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.

The civil war in Libya went on longer than expected, but the fall of Tripoli came faster than was forecast. As in Kabul in 2001 and Baghdad in 2003, there was no last-ditch stand by the defeated regime, whose supporters appear to have melted away once they saw that defeat was inevitable.

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.

These are interesting times — and I mean that in the worst way. Right now we’re looking at not one but two looming crises, either of which could produce a global disaster. In the United States, right-wing fanatics in Congress may block a necessary rise in the debt ceiling, potentially wreaking havoc in world financial markets. Meanwhile, if the plan just agreed to by European heads of state fails to calm markets, we could see falling dominoes all across southern Europe — which would also wreak havoc in world financial markets.

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?

IF THERE is a critics choice award for the most shrewd Pakistani politician, he would likely take the honours.

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.

In July of 2002 I was in Damascus, Syria, having been invited by the US embassy to deliver an address at the university. I was delighted that the auditorium was full, but a touch nervous since I had chosen to speak on the challenges facing the country.

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.

DO not be deceived by the bland, consensual tone that permeates the current political debate on the riots. Behind the unsurprising, universal condemnation of the criminality there are deep divisions between the parties and perhaps within them. When they surface, as they will do, the dividing lines will be clearer than at any time for several decades.

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.

Never mind Ed Miliband, Hugh Grant has been the indisputable star of the campaign against the late News of the World and its proprietor Rupert Murdoch. The actor most noted for his comic talents on screen has played a very serious part in this real-life drama, both in his revelatory counter-bugging of an ex-News of the World reporter, and in launching Hacked Off alongside such noted fellow-victims of tabloid sex exposes as Max Mosley and John Prescott.

Did the Taleban guerrillas who launched a terrifying assault on the British Council in Kabul on Friday have the faintest idea what they were doing?

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.

August, historians will tell you, is a good time to start a war. And, boy, does this feel like a war. This feels, when you switch on the TV, and see footage of burning cars, and burning buildings, and of people jumping out of burning buildings, and of people too scared to walk down their street, and of dark silhouettes in helmets waving shields, and of dark silhouettes in hoodies waving iron bars, like the nearest to war most of us have been.

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.

By rights, President Barack Obama should be emerging as the big political winner in the debt ceiling debate. For months, he’s positioned himself near the centre of public opinion, leaving Republicans to occupy the rightward flank. Poll after poll suggests that Americans prefer the president’s call for a mix of spending cuts and tax increases to the Republican Party’s anti-tax approach. Poll after poll shows that House Republicans, not Obama, would take most of the blame if the debt ceiling weren’t raised.

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.

THE greatest political show on earth is under way in earnest. With last weekend’s official declaration of Rick Perry, and the Iowa straw poll that sealed the ascent of Michele Bachmann and the demise of Tim Pawlenty, the battle to secure the Republican nomination to face President Barack Obama has come into focus.

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.

A slim figure in a dark suit, Brahumdagh Bugti, 30, could pass for a banker in the streets of this sedate Swiss city. But in truth he is a resistance leader in exile, a player in an increasingly ugly independence war within Pakistan.

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.

IN their frantic efforts to stop the Palestinian leadership from going to the UN, Israeli officials and propagandists pose what appears to be a mistaken choice. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on Palestinians to have direct talks, and even offered to meet Palestinian officials anywhere if they choose what he called direct talks instead of unilateral action.

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.

Six months after Libyan rebels took up arms against the country’s leader, Muammar Gaddafi, they have finally toppled him. But, while victorious on the battlefield, they have not been triumphant in political and economic terms. If the rebels are to ensure their revolution’s long-term success, they will have to overcome the weaknesses that plague them.

AN oddly equipped car made its way last week through the rubble in this tsunami-stricken port city. On the roof: an assembly of nine cameras creating 360-degree panoramic digital images of the disaster zone to archive damage.

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.

First things first. Nobody in his right senses would deny that a stronger Lokpal would go a long way in fighting the deep-rooted and well entrenched malaise of corruption in India.

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.

The similarities between the rioting in London and the race riots which shocked Britain in the 1980s are striking. But they do not tell the whole story.

At least 38 people were killed and more than 200 injured by the recent crash of two high-speed trains near Zhenzhou in Zhejiang, a province in China. The wrecked body of the ruined train was buried immediately afterward, with no investigation. The intellectual-property dispute between Japan and China over the technology used in China’s new bullet trains was heated even before the accident. In the wake of the crash, the dispute has come to a boil.

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.

