The Libyan deputy ambassador to the United Nations has called on the country's ruler, Muammar Gaddafi, to step down and face trial over war crimes and genocide. 　　"He has to leave as soon as possible. He has to stop killing the Libyan people," Ibrahim Dabbashi told CNN on Monday. 　　"The... More

　　The sheer brutality of the Libyan suppression of anti-government protests has exposed the fallacy of the post-colonial Arab dictatorships, which have relied on revolutionary slogans as their source of legitimacy. 　　Ever since his ascension to power, through a military coup, in 1969, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has used every piece of... More

　　Israeli settlers damaged houses and cars in two Palestinian villages on Tuesday, witnesses said, after Israel's demolition of homes in an unauthorized settler outpost. 　　Villagers in Hiwwara in the occupied West Bank said settlers threw petrol bombs into a house, broke the windows of another, and burned several cars in... More

　　In the distance and high above, a Libyan air force jet circled over the town of Brega, a key oil port in eastern Libya around 330km from Sirte, one of Muammar Gaddafi’s last remaining strongholds. 　　As scores of revolution fighters armed with AK-47 assault rifles, shotguns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers... More

　　Recent polls suggest that while a majority of U.S. people disapprove of the war in Afghanistan, many on grounds of its horrible economic cost, only 3% took the war into account when voting in the 2010 midterm elections. The issue of the economy weighed heavily on voters, but the war... More

　　While we have been fixated on successive Arab breakthroughs and victories against tyranny and extremism, Washington is failing miserably but discreetly in Afghanistan. 　　The American media's one-obsession-at-a-time coverage of global affairs might have put the spotlight on President Obama's slow and poor reaction to the breathtaking developments starting in Tunisia... More

　　Top commanders in the Israeli military are 'warning' that the military is completely incapable of crushing an Egypt-style popular uprising in the West Bank, assuming one actually begins. 　　“There is nothing for it,” one of the commanders noted, and while the Israeli military apparently developed a major program last year... More

　　The political and economic problems facing Yemen: 　　Yemen is probably the hardest [state in the region] in terms of economic challenges and development challenges. The people of Yemen are the poorest in the region. The state in Yemen is by far the weakest, compared to Libya in the sense of... More

　　Israel's expansion of settlements in East Jerusalem and eviction of Palestinians from their homes there is a form of ethnic cleansing, a United Nations investigator said on Monday. 　　United States academic Richard Falk was speaking to the UN Human Rights Council as it prepared to pass resolutions condemning settlement building... More

　　German Magazine Der Spiegel has released hideous photographs of US soldiers posing with the dead bodies of defenseless Afghan civilians they killed. 　　Senior officials at Nato's International Security Assistance Force in Kabul have compared the pictures published by the German news weekly Der Spiegel to the images of US soldiers... More

　　A distraught Libyan woman has told journalists in Tripoli how she was raped by government troops, before being bundled away by officials. 　　Iman al-Obeidi sought out foreign reporters in the capital's Rixos hotel on Saturday morning, weeping and claiming that troops had detained her at a checkpoint, tied her up,... More

　　NATO's political mission "should swiftly identify and nurture a national opposition and plot the path for a post-conflict transition to democracy, probably under UN auspices", or so advises the Financial Times in its lead editorial, "Plotting the Way Forward". 　　Both the title and the advice are borrowed from a past... More

　　Israeli troops arrested 100 Palestinian women in an overnight raid Thursday, the latest in a series of round-ups around the West Bank city of Nablus. 　　Israeli troops stormed a village near Nablus early Thursday, arresting more than 100 women, local officials said. 　　Hundreds of troops entered Awarta shortly after midnight... More