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

By the time you read this, my head will be thump-thumping - but this is not a standard-issue New Year's Day hangover. No. My New Year's resolution is to finally give up my addiction to two liquids that are trashing the lives of some of the poorest people on earth:...

The world isn't just watching the Israeli government commit a crime in Gaza; we are watching it self-harm. This morning, and tomorrow morning, and every morning until this punishment-beating ends, the young people of the Gaza Strip are going to be more filled with hate, and more determined to fight...

All year I write columns exposing people who threaten ordinary life, but I want now - for once, for a moment - to describe the people who make that ordinary life worth living. For me, near the top slot would be one word: Gran.

This September, a solitary tear symbolised...

And so. Pinter. Has. Died. Without the trademark pause, there will now be a torrent of praise for the departed playwright. But in the fawning, the more interesting - and bleak - questions about Harold Pinter will be lost.

How did the world's leading literary prize, the Nobel, go to...

Are we living in the final days of American dominance? The Newsweek honcho Fareed Zakaria opens his latest work -- The Post-American World -- with some slap-in-the-face facts: "The world's tallest building is now in Taipei, and it will soon be overtaken by one being built in Dubai. The world's...

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

The myth of Che Guevara - recycled yet again in Steven Soderberg's new film 'Che' - is seductive and lush. It's the story of an Argentinian rich-boy who was so shocked by poverty he became a Robin Hood fighting alongside the poor, until eventually he was murdered by the CIA....

This interview was conducted before the Mumbai atrocities, but it can help readers to understand what is happening in Kashmir -- and how to respond.

And so it begins again: the low rumble of Islamist death-threats against a novelist, simply because he dares to revel in free speech and free...

Martin Amis' tiny blonde daughter answers the door to their vast Primrose Hill house, beaming and waving -- and then a moment later, the 58-year old novelist appears behind her, with his sad, semi-scowling face sucking on another roll-up. He leads me through into his front room, a huge, swollen...

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was stabbed into the world's consciousness four years ago. One wet afternoon in November 2004, her friend Theo Van Gogh - descendant of Vincent - left his house and was about to start cycling down the streets of Amsterdam. But a young Dutch-born Muslim called Mohammed Bouyeri...

In the spring of 2004, a crystal meth addict slumped into a clinic in New York with lesions and a story about barebacking with several hundred men over that year. At first it seemed like the sad same-old, the kind of case that staggers into AIDS clinics across the world...

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

So the British people are going to get a president after all. He will "speak for the nation and to the nation." He will rule over us with his "knowledge and contacts and unique ability." How do we know? Because Charles Windsor has just announced -- via his biographer, Jonathan...

Their story seems strange even after all this time. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, small posses emerged from among the most privileged young people in Europe and America and took up arms against the society their parents had built. They bombed the Pentagon, killed some of the most...

This is a post I don't want to write. Its subject is ugly; it makes me instinctively recoil. I have chastised people who bring it up at environmentalist meetings. The people who talk about it obsessively have often been callous about human life, and consistently proved wrong throughout history. And...

The world is still pleasurably suffering from Woah-bama whiplash. Did he really win? Are we all awake? And would anybody mind if he starts a few months early? The need for decisions is rapidly piling up - and one of President-Elect Obama's first choices is whether to bring to an...

Mr President-Elect, that was the easy part. Yes, becoming the first black President by a landslide - winning even the former capital of the Confederate slaveocracy, Virginia - didn't seem like a stroll at the time. But now there is a pile of ticking time-bombs waiting in your in-tray and...

Can it happen? Are the Bush years going to end with the election of a cerebral, liberal black man born to a Muslim goat-herd from Kenya and an atheist farm-girl from Kansas? Will we witness it in less than 48 hours? Whisper it: yes we can. At the midnight hour...

The deadliest war since Adolf Hitler marched across Europe is starting again -- and you are almost certainly carrying a blood-soaked chunk of the slaughter in your pocket. When we glance at the holocaust in the Congo, with 5.4 million dead, the clichés of Africa reporting tumble out: this is...