The world was expecting Eurobonds to come out of last week’s Franco-German summit; instead, the eurozone will get economic governance. According to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, the great leap forward to the creation of Eurobonds would perhaps be the culmination of that process, but for the moment small steps remain the order of the day. The question, obviously, is whether or not these small steps serve any purpose.

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.

Until now, and with few exceptions, the West has nurtured two distinct communities of foreign-policy specialists: the development community and the democratic community. More often than not, they have had little or no connection with one another: development specialists dealt comfortably with dictatorships and democracies alike, believing that prosperity can best be created by concentrating exclusively on economic issues and institutions.

Eliminating nuclear weapons is the democratic wish of the world’s people. Yet no nuclear-armed country currently appears to be preparing for a future without these terrifying devices.

OF the world’s almost seven billion people, about one billion are starving, owing to a long list of unfortunate local events and circumstances, together with steadily increasing demand, unpredictable weather patterns, and poor financial management.

Greece’s GDP, at about $300 billion, represents approximately 0.5 per cent of world output. Its $470 billion public debt is very large relative to the Greek economy’s size, but less than 1 per cent of global debt – and less than half is held by private banks (mainly Greek).

I gave my friends and family fair warning, via a Wall post, that I would leave within a week. One — yes, one — of my 200-plus “friends” openly objected in a comment. Otherwise, the post was met with silence. My friends probably didn’t think I was serious, or they weren’t paying attention. Who could blame them? I had been on Facebook for years and had a habit of posting at least once a day — as a means to keep in touch.

At the hearing into the News of the World phone hacking scandal in London on Tuesday, the commissioner of Scotland Yard did something unusual for a policeman. He quoted Shakespeare.

Few wish to examine the possibility that the killer may simply have taken to a violent extreme ideas that, while hateful, are current in mainstream political debate.

Until last Thursday, Libya was beginning to look like the relative good news in the troubled summer that has followed the Arab Spring.

After four months of popular demonstrations and ferocious repression, including a bloody crackdown on the central city of Hama on Sunday, the Syrian president, Bashar Al Assad, still refuses to step down, insisting that he can reform his regime.

Early in the financial crisis, a major emerging-market investor told me: “This is not a global, but a semi-global financial crisis.” He was right: it really was a crisis of the United States, Europe, and Japan. Among emerging markets, only Eastern Europe was badly hit. Indeed, the crisis marks the emerging economies’ overtaking of the major Western countries, with huge consequences for global power, finance, politics, and economics.

Relations between the United States and Pakistan have continued to fray since a US Special Forces team killed Osama bin Laden in a comfortable villa near a major Pakistani military academy. But the tit-for-tat retaliation that has followed the raid reflects deeper sources of mistrust and mutual suspicion.

In the end, as always, Europe acted. But will it be enough? Financial markets, no doubt, will be skeptical about the eurozone members’ solemn commitment that the de facto Greek default will remain the exception. Verbal assurances have been the European Union’s preferred currency in tackling the euro crisis, but words now have as little value as Greece’s sovereign debt. It took more than a year for Europe to do what everyone knew needed to be done to contain the Greek crisis, and it still may not be enough. For the approved measures do not provide the transparent and long-term commitment to restoring Greek finances that markets want to see.

Cancer is sometimes thought of as a disease of wealthier countries, but it is a major cause of morbidity and mortality in poorer ones as well. Indeed, by the end of this decade, about 150 million people worldwide will have cancer, with approximately 60 per cent of them residing in developing countries.

THE recent dramatic declines in equity markets worldwide are a response to the interaction of two factors: economic fundamentals and policy responses — or, rather, the lack of policy responses.

IN the Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila, a corner of Beirut bearing the scars of massacres and an enduring despair, the words of a young barber hinted at an emerging optimism about what the Arab revolts could mean for a central issue of the last half century in the Middle East: the fate of Palestinians.

The rules of economics say: “nothing produced can be allowed to maintain a life span longer than what can be endured in order to continue cyclical consumption”.

Every year, during India’s rainy season, there is, equally predictably, a “monsoon session” of Parliament. And, every year, there seems to be increasing debate about which is stormier – the weather or the legislature.

The number of women murdered is increasing in most of Central America and Mexico. In some countries, such as Honduras, the increase is four times that of men. Moreover, many of these murders are committed with extreme violence – sexual savagery, torture, and mutilations – by perpetrators (often involved in organised crime) acting with a high degree of impunity.

BY the time I arrived in West Berlin, in 1962, the wall was in place. The half-city was a hysterical, intellectually exciting place; the wall, whose construction began 50 years ago today, made it more so. From the East and West radio and TV stations you heard competing, mutually exclusive versions of every event.

