International issues

Bucharest says the United States is going ahead with deploying controversial anti-missile interceptors in Romania despite opposition from Russia. Romanian Defense Minister Mircea Dusa says the missile system will most likely be deployed in 2015. “I have very serious assurances…

U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper confirmed this week Iran has not decided to develop a nuclear weapon and that it would be unable to do so secretly. Testifying before the Senate, Clapper said Iran could not divert safeguarded…

A decade of war in Iraq has killed roughly 134,000 Iraqi civilians and potentially contributed to the deaths of many hundreds of thousands more, according to researchers at Brown University. Their report was released ahead of the 10th anniversary of…

Norway, Australia and the United States lead this year’s Human Development Index (HDI) rankings, the annual United Nations measure of progress in human well-being, while Niger, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Mozambique are at the bottom. The…

Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) condemns the forthcoming official visit of Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia because it openly supports a deeply repressive and abusive regime and promotes the already strong military…

The Freedom of the Press Foundation published a full audio recording of Bradley Manning’s statement to the court taking responsibility for WikiLeaks’ releases. The transparency group Freedom of the Press Foundation has published an illicit audio recording of Pfc. Bradley…

Godzilla, a giant monster mutated by nuclear radiation, first appears in a 1954 Japanese science fiction movie by the same name, ravaging Japan in a symbolic warning about the risks of nuclear weapons. For a couple of decades Godzilla was…

(Here, Tony Robinson writies in a personal capacity about the recent Falkland islands referendum and issues of ownership) The issue of the Falkland Islands comes up frequently among my many Argentinean friends and as fierce patriots they proclaim their sovereignty…

China has called for “calm and restraint” after North Korea reacted to a new series of UN sanctions with vows of a nuclear strike and cancellation of peace deals with South Korea. “China calls on relevant parties to exercise calm…

British Foreign Secretary, William Hague has pressed the EU to amend the arms embargo on Syria so that military equipment could be supplied to opposition forces. On 18 February the EU agreed to maintain the embargo, but on 6 March…