International

WHILE THE international news media focus on the fighting in Syria, news about the suffering in Yemen is beginning to seep out. Back in March, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) announced that over 62,000 people had been ...

LIFE DOESN’T STOP just because there is a war on – but sometimes it does get put on hold for a while. Children in Mosul have been in danger because of the fighting going on around them, but for some ...

THE ELECTION OF Donald Trump as US President was never going to make the world a safer place. Nonetheless, even his harshest critics did not think that it would all go wrong so soon. Two things have happened. •First, on 4th ...

AS 58 SYRIAN citizens lie dead, Human Rights monitors have accused the Syrian regime of using chemical weapons against its own people – not for the first time. Rebel forces fighting the Government have also been accused of using chemical ...

REPORTS ARE emerging from Mosul that chemical weapons have been used on the civilian population for the first time since Syria’s civil war began. The city is divided by the river Tigris. Government forces on the east side of the ...

THE LAST DAYS OF US President Obama’s term of office have seen a sudden push to get peace talks re-started between the state of Israel and displaced Palestinians. Don’t hold your breath. Just before Christmas, the United Nations (UN) passed a ...

GERMANY HAS just announced that Angela Merkel’s “open door” policy for refugees has been overturned in practice as well as forgotten in principle: only 280,000 people sought asylum in 2016 – down by 600,000 on 2015. Merkel’s original response to ...

A group of prominent community activists and politicians, including eleven Nobel peace prize winners, have written to the UN Security Council urging them to help end the suffering of the Rohingya Muslims living in the Rakhine province in Myanmar. The ...

Manjurul Islam, a member of the Bangladesh Parliament for the Gaibandha Sundarganj constituency, has died after being shot by three gunmen who attacked him at his home in Bamandanga of Sundarganj in northern Bangladesh. Mr Islam was injured in the ...

Last month a UN inquiry came to the conclusion that the Syrian Government had twice used the highly poisonous gas chlorine against its own people. In August there were allegations that chlorine had been used for a third time, and ...