Amid a growing wave of concern about climate change, many countries – including Brazil, Australia, the United States, and the members of the European Union – passed laws in the 2000’s outlawing or severely restricting access to incandescent light bulbs. The intention was understandable: if everyone in the world exchanged most light bulbs for energy-efficient compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs), we could save 3.5 per cent of all electricity, or 1 per cent of our CO2 emissions.

There is no one whose thoughts European officials would rather read than Chancellor Angela Merkel, who meets Tuesday at the Élysée Palace with France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, as they struggle to find a lasting solution to the European debt crisis.

The pundit could not have been clearer. “Equities are cheap,” she declared with wonderful certainty. In plain English what listeners to the Today programme were being told was that they should consider scrabbling together whatever spare cash they could to buy shares in stock-market companies. But we never got to hear which companies in particular we should be investing in.

For more than a half-century, the US dollar has been not only America’s currency, but the world’s as well. It has been the dominant unit used in cross-border transactions and the principal asset held as reserves by central banks and governments.

For decades Africa has been the problem continent. Ravaged by leaders unanimously opting for autocratic rule, looted and fractured by base sectarian warfare and economically stifled by unyielding climate change and abusive agriculture mechanisation; Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea have monopolised global tragedy for as long as the world has been watching.

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.

What a difference three decades make. In April 1982, I was assigned to be the Beirut correspondent for The Times. Before I arrived, word had filtered back to Lebanon about an uprising in February in the Syrian town of Hama – famed for its water wheels on the Orontes River.

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.”

Doomed always to fight the last war, we are recommitting the same old sin in Libya. Muammar Gaddafi vanishes after promising to fight to the death. Isn’t that just what Saddam Hussein did? And of course, when Saddam disappeared and US troops suffered the very first losses from the Iraqi insurgency in 2003, we were told — by the US proconsul Paul Bremer, the generals, diplomats and the decaying televiwsion “experts” — that the gunmen of the resistance were “die-hards”, “dead-enders” who didn’t realise that the war was over.

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.

AUGUST was once a time for dreaming, wandering the empty streets of this city, reading silly-season newspaper stories after a leisurely lunch washed down with Sancerre, gazing at squares where fountains plashed and the pregnant or the old chatted on benches at dusk. Then something happened.

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”.

WHAT would happen to the European Union were a country, or several countries, to drop the euro and return to their own currencies? It is the sort of question that you are not really supposed to ask, or at least not if you are a eurozone politician. Angela Merkel said at the weekend: “I have said that if the euro fails, Europe will fail....”

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.

IT is something of a cliché question in South Korea nowadays: Who would be the country’s next president if the election were held tomorrow, rather than in December 2012? Numerous opinion polls show Park Geun-hye of the ruling Grand National Party (GNP) to be the leading candidate. If elected, she would be South Korea’s first woman president, and, for her rivals, her dominant position in the race is an uncomfortable but unassailable fact.

Some political problems can be solved overnight; others take years to tackle. But, in the distant future, when the financial crisis and the euro’s troubles are long forgotten, we will still be facing the consequences of climate change.

IT was said of one 19th-century British politician that he never missed a chance to let slip an opportunity. Although European leaders were quick to define last month’s euro summit of 2011 as the day European leaders faced the crisis down, they know better now.

WITH a sweet, awkward smile, Nancy Lilia Núñez offered up the main details of her life: she is a mother of three, having given birth to a daughter just seven months ago, and she is serving a 25-year sentence for helping to kidnap a 15-year-old girl. We were sitting at El Cereso — the Ciudad Juárez prison — a drab, hulking complex of brick and steel. Núñez wore tight jeans and eye makeup, as if heading to the mall.

YOU go away for a few days and come back to find that the Socialist Workers Party was right all along. Global capitalism is in crisis and, if the revolution is not exactly round the corner, there has been a spot of appropriation of surplus value going on in Tottenham.

The demand for global leadership has never been greater. The world is truly lost in trying to find a way out of the current crisis. America is imploding. Europe is crumbling. London is burning. The Arab Spring has lost direction. China and India remain internally preoccupied. If ever there were a moment for a global leader to step up, this is it. So why is no leader emerging?

April is the cruellest month, wrote T.S. Eliot at the beginning of his great poem, The Waste Land. But, if Eliot had been a professional investor who had observed European financial markets over the last few years, I am quite certain that his choice would have been August.

IT’S called a street, but it’s really a neighbourhood. Al Sarim Street in Tripoli, the Libyan capital, falls between low-lying Nasr Street and elevated Al Jumhuriyya Street. Its older buildings date from the Italian colonial era. Most were built as single-storey homes on the upper side of the street. I used to drive down this street daily on my way home from my law firm nearby.

