in a time-honoured tradition: Americans have worried about Europeans shirking their share of global burdens since the start of the 60-year-old alliance.

Like many war stories, this one too began with love. Before the tear gas and street riots, the violent arrests and hospital visits, Yoweri Museveni and Kizza Besigye were close friends, a future president and the doctor to whom he entrusted his life.

PEN Sokchan was just 16 when in late 1978 she was ordered to marry a Khmer Rouge soldier, a man who was a stranger to her. More than 30 years on, she remembers how she tried to prevent him consummating the marriage by wearing two pairs of trousers.

With a rhetorical flourish, President Obama last week drew to a close an era of war. The President’s speech on Afghanistan attracted attention, but not as much as it should have done, given its historical moment.

Shinzo Hamai, who took over the helm of an atom-bombed and destitute Hiroshima in the spring of 1947 and who, over four terms as mayor, helped stir it back to life from the brink of hell, wrote in his memoirs that so utterly hopeless was Hiroshima’s predicament in those immediate post war months that he and his friends started a “Dreamers Club”.

Months after the devastating March 11 earthquake and tsunami hit Japan, the ongoing nuclear disaster at Fukushima compounds the humanitarian tragedy and impedes recovery.

Are women in Europe on the verge of becoming an engine for political change? In economic-development circles, experience and common sense suggest that progress, accountability, and hard work start with and depend on women. Micro-credits, for example, are much more efficient when women receive and repay them.

THE Western campaign for hearts and minds in Afghanistan is based heavily on providing roads, dams, buildings and, especially, electricity. The United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, expects to spend $2.1 billion this year in Afghanistan. It has been working there for half a century, since the Soviets and Americans were competing to be the country’s development partners.

On Saturday night at the BBC, I bumped into Tony Benn, looking more tired but still with that flame of righteous veracity in his eyes, which never quivers or wavers, a beacon for so many flapping around in this uncertain world.

When Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei was living in New York in the 1980s, so avid was his blackjack habit that an Atlantic City casino used to send a limo to pick him up from his unfurnished room in the then down-at-heel Lower East Side. He joked that his neighbours probably thought he was a newly-arrived Chinese drug dealer.

TOGETHER with our Nato allies and coalition partners, the United States, France and Britain have been united from the start in responding to the crisis in Libya, and we are united on what needs to happen in order to end it.

Somewhere in a cave, in Pakistan or Afghanistan or wherever, a tall, skeletal man with a long stick and dodgy kidneys must have been laughing on Monday. No one has a clue where Osama bin Laden is, or even if he is at all. We hear little from or about him these days, apart for the odd report of a sighting or claim of his death. But assuming he is alive, we might imagine this conversation two days ago with a minion. I translate very loosely from the original.

IT’S a warm evening in the summer of 2010. I am leaving a cafe in the very centre of Moscow when I notice my car is missing its licence plate. I know what this means: I am being followed.

LESS than a month after the death of Osama bin Laden, Ratko Mladic, one of the most evil men of the 20th century, has been captured. The moment is sweet. For me, bittersweet.

IN Ambassador Ivo Daalder’s surreal world of Nato “more than 150,000 troops participate in six Nato operations on three continents”; in Afghanistan, “a Nato-led force made up of troops from 48 nations is helping to build security”; in Libya, “17 allies and partner nations have taken on the new responsibility of helping the Libyan people determine their own destiny”; and Nato “continues its long-standing commitment to stabilise

On Saturday British forces went into action over Libya as part of an international operation working with the United States and others at the request of Arab nations acting to enforce the will of the United Nations.

Who would have thought it? The answer is nobody. If anyone had said at the beginning of the year that, by March, the Arab world would not only be in uproar but would have peacefully got rid of two of its longest serving rulers, that the UN would have sanctioned a US-led military intervention in a Muslim country and that the world’s second largest economy would have been overwhelmed by a tsunami, they would have been dismissed as a sad delusionist seeking what they might dream of, but not what they could reasonably predict.

There’s an old English ditty, “a young lady of Kent,” that ends with these lines: she knew what it meant, but she went”.

The suicide bombing at Moscow’s busiest airport on January 24 exposed more than a failure by security services to man metal detectors or extinguish potential threats. The terrorist attack, which killed 35 people and injured more than 100, revealed cracks in the rigid political system that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin built over the last decade.

Species die. It has become a catastrophic fact of modern life. On our present course, by E. O. Wilson’s estimate, half of all plant and animal species could be extinct by 2100 — that is, within the lifetime of a child born today.

In Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden was based for many years and where Al Qaeda helped to train and pay insurgents, there was relief and uncertainty about how his death would play out in the fraught regional power politics now shaping the war.

Once upon a time, there was a country plagued by large deficits, high inflation, and decades of economic stagnation. When economic problems once again became particularly acute, the country’s leadership embraced a radical approach to achieving price stability.

The tents still stretch for more than a mile, weaving a jumbled path from the gates of Sana University along the ring road, an enduring reminder of the determination of this nation’s young protesters who took to the streets months ago demanding a new, more democratic government.

