Maldives heads to historic presidential poll

Asia's longest serving political leader is facing the prospect of losing his job as the President of the Maldives. The Indian Ocean tourist paradise is having its first taste of democracy with multi-party elections being held to choose a president for the next five years. The...

The strongman and the war on terror

"The resignation of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf is a sign of how the "war on terror" is changing. Mr Musharraf was once the lynchpin of Pakistan's alliance with the United States in President George Bush's war, but the days of a single strongman laying down and...

The Bush administration fails to stop al-Qaida in Pakistan - By Arthur Delan...

" The New York Times leads with a big story on the growth of al-Qaida in Pakistan and the Bush administration's waffling over plans to give commandos greater latitude to operate in the country's tribal areas. The Washington Post leads locally with the surprise death of a...

Australia`s Keating : "I told Soeharto to go"

""You can imagine, there's not many other people in history who have actually lined up to someone like Suharto and told him to resign," Keating was quoted as saying by DPA Friday in an excerpt from a documentary that the SBS television network will air next month."It turned...

Saanrat "Lydia" Wisutthithadato Not Thaksin Shinawatra's Part Time Lover

" It's been a year since the former Thai prime minister was ousted in a bloodless coup and despite stringent efforts by the military junta to black out news of the former strongman, the media-savvy Thaksin Shinawatra has found novel ways to remain in the Thai public eye. On...

Stability v democracy?

Daniel Pipes suggests that stability in Iraq is more necessary now than the forms of democracy, as, evidently, he has been since the despot Saddam Hussein was deposed.  The occasion of his restatement of his case is today's article by Mr John Burns in the New York Times,...