THREE months ago, Japan’s prime minister, Naoto Kan, seemed to have a chance at a comeback. The former civic activist ordered the shutdown of a nuclear plant in a risky earthquake fault zone, enraging the powerful atomic energy establishment but winning applause from Japan’s now nuclear-phobic public.

AS China gets closer to overtaking the United States as the world’s largest economic power, and its disinclination to accept US military dominance of the Western Pacific grows more obvious, America’s Asia/Pacific allies and friends are becoming increasingly anxious about their longer-term strategic environment.

Humanity’s main concerns today are not so much concrete evils as indeterminate threats. We are not worried by visible dangers, but by vague ones that could strike when least expected – and against which we are insufficiently protected.

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.

A reader responded to my recent column about how the US president was becoming a Caesar with a question: “Wouldn’t a Caesar be preferable to a democracy in which the people are too ignorant, disinterested, and stupid to engage in self-government?”

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.

In Shakespeare’s plays, comedy often meets tragedy. Perhaps Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao reflected on this as he watched a performance of Hamlet in Stratford-upon-Avon during his recent European tour. And, apropos the play, he may have been thinking: “To buy or not to buy?” In Bulgaria last March, one of his ministers quipped that “there will always be someone pointing fingers at us, whether or not we buy.” But, as Wen’s trip to the United Kingdom, Germany, and Hungary showed, China is indeed buying — and European Union leaders are eagerly selling.

The thunderous results of Thailand’s general election will seem familiar to anyone attuned to the political upheaval in the Middle East and North Africa.

SENIOR American and Nato officers in Afghanistan have wanted Ahmed Wali Karzai gone — set aside, retired, out of the country or worse — for many years now. His killing by a close family associate on Tuesday may have granted their wishes. But what now follows the death of the most powerful political broker in southern Afghanistan may be much worse than Karzai ever was.

Two weeks ago, President Barack Obama held a Twitter Town hall, where the president responded on camera to questions from Twitter users. That was novel, everyone said, and exciting! And at least the president responded to the tweets in complete sentences, out loud, with some semblance of dignity.

It is hard right now to write about American political economy. Nobody knows whether the debt-ceiling tripwire will be evaded; if so, how; or what will happen if it is not.

August 3, 2011, will be remembered as a historic day in Egypt. Former President Hosni Mubarak was put on public trial, together with his two sons and his ex-interior minister, General Habib El Adly. The repercussions for Egypt, indeed for the entire Arab world, will be profound.

IT is time to wake up to the environment that is the reflection of what we are. The one-sided science, intellectual arrogance, mental lethargy created by idiot boxes depicts the shallowness of the human mind.

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.

I remember the original Broadwater Farm riots clearly. So it was a heart-stopping moment on Saturday night to realise that, 26 years later, Tottenham was in flames again. But in 2011, a lot is different. For one thing, the first I heard about the riots was on Twitter; complete with photographs of burning police cars.

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.

THE military council governing Egypt is moving to lay down ground rules for a new constitution that would protect and potentially expand its own authority indefinitely, possibly circumscribing the power of future elected officials.

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.

What now for British journalism? Once again its working practices are stained in the eyes of those who consume it, and once more it will face a humiliating and public examination of how it goes about its business.

IN making a volte-face and in shifting allegiance, the Egyptian army, especially the members of the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF), has set in new inglorious precedence and a fresh infamous benchmark. In a show of scanty deference for their former supreme commander, the SCAF members unhesitatingly exposed Egypt’s former president, now deposed, Hosni Mubarak to an unprecedented courtroom humiliation.

Peaceable in its outlook, the country has long struggled against a handful of people who find perpetual tolerance unforgivable Think of Norway and what do you imagine? Oil. Fjords. Pine trees.

Listen to the chatter from top officials and you’d think that World War III was about to break out on the Internet. The defence secretary is warning about a digital “Pearl Harbour.” Former director of national intelligence Mike McConnell declares that the United States is “fighting a cyber war, and we’re losing.” Every new hack brings more pronouncements of network doom.

It is easy to take pride in being Norwegian this week, when hundreds of thousands of people gather on our public squares without a yell for revenge or death.

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.

Here’s a monumental historical irony: A moment in the origins of the United States that every American schoolchild learns to view with pride, the Boston Tea Party, has now become a symbol of our (inter)national shame. In one sense, it is difficult to know what to say in response to the utter irrationality of the Tea Party’s self-destructive decision to sabotage the American political process – and thus its own country’s economy, and the global economy.