Motherhood is a very special, divine emotion that only a woman has the privilege to enjoy. From the time she goes in to birth labour to the time she is ready to leave the world, she is full of sacrifices. There can be no other relationship that is totally selfless and yet taken for granted.

The “dawn chorus” came in on time, salvos of missiles crashing down with shattering noise, burning buildings, killing and maiming people. It was the start of another day in Misrata, the city whose fate may decide the military outcome of this brutal civil war.

Protest has been a periodic feature of student behaviour since the first universities were founded in medieval times — Oman’s institutions are proving they are no exception to this rule.

Birthed in a big lie about weapons of mass destruction, the war in Iraq was in desperate need of a hero in 2003 when Jessica Lynch wrecked and was knocked unconscious in enemy territory.

WITH deep-tread tyres and ample ground clearance, a rugged 4-wheel-drive Hummer or Jeep might seem the best choice for navigating through the wrecked cities of north eastern Japan. The areas pummelled by the earthquake and tsunami in March would surely be inhospitable for an electric vehicle.

The threat of a catastrophic release of radioactive materials from a spent fuel pool at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant is dwarfed by the risk posed by such pools in the United States, which are typically filled with far more radioactive material, according to a study released on Tuesday by a non-profit institute.

IT is not true that Oman continues to maintain “strict” restrictions on freedom of expression and assembly. Any current visitor to Oman will testify that there are several protest groups visibly camped along the main road to the airport in Muscat and no one has touched them even though they are a nuisance to traffic.

EVEN the Gaddafi government escort could not contain his disbelief at the sloppiness of the fraud: Bloodstains his colleagues had left on bed sheets in a damaged hospital room for more than a week as evidence of civilian casualties from western air strikes.

MANY in the west had taken comfort in Al Qaeda’s silence in the wake of the uprisings in the Arab world this year, as secular, non violent protests, led by educated youth focused on redressing longstanding local grievances, showcased democracy’s promise and seemed to leave Al Qaeda behind.

FOUR American yacht operators killed; a Danish family of five and two crew members kidnapped: these events in the space of a week early this year may finally fuel a consensus that something needs to be done about piracy in the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden. And something should be done: in addition to the yacht operators, nearly 700 sailors, mostly Filipino, Bangladeshi and Russian, are being held hostage.

US needed to eliminate Osama bin Laden to fulfil its sense of justice and, to a lesser extent, to end the myth of his invincibility. But his elimination does not end the terrorist threat, nor does it remove the ideological motivation of Al Qaeda’s supporters.

SOMETIMES there is turmoil in the markets because a government threatens to do what is best for its citizens.

There seem to be a thousand and one interpretations of the changes sweeping across the countries of the Middle East and North Africa. One response that is often heard is a note of cautious optimism, captured in US President Barack Obama’s recent speech at the State Department when he referred to the “promise of the future”.

IN a recent interview, Russia’s President Dmitri Medvedev proclaimed that he wants a second term in office following the 2012 election, but that he would not run against Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who put him in power in the first place. Such a rivalry, Medvedev implied, would damage the country’s well-being and image.

IN Ritan Park in Beijing, people are belting out patriotic songs, such as “I Love You, China”. In fact, there has been a lot of singing to mark the event and a particular favourite is “Without the Communist Party, there would be no new China”. At an event in Beijing, 90 ministers and deputy ministers sang a chorus of “red songs”, basically propaganda ditties, to mark the anniversary.

Six years ago, when he was climbing a Himalayan peak in northern Nepal, commercial pilot and adventurer Mike Allsop met a venerable Buddhist monk whose philosophy left an indelible impression on him.

AS President Obama began mulling his next big decision on troop levels in Afghanistan last January, Vice-President Joseph R. Biden Jr quietly flew to Kabul to meet with President Hamid Karzai and our battlefield with the top American commander, Gen. David H. Petraeus.

Turkey has emerged stronger and the leadership of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan stands taller, after the last elections held in June this year. The third-consecutive victory of Justice and Development Party (coined ‘AKP’) — amid the Arab Spring — proves to the world Turkish leaders’ political maturity, commitment to democracy, capability to govern with sustained economic development, and assertive diplomacy.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s furious rejection of US President Barack Obama’s proposal to use the 1967 borders as the basis for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute — frontiers that he called “utterly indefensible” — reflects not only the Israeli prime minister’s poor statesmanship, but also his antiquated military philosophy.

FOR all the excitement about the twilight of the dictators, only two — Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia — have been officially knocked over since the start of the so-called Arab Spring six months ago. It isn’t even clear whether that count will reach three.

The China doubters are back in force. They seem to come in waves — every few years, or so. Yet, year in and year out, China has defied the naysayers and stayed the course, perpetuating the most spectacular development miracle of modern times. That seems likely to continue.

China’s announcement that its first aircraft carrier is ready to set sail as early as the end of this month has refocused attention on the country’s naval ambitions. So, too, has the Pakistani defence minister’s disclosure that his country recently asked China to start building a naval base at its strategically positioned port of Gwadar, on the Arabian Sea.