Ravaged by war and in the grip of a terrible drought, the people of Afghanistan are in desperate need of foreign help. The BBC's Damian Grammaticas travels to the central highlands to assess the situation and asks whether the next US president will need to rethink America's strategy against al-Qaeda... More

　　The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that devastated large parts of Asia was not the first and will likely not be the last, two separate geological studies have found. 　　Geologists analyzing rocks in coastal marshes in the region found that a massive wave struck the same area about 700 years ago,... More

　　Even though Barack Obama has been elected the 44th president of the United States, there are some in the Middle East who believe his policies towards the region will differ little from those of his defeated Republican rival, John McCain. 　　Al Jazeera asked a number of people in Egypt, the... More

　　Israel should pursue "talks with Syria next year in return of concessions to weaken Iran and Hamas in the region", an internal Israeli government report says. 　　Compiled by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's National Security Council (NSC) and published in part by an Israeli newspaper on Sunday, the report argues for... More

　　Hate crimes against Arab Americans have decreased steadily since the Sept. 11 attacks but are still more common than they were before the hijackings, a civil rights group said on Thursday. 　　The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee said it received an average of 120 to 130 reports of ethnically motivated attacks or... More

　　President-elect Barack Obama plans to offer Israel a strategic pact designed to fend off any nuclear attack on the Jewish state by Iran, an Israeli newspaper reported on Thursday. 　　Quoting an unnamed American source close to Obama, Haaretz daily said Obama's administration would pledge under the proposed "nuclear umbrella" to... More

　　When Mozambique emerged from its grueling war of liberation in 1975, it was immediately plunged into a civil war that would last until 1992. 　　Under such uncertain conditions, the country's leaders had little time to implement laws or ratify international conventions. 　　This failure was partly responsible for the emergence of... More

　　When George Bush, the US president, first entered the White House as the commander-in-chief in 2001, Palestinians were being killed in the al-Aqsa intifada. 　　Eight years later, as Bush prepares to leave office, Israel is carrying out one of the largest massacres in its 60-year occupation of Palestine. 　　The US,... More

　　The images of two women on the front page of an edition of The Washington Post last week illustrates how mainstream US media has been reporting Israel's war on Gaza. 　　On the left was a Palestinian mother who had lost five children. On the right was a nearly equally sized... More

　　THE media coverage of the war in Gaza by Western television companies is largely unfair and biased because of a refusal to show viewers the real images of the victims. One of the reasons for this is Israel’s decision not to allow the Western media in to Gaza. 　　In addition... More

　　I am Israel - I came to a land without a people for a people without a land. Those people who happened to be here, had no right to be here, and my people showed them they had to leave or die, razing 480 Palestinian villages to the ground, erasing... More

　　The survivors of the Israeli offensive in Gaza have slowly begun to restore a semblance of normalcy to their daily lives. 　　Public facilities are operating once again, the streets are being cleared, tractors are at work removing piles of rubble, power lines are being fixed and electricity and water services... More

　　TRY as he might, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert can not snatch any sort of victory out of the jaws of defeat that are closing down on the failed Zionist project. 　　This, quite simply, is the beginning of the end for Israel. 　　The only thing Israel has proved it can... More