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...

When John McCain loses next week, what will be left of the Republican Party? The answer lies in the sands of Florida, where the Sunshine-State Republicans have nominated an unrepentant torturer as their candidate for Congress. They view his readiness to torture an innocent Iraqi not as a source...

It's the smell I remember. Shahnaz's face -- what was left of it -- reeked of a day old barbeque, left out in the rain. Her flesh was a mess of charred meat: her skin, the soft flesh of her cheeks, and the bones beneath had been burned away. Her...

The news that Jorg Haider - the Austrian fascist leader - spent his final few hours in a gay bar with a hot blond has shocked some people. It hasn't shocked me. This is a taboo topic for a gay left-wing man like me to touch, but there has always...

We are living through two great meltdowns -- the credit crunch, and the climate crunch. The heating of the planet is now happening so fast it's hard to pluck a single event to fix on, but here's one. By the summer of 2013, the Arctic will be free of ice....

The presidential debates are ending with Barack Obama rollercoastering up the opinion polls as the old economic scenery collapses behind him. Here in the middle of 1929, it's tempting to write this off as a race between the first black man to run for President and the first corpse. Yet...

Since it emerged that John McCain has a history of palling around with the Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy, I have been thinking back to the time in 2005 when I met him in New York City. Here is the story of the strange few hours I spent with...

John McCain is desperate to talk about the surge rather than the splurge. His Iraq war is set to cost one trillion dollars, and his deregulation-mania has cost hundreds of billions. So in order to maintain his façade of being "tough on spending", he needs to shift the subject. That's...

It was slower. It was quieter. It looked for a moment only like a stream of suited men carrying cardboard boxes. But the news this month - the Great Crash of 2008 - is going to change your life, as surely as the last time we all stared at footage...

In five weeks, I hope look back on this column with a wry chuckle at my paranoia. If the system works, Barack Obama will take the White House. The two issues John McCain is most closely associated with - invading Iraq, and deregulating the economy - have produced history-snatching catastrophes...

This is the story of two debates that have been unfolding in rival nations, in rival tongues, on one skinny patch of land in the Levant. In Israel, Kadima -- the main governing party -- has been deciding who should be its new leader. In Palestine, the